EVE Online is a massive multiplayer that has thousands of players around the world flying around in spaceships. The scale of this game is impressive and has made the news countless times whenever massive battles occur.

Note: I apologize for my immature commit messages.

1. Corporations.
A Corporation is an entity that can contain members, own assets, and have custom branding. Similar to a guild, clan, or even a business. Members will join a corporation to gain certain benefits such as shared communication, assets, and standings. Managing a corporation can be a full-time (in-game) job for the CEO, Directors, or other members. Accepting a member into a corporation also has a risk, because they can steal, hunt, and destroy other member’s assets.

2. Characters.
When you sign-up for an EVE Online account you can create and play with three characters. Each character is customizable from looks to the skill traits. After a character is created, you have to train the character with skills to unlock ships, modules, and other benefits. Typically, you want always to be training a character to gain skill points. The higher the skill points, the more benefits that character will have.

3. Assets
Each character can have assets. An asset could be a ship, a module for ships, ISK (the in-game currency), or several other types of items that can be bought and sold from the in-game economy. These items can be manufactured, stolen, or received as a reward.

EVE Online is an open-world universe that allows players to decide their own future. When accepting new members into a corporation, you as the Director or CEO have to weigh the risk of that player joining. Will they steal from us? Will they hurt other members? Will they benefit the corp? are all questions that have to be answered. It’s a common strategy to join a corporation to steal and hunt the members within that corp. Because of that, the responsibility is on the Director or CEO to investigate the joining member’s history, references, and any other intel that can be found about that player. Some corporations go to great lengths, including an interview over voice chat (Teamspeak or Mumble).

I wanted to make it easier to manage a corporation, it’s members and the investigation of a member. By using the EVE-Online API and several other APIs, I was able to create a platform that handled the registration, research, and management of a Corporation.

When a player wanted to join our corporation, we would direct them to a website to fill out a form. That form included an API key and secret for that player so that our system could pull the required information to process their application.

This side-project started as an experiment to become more familiar with Ruby on Rails, and was also a playground to experiment with some architecture concepts. If I were to approach this project today, I would want to separate and modularize some of the systems so that it can scale with the size of a corporation or alliance that has hundreds or thousands of members.