I’ve been living in Syndicate for a while now, mostly around Poitot, and at some point I realised I was spending almost as much time taking notes as I was actually playing.
It started with fairly basic stuff: missions, travelling around, getting caught in camps, talking to locals, watching who was active where, and trying to understand why the region works the way it does.
The question that kept coming back was this: why do some groups manage to stick around in Syndicate while others vanish?
My first assumption was that NPC stations were probably the main reason. You can lose ships, structures, territory, whatever, but the station is still there. Nobody can evict you from it.
That explanation worked up to a point, but not nearly as well as I expected once I started looking at older groups and comparing what actually happened to them.
Somewhere along the way I realised I wasn’t just collecting EVE notes anymore. I had enough material to try turning it into an actual research paper.
It looks at Syndicate’s political geography, some of the groups that have lived there, the Caldari connection, and what happened to groups after they lost territory or infrastructure.
There’s some data analysis in it, but I’ve tried to keep the claims fairly modest. I’m looking at Syndicate specifically, not claiming I’ve found some universal rule for why alliances survive in EVE.
The paper is up on Zenodo now:
Pirate Polities Between Great Powers: The Syndicate as a Case Study of Political Survival in New Eden
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2281770 Pirate Polities Between Great Powers: The Syndicate as a Case Study of Political Survival in New Eden | Zenodo
If you’ve lived in Syndicate, particularly if you’ve been there longer than me, I’d be interested to hear what you think. Especially where your own experience doesn’t match what I found.
