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Submission: Power Struggle

April 4, 2014

When you first started EVE Online you’d have found yourself in one of many Non Player Controlled (NPC) corporations most likely running missions. They often talk about the corporations having their own police force and being able to control vast amounts of space, for example the CBD Corporation having it’s police force to manipulate the politics of highsec. However this isn’t limited to NPC entities. Players also possess the ability to control sizable private police forces and do, with one word form the CEO they can shut down systems, lock off stations and control eve on a grand scale.

The same applies to real life where large corporations have a huge amount of money at stake being pushed to get laws in place to be the only ones to profit and sell it to the masses as was seen in the 60’s with big tobacco companies. Also the wars in 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état that was pushed by United Fruit Company.

Now you have the Eve corporations that are much run like an company in real life, you have directors and a sources of income be it production, mining, just purely taxes of the members or any another other means. Notoriously however it is more often than not moon goo resulting in countless systems changing hands in an attempt to get a hold of this substance. But the price is dropping which means loss of income, making the owners having to sniff out and take control of more moons or alternatively adopt a new form of income.

Which brings me to the question,

Just how much do the Mega corporations control in eve?

The Fight of B-R
In the battle of B-R5RB analysis here
we see that mineral prices sky-rocket caused by panic buying and market savvy individuals making the cost of minerals nearly double for several days with losses of 11 trillion isk. 576 Capital class ships including 75 Titans were lost in the battle of B-R. Smaller crops can’t even obtain one Titan let alone be able to afford the loss of 75. Following the fight the alliances involved came out and said that most of the ships have been replaced. That is an astronomical amount of wealth at the hands of these corporations, There is no way a small corp could even begin to contest with these alliances without getting crushed, the only option is to join them.

Gallente Ice Interdiction
That in turn brings up the subject of market manipulations. For those of you who may not known about the Goonswarm gank of ice miners, it seems to happen about once a year but one of the more notable was the Gallente Ice Interdiction
This was a highly successful to the point where it effectively doubled the price of Oxygen isotopes for 3 months and the volume being sold went form 20m to less than 1m. Most of the reason for this follows the same idea as that which happened to the minerals after the battle of B-R5RB but over the course of 3 months rather than a few days. with the shortage of ice every thing that needed it went up, who is to say they wont do it again. This was just the sole efforts of a mega corporation, one attempted at manipulating the market no doubt in it’s favor. The people who knew about it and planed it presumably made billions and most likely had stocked ice for weeks before putting this plan into action.

Moon Mining
The only way to obtain a moon and therefore defend it is to have both large numbers and big guns, with that you are looking at hundreds of players and tidi fights, over what? Well it is no secret that moon goo is valuable but how much are we talking about, if a corp has an r64 or an r32 moon it may contain Dysprosium or Promethium which sells for 60,000 and 45,000 each and so you end up making 4,320,000,000 isk/per month or 3,240,000,000 isk/per month (respectively) not including fuel costs, if you have constellations that have thousands of moons in it like fountain well your corp is making trillions a month.

But that’s just a fraction of the amount of isk that is at stake in the whole picture that an outsider will never witness, it is a closely regarded secret as to how much isk the Mega Corporations control. They can drop billions without bating an eye and buy an unlimited amount of capital alts. With that much isk and thousands of players how much of a say do they have in controlling eve? If you look at the map maybe all null systems had 10-20 players fly in it within a 24 hour period. that is not a lot, But what goes on there causes huge rifts throughout the eve market. But this is no surprise with the top 10 player corps being pvp oriented.

Now if you look at the player corporations and their numbers, the top 10 the Mega corps’ member count is at 54,268. All 10 of these corps have direct interaction with each other in some way, be it blue or red. That is 10% of eve not even mentioning the top 20 with the numbers still in the thousands. All it takes is for one corporation to get a few other corps together and make something like the Gallente Ice Interdiction happen. Who is to say they won’t get together and say lets vote for this person on the CSM? Much like the big tobacco funding states senators.

According to a recent Q and A done by EVE-U 36 thousand Characters in control of one of the null sec alliances now say there are 3 characters per account, that is 12 thousand accounts, 12,000 votes going to one CSM that is for just one corporation, so maybe every one won’t vote for who they tell them too maybe some players wont vote but still that’s a lot. Now if you look at this data (granted it is old and no new data has been released) but only a small percentage of eve players voted for CSM 5 12.67% CSM 4 7.36% and for CSM 3 9.37%. The eve population back then was around 250,000 Now the last count that there was 500k people playing eve. If you look at the CSM in the past the mega corps have successfully voted candidate into a CSM seat, even with a few corps coming out and saying we can get someone who we want to run.

Now that the Mega corps have a spot on the CSM, Could they push more updates that just benefit themselves in one aspect of space more than others? Can they turn the what they know for a profit for their own corp like the drone guidance systems did?

Just how much can the Mega Corporations of Eve control?