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Riding the Failure Cascade
An anonymous reader writes "The Escapist has up an article looking at a curve that represents the dissolution of large social groups, like online guilds. Called the Failure Cascade, it's essentially a way of examining the dissociation of members of an organization predicated on a culture of success. They primarily explore this phenomenon using descriptions of EVE corporate alliances. 'These are the two forces at work in [an] alliance's failure cascade: the individual and the guild ... This happens because the failure cascade is the inverse of a network effect. Websites like MySpace define their value by the people that use the service just as guilds define their quality by their members. As bad events cause players to leave or become inactive, the quality drop leads others to do the same in a spiral that rarely stabilizes, until no one is left.'"
Indeed, the summary paints a glowing portrait of an article which does not exist. Nothing is explored, and there's certainly nothing even remotely relating the pseudo-scientific terms of "probility curve" within the article itself.
It all breaks down to a statement of the events which occurred, without any actual insights into the particular motivations (there's some pure speculation, but no actual information).
Cultures of success breaking down when encountering failure is nothing new, and doesn't need vague exploration. Actual exploration of the problem, with statistical models to help understand and, possibly, predict the curve would be helpful. Too bad this article offers none of that.
It's interesting that in EvE, the most vulnerable alliances are the ones that are most democratic.
The article is a really horrible description of what happened. The goons launched a combination of raw propoganda as well as propoganda targetted to specific events. Defeats for the goons were absorbed and made part of the culture. Wins were beaten into the ground as a failing on the part of the enemy. An impressive spy and saboture network was fully exploited in terms of economic and military assistance, as well as in the propoganda.
"Failure Cascade" was a term coined by The Mittani, the leader of the Goon Intelligence Agency (GIA). It seems to apply mostly to the application of public opinion and propoganda to widen rifts and blame games within an enemy organization. If the logistics people make a mistake, any military victories are met with comments on the pointlessness of fighting when the territory-holding infrastructure won't hold. Same thing applies to military losses in the face of stout infrastructure. Pretty soon the fighters and logisticians are distrustful and burnt out, not trusting the others to do their jobs.
Enemy command structures are infiltrated and often the goon populace knows as much or more about internal workings as the rank and file members. After the fighters begin got get more confirmed leaks from their leadership on public boards than they do on private boards, a rift is formed and further exploited. At some point, these rifts become self sustaining -- a "failure cascade". It's not unrecoverable.
Democratic alliances are more vulnerable because there are more rifts. People bring up and participate and lose in the democratic process, causing a LOT of "I told you so"s and "If you'd only gone my way..." to exploit. An alliance with ideals presents a target for showing hypocracy within the leadership. The best defense seems to be playing in a largely amoral, berserker-don't-give-a-damn-about-loses style.