Big alliances give you a chance to be casualish. I played with goonswarm back in the day and swarming was part of the tactics.

Or a job. EVE seems to be populated primarily by oil barons and trust fund kiddies.

I remember back in the day, 2010 or thereabouts, calculating how much time I’d need to spend doing pve missions to afford PLEX with ISK alone. it was going to work out at something like 30 hours. that’s a full time job in this country.

Having been involved in one of those wars, from a grunt’s perspective it mostly feels like this:

1. Follow FC to assigned position.
2. Observe slide show because there’s a zillion people in this system and time dilation kicked in.
3. Push butan when told over comms.
4. Explode for some reason.
5. Try to escape in pod, get podded because the UI is hard to use and TiDi makes everything weird.

Or my other favorite experience, ratting for money.

1. Fly expensive ship into system.
2. Target NPC ships in overview, blow them up while orbiting something.
3. Get attacked by pirates which is either one guy multi-boxing 12 ewar frigates or gang of roving pirates nobody bothered to deal with.
4. Lose expensive ship that nullifies somewhere between .5 and 2 hours of boring ratting.

Stealth bombing was pretty fun, I’ll admit. But everything else was a bunch of neat ideas saddled by the most profoundly boring implementations imaginable. It truly is spreadsheets in space, and not just for all the math, but because one of the most important UI elements for the longest time literally was a spreadsheet. And then they did this.