Bret Devereaux

So, youtube keeps showing me this one EVE Online ad and - having actually played EVE back when, as an undergraduate, I had too much time for such things - it is odd because they are selling an experience that *exists* in EVE, but only for a tiny fraction of players. 1/12

But players can work together and fight each other and you can seize territory and so there are big fleet battles with hundreds of players (in exactly that many ships) battling each other. What being advertised here is essentially the 'fleet commander' ('FC') experience. 3/12

The FC being the person who commands those player-fleets. Which, funnily enough, I did that. I was a/the senior FC of a largish player alliance (c. 1500 humans) that, for a time held and defended a chunk of 'sov' space (space that player organizations can fight over). 4/12

And on the one hand, the fraction of players who get to do that is tiny. I don't know the statistics now, but back when I played, most players never entered the lawless parts of the game where you can do this. I think I saw an estimate that it was c. 1/4th who did. 5/12

So most players will never be in the same zip-code as this playstyle. But that's only the start of it because not everyone in an alliance gets to be an FC. Our 1,500 person alliance had maybe a dozen active FCs at any given time. 6/12

At any given time, there are maybe 50-75 or so active '0.0' alliances (0.0 or 'nullsec' being the term for the lawless space where players wage their wars). So maybe around 1,000 or so active big alliance FCs, of which maybe 100 or so do any real campaign planning. 7/12