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Phase Three: Collective Helplessness

Helplessness is a state where a pilot comes to believe that his actions on behalf of the alliance are pointless, impotent, or irrelevant in the face of adversity. This can be because he cannot ignore the failings of his alliance and must acknowledge them: "This alliance sucks, what's the point."  It can also be because he feels that no action he can take will make an impact on the situation: "I love my alliance, but I can't do anything to keep us from getting rolled." Regardless of the reasoning, helplessness takes the pilot out of the war until the helpless state is overcome, which will depending on the pilot's explanatory style.  For some, helplessness may be swiftly overcome. Some pilots never give up in the first place, others keep fighting with only short breaks until the bitter end. Others throw in the towel after the first loss.

Individual variation is minimized when dealing with a group of more than a thousand pilots, however. It doesn't matter much to the alliance if any given random pilot has given up and needs some time out to recuperate, but if the level of trauma reaches the point that the alliance cannot muster an effective military defense, a state of collective helplessness results. There is a certain military threshold of effective resistance, and once the victim alliance loses the ability to resist, adversity accelerates rapidly. Failure after undeniable failure knocks increasing numbers of pilots into a state of helplessness, further degrading the alliance's ability to defend itself.

It is difficult to come up with an example of an alliance which has recovered from this late stage of the cascade. But there are some examples of alliances avoiding this state altogether, even after the failure of rationalization. One of the significant mysteries of modern 0.0 warfare is Red Alliance's incredible 2006 defense of C-J6 against the combined assault of Lotka Volterra, Ascendant Frontier, and the rest of the Southern Coalition. RA was outnumbered six to one, more so if you consider that the average RA pilot in that battle was multiboxing. They had no allies to help them (as this was months before Goonswarm and Tau Ceti Federation joined with them) and were considered pariahs in the 'EVE Community' on account of RA's adoption of 'dishonorable' tactics in the face of these overwhelming odds. Red Alliance had lost a massive amount of territory and had one single station left. By most theories of alliance disintegration, Red Alliance should have been rubble. But somehow they resisted and turned the tide. How? 

The conventional wisdom says that this is due to the ethnic nature of Red Alliance; they did not cascade because they possessed a unique, out of game culture. Yet there were multiple ethnic-Russian alliances in EVE at the time (RISK and Against All Authorities) and other ethnic Russian alliances have since hit failure cascade. Why did Red Alliance survive? Because they were not helpless, even in the face of sustained, undeniable adversity. The average skill level of the RA pilots was far beyond that of their enemies. While RA did lose territory, in the battle for C-J6 and elsewhere the Red Alliance battleship sniping groups devastated their opponents, even if they lost battle after battle. Red Alliance pilots repeatedly destroyed Southern Coalition capitals in an era where capitals were far more valuable than they are today. Adding further confirmation that they were not helpless, RA pilots could see evidence of the impact their efforts made when Lotka Volterra and Southern Coalition pilots would whine on the forums and accuse RA of 'not dying fast enough'.