Saturday 28 December 2013

Why invite pilots to your corporation?

Gevlon asked why he should invite other pilots to his corporation. I suspect there is also an element of asking why should he endorse others inviting pilots to other corporations.

In essence, there is a "large POS" fuel bill to be paid, of roughly 500m/month.  This bill is the same whether covered by 1 pilot or 7.  Why not allow others to pay your fuel bill for you? 

Pilots will pay for division rental and POS research slots (especially ME and copy slots).  Pilots that have a safe home will often take advantage of PI, and pay additional taxes.  Depending on the month, this ranges between 400M and 600M for a Foo corporation. 

I am sympathetic to Gevlon's question.  Inviting a pilot to your corporation is to trust them to a degree. In Eve, trust is not a desirable attribute.  At no times more undesirable than when you are under a wardec, and it is not merely (protective) paranoia making you think someone is out to get you.

No one needs to be in the same corp to run missions, mine, haul.  These are all roles done very easily out of corporation.  Today, I ran some wormhole anomalies, with 3 different corps involved.  It made zero difference what corp we were in, especially with mobile depots to refit.



What a corp does give, is the ability to use facilities in a POS.  These facilities are valuable to players, and those players are willing to spend ISK to use them.  We charge per division (manually), for research slots (game mechanic), and for PI tax (mix of manual and game mechanic); with the goal of ending up in front of costs, with a small margin.   We don't charge for simply being in corp and using bookmarks, SMA's to refit and PHA's; though these are also valuable services.

POS permissions are not easy to understand, but we have used them to good effect; and prevented a known theft/awox attempt from taking anything of value (and they ended up taking nothing because they didn't want a couple of industrial ships).  Better POS permissions would allow me to grow the Foo corps size rather than the number of Foo corporations, but we take what we are given, and do the best we can with it.


In a 1 player corp, the player has to bear the entire cost of running the POS by themselves.  For some that is trivial.  For others it is a huge 'tax' on their activities.  They might be trying to plex 1 or 2 accounts, and the cost of the fuel is 30% to 50% of their income.

There are other ways to subsidise this cost. I did try reactions using gas that other corp members farmed and I bought.  I ended up shutting this down due to lack of profit.  It however can go some way towards paying for some of your fuel bill. 

Many corps use a wormhole buying program, so that those with 'moving things' skills can do that, while others who prefer other activities can do so.  While this does not need to be done in a corp POS using divisions, it is more convenient and more secure to move large items directly into secure storage, especially as this can be done while one player is offline.  Such services can be charged for, and the Foo corps charge a small margin on this.

Due to wardecs, the Foo corps are not currently recruiting. F2P is another industry minded alliance that I have relations with that are recruiting (in game channel F2P).  However, if you are willing to set up your corp in a similar manner to ours (preferably without the wardec) and want some assistance or advice, please either evemail Dotoo Foo or drop into the "FooPub" channel.

6 comments:

  1. 30. "A little trust goes a long way. The less you use, the further you'll go." From The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, Schlock Mercenary

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  2. But POS costs and other overhead like scanning go with pilots and not players.

    Why don't you invite your own alts instead? PI and research needs no multiboxing, you just log in one after the other.

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  3. POS costs are fixed. It costs the same amount of fuel to have 1 pilot or 20 pilots.

    However 7 different players can spread that cost between them; Division rental is a method to directly earn isk on that fixed cost.

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  4. But they also use resources. The planet production, the sites aren't unlimited. Do they worth what they take?

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    Replies
    1. Typically one player even with multiple accounts and alts can't reduce the resources in a c2 without devoting a lot of hours online. If you don't spend that much time online you end up with what you found in your c1, a lot of sites not being run and a tower with a sole occupant that only utilizes a very minimal amount of the resources. Adding more active people to utilize those resources that otherwise waste away and/or draw unwelcome attention is simply more efficient.

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  5. The resources you are worried about depleting here, would be depleted by co-inhabitants regardless of whether they are in corp or not.

    Our planets do not produce all resources at the same rate as a 'pristine planet would', but they certainly have a very solid rate of regeneration. For me, more PI pilots means more PI tax.

    Even those pilots who are here purely for the PI feel that a few more pilots to keep an eye on things would be useful.

    In terms of site running, we run sites primarily to keep the wormholes look used and not as much for the ISK. On top of that, our c1 was always more heavily farmed by daytrippers even before we moved in. In our deeper wormholes, we are moving pilots around a little (and even daytripping other wormhole pilots where necessary) to ensure that the sites are kept relatively clean.

    That is, if the sites were picked clean, I would be happy.

    Our deeper wormholes regularly have sites to run, as neighbouring sites are often not run.

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