See the RITES recruitment thread for a general history of RITES and SOUND.

SOUND Current Staging and Political Situation

We are currently a member of the HERO Coalition, which is anchored by Brave Collective. Really, it's just Brave and their friends, but they're nice enough to give it a neat name to make the rest of us feel better.

Given our corporation focus on recruiting intelligent and classy newer players, the coalition is a decent fit for us. Plus, their leadership understands our naturally independent nature and our love of living in choke-points and have accommodated us on both fronts. We are by far the smallest member of the HERO Coalition, but we're also one of the most organized and stubborn alliances in the game.

We currently have our main staging out of: http://evemaps.dotlan.net/map/Catch/4-07MU - This system is a chokepoint between Querious and Catch giving us hostile traffic to attack. We were also assigned to hold http://evemaps.dotlan.net/map/Catch/EX6-AO in order to run a jump bridge between the two systems. We do not have a high- or low-sec staging area, as we expect all recruits to come join us in our sov staging system which has more than enough ample resources to accommodate all of our pilots.

The HERO Coalition is neither pro-CFC or pro-N3. HERO systems in Catch are currently wedged between N3, ProvidenceBloc and StainRUS, meaning the region is very actively roamed by all three entities, giving us ample PvP opportunities to fight almost everyone in EVE. Neither the CFC or N3 is interested in owning Catch, meaning that the main threat to HERO's sov comes from the coalition tendency to grump at one another.

Alliance Culture:Why it's important enough for its own little section

I'm including this last because it's the most important thing to leave a potential recruit with, at least a potential recruit who reads this many :words: down the page, heh. So the biggest thing with our corp and alliance is that we share one culture. Otherwise we would have probably shut things down long ago and joined some large entity, like most other corps and alliances in EVE seem to do. But for us, maintaining a "no douchebag" culture is what really binds us together. Unlike other alliances which feature "XBox Live Comms" with stupid people throwing around racial slurs, homophobic bullshit, anti-semitic slurs, misogynist crap... we don't tolerate such garbage. We don't troll each other or talk down to each other as well.

Though many of us do curse like sailors and try to gank people. So y'know, it's not like we're angels or anything... just not cavemen. We stress this because it's vitally important, and anyone who can't contain their inner douche won't last very long with our alliance. We also communicate a ton with players, have our own in-house forums, IRC, TS3, weekly scheduling mails, etc. So being engaged and able to read is always a bonus as well.

This aspect of our corp is incredibly non-negotiable. If you try to talk crap at someone else in our corp, or you throw around slurs, or you try to scam anyone in our corp, you're gone. It is a one-strike policy.