- Phase One; a fighting force/Alliance grows up together and operates, and ends up working well together. It's been been forged in the heat of battles and secures a chunk of space through hard fighting, solid tactics and a DESIRE to PvP. With your newly claimed space, the alliance hits a lul. Alliance leadership heads off, looking to recruit to provide extra pilots/corps for defense.
- Phase two is when the supposed support organizations bring more bears than pvpers, bring in numbers but no real pvp quality. They usually integrate badly on vent, form mining gangs and complain when they don't get PvP "security" support for their ops. Even worse are the "special bears", ones that think they can pvp better than the long time good pvpers of your alliance. They end up on your forums, in your fleets, talking over the FC, following bad comms, bat fits. Refusing to change their fits, thereby lowering the overall effectiveness of your alliance fleets. Around here you also start to get an attrition of the elite pvp pilots as they leave to find new and now much better places to pew pew. Sometimes engaging the very carebears they were driven off by in revenge, usually creating a integral part of Phase four.
- Phase three; these support corps gain more power in the alliance, banding together in the directorate forcing non-pew related decisions, blues, miningfests, and they also take on more members as bears join bears when they have a good thing going. Now your alliance takes a subtle shift from pew pew focus to bear focus. If you are in a good pew pew corp in the alliance you usually won't even notice since you are off doing your own thing, engaging in roams and fighting off other roams and otherwise having a great time.
- Phase four is ALWAYS initiated by external conflicts. In this Phase your space gets threatened externally by a now up-and coming or established pew pew force, like C0ven and SE who don't have the bear rot in their ranks or at least not to the same extent. Leading indicators of this is spikes of skirmish warfare on your borders, think of them like probing attacks. Your remaining pew pewers and pew corps take up arms and do their best to skirmish and usually this stage can be a lot of fun, however it will lead to invasion when the opposing force realizes that you are now an easy target for a full frontal confrontation.
- Phase five, failscade phase 1. Invasion knocks on the doors of Alliance 0.0, but instead of the participation you are expecting, ie >55-65% alliance in fleet ratio like when the alliance was in full-fledged PvP mode, you get 5-10% with all the bears staying out of the pvp, or even showing up for the early battles, losing a few ships and then dropping out, sometimes reflected in whining on the forums, transporting assets out, and otherwise bitching, all the while failing to provide any of the pvp support or continued support they were actually brought in for. This phase sets the stage for the most painful part. The remaining PvP corps in the alliance STRUGGLE hard to keep their pvpers on the field, the remaining PvP corps usually offering the majority of the 5-10% response forces and usually more heavily engaged in the fight than anyone else. Losing assets, isk and pilots to burnout.
- Phase six, complete failscade. Space is being taken, PvPers are now outnumbered in almost every fight, some continue to fight, growing more and more bitter, still taking some kind of sick enjoyment out of getting killed or getting 1-2 kills being outnumbered heavily. Other PvP corps leave, sometimes joining the corps invading your systems. Bears and bear corps start leaving the alliance, having evacuated in part 5. The Alliance loses the space and either shuts it's doors or starts back at Phase one, down to a core of good and reforged PvP corps, hopefully smart enough to avoid going down the path again.
Phases two and three can take as little as two weeks or as long as two years, or might never happen depending on leadership. It's not a forgone conclusion that bears in alliance = fail.
It's not that having non-pvp corps is fail in an alliance. It is that those corps have to contribute, and should be expected and, in fact, ARE expected to help with defense, muster some people to gangs and actually provide pvp support more with their numbers than with their isk. Think of the NC alliances, largely considered carebears when not under attack, unless MM or RAZOR, who take frequent road trips. When under attack they muster strong numbers in every TZ from all walks of Eve. Bottom lime is that Eve sov is blobby so having a pure industrial corp when defending your own space, muster a lousy 0-10 combat pilots out of a corp of 100 means the pvp corps providing 70 or 80% of their corp overall membership per fight are just going to be outnumbered and beaten down. Even during lag times, PvP corps aren't made to provide "security" for mining ops, or PvEr's. Bears need to have teeth and not rely on the PvP backbone to be the line of defense.
It's a simple concept but a surprising communications disconnect in almost every alliance I have ever been in with both PvPers and industrialists/Pvers. "They" tend to think it's the PvPers job to clear their systems out and keep them safe all the time, while they still profit off alliance space, rats, roids and members sometimes selling their modules out in market systems in their own 0.0 space when selling alliance mates. Often even price gouging vs Jita to same alliance membership. To be successful to the alliance the bears have to contribute more than just isk in taxes, ships and modules to defend space. The need to be able to fight for it as well.
