In my experience recruiting in Eve Online is much harder than in other MMO's.
"You have a pulse? Great! Come on in!", any other MMO.
In Eve? The big difference is we have something to lose apart from our minds if we recruit some nut job, and let's be clear. I value my Eve "stuff" more than my mind! My mind is like an old enemy, but we've both grown older and the visceral hate has faded away to some half remembered discomfort about something neither of us can remember clearly.
Oh and I'm pretty sure my sub conscious hates me.
Another time for that one.
In recruiting for the corp and greater alliance I've found a few things.
Alpha accounts are not reliable and will usually kick around for a few days, perhaps a week or two, and then you never hear from them again. The big question with the Alpha accounts is retention. How many of them are active in the game two, four, six months down the road? You can be damn sure those figures are, probably, never going to be released by CCP.
You never really know who you're going to get with recruiting. We certainly have an idea of what we want but sometimes what they say, and then do, are two different things. It reminds me of hiring people for business, roughly six months down the road you find out who the person is you've hired.
Don't get me wrong we have a great group of people, I don't often talk about them here as fluffing their egos is for their significant others, not me, but sometimes it just doesn't work out.
Other times we know a person isn't right for the alliance pretty quickly during the recruiting chat.
Often this will be due to reasons of time zone, poor standings with the faction in our region, wanting different things, etc.
Every once in a while though, wow!
Last night we had some guy, and I won't mention his name, I assume he is a guy as this is Eve Online and everyone is a he until verified.
Stereotypes save time kids!
From the very beginning his pilot details started waving all sorts of red flags, and I don't mean the sort of flaccid red flag waving you see at some motor racing event, where the marshal is bored, and all he can think about is the amount of beer he's going to consume tonight to try and forget about the never ending pain. No, this is the type of flag waving you see at a Mardi Gras, vigorous and full of pep.
The kind of flag waving you really cannot ignore.
His corporation history was an evidence trail of very short stays, which speaks volumes. If a bunch of other corps, and we are pretty vanilla compared to many others, cannot stand you then odds are we/I are certainly not going to also.
Then of course his corp application, to one of the other corps in the alliance but happily I get to view this stuff, often it's the only entertainment I get, is something very close to "I have 3 million skill points and I'm better at this game than all of you!"
At this stage I would have done the thanks but no thanks bit, but it wasn't my corp so screw it, lets see where this goes!
During the evening while we are doing "alliance activities" he jumps into the recruitment chat for the corp he's applied for. It's an arse about way of doing it but nobody seems to read the requirements anymore so he's certainly not on his own.
Very quickly it starts going south.
And I don't mean in a "lets head south for the winter in a slow measured way taking care to eat some stuff and visit some nice ponds" way. This was something like a screaming banshee, SR-71 type lawn dart straight as the crow flies towards anything away from "normal".
He asked questions. Questions are good. But when the questions were not answered to his satisfaction he would ask them again, or just put a question mark, or harangue about not answering them to his liking. I could see the discussion was going off the rails, I would have told him to POQ by this stage but it wasn't my corp and I wasn't leading the interview, so I was able to watch, and judge.
It quickly degenerated as the interviewer started asking his own questions , at my prompting, but I'm sure that was where he was heading anyway. Of course that meant he hadn't answered one of the questions of the interviewee.
Then it went bad.
Well...worse.
He was accused of not answering the question, and was getting attacked for somehow "not completing the circle" I guess.
Then their was a pause, I had some idea of what was coming, and there it is!
"Thank you for your enquiry, but you're not right for us, best of luck in the future.", to paraphrase.
Somehow the guy, who wanted to join the alliance, must have thought the interview was still going well as he was quite annoyed it had taken this turn.
From his point of view he was in! All we had to work out were the details!
Probably something like a real world mental health plan for all alliance members.
So his last line of text, before he rage quit the recruitment chat was the icing on the cake, the hilarious mid point of our night.
"Fuck you cunt!"
Comedy gold.
