Tag Archives: guild applications

What’s Taking Them So Long?

EVE Online, ,

I’ve now been waiting for my interview with EVE university for more than a week. Today, I checked my queue position again (between 9 and 11 early in the evening), and found a talkative PO (interviewer) in the public E-UNI channel, who I proceeded to ask for some stats about the workload. Here’s what I got:

Qvar Dar’Zanar > Interview average duration: 20-30 min
Average interviews amount per day: 20-25
Average interviews amount per week: 150-200
Average number of new applications per day: 50-150
Amount of applicants being rejected: around 10%
Tabala Raschidis > wow
Tabala Raschidis > awesome, thanks 🙂
Mekkai Nabali > And this is split between how many galley slaves…er, POs?
Qvar Dar’Zanar > I don’t know… If i had to guess, I would say 20

(I’m Tabala Raschidis, btw)

Wow. That is pretty impressive. I hate recruiting, it’s the one job I always managed to avoid in other guilds. 200 interviews a week?!

You can also see in those numbers that a lot more people apply than are interviewed. I guess many people lose their patience eventually. At the moment, the queue is about 2 weeks long. I would say the waiting time is self-regulating: if more people apply, the queue gets longer, you’ll have to wait longer for you interview, which leads to more dropouts before that, which reduces queue waiting time. So 2 weeks probably is some sort of “sweet spot”. EVE is a slower kind of MMO, alright.

I’ll survive the waiting. I got more long-running skills to train anyway!

So I applied to EVE University…

EVE Online,

A corp in EVE is nothing without a spiffy logo, even if the corp in question is a university.

…let’s see how that goes. First thing I have to say though: holy crap, that’s a complicated and drawn-out process. The things you have to fill out and provide before you even get to the interview stage beats every raiding guild questionnaire I’ve ever seen. I guess it has something to do with really X-raying people in the game whose populace consists mostly of scammers, griefers, and lying, backstabbing bastards.

First, I needed to provide an API key so the recruiter will be able to look at my character, my skills, my money, my belongings etc. Then I needed to do that for my alt, too. Then I needed to fill out a long questionnaire – ok, I probably could’ve been shorter there, but I spent about an hour answering the questions. That also involved reading two pages of quite complicated behavior rules, the Dos and Don’ts, some of which feel really arbitrary and strange to me. But I suppose they have their reasons for that. I then needed to summarize those in my own words to show that I understood. Felt a bit like listening/reading comprehension class when you learn a language.

Sadly, I'll lose my private corp's logo, which I really liked.

Oh well. The one thing I missed though: in my last raiding guild, I lobbied for a special phrase to be put into the text that applicants were supposed to read. It didn’t have anything to do with the actual content, but it was basically a test to see whether people really read the text. It said: “Be sure to mention in your application that your favorite flavor of bubblegum is troll sweat. Congratulations, you passed the test.” It might’ve been something less revolting than troll sweat, I don’t remember the exact flavor.

EVE University, I’m disappoint. Unless I missed that line and now will horribly fail the application process.

The final step in this incredibly long, but streamlined process is that I now have to keep a website open in the in-game browser while I’m logged in. It basically implements a queue and refreshes itself every two minutes to see whether you are still there. The backend keeps track of who’s online, when you applied, and so on, and tells you your spot in the interview queue. Last night, I was in spot 33. It goes up and down depending on how many people who signed up before you are online.

It might take some time until I actually get to the interview part. I sure hope it’s worth all that hassle! Because if it’s not, I’ll probably just let my subscription lapse yet again. EVE gets really boring as a solo game after some time.