This article was originally published on July 3, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Alex Hastings made his first Eve Online character in 2006, at the age of 16. Twenty years and several breaks later, he's still logging into New Eden with his in-game handle, Machiavelian. He's been playing so long, in fact, that he was giving interviews at Fanfest in Iceland this year. Now an attorney in his mid-30s, Hastings had no idea what he was getting himself into when he installed the MMO. 

"I had no perception or context for how deep a lot of the political things go, because I came from much simpler games like Freelancer," he says. "Coming from a much more simple single-player or small multiplayer game into a game like Eve, it was just mind-blowing because of the complexity of the relationships."

That complexity, and the human relationships built on top of it, is the glue that's stuck Hastings to Eve for two decades of play, including a stint of several years as a mid-level figure inside Pandemic Horde, a group of some 17,000 players. Hastings, a former police officer who now practises labour law, says the role was effectively a management job. "I was essentially more like a middle manager, handling a lot of human resources and administrative stuff," he says.

It's this social dimension that's kept him playing. "For me personally, it's the social relationships, the social aspects of it," he says. "Most of my time spent playing Eve was communicating, talking to people. I didn't even have the game open to do a lot of the work I did." His wife calls it his "space job". "The best man at my wedding, I met him through Eve," he says. "We've built these lifelong relationships that you probably wouldn't make in a game where you're role-playing as though you're the character."

Hands-off development

Able to give a unique perspective on the shaping of Eve Online over its 23-year history, Hastings, who sits on Eve's Council of Stellar Management, reserves particular praise for the restraint shown by the game's developer, Fenris Creations, in seeking to influence player-led affairs.

"I would call it interference, and I think Fenris has done a phenomenal job of staying out of it," he says. "That's the spirit of the game. We want to encourage real engagement between people. If the developer can come in and remove something you've worked very hard to negotiate or organise, that can have a huge knock-on effect that's completely unintended."

He points to Fenris's practice of "grandfathering" out old mechanics rather than tearing them down.

"When they make a change, if possible, they will try to grandfather it in," he says. "If they say, 'OK, you can no longer put this extra-large space station in this area of space,' they're not going to remove the space stations that are already there. But if they get destroyed, they're not going to allow you to replace them."

Managing the level of influence Fenris has over player narrative isn't simple, where even this type of decision can lead to anachronistic infrastructure negatively impacting the live game for some.

"It's been very frustrating," Hastings says, "because it creates situations like the largest group in the game having an unassailable capital system that's no longer possible to make. But the developers didn't want to mess with that, because at the time they built it, it was legitimate."

Fresh meat

New Eden, then, is no utopia. Asked what is most urgently in need of attention in Eve Online, Hastings does not hesitate: recruitment.

"The one thing I want [Fenris] to prioritise – and this is a very difficult problem to crack – is how do we get more new, younger players," he says. "Pretty much everybody I work with is my age or older. From a financial perspective, that's a good problem to have, because we have disposable income. But we do need more fresh players, because that brings new ideas in."

His deeper concern is structural. Because resources in New Eden reward cooperation over conflict, Hastings says, the game has drifted toward what players call the "blue doughnut": vast, low-cost alliances of convenience that leave little left to fight over.

"The cost of being friends with somebody is so low that eventually you have this big blue doughnut of all these people allied with each other, and then there's nothing to fight over," he says.

He cites the Imperium, Goonswarm's coalition, as the clearest case.

"They're 50 per cent of the players in nullsec, and that's too big to fail. There's nothing that's going to take that group down except them deciding to no longer be the big dog."

But, again, he's wary of a developer fix: "I don't know how Fenris can step in, and I worry that discouraging that kind of gameplay may break the game. At this point, just let it be. Those leaders are fabulously wealthy because of those groups. Those taxes flow upwards. There's no trickle-down economics in Eve."

But regardless of the attention constantly needed to keep New Eden evolving, the chances of Hastings bowing out after 20 years of space politics are zero. Struggle and problem solving are the keys to Eve's community. After Pandemic Horde, Hastings moved into another society. And now he's looking for another.

"That group fell apart a couple of months ago," he says. "So now we find a new home. Now I'm back on the search for what's going to hook me next."

This article was originally published on July 3, 2026 - read the full issue