Mark Wallace has an interesting piece (although wordy) in The Escapist where he explains Eve’s organisational development in dealing with newbies. Eve is divided into corporations and when you first start playing Eve, you are automatically signed into a newpie corp. One of these is SAK (The School of Applied Knowledge). In the article he goes on to explain the economic benefits of gaming together or being a part of a corporation and how extremely helpful we MMORPG gamers are and well, a lot of blah blah blah if you ask me. But I was, however very interested to learn how Eve deals with newbies. They must be an increasing concern in all MMORPGs and I think the corporation model looks good for now (it will of course become dangerous, but we’ll come back to that another time). When online games have existed a while it becomes more and more daunting for new players to join, being a newbie is never fun (at least, I’m not a fan) and having a support network around you at that time is excellent, not only for the enjoyment of the game, but also for economic benefits and skill advancement. Of course, he quite rightly compares this to the mafia as they take you in and demand your allegiance to the corp. It’s an interesting and informative read, so I recomend you look at it if you’re interested in this stuff!! He also mentions some of Mr. Glorious Nick Yee’s work! Just a bit too many words and useless information for my taste (but then again, I read it at work and my concentration may have wandered a few times)!