To be fair, I think that our species is generally bad at understanding the impact of policy on economies. People whose job it is to understand this sort of thing often get it wrong in the real world, so I wouldn't be too harsh on game developers.

Letting these things slip in might be a deliberate choice that rewards out of the box gameplay and generates noteworthy PR. As I understand it, classifying one as an exploit can reverse the damage if it gets out of hand.

My corp was (is) one of the biggest ones and was derived originally from the Something Awful forums. So that certainly helps a lot. The corp has a long history, a very unique culture and personality and commands pretty intense loyalty (for an internet spaceship game).

Part of the cooperation in Eve is also because of the "player-owned space". Most competitive corps live in nullsec, which is free-for-all territory. You become invested in the place you live - all your possessions are there, you are familiar with the geography. It's your virtual space-home. Which also means you try to make it better, and try to defend it from other corps trying to encroach in your space.

Leadership is a complicated political mess that leads to a lot of hilarious moments. We have a CEO who is either elected or assigned, depending on the whims of our leadership. The CEO is assisted by a board of directors who basically oversee everything else. A lot is pretty standard - defense, fuel logistics, finance, etc. We have Fleet Commanders who don't hold political power, but are in charge of commanding fleet engagements and organizing defenses/raids. We also have squads, which are basically informal social groups. A lot of people like to chill with their squads when not involved in something else.

But we also have a lot of directors that manage groups of players involved in "unorthodox" gameplay.

For example, we have a large foreign intelligence division, whose sole job is to infiltrate other corporations. They feed false information, obtain intel and occasionally pull of theft on hilariously grand scale. A lot of these agents have accounts bankrolled by the corp (through in-game timecards) as compensation for having to play with terrible "pubbies" all day long.

We also have a diplomatic corp, which is basically the public face of the corp. I was in that for a while and it was very fun. I spent all day chatting with other corps, even ones we were at war with, trying to work out political solutions, swap intel, intimidate, etc.

There are so many more: extreme finance (exploit new CCP releases), foreign legions (helping allies in their wars), scamming/griefing, black ops (lone players that live in enemy space making their lives miserable), Bomberwaffe (stealth bomber raids), counter-intel (finding spies in our corp), etc etc.

That said, the "unorthodox" gameplay is what makes EVE the best MMO ever. As a veteran of XZH, I helped run logistics for a 3000 person force. At our peak, we were returning pilots to the front within 10 minutes of their death - new ship, fully fitted, ready to fight - at no cost to them. I was spending 6-8 hours a night and loving every minute of it. Sadly, that's unsustainable with my life goals. =)

Unless you spend an extremely sad and unhealthy amount of time playing the game you will never, ever get to do anything polyfractal describes.

A good example is the end of the BoB/Goonswarm war (the latter being polyfractal's alliance). Not that I ever had anything to do with either.

Basically a single guy from Goonswarm infiltrated BoB and got granted privileges to delete the BoB alliance. That meant they lost all their territory. OK, the game mechanics sucked at the time with too much advantage given to BoB's defence, but after the alliance got deleted, game over for BoB. And CCP didn't know what to do so just kinda went 'um, yeah, that's a real mechanic, not a bug/exploit'. Game over. No epic spaceship war. No amazing tactical genius. Just some guy lying about who he was with zero consequences and smarming BoB leadership until he could click the iwin button. Just a single click.

And that's the essence of end-game eve, find the exploit, click it, laugh, then wonder why the hell you were even playing the game in the first place.

polyfractal sounds very much like he's in the bright-eyed bushy tailed phase of eve before you realise, hang on a sec, I was supposed to be playing a spaceship game...

I would argue that the alliance you are a part of is more important than the amount of time spent. I got to do some really cool stuff because I was part of Goonfleet - which was very well organized and interested in playing all the parts of the game...not just the shooty parts.

You are also leaving out all the history that happened after that single "disband alliance" event. Did it suck for their alliance? Sure. What happened after that? They rallied and led an impressive one-year campaign to retake their homeland.

What other games allow for a year-long campaign against other players, keeping everyone involved actively engaged and interested? There were battles so large that the servers crashed, because there were several thousand people playing in the same system at the same time.

Hilariously enough, the same thing happened to Goonfleet (our CEO went rogue, deleted alliance, LOL). We were booted from our homeland as BoB took it back over. Guess what happened? Player engagement rates went through the roof. The alliance had been stagnating and people were quitting...after the exodus many players rejoined and started being active again.

My point in all of this is that the people who gravitate towards EVE are the ones that find this kind of gameplay enticing. It makes it so much more interesting than WoW or any other fluffy MMO where there is nothing to lose.

When I used to play shooters there where guilds, and the better ones ran in the same way to the guilds in MMOs. A group of players gather together, plays and trains together, discusses strategy etc. The difference is that you can start up Call of Duty or whatever and play a quick fun game by yourself. Playing EVE solo is going to be a lot less rewarding.

This is magnified as the reward structure in MMOs is usually designed around the best rewards being available only to the most coordinated groups. Thus a coordinated group of 15 players will gain rewards far, far greater then 15x that of a single player.

EVE has its guild system built into the game, there are recruitments posts etc. So finding other players is fairly easy. The forums of course extend this, and most serious groups will have their own websites and forums.

For me, I found myself spending far too much time worrying about my product inventory or how to optimize my logistics chain to squeeze a few more percentage points out of my margin.

Basically, I realized I could be doing the same thing but making real-money instead of space-money. I never really enjoyed the combat part of EVE (it kinda sucks), so when I realized that I was basically playing at business...why not start building real businesses?

It's an awesome game that I'd totally get back into...once I'm financially secure and playing EVE from a yacht.

That line sums up EVE for a good number of bittervets, I'd imagine. It's the reason why I don't want to sign up again, not until I'm on a yacht (as you put it). Also wassup goon buddy.

To answer your question, I think it largely depends on what a player does in-game. A young player running a lucrative in-game business is indicative of something very different from, let's say, if they spent their time scamming others or were primarily involved in combat ops.

I dunno if I would say it should be a standard teaching instrument, but I certainly learned a lot about macro and micro economics, finance, logistics, supply chain management etc etc.