Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ultimately, EVE is a voluntary pastime which has its tedious bits, particularly in the realm of alliance warfare. In a galaxy full of would-be Space Knights following e-bushido, reputation and 'face' are themselves resources that can be built up or destroyed. In any given war, a significant amount of attention must be paid to what keeps your pilots motivated and logging into the game, losing ships for your alliance's banner, and maintaining a positive cultural identity so that defectors and spies are not bred. Morale is key, as the history of Red Alliance demonstrates; lose enough pilots due to demoralization and your military suffers, and suddenly your alliance is in a full-on failure cascade. The intelligent use and deployment of propaganda is of crucial strategic importance, no matter how much the e-honor crowd may deny its impact.

When I got into the spy game, I didn't realize that I would end up spending more than half of my time on propaganda and spin control. There are three broad areas of social engineering within EVE: diplomacy, espionage, and propaganda. Like everything involving monkeys chattering at each other, the lines are blurry; diplomacy and espionage are muddied together constantly, and almost every act of espionage can be twisted to have some kind of public relations angle. One of the best examples of this is the now-infamous 'Yaay Peptalk', where a KenZoku FC gave a 'pep talk' to their pet alliance RISE; the 'pep talk' devolved into a rant about how terrible RISE was, and a GIA agent caught the whole thing on tape. We published the mp3 of the peptalk and spread it far beyond its initial audience of RISE members, cementing the narrative that RISE was an alliance of sycophantic losers willing to take any sort of abuse from KenZoku. Shortly thereafter, RISE failure cascaded, lost all their space, and disbanded. Efficient use of propaganda can turn an alliance that merely loses out militarily - of which there are hundreds - into an alliance which is a galactic laughingstock, a black mark on the employment history of any pilot unlucky enough to have been a part of it.

As Yaay told RISE, "Don’t worry about the forums, don’t even read the forums. All they’re doing is throwing out slander." Whenever one side decisively loses control of a propaganda vector, the most common response is to try to insulate their membership from hostile ideas. At the most basic level there is the relatively common 'forum ban'; a number of alliances ban their membership from posting on the official forums, and do their level best to discourage even reading them. This almost never works as a propaganda defense, as people who have been told not to do something begin to see the banned activity as more valuable. For example, Goonswarm spent several months trying to ban its members from posting on the forums for the strategic purpose of convincing the galaxy that we had been driven fully out of our old homeland of Syndicate and nearly destroyed; while the 'Big Lie' was a success, a legion of goons took up a habit of alt-posting, and whatever was said on the official forums was of heightened interest due to the ban.