Another Eve online comment

Yeah yeah, I wanted to write something about Berlin and WoW.

Anyway, I started looking deeper into Eve Online politics and it is as I suspected.

Let me quote some stuff my corpmates from Eve University wrote:

Band of Brothers(bob) and Ascendent Frontier(ASCN) are by far the top 2 alliances in terms of power, size, territory and military. As far as publicly known these are the only 2 alliances that have a titan(s). BoB tends to take things over by military force where as Ascn tends to use merger and buyouts as their method of growth. BoB has taken military action on any allinace where they find out titans or mothership building capabilities have been shown. (ala them destroying TRUST which was cassini now and getting MC to blow up our(the big blue) capital shipyards after we built a mothership for a small pirate corp)

Most of the older alliances history is made up up various more famous corps who owned 0.0 space before allinaces were formally an in game mechanic and of course have their own territorial battle stories.

Most alliances run an NBSI policy. (not blue shoot it) ISS is one of the few who do not shoot neutrals and allow them in their space as was the big blue.

Mercenary coalition is an alliance of mercs. Many rumoured to be alts of Bob. They live in Bob's space so you can call them bob's bitches like other corps/allinaces who rent space from bob:P

The only newer alliance of note would be Goonswarm as they joined eve as one large group I believe around a year ago and became a top 5 sized allinace very quickly. They had no claimed territory and had recently fought for some and basically pissed off many allinaces in the world and got bitchslapped by a lot fo large alliances back to empire for now.

That's a general summary.

And here something more:

Eve is all about politics. To be precise, 0.0 space is all about politics. Sometimes, it only takes a bet to get a large war machine on the move (it has been hinted at that the Big Blue got wardecced by the Mercenary Coalition as the result of a bet). Sometimes war is a direct result of forum flame wars (as illustrated by the recent BOB vs Goonfleet conflict). Eve politics can boggle the mind at times, but it's all real, and it's not scripted by CCP.

As it has indeed been pointed out before, ISS Cassini used to belong to an alliance called TRUST. I don't quite recall the exact reasons why BOB invaded, and the reasons don't really matter at this point anyway, but it may have had to do with capital ship production and the fact that BOB does not like anyone else to have cap ships. While not liking something is fine in itself, BOB has the means of enforcing their "no capships" policy.

After the Mercenary Coalition destroyed the NAGA capital shipyard in 8MG (which had been the goal of their war), BOB occasionally conducted spot checks to make sure BLUE would not start cap ship construction over again. They did this with just a couple of recon pilots in interceptors - all you need to do is park at a planet an scan for the relevant POS module.

Soon after TRUST lost its outpost to BOB, it ceased to be neutral and formed a new alliance in the North - Dusk and Dawn, or D2. As outposts can not be destroyed once constructed, BOB was stuck with a station in a part of space it had no intention of controlling, so it handed it over to ISS.

ISS is a wise organization. It constructed deep space outposts to stimulate trade and business, guaranteeing the space's neutrality by giving station shares to major player factions. It is political maneuvering at its best, and I do recommend you drop by the ISS website to read up on how it's done.

ISS outposts are funded by shares. An IPO raises sufficient cash to build the outpost and shareholders receive dividents from station revenues (such as docking fees, repairs and so on).

ISS Cassini is the sole ISS station that was not built from an IPO but essentially given away for free. It does not mesh well into ISS's existing business model, as the alliance already has a 0.0 outpose deeper into Pure Blind.

Now this all sums up to a very Shadowrun-esk setting with hugh corporations controling 0.0 space plotting and scheming all player controled. Even though I'm just a very very very very tiny dot in all this, I have the feeling being part of all this and that appeals to me more and more.