EVE Online

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

The MMO that World of Warcraft couldn't kill.

EVE Online is what you'd get if you combine Traveller with Microsoft Excel, Euro Truck Simulator, and a tattered copy of Machiavelli's The Prince: a game where you fight interstellar wars by flying spreadsheets in space. Developed by Icelandic studio CCP Games, the company that briefly bought White Wolf with delusions of making a World of Darkness MMO before realizing that building an actual mmo is much harder than making spreadsheets fly in space.

EVE is set in the distant future after humans left Earth through a giant wormhole which subsequently closed, stranding them and causing a dark age for the newly formed colonies until they were able to develop back to the level they'd been at, whereupon they immediately set to fighting each other. Technology wise it's somewhere around the level of Star*Drive or Babylon 5 where big ships are able to jump around unassisted but smaller ships need some help to cover interstellar distances.

There are four main NPC factions in the game, who's role is generally to represent different combinations of technology:

• Amarr - Theocratic empire, loves heavily armored ships covered in gold filigree with lasers. Amarr capital ships are generally regarded as the best due to armor tanking being better than shield tanking in most circumstances.
• Caldari - Capitalist plutarchy, their ships are unpainted metal boxes with missiles and railguns. Caldari are shield tankers, which makes them a solid choice for subcapital combat but highly situational at capital ship scales.
• Gallente - Noblebright democracy, flies curvy ships with drones and blasters. Gallente kinda suck; blasters are short ranged and power hungry, while drones work slower and can be destroyed. Generally regarded as a PvE choice on account of having the best drone/fighter carriers.
• Minmatar - Tribal republic of dirt poor ex-slaves, fleet made out of rust and duct tape and armed with guns. Minmatar ships benefit from not needing to use capacitor power to shoot, allowing them to focus on engine boosting; a lot of Minmatar ships are the meta for their role, at least in the subcapital categories. Their capital ships however are garbage and nobody pretends otherwise even ironically.

But nobody cares about those factions.

The real action is between player organizations. The basic building block of organization in EVE is the Corporation. The corp is equivalent to the guild or clan of most MMO's, with a member list, some super users, guild bank and assets, etc. However, corps can have more assets, such as deplorable space equipment that remains on the server indefinitely (as long as the bills are paid, resources are supplied, and nobody blows it away). The typical corporation has a few dozen to a few hundred members, although holding corps tend to be very small and actively recruiting player corps can range into the thousands of members.

Corporations can band together formally into alliances. Corporations in an alliance can make sovereignty claims over systems by deploying and maintaining a thing in space that says they have sovereignty. Having sovereignty over a system allows deployment of system upgrades that can make the system more ideal for the owner's intended use. The typical alliance has thousands of members, with the largest breaking into tens of thousands.

Alliances often informally band together into coalitions, usually consisting of a central power with satellite allies. Coalitions aren't precisely modeled in the game, they're more of a meta feature, although alliances can set standings towards each other so their pilots see other pilots as friendly or hostile. The major hallmarks of a coalition are having a unified command and communications so that all coalition members can cooperate both at the battle and campaign level of operations.

An actual list of player coalitions in the game would be impossible to maintain as they change regularly and often without warning. However, as a general rule of thumb there are always multiple predominately American coalitions that hate each other, and one Russian coalition that hates everyone who isn't Russian.