It's already been in lots of topics: starter corps don't have anything in for players other than deciding where to start from. Once you're in game, there is neither an advantage of being part of a megacorporation nor a loss at leaving it or running missions for the opposing factions.

I already posted some suggestions here and here to give them a bit more meaning and perhaps to bring back the megacorporations link to the Perpetuum Project. There's a lot more ideas to be found at strolling the forums.

Here we go with a collection of ideas to "revive" the factions.

1. Negative standing at the opposing factions: <-- only one not related with being in a starter corp!
   Back to the roots, originally when you ran a mission for one faction you got negative standing at the other two. The "relation"-extensions still remind on this, the higher you skill them the lesser your loss.

2. Syndicate Auras:
   Similiar to outpost buffs; they provide a geoscanning buff and maybe a light autorepair buff to help new players who are still in their starter corp to get better through training and first steps after it. These buffs take effect on all areas of alpha1

3. Standing Bonus:
   A non-mission related static standing that adds to your mission one in each terminal/outpost of that megacorp. It is only added in facilities of your faction, so you won't be able to run lvl3-5 missions from the get-go. Purpose: Make facilities cheaper to use and reduce time on production + RE

4. Additional reward boni:
   Like NIC-incentive (increase NIC reward by x%), ammo/charges rewards, token amount increased by x%, ...

5. Standing loss:
   At leaving the player corp you loose naturally aura-support and all boni, maybe you even loose a certain percentage of your mission standing

6. Police towers:
   Nerf machines and outlaw shooting positionend near outposts and the terminal: If your standing drops under a certain point like under 0 they "nerve" you in their own range like t4 interference emitters (example!); and under -10 standing (= outlaw) they first warn you to leave their range within a few seconds, then if not done so shoot you down

7. Freelancer's choice:
   By leaving a player corporation you normally end up as freelancer - enable the choice of coming back to the starter corp. Of course, the trust needs to be rebuild, so the standing bonus won't be as high as before, other measures may be buff effects and add. rew. boni are halfed (if both of them would be implemented, why not) - this could be undone by running a certain amount of missions

some side thoughts and backgrounds:

• Syndicate aura: it counts as one indy + one combat buff - if you don't like auto repair please state another combat buff that would help newcomers; aside from that I prefer a buff solution to having only orange spawns on alpha1 - if you are already in a player corp, they should be able to help you with the aggressive NPCs either way...

• Freelancer's choice: Norrdecs post in the geoscanning topic gave me that idea - thanks!

• Police towers (PTs): were ingame in beta to give a few "safe zones" within the isle - it shot down everyone with an aggression flag that came into their range. Back then the whole perp world was open PvP. They were quite nice but the earlier AI was troublesome and let tooo much place to exploit them - with current mechanics they should be able to get a comeback; but for this you would either need to revert alphas back to open PvP with maany PTs (:/), new isles with semi-PvP (nice one but perhaps later - too much unnecessary workload:/) or to find another purpose without crashing their nice flair (idea listed)