You can easily spend 20 hours in game in EVE for months on end and will ALWAYS have something critical to do, especially in the current Pendulum War ("The Great War"). That’s why "burn out" is a serious problem amongst EVE PvP pilots (especially fleet commanders). And maybe even more of a problem amongst the logistics people, the true heroes operating behind the curtain of flashy killboard statistics. My alliance just fought one such fight this week. Our POS was attacked by a vastly larger force at a time of day when we really couldn't put up any kind of fight. The POS went into reinforced but it came out at a time that was good for us so we repaired it and fought off the attack to kill the station later. Our enemy, learning from their mistake, attacked at a different time of day and took our POS into reinforced mode again.

As mentioned above, the logistics guys really have a tough time with situations like this. POS need to be fueled and delivering large quantities of supplies in wartime conditions means a lot more work and odd hours for the guys who have to deliver the goods. SVgr. Yeah. POS war is both horrible (A lot of eve players, including myself, hate it, because of the way it can colonise our time), and really interesting. Honestly, the solution is to recruit as many timezone as possible to counter. Part of the love between the goons and "the russians" (RA/AAA) is that the goons have 3 timezones, East/West coast American (our strongpoint), "Anzac" (australia, NZ, and asia), and "Euro" (Western Europe). We where however traditionally crap at Eastern europe timezones.

Although, the point about (finally) a benefit of a cross continental corp. raises some interesting questions about why people group together online. For friendship and guild marriages, please, just go to sexy chat if your RL is that desperate. For mutual benefit that doesn't end up with your heart exploding on caffeine, sounds good! Another morale tweaker in the game is the whole "spy game" metagame. Both BoB and the Goons have fairly extensive spy networks, basically players who join the opposing team and perform espionage and sabotage. Often the results of the spying are used as morale boosters. When the enemy team has a big defeat, it will often lead to arguments on the forums of the defeated team. The spies then take the discussion and posts it on his own forum for the victor to have bit of a gloat. Sometimes these might be posted on the main eve-o forums to try and humiliate the team. So on.

"Forum porn" (as its sometimes known) can sometimes be used as an incentive for participation in boring ops (Ie pos shooting ops, which can be pretty boring). "Turn up to this pos shot op, and at the end Mittani will read some BoB forum porn!" Its nasty stuff really, but it’s entirely sanctioned by CCP (encouraged even) and it has a huge effect on the game. Part of the demoralisation of ASCN before its defeat was a perception in ASCN that there were no safe places to discus strategy. BOB had guys on team speak, and tactical maneuvers would constantly be anticipated. This got pretty demoralising for them.

Are there any double or triple agents? Any stories of spies who got turned out there? Excellent points, Enrillion. I will do what I can (to the limits of my understanding). This brings me to a larger more important point. To those who have contributed in comment over the series so far, and to those who have played and have read this series, I encourage you to think about your experiences - good and bad - and pull together thought on what you think it means and let us all know at some point. Because of its single shard + sandbox design and its scale (200K subscribers), I firmly believe EO is a unique experiment in virtual worlds now. I think in 10 years time we will all look back at it as one of those really big experiments that I fear may leave us poorly documented.

It gets worse. The "deep space" or 0.0 game which has been the focus of this series is even less well understood. Even many empire Eve Online players don't get it. Reasons here are isolation, isolation and isolation - 0.0 is hard to get to (for reasons well discussed in this series). It also seems that 0.0 tends to attract a clammy but strange military-hybrid-PvPer crowd who tend to reduce nuanced propaganda plays, for example, to "forum porn" lingo -- hard to digest outside the culture. For whatever (and all) the reasons, I've been struck over the years about how misunderstood Eve Online has appeared to me by those outside the community. Worse still, as uniquely interesting the place is (I hope some of it has been communicated in the series thus far), the outside understanding (e.g. documentation) is appalling.

This is why the more academic-oriented players of Eve should take a few cycles and write some of their stuff down and if they are just fragments, send 'em in to TN and I'll even (volunteer) to edit em up - if that is what it takes. Write. I'd love to hear objective (no propaganda, please) reminiscing by alliance leadership types - a rare crowd. On this point, I'm really struggling with taxonomy to generalize what was presented in the slides as well as some of Enrillion's points in terms of 4 or 5 (say) categories. Weigh-in here now, or weigh-in later when you see what I propose. Oh yea, did I say write? Not that I'm aware of, but it'd be a pretty fun little outcome I guess. What DOES happen is bogus/scam turncoats. I've done it once. I was talking to some guy from a smaller enemy alliance, and I convinced them I was really disillusioned. The guy then offered me 100mil to sell out a fleet op.

Ultimately it’s about control of fun. Goons observed a year ago, that the winner of alliance wars ultimately is the team having the most fun. The downside is it means denying fun to the opponent. Propagandists oft talk about 'make the enemy miserable'. Theres actually something to that (as horrible as it sounds). To 'win eve’, you need to control space, you need to control time, and you need to control fun. A correction: You state on page 7 that standings are the prerogative of corporations. This is incorrect. Standings are very complicated, but the primary things standings are used for are 1) visual identification of friend-or-foe by pilots and 2) automated FOF identification by game objects (for instance, telling POS guns who to fire at, or telling a station who is allowed to dock).

I've heard a variant of this that goes as "you need to get them off their game" In this case what was meant was quite specific. It was made in recognition that very specific player niches have certain patterns of activity that they like to do. There are quite a few of 'em. To undermine a particular player group, you need to decode what they are about and as this reference meant it, you need to force them to play a different game from the one they like to engage in. The further you force them to play afield, so to speak, the more successful you will likely be in "winning." Nate, may I say that your comment above is a fantastic explanation of your overall project with regards to EVE? I'm not sure if I qualify as alliance leadership, but I am on the next rung down - upper corp leadership within a 0.0 alliance. Can you tell us what kind of stories you're looking for?

I would however really enjoy hearing more about life as a long term empire denizen. It’s practically a different game in the middle there, and as someone who's been in 0.0 since day #1 in the game, I don't know an awful lot about it. Empire scares me a bit. Anyway, Eve is a unique game. I truly believe it the most interesting, academically, game out there. I've tried and tried to like Second Life, but the whole thing seemed to me to be, well, an academic exercise , sort of a wish fulfillment of a lot of academic dreams of 'cyberspace' the wide eyed cyber culture academics of the 90s always wanted. But it just isn't fun and the commercialism and cheer-leading really wrecks it for me. But Eve is a game by gamers for gamers, not unlike say WOW in that respect, but it’s most interesting at how amazing the emergent gameplay is.