Riding the Failure Cascade

[Joel Gonzales]

Riding the Failure Cascade

"LV lost a few early battles in key sections of space, which allowed their enemies deeper into their territory. In just a few weeks, the advancing enemy destroyed LV's titan ship - the largest, most expensive ship in EVE, which takes weeks to build. Days after that battle, Lotka Volterra's directorate went missing. From that point on, LV's resistance grew weaker as they lost more and more territory. They disbanded in April 2007 but had stopped operating as an entity two months before. I tried to interview a former Lotka Volterra member about what the last few weeks were like. Before declining, he said that those were bad times."

Joel Gonzales looks inside the death of a guild.


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[lowrads]

It's spelled c-o-r-p.

Unless of course you're trying to piss off the whole server in which case carry on.

 

[Katana314]

Let me clarify something.
PLAYERS whack small animals with vaguely swordlike objects.
GUILDS whack bigger animals with even more vague, swordlike objects.
CORPS mine minerals which they then produce into battlecruisers which are sold on the black market for mucho moolah. They also serve as an outsourcing firm for other corporations to produce various other forms of ships when the assembly lines free up. Other kinds of corps may serve as delivery or transport services, freedom fighters (warriors with a lot of cash to burn on big guns), "corner the market" traders or simply just small groups of friends who play together.

In other words, you do more than just one thing.

 

[Callistus]

Terrible article. Biased and poorly informed at best.

 

[Ackillez]

What above poster said.

It really is astonishing that the author couldn't get ahold of a former member of LV to comment and instead chose to use their in-game enemies as primary source for the article. Considering that there were thousands of people in the alliance, surely there must've been someone available for comments.

 

[Geoffrey42]

With each additional comment, my suspicion that I must've been presented a different article than everyone else grows. The one I read had very little to do saying bad things about LV, or being a platform for "enemies" thereof. Moreso, it seemed like a discussion of how perfectly healthy organizations can fall apart. Anyone care to point out some passages they found particularly offensive?

 

[The Irrelevant Gamer]

With each additional comment, my suspicion that I must've been presented a different article than everyone else grows. The one I read had very little to do saying bad things about LV, or being a platform for "enemies" thereof. Moreso, it seemed like a discussion of how perfectly healthy organizations can fall apart. Anyone care to point out some passages they found particularly offensive?

You, and me both, mate. Maybe it is because I don't play EVE Online?

I thought the article was interesting. The idea of some guilds failing when hard times hit because they are basically success cultures makes a lot of sense.

 

[Ackillez]

With each additional comment, my suspicion that I must've been presented a different article than everyone else grows. The one I read had very little to do saying bad things about LV, or being a platform for "enemies" thereof. Moreso, it seemed like a discussion of how perfectly healthy organizations can fall apart. Anyone care to point out some passages they found particularly offensive?

Call me mad, but I'd think a first-hand account from someone who actually experienced the guild/corporation falling apart would have a natural place in such an article. If the author actually wanted to give a decent treatise on the subject, he really should have gotten hold of more reliable sources than someone with an ingame axe to grind. Sorry, but I don't understand how the author can parade as an authority on the subject when his source material is this shallow. I've been part of a corporation collapse in EVE personally and it was nothing like how he describes it at all...

 

[Callistus]

As the above poster says, if the author was really interested in providing a balanced account of why corporations fail then he would have talked to some people who have actually been in the failed alliance which he bases the majority of his article on. Instead he writes entirely from the point of view of the victors in that war, quotes extensively from one of their most prominent leaders, while relying only on a glib and uninformative one-liner from an un-named source on the other side of the fence. If he could not find a source in an (ex)alliance of thousands then I suggest he wasn't looking hard enough.

If he was intending to examine how out of game loyalties affect the ability of a corp to withstand hardship, then perhaps he should have asked why, unlike the Russian Red Alliance, the predominantly German alliances of G Alliance and later D2 both collapsed? Or how many corps not based on any out of game culture or lineage do survive adversity?

I understand that this article is aimed at people who don't play EVE, and yes, the idea that corps/guilds fail because they are based on a success culture is an interesting one and does make a lot of sense, but the author doesn't actually give us a real examples of this. Rather he chooses to present his case purely through heavily biased sources and fictional and highly sensationalist accounts of internal struggles in a failing corp.

 

[bok]

This is just a crappy copy of this article:
http://shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=564

Worst article I've read on this site, not just for it's limited scope but also it's just so damn lazy. There are so any things you could find to talk about in eve it's sad no one can be bothered.

 

[Tacitus]

I highly suggest that you get your information together in regards to EVE alliance history before publishing a story. As a former member of Lotka Volterra it's rather disappointing to see my alliance refered to with little knowledge on the subject matter.

Let's not even count the fact that we were at war with a multitude of neighbors for well over a year. Day in, day out. It wasn't a few weeks in the kitchen that got people hot and leaving. It was the fact that we were constantly between a hammer and anvil.
And in regards to the titan loss -- we never lost ours. What we lost was a station building another. Search the EVE forums for the "Battle of JV1V-D" and you'll find something in the likes of several thousand posts in respect to the engagement (rather, the engagement that never happened). Divulge what information you want from there and you'll soon realize that both sides were at a loss because of server instability. It wasn't a failure on our part, however, I won't say it didn't hurt our morale. We had roughly 1,000 pilots in our system ALL at a choke point. Our enemies had roughly 2,000 pilots a jump out. A system crash due to these extreme numbers, followed by hours of trying to log back in (I was there, It was no fun) was a kick in the shins in respect to the fight wanted by both sides.

Well written in most regards, however, your information regarding Lotka Volterra isn't entirely accurate. Good article though, and always nice to see something about EVE being thrown around.

 

[Arbre]

So the story is to never trust someone who says he knows what he's speaking about, until he's clearly proved it.

 

[Chilango2]

...Honestly, the article wasn't mainly about LV or its history, or anything. It was about a phenomenon.

It wasn't "this gild sucks, ahahahah!" I mean.. am I reading the same article as all of you? The one that mostly talks about the meta level of why guilds (in general) fail? I mean, sheesh.

 

[rhizic]

i thought the article was just about how guilds/corps whatever fall apart, was'nt it? i found it pretty interesting, and if anything its made me really really wanna play eve

 

[Ackillez]

I think you're missing the point- EVE players will be annoyed with the article because it provides a biased account of that specific event, but in general the article is seriously flawed for not researching the core issue here- the failure cascade phenomenon. Had the author bothered to use more than just one guy with an axe to grind as his reference, you could actually have gotten a useful article out of it. As it stands, it doesn't provide accurate information on the failure cascade at all and as such it really fails to deliver.

 

[Chilango2]

I think you're missing the point- EVE players will be annoyed with the article because it provides a biased account of that specific event, but in general the article is seriously flawed for not researching the core issue here- the failure cascade phenomenon. Had the author bothered to use more than just one guy with an axe to grind as his reference, you could actually have gotten a useful article out of it. As it stands, it doesn't provide accurate information on the failure cascade at all and as such it really fails to deliver.

Well, a fuller discussion of ti would have been nice yes, I agree. I'm not sure if ti was edited to that length, or if the writer just wrote it that way. It was at least a modertly intelligent and interesting article, which puts it on the "median" of escapist articles, and "so good you never see it" just about anywhere else. But yes, he could have devoted more effort to exploring the idea, as it was, it was more or less a "thought, guilds fail because they are a culture of success, so the moment they don't succeed, they fail: Discuss."

The article as it resulted is, I think, a result of the fact that the escapist editors aren't familiar with the situation (why should they be), and the writer being a volunteer submission (that's how it reads..) who didn't know alot about the situation in question (and as such may have not had an accurate picture of it..), wasn't able to get any interviews, but had a few interesting thoughts anyway. YMMV.