"-A- is shit" became a common saying in EVE. They lost 2/3 of their Sov, they lost their staging systems without a fight, they are now living in NPC null, often undock-camped. Also, they are targeted by wide variations of hatred. HoneyBadger Coalition now attacks Esoteria, but I've seen no sign of hatred towards its denizens. There is more like a "they live in a space we want and also they are a nuisance so let's evict them" attitude towards them. HBC fleets also often combat N2S and CVA fleets without any sign of hate.
It seems -A- earned the hatred and despise of both its enemies and most spectators. They must be horrible. This is indeed the common opinion about them. However I think that the average -A- line members are coming from no different background than most EVE players and they are not worse people in real life. They are just random guys placed in a bad structure. Please read the experiment of Milgram: his totally normal test subject were ready to torture to death other innocent people just because they were told to. Social people are very much product of their surroundings and their behavior is coming from outside factors instead of their internal qualities.
What is responsible for turning average guys into "shit -A-"? Is it some evil leaders or "culture"? I also disagree with that. "OMG losses" posts come up all the time on the TEST forum, warning us the dangers of supercarrier ratting or calling out some expensive idiot fit, demanding rules to stop these "embarrassing losses". They are ridiculed and talked down of course. But the seed of "l33t PvP" that turns -A- into -A- is clearly present in TEST too. But for some reason it could consume -A- and TEST is immune to this disease.
I believe the main reason is corporate size. Before you'd say there isn't that big difference, let's get numbers. No, average corp size is not good. If there are two alliances with 1000 members, with 2 corporations both, the average corp size is 500 for both. However if one has two 500-men corps, then in this alliance everyone has 499 corpmates. If the other has 100+900 members, than 900 people have 899 corpmates and 100 have 99. The average corpmate number here is (900*899+100*99)/1000 = 819. Let's calculate average corpmate number for -A- and TEST and get 221 and 1830. The difference is 8.7x!
OK, it's clear that -A- has much smaller corps, but how does it make them bad? The key is in their October alliance meeting: "Leadership encourages that -A- is still the best alliance on eve-kill, however their Russian corps have been doing the shittiest job, and are asked to step up their game." The small corporations allow -A- to have intra-alliance competition. The -A- member is not embarrassing himself by having losses but his corporation. Even if he is ready to damn his kill/death ratio and undock to go down in flames taking a few hostiles with him, he can't without damning his friends. So anyone who'd suggest to change the "never undock" attitude of -A- is talked down by his close social circles, therefore there cannot be pioneers in -A- facilitating the change.
There is another reason that holds -A- back. Imagine that two fleets fight and both kill 10-10 equal ships. 1.0 Kill/Death and 50% ISK ratio. Now let's see what happens if one of the fleets had 10 different corporations, and each corporations lost one ship while they did damage in all killed enemy ships. Then their killboard will have 10 kills and only one loss, 10.0 K/D and 91% ISK ratio, despite we talk about the same battle. Generally the K/D_corp = K/D_fleet*fleet_size/corp_size. The smaller the corps are, the better their K/D is if they are fighting in a large-fleet setting. This problem causes that -A- members look at their corporation killboard and rightfully say "yes, we are absolutely elite" even if their fleet lost every battle. Obviously it's based on the error of the killboards that give one kill to all pilots who killed the same one ship instead of giving them 1/n kills. But killboards are the way they are and people are bad at maths. This gives them a very distorted perception of reality where they don't see why should they change anything at all.
The large-corp based TEST is immune to both effects. TEST corporations can't meaningfully compete with each other over killboard stats since Dreddit is 20-30x bigger then them, so they need to have 20-30x more kills/pilot to compete. Also, the large size of Dreddit ruins its killboard ratio (remember that it's fleet_size/corp_size), making the "greenness" competition trivial/meaningless. So TEST couldn't be a killboard worshipping alliance even if it wanted to, the irreparable "l33t PvP"-ers quit it in disgust, removing their harmful cultural effect.
It seems -A- earned the hatred and despise of both its enemies and most spectators. They must be horrible. This is indeed the common opinion about them. However I think that the average -A- line members are coming from no different background than most EVE players and they are not worse people in real life. They are just random guys placed in a bad structure. Please read the experiment of Milgram: his totally normal test subject were ready to torture to death other innocent people just because they were told to. Social people are very much product of their surroundings and their behavior is coming from outside factors instead of their internal qualities.
What is responsible for turning average guys into "shit -A-"? Is it some evil leaders or "culture"? I also disagree with that. "OMG losses" posts come up all the time on the TEST forum, warning us the dangers of supercarrier ratting or calling out some expensive idiot fit, demanding rules to stop these "embarrassing losses". They are ridiculed and talked down of course. But the seed of "l33t PvP" that turns -A- into -A- is clearly present in TEST too. But for some reason it could consume -A- and TEST is immune to this disease.
I believe the main reason is corporate size. Before you'd say there isn't that big difference, let's get numbers. No, average corp size is not good. If there are two alliances with 1000 members, with 2 corporations both, the average corp size is 500 for both. However if one has two 500-men corps, then in this alliance everyone has 499 corpmates. If the other has 100+900 members, than 900 people have 899 corpmates and 100 have 99. The average corpmate number here is (900*899+100*99)/1000 = 819. Let's calculate average corpmate number for -A- and TEST and get 221 and 1830. The difference is 8.7x!
OK, it's clear that -A- has much smaller corps, but how does it make them bad? The key is in their October alliance meeting: "Leadership encourages that -A- is still the best alliance on eve-kill, however their Russian corps have been doing the shittiest job, and are asked to step up their game." The small corporations allow -A- to have intra-alliance competition. The -A- member is not embarrassing himself by having losses but his corporation. Even if he is ready to damn his kill/death ratio and undock to go down in flames taking a few hostiles with him, he can't without damning his friends. So anyone who'd suggest to change the "never undock" attitude of -A- is talked down by his close social circles, therefore there cannot be pioneers in -A- facilitating the change.
There is another reason that holds -A- back. Imagine that two fleets fight and both kill 10-10 equal ships. 1.0 Kill/Death and 50% ISK ratio. Now let's see what happens if one of the fleets had 10 different corporations, and each corporations lost one ship while they did damage in all killed enemy ships. Then their killboard will have 10 kills and only one loss, 10.0 K/D and 91% ISK ratio, despite we talk about the same battle. Generally the K/D_corp = K/D_fleet*fleet_size/corp_size. The smaller the corps are, the better their K/D is if they are fighting in a large-fleet setting. This problem causes that -A- members look at their corporation killboard and rightfully say "yes, we are absolutely elite" even if their fleet lost every battle. Obviously it's based on the error of the killboards that give one kill to all pilots who killed the same one ship instead of giving them 1/n kills. But killboards are the way they are and people are bad at maths. This gives them a very distorted perception of reality where they don't see why should they change anything at all.
The large-corp based TEST is immune to both effects. TEST corporations can't meaningfully compete with each other over killboard stats since Dreddit is 20-30x bigger then them, so they need to have 20-30x more kills/pilot to compete. Also, the large size of Dreddit ruins its killboard ratio (remember that it's fleet_size/corp_size), making the "greenness" competition trivial/meaningless. So TEST couldn't be a killboard worshipping alliance even if it wanted to, the irreparable "l33t PvP"-ers quit it in disgust, removing their harmful cultural effect.
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