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RPS: This idea of leadership is something I’ve become fascinated with since coming out here. The fact that whole corporations and alliances can be built around one person.
MT: Eve is a fascinating social sandbox. People with the ability to bind people to them are rare in real life, and they are in Eve as well. One of the scariest moments for me in Eve was during our most recent campaign, the Fountain Campaign. We’d created this coalition called The Cluster:daisy:, and I was set to give this speech. Occasionally we do this, and we call it the State of the Goonion and it gets four hundred or five hundred people on Teamspeak. So I gave a speech and welcoming the Cluster:daisy:, and found one thousand, two hundred and seventy humans had tuned in to hear me talk about a bad game. And then we went off to break up the alliance we were at war with.
You can’t kill an alliance unless you break up the social bonds that hold it together. Espionage is only ever a means to an end to induce a failure cascade.
When things get bad, when an alliance starts losing enough that they stop logging in, when they start blaming each other and they start internalising their failures, then you start seeing “the graph”. An alliance goes into failure cascade when its capabilities have been degraded to the point that one failure piles on top of another, and they start shedding corporations, because rather than identifying with the alliance the pilots say “Well, I’m still a proud member of my corporation”, and then one corp goes its seperate ways. And if one corp stops showing up on operations, everyone else says “What the :daisy: is with these people?” And it becomes a circular firing squad.
During the Great Wars 1 and 2 we had destroyed Band of Brothers and taken their space, but they were still a cohesive social force and simply reformed. It was only most recently during the Fountain campaign that they went into true failure cascade, and are now three or four different alliances which hate each other’s guts now. Which is great!
Failure cascades just fascinate me. That’s why I play the game, really- to tear social groups apart. That’s the stuff that’s interesting about Eve. The political and social dimensions. Not the brackets shooting brackets :daisy:. That’s why we say Eve is a bad game.
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RPS: I think I’ll indulge you. What makes a good leader?
MT: I used to actually be a very bad leader. Many years ago Remedial – the guy now facing 25 million dollars in fines – retired and made me CEO against my will, and I failed spectacularly. I listened to too many people and tried to poll my membership for what I should do, and it was a disaster. I handed leadership over to somebody who knew what they were doing and the organisation was much better for it.
Later, after watching so many failure cascades, I saw some commonalities in what made good and bad leaders. Through my spy network and watching the mistakes of others I developed into what I would call a good leader.
It’s essentially about delegation. People will show up and be good leaders, but they’ll try and do everything, then they’ll burn out, disappear and their alliance dies. For example, in Goonswarm we have a team structure. I’m the autocrat, but we have a finance team, a fleet commander team, a logistics team and so on, and these teams don’t have heads. These teams simply work together to solve common problems, and that removes single person dependencies which are a huge problem in alliances.
In some ways, it’s a lot more complicated than running a small business. Most small businesses are between a hundred and two hundred employees, or less. We run an organisation of six thousand people in a coalition of ten thousand.
RPS: So you can remove any one person in that power structure…
MT: And it won’t fall down. The purpose of the autocrat is to essentially let the people who are experts do their jobs, make large strategic decisions and be a figurehead, but a lot of it’s just human resources work. Resolving disputes, hiring good people, firing bad people.
I don’t know :daisy: about logisitics, I’m not a fleet commander – I’ve got spying down, but I’m just a leader. I’ve got the charisma. Micromanaging is death. It leaves you with good people wondering why the :daisy: some :daisy: is telling them how to run a logistics chain or what ships to use in the fleet they’re composing. A lot of other autocrats meddle too much.
RPS: How do you reinforce against a failure cascade?
MT: This was actually asked by somebody in IT Alliance when their alliance was already in failure cascade. They just hadn’t noticed yet, and had yet to split apart.
The best way to deal with a failure cascade is to not generate false expectations about a situation. If you’re honest with your people as to the strategic situation, you’ll be able to survive terrible things. Goonswarm has lost all of its space before because we forgot to pay our sovreignity bills, and we just imploded. We were nearly destroyed at one point when we were beaten back to one region.
So yeah, don’t lie to your people because they’ll find out what’s going on from other sources, and then they won’t trust you. You also have to have a coherent culture and ideology.
The reason Red Alliance were able to survive again a thirteen thousand man alliance that beat them back to a single station is because they had a strong nationalistic bond. The reason why Goonfleet was able to survive crippling failures was because of our culture.
There’s one type of alliance that cascades easier than any other, which we call “renter” alliances. They’re the ones that don’t own space, but rent it from somebody else. What we call Space Feudalism. There are three types of government in Eve, Space Feudalism, Space Communism and Council Systems.
The talk of failure cascades is interesting to me in how it applies to rage quitting in L4D.