Achernar: The space commute

This post is part of the EVE Blog Banter, a monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to him. The twenty-fifth topic comes from @Tetraetc - Tetra's EVE Blog, who asks us: "Have Alliances and the sovereignty system limited the amount of PVP and RP potential in Null sec? Imagine a Null Sec where anyone could build outposts wherever. Would the reduction of the alliance game mechanic, and the removal of the sovereignty game mechanics (or the modification of it from Alliance level to Corp level for that matter) force more PVP into Null sec, or would giant power blocs like the NC still form themselves?"

Strategic warfare: blobbing
How do you get your fix of player-versus-player adrenaline if you need to travel a long way before locating ships your in-game organization allows you to shoot at? For those who revel in the proverbial "good fight" rather than in-game commute, the game loses value. This can happen in empires: the Northern Coalition and the Clusterfuck Coalition are, for the time being, "best friends forever". You can travel for dozens of jumps and keep within the boundaries of friendly space. Drone Russians and their allies too occupy huge tracts of space and make their best not to interfere with each other's business (some of them, if rumors are to be believed, due to the laws of robotics).
When roaming pvp is time-consuming, fleet battles are incredibly more so, with hours lost waiting for gigantic fleets to move. Logistic bottlenecks (rally point, FC, titan bridge, liquid ozone, cyno ship, etc.) become the main obstacle to reach desired critical numbers on the battlefield. Why the swarms ?
1. Two fishes will eat one fish.
2. Military tactics on a strategic level are designed around lag, which makes and unmakes victories. Lag makes it important to occupy a strategic system before the enemy and for as long as possible.
Blobbing, that is, refusing to engage with nothing less than an obvious advantage and a sun-blotting quantity of ships, thus emitting waves of soul-crushing lag, becomes the rational tactic. (My perception, not necessarily an ubiquitous reality in all of 0.0.)

Are alliances the problem?
As far as I know (I was not a capsuleer back then), functional alliances predate the game mechanism providing an umbrella organization to friendly corporations. It is one of those instances when new features help structure what was essentially the spontaneous evolution of the political system from its corporation-based origin [insert Darwin quote]. One could argue that the geopolitical landscape of 0.0 nowadays is really shaped by the decisions of bloc leaderships; perhaps will we see someday the introduction of a coalition game mechanism (with actual alliance-like mechanisms or through an evolution of "treaties", a proposed game mechanism purportedly designed to help small entities finding their place in the 0.0 geopolitical ecosystem).

As long as strength lies in numbers
Groups of players will keep forming functional alliances at a strategic level as long as it makes sense, as long as they can find an advantage in this situation. The need for protection, the ambition to conquer, the desire to exploit, are all best served by people cooperating on a grand scale.
If both the alliance game mechanism and the current sovereignty system are modified so that corporations become the sovereignty unit in 0.0, large fleet battles will become more difficult to engineer. However, players will find different ways to collaborate and to replicate alliance functionalities. For example, they can establish huge standings list like the one Curatores Veritatis Alliance manages, or they can reuse the high-sec Red vs Blue concept of warring corporations, which ties players not to common territory but to common enemies. Mega-corporations would certainly see a surge, with massive influx of players into a few corporations, thus decreasing the biodiversity of 0.0. Reducing the role of alliances does not sound to me like the easy fix to commuting warfare. Modifying the sovereignty system itself (the way a system is conquered and exploited) might do the trick if, somehow, it becomes overkill or counter-productive to bring a blob to a battle.

Check other Eve Blog Banter articles on the same topic.

Achernar

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The space commute

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