EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

While a detailed theory of how alliances in EVE disintegrate may provide some academic amusement, it doesn't offer any practical guidance, except for the rare few who find themselves in a position of leadership. Yet all alliances die; if a pilot is going to get involved in 0.0 (and why not, since Empire is a criminally boring place) he will be faced with the eventual decline and fall of his organization. If handled with naivete, alliance death wreaks untold personal destruction. Asset stockpiles become trapped in stations with no hope of retrieval and personal wallets are emptied to fund a hopeless war effort. Far too many pilots find themselves fighting and dying for a lost cause, and when the war is over they are penniless and without the means to recover. Yet this worst case can be easily avoided if a few common sense steps are taken, and some foresight applied. You have to learn how to recognize when your alliance is in trouble, and then know what to do about it.

Recognizing an alliance in trouble is made simple by the fact that most alliances are structured in roughly the same way, and face nearly identical issues over the course of their life cycle. When bad things happen, spaceship nerds react in a predictable fashion, even across cultural boundaries. Just as a running nose and a fever indicates a cold, these symptoms reflect organizational distress for an alliance. These occur in no particular order, meaning that you could find an alliance which begins howling about 'wolfpacks' at the first sign of trouble, when for others 'wolfpacks' are mentioned only after a complete breakdown.

Indicators of an Alliance Under Stress

Wolfpacks: Warfare in 0.0 is about accomplishing strategic objectives: seizing space, blowing up control towers, capturing R64 moons, and blowing up capital ships. If you are an aggressor, there's something to be said for sending small gang raiding parties into your target's territory to disrupt member operations such as ratting or mining. But if your alliance is on the defensive and losing ground, nothing sets off the warning alarms quite like calling for small gangs of fast ships to harass the invader. These gangs are almost always cast in terms of 'wolfpacks', as if invoking submarine warfare from World War II is a good model for success. Hint: Submarine warfare didn't prevent Berlin from being sacked, and wolfpacks won't prevent hostile capital fleets from ravaging your control towers. Wolfpacks are a sign of desperation from an alliance who cannot defend themselves at the strategic level, but feel compelled to 'do something'.

Forum Censorship (Lotka.org): Lotka Volterra cornered the market on overt forum censorship in EVE. Since their downfall, their name has been 'verbed' and now describes heavy handed moderation of dissenting views. Example: "Oldma lotka'd the Intrepid Crossing forums, they've been scrubbed clean." Some alliances will censor dissent only when under extreme duress, others are so sensitive to criticism that anything not pro-leadership will be nuked immediately. This sort of behavior is something that a wise pilot will be very suspicious of, as it indicates an inability to confront problems directly.

"We Didn't Want That Anyway": Certain types of excuses crop up over and over again in EVE. "We didn't want that anyway" goes in the same bucket as "It was just holding us back," "Now we're really mad," and any reference to wounded tigers. These feeble rationalizations have become such stereotypes that they are often used as jokes. If you see any of these deployed unironically with regards to a significant strategic asset, that's a problem. If your leadership is saying that they didn't want that chromium mining tower anyway, it's probably a fair statement. When they start talking about R64s and stations, run; it's only a matter of time before they start announcing that losing everything has "freed [them] from the shackles of pos warfare."

Red Pen: This category covers any kind of op announcement or "Call to Arms" which includes negative reinforcement as a motivator, demanding that pilots show up and fight "or else." Threatening people to play a voluntary and sometimes tedious spaceship game is not a winning strategy when your alliance is on the defensive, and it inevitably reduces participation and defensive capability - even if in the short term it seems like things perk up. Red Pen announcements are a good indicator that your alliance is being run by mongoloids. Note that alliances will frequently make use of threats when going on the offensive, and that this isn't necessarily a sign of weakness; an offensive Red Pen is used as an excuse to purge corporations or individuals who aren't pulling their weight.