OTEC and other true meta is awesome.

It's not stopping people from being friends, it's limiting the power of the ingame mechanics that makes being friends too easy and powerful.

EVE wants conflict and diversity.

It doesn't have to be hauler sized cargo either, you can easily find variations that include different combat ships and put different demands on your cargo. Tech III's would obviously be popular, but this is hardly the place to flesh out any such suggestions.

Back on track, regions would then be coveted based on the old values such as NPC's (truesec), minerals or quality of deep-space agents.

It can be ratting, missions, mining whatever.

It could even be new things like missions that are not based around NPC grind, but rather travelling around (a gurista agent giving you an assassination mission of an angel commander, sending you down south for a single NPC kill and back, or maybe PvP assassination missions based on corporate standings; if you're in Test, kill a member of a specific A-corp or similar). I'm not saying that's how it should be done, but the possibilities are endless if you find the current ship-based PvE to be dull and "grindy".

As far as my comment went, it only meant to say things related to ships (ship-ship, ship-space) rather than structures.

Imagine the rage/tears.

Also people just do whatever gives them the most isk / hour doing pve anyway (look at incursions dying when you couldn't just deltole deltole deltole anymore) if ring mining gives more isk per hour than running havens then people will move from haven grinding to ring mining grinding, which will turn the isk faucet into a tech faucet.

Your average alliance grunt can make more money, an isk faucet turns down, and Tech 2 ships get a little cheaper (and blow up in larger numbers)

What you can't do is stopping people from collaborating politically. Not many people would like to stop that on the other hand though, and collaboration is not a problem within itself.

The problem is imbalanced and overblown political tools and mechanics, like the inifinite blue list.

Having friends, that are more difficult to distinguish on a heavy grid, is well different from friends that you can simply blue and remove from overview.

It's a perfect example of the "cumber in number" perspective. Today you can have 500 friends sitting on a gate, and as soon as one neutral player slip through everyone will know to shoot him, because he is the only visible target. He can't hide in your mass so your numbers have no cumber. That is a game mechanic, not a player ideal.

The problem isn't that large alliances, politics or blobs exist – the problem is that the game mechanics are not balanced in regard to them. They are serving them.