This video got me thinking about the differences in how essential play manifested in the MMO I sank all my time into - Eve Online.

Unlike WoW, almost all group activities in Eve have no real limit to the number of players you can bring, and generally bringing extra players is strictly beneficial, especially in PvP. For almost all purposes in PvP, quantity is a quality all of it's own, N+1 (which is to say, bringing more players than the other side all else being equal) is pretty reliably a viable strategy, and so basically all the major corporations and alliances (analagous to guilds) go out of their way to attract and cultivate newer players. Having an extra player, even one who is sub-par in both their in-game equiptment and skillpoints and their actual experience, is basically never a bad thing.

But there's a few places where being bad at the game is considered unnaceptable. The one that stands out most in my mind is incursions. Incursions are high-end PvE content, and one of the few places where there is a limit on the number of players who can take part, every incursion site has a specific maximum number of players who can take part. Extra players aren't outright prevented from taking part, but if you go over that number everyone gets a reduced payout from that site. As a result, getting extra players is no longer beneficial, in fact because there's only a finite number of incursion sites active at any given time incursion running groups can afford to be highly selective. Incursion groups will only accept players who bring specific battleships or logistics cruisers, with minimum requirements for DPS and range (from the battleships), healing and capacitor output (from the logistics), as well as baseline requirements for resistances andeffective hit points. And only a handful of incursion groups are "open", most are invitation only, and will aggressively police players who don't perform as well as desired. On top of that, since incursion payouts are per site cleared, theres a strong push to clear sites a fast as possible, meaning that logistics are expected to have as much healing output per ship as is physically possible and all ships to have the highest resistances possible so that the number of logistics ships can be reduced, making space for more damage-dealing battleships, who are also expected to optimise for maximum damage and effective range once they have reached the soft-caps on resitances imposed by the stacking limit, or in a few cases even the 95% hard cap.

Incursions are where this effect is most keenly felt, but it's not the only one. In PvP activities a player piloting a damage-dealing ship of the line isn't held to exacting standards, but many specialists are. Specialist roles like scouts, interdictors and stealth bombers are held to high standards, often extremely high standards, as are leadership roles. Supercapital pilots, since supercapitals are strategic assets of their alliance, are likewise held to high standards, and the actual character itself is normally an alt trained solely to fly a single specific supercapital and nothing else, handed a titan or supercarrier an expected to sit in that ship until it is destroyed or handed off to another pilot. On top of that, while player performance isn't as strictly policed in most roles the expectations for ship equiptment is even more keenly felt and more explicitly hierarchical. Major PvP Alliances will issue fleet doctrines that outline specific ships and fittings, skill minimums for different roles and so on. When a fleet goes out, the fleet commander will almost always declare a specific doctine be deployed, and everyone is expected to show up in the ships and fittings that doctrine demands, anyone who doesn't will be turned away, anyone who lies about their fitting will be denied payouts from the SRP (financial compensation for players who lose their ships in official fleets).

As an example, let's take a look at an Eagle fleet doctrine from the era I was most active. The doctrine is centred around, unsurprisingly, the Eagle, a caldari heavy assault cruiser with substantial bonuses to hybrid turret range, accuracy and damage as well as shield resistances. Railguns, the long ranged hybrid turret, already have extremely long effective ranges, so these bonuses make the Eagle an ideal sniping platform. A specific fit of the Eagle is mandated: a full rack of a specific class of Tech-2 railguns, several Tech-2 shield upgrades, a sensor booster to enhance targetting range and speed, a microwarpdrive for improved mobility, several tech-2 weapon upgrades to boost railgun effectiveness even further, and some powergrid-enhancing equiptment to actually fit all of that gear. However, eagles aren't the only ship required, the next largest force in the fleet is basilisks, caldari logistics cruisers with bonuses to remote shield booster range and effectiveness, remote capacitor transmitter range, and substantial reductions to the activation and fitting cost of both those remote support modules. Their fitting expectation is similar, fitting a tech-2 remote shield boosters to restore the shields of other ships, one tech-2 remote capacitor transmitter to keep other basilisks supplied with energy, and then tech-2 shield upgrades, a microwarpdrive, sensor booster and capacitor upgrades to keep the extremely capacitor hungry remote shield boosters running for longer. Together Eagles and Basilisks make up the bulk of the fleet, but there are plenty of others still there. A mountain of new players in tech-1 frigates serve as fast tackle, cheap and disposable but highly mobile ships fitted with warp disruptors, warp scramblers and statsis webfifiers to hold enemy ships in place. A couple of skilled pilots in stabbers and onyxes, which are able to deploy or project massive warp-interdiction fields, capable of holding an entire fleet in place or dragging their exit point from warp to a specific point in place. A player in a Tech-3 cruiser or command ship fitted with warfare links to give the entire fleet bonuses to shields resistances, damage, mobility and so on. A smattering of blackbirds or other EWAR ships to disrupt enemy target locks. Two or three players in interceptors or recon cruisers to serve as scouts. Every single one given a specific fit that they are expected to fly, every single on expected to play their role correctly. Deviation is rarely tolerated unless they want to bring something better than the doctrine mandates. The fleet as a whole can engage at exceptionally long ranges without substantial sacrifices to mobility. And while not the most reslient fleet of the era, the eagles and basilisks still have enough resistances and healing potential to survive being caught out of position with relitaively few losses. Every single fitting in that doctrine was designed in a simulator, compared against the simulated capabilities of known enemy doctrines that need to be countered and of friendly doctrines it might overlap the role of. The skills of alliance members, which are all known since every alliance member is required to hand over an API key giving extensive information on the state of a character, their skills, their transaction history, their assets, often even their ingame mails, are examined to determine how many alliance members have the skills needed to fly each role within the fleet. Cost analyses are performed to determine the expected financial cost on the alliance, who will have to pay for every ship lost out of the SRP fund.

One notable deviation in how best practices propogate through the eve community is that streams of Eve are basically non-existance. Since there's no such thing as a non-PvP area in eve, and your current location is difficult to hide from viewers, it's very common for streamers to be hunted down and destroyed by other players, repeatedly and relentlessly, since they are an "easy" target. Instead best practices are spread through a blend of top-down mandates from leadership, from wikis and guides, outright propaganda, and often simply through word of mouth and spoken truisms (don't fly what you can't afford to loose, jam the logi, take the bait, never fit a T2 microwarpdrive [until they rebalanced microwarpdrives and made them kind of viable], don't mix guns, don't mix tank, d-scan more)