MMORPG.com EVE Online Correspondent Sam Guss writes this guide to starting a successful corporation in CCP's EVE Online.

This series of articles over the next couple of months will explore some thought experiments on creating EVE Corporations. In MMOs, one of the common themes is that of like-minded players grouping together in miniature societies called Clans or Guilds. EVE Online is no different, only these smaller societies are called Corporations.

Corporations are unique to the MMO world, as they can go much deeper in concept than that of other MMOs. Due to the nature of player-based sandbox of the EVE Online universe, different issues can spring up in Corporations than in typical guilds or clans of other games. Potential pitfalls such as espionage, corporation-crippling theft, scams, economic warfare and much more can leave a Corporation in ruin and in some cases unrecoverable.

Read the EVE Online Correspondent Article.

Just a note on the article, you should probably mention that being the CEO of such a corporation, as discussed in the article, pretty much relegates you to having no life.  It is just like having a full time job.  It is a quick way to burn out in the game.  Of course you could treat such an enterprise more casually, but the chance of success go down exponentially.

Excellent  guide so far. Running a successful corp in Eve is one of the most ambitious things anyone can do in all MMOdom.

Looking forward to the rest of the series.

while i agree with the guide on how to become succesful i dont agree on the path it is stateing. sure have a goal for your corp from the outset, but from my own experience as a ceo in eve, your starting goals can apear incredibly daunting to your new work force who may not be entirely as dedicated to the idea as you are.. in eve you have to rely on others in order for the goals to take shape and be accomplished. you have to first establish a raport with your fellow corp mates.

then you have to bee open and hones t and as clear as day so they can adjust to your wavelength to get some idea of what your aiming for..

so to start off with you need small quickly achievable goals things you can be successful at in just a few weeks to a month. you need to give your new team and wqork force that feeling of acheivement so they want more.

dont bother them with internal infrastructure of the corp or how you intend to make the industry sector work lol they are not really interested, they need to know what to do and when to do it so clear definable goals need to be set.

also you dont have to keep your corp as a one trick pony, with the rigth direction and team management you can get 2-3 diffrent aspects on the go at once.

to do that they have to be so clearly definable that you can point at it and people will know what it is. the best way ive found to do this is by giving a corp wallet to each cell. this allows you the ceo to clearly see what kind of growth each cell is provideing the corp with. it will also allow you to identify any short falls so you can quickly work out ways to improve the negatives into positives.

the wya i did this was chop the corp into segments or cells so to speak and gave each cell an area to foccus on with its own short term goals set by the corp leaders i.e. ceo's and directors.

my areas where a military arm to help us survive the rigours of the eve mentality  an indsutry cell to deal with all things contruction  and resdearch related and then the all importan logistics cell which dealth with fetch and carry trades and barters. 

its very important to paint your vision in a picture format for your guys to look at  and get some clue of your master plan, this will help them to better understand your actions and motives imporving loyalty.. sure you will have your friends but it takes much more than just a hand full of friends to make a corp work. and from my experience most of your friends that play the game with you will have very little aspiration for way you as a ceo are intending to play eve and most of the time they just play as casual members. so relying on real life friends to perform vital corp roles is not good, instead you have to identify the leader types out their and give them a chance to be the leader you think they are.

to many people dimiss the little guys who do all the graft and focus their intention on the people at the top holding the titles and reigns.  breaking a corp up into cells helps the individual player to become recognised and   have their names known. people in genral like personal recognition for their efforts. for instance is it better to have a corp of 150 players where you only know a handful of people or a corp of 3 groups of 50 where you have to deal with most of the players in each cell to some degree.

i personally like the personal touch idea, i like my guys to know i know they are helping out. if they know i have recognised their efforts and that im actively checking in to see how things go, they dont feel ignored. they are also aware that i hear of their own ideas too.

my strongest belief is 2 heads are better than 1!! 3 better than 2  and so on.

at out peak we had 12 carriers 6 dreads and managed 3 outposts and over 20 pos towers and controlled 12 systems.  we had 4 jump frieghters 3 indy caps (rorqs) and the corp was easily earning 5-6 billion per week. we owned premium systems to -1.0 -0.99 -0.98 -.96 and a few other really sought after systems.  i know compaired to many alliances thats small fry, but for an individual corp thats not half bad, i certainly concidered it to be successful and all our guys also concidered it to be successful. and thats not to mention a healthy bpo collection of over 700+ bpo's and bpc's  although we wasnt able to manufacure super caps we did play a part in creating the components for the alliance super cap efforts.  how we got into creating super cap components was all down to us planning on setting up our own super cap construction programme.  we got so far, we set up all the towers with all the essential structures to produce them, but ended up mass producing components instead.

while all this was going on, we had a dedicated military arm running regular ops for the alliance and practicing with our corps cap fleet.

we also set up an extensive jump bridge network around our core systems consisting of some 8 jump bridges linking essential systems to make it easier for our people to get about in 0.0 safely.

building a corp is indeed a full time job if your in a rush, but it is also possible to build one  casually. sure it will take a while but it is possible. i used to play eve with a hardcore attitude spending some 10 hours + per day sometimes more. and it certainly does wear you down.

building a corporation in eve is an epic undertakeing, its nothing like forming guilds and running guilds in other games, that other stuff is childs play compaired to eve online.

and this is why eve online is the best game as far as im concerned on todays market. nothing rivals it!

Originally posted by Ozmodan

Just a note on the article, you should probably mention that being the CEO of such a corporation, as discussed in the article, pretty much relegates you to having no life.  It is just like having a full time job.  It is a quick way to burn out in the game.  Of course you could treat such an enterprise more casually, but the chance of success go down exponentially.

That's pretty much a given for any guild or organization leader.

Great article, Guss!

Great guide man! Will forward this to my noob friend.