Your Alliance and You

This one time, in Shiva camp, when creating an Alliance. No wait, wrong quote. In Shiva, we're finally allowing corporations to formally unite under a single banner - literally. Seriously. Alliances are a very big entity within EVE and are really the player equivalent of an NPC Faction and as such, it has a number of pros and cons.

Regarding the banner thing, lets get that out of the way first. Alliances will have their own unique logo ingame as all other major entities have (Yes, seriously). They will of course be stylized and modified by our graphics department to prevent flaming skulls and the legendary EVE paint art but otherwise it's up to the Alliance. Think of it like you request us to create your logo for you by sending in a draft. This process usually takes a full month to complete, so Alliances should start sending their drafts to scc@ccpgames.com. Nifty, huh?

More good stuff. Just as NPC Factions can claim territory, Alliances can do the same. The limitation of course being that you can't claim territory from another NPC Faction (Lets do that next year). The claimed territory will eventually be viewable from the Starmap, where Alliances have their own color and the sovereignty will be displayed when you are in the system itself.

Being such a large and important entity, the restrictions to create an Alliance are high, higher than previously mentioned. This is to prevent us having 500 Alliances, which does not make sense from a Roleplay perspective nor a system perspective. Currently, I'm only considering increasing the initial fee to 1000 Million ISK, not having any member limitations. It should have the threshold high enough.

Let's remember one thing before saying "OMGWTFBBQ I can't create an Alliance for my three 20 man corps?". No, you can't. Well, you can of course, if you fill the prerequisites and can pay the price. Alliances is high-end gameplay, Alliances are equivalents of an NPC Faction. They can own space and ... well, what the future of Alliances is will be unvealed at the Fanfest. It's part our hidden agenda.

We do realize that currently, some Alliances might not consider it worth due to a number of circumstances but you know us. We love to nerf and give luv, change and adapt things by how the players use it. Trying to foresee how the features will be used by players is redundant because I have never seen that work out. 50 thousand people have a mind of their own on how to do things. So I ask for a little patience here.

Player owned factions on this scale, their future possibilities of affecting the storyline and political landscape has never been done before in such a large gaming population that I'm aware of. The probability of this going wrong is very high, but hey, that hasn't stopped us before. I mean, imagine 8 years ago, 2 guys pitching a game thats in space, where you have 50 thousand people interacting in the same universe over the internet - in Iceland ...