No More SuperData Monthly Charts

Information about the business side of video games in general, and MMORPGs in particular, has grown more and more scarce over the years.  Everybody likes to put out a press release and announce at earnings calls when business is up and subscriber numbers are booming.  But when they’re down all of that becomes “not interesting” and companies reach for bullshit metrics or data without sufficient context to cover their tracks.

In the middle of that SuperData Research gave us something of a peek into digital revenues with their monthly charts and annual reports.

The monthly ranking lacked numbers, but at least gave us some sort of relative feel for how a certain small set of higher earning titles were doing.  We argued about how accurate their rankings actually were, but even flawed data collected consistently can demonstrate trends over time.

We will have to do without even that monthly tidbit of data going forward, as it appears that Nielsen, which has been cutting staff since last summer, decided to shut down their SuperData group that they had acquired back in 2018.  A crowded field and under performing revenues are reported to be why Nielsen decided to shut down the unit.  There has been no official press release from Nielsen up to this point, though they have been notifying their customers, which is apparently how word got out, and confirmed the closure with a statement.

Sources:

• GamesIndustry.biz
• The eSports Observer
• Gamasutra

PLEX for Good and COVID-19

CCP announced yesterday that they would be reviving the PLEX for Good idea to raise funds to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

PLEX for Good Returns

The PLEX for Good plan has seen CCP channel donations from players to support various disaster relief programs, most recently involving the Australian wild fires, which was just back in January of this year.

To give to this campaign you can contract PLEX in the game to the character CCP PLEX for GOOD. CCP would like you to please keep the minimum donation at 250 PLEX.  That works out to about $10, though with the PLEX pricing on the site a definite number can be difficult to pin down exactly.  $10 gets you 240 PLEX, but $20 gets you 500.

In the end though, the real-world monetary value of all PLEX collected will be donated by CCP to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund at the conclusion of the campaign.

Since I spent some time last go around figuring out how to do this, I thought I would mention how to actually contract PLEX.  By default, PLEX is stuck in your PLEX vault, and if you go to your wallet, it will show you how much PLEX you have and let you spend it on things, but you cannot actually contract it from there. (Maybe you can, but I couldn’t figure out how.)

That is because the PLEX Vault is really in your inventory window.  You need to go there and drag the big PLEX icon over to Item Hangar.

Dragging PLEX

When you drop that on your Item Hangar it will ask you how much PLEX you want to move there.  Once it is in your Item Hangar, it is like a normal object in EVE Online.  You can put it in your cargo hold, undock, get blown up, and have your loss mail become a thread over on /r/eve.  Or maybe you’ll right click on it, select Create Contract and contract it to the PLEX for Good campaign.

I chose the latter.

There is also a video in CCP’s post that hints that we might get a mask to wear in-game to keep capsuleers safe.

The face covering option some of us need

I can see pirates wearing that even if they aren’t worried about social distancing as they tackle you.

Sotiyo Fight in The Spire

I let my time in New Eden taper off somewhat in the latter half of March.  But now a new month is upon us.  It was time start earning a few PAP links, the currency that displays your value to your SIG, squad, corp, alliance, or coalition.  It is probably the only thing of value I contribute to my own corp, since I am generally nowhere near them in space.

When I left off Liberty Squad… which is something of “Reavers Jr” due to the fact that there is a huge overlap between the two groups… I hear a lot of the same voices on Liberty coms… we were deployed in the east of New Eden null sec reinforcing structures and blowing up ihubs in The Kalevala Expanse so as to keep Pandemic Horde from turning that into a rental income region.  Or so I understood it.

We have since moved on to a new target.  But I didn’t know that when the fleet went up.  It was Eagles on Zed Starshine and there was a call to be sure to bring structure bashing (read cheap) ammo.  Once together we undocked, aligned for the usual gate, and warped off.

Eagle fleet spilling out of the station

While the first gate was the same, we took a different turn after that and flew through Etherium Reach and into The Spire.  That region is primarily occupied by the rental alliance Brothers or Tangra, which was once owned by Pandemic Legion and is now run by NCDot, though on the coalition map

East Central Null Sec Area

While I missed the coalition update the last couple of weeks, I understand that there is a wider war going on in the east, to which we are totally not committing as a coalition, but that SIGs and squads are roaming about making trouble for one side.

Our target was a Sotiyo, the big engineering complex, the structure one uses to build titans and super carriers, located in the system 5LAJ-8.

We were shadowed on the way to the target, and on jumping in we found a large group of hostiles on the other side of the gate.  Well, Lazerhawks, who are usually hostile to us.  But we were teaming up with them for the structure shoot, so it was going to be one of those evening where one would have to take care not to shoot random reds in the overview.  Not that I would have to worry about that, I was in the logi wing in my Basilisk.

The timer ran down and to shoot the Sotiyo.  It was the hull timer, the final timer, which meant that if we succeeded it would blow up.  A kill mail to be had, I launched my combat drone to take a couple of shots at the structure.  It was safe enough at that point.  The structure was being gunned and it was tossing bombs our way, but that wasn’t enough to keep me very busy as I stayed on anchor.

Early fight with us just tangling with the Sotiyo

The locals were not going to let us just wander around space dodging bombs and shooting their big structure.  A Pandemic Horde Ferox fleet showed up to challenge us, along with a Hurricane fleet from The Damned Brotherhood, an Eagle fleet from NCDot, and some bombers in the mix.

At that point things got very busy for me.  I can generally gauge how active I am in a fight by the number of screen shots that end up in the capture folder.  There were not a lot in there after we started off.

As these things go there was what seemed like a very long stretch of frantically swapping reps onto people, watching the cap chain to ensure I was still giving/getting cap as ECM hit us, and checking to to be sure I hadn’t accidentally clicked in space, a common mid-battle issue for me that can end up with your ship way off anchor and away from the fleet.  Somehow I managed as we trailed the FC around the grid.

Sticking with the FC

It was very touch and go for a while, with neither side making much headway against the other, but with the feeling that we might break if we slackened our efforts even a bit.  While we were repping shields again and again, I was putting out my armor repair drones to pick up some damage that had slipped through shield between reps.  I saw a couple of Eagles with damage down into hull, which means they got saved, but only just.

And then, suddenly, things bent our way.  A Jackdaw fleet joined us and, while they were savaged, they may have tipped the balance.  Feroxes and Hurricanes started going down.  Soon it was just the bombers and the Eagle fleet to fence with.  Cainun, who was anchoring at that point, led the fleet down into the wrecks of the Ferox fleet so people could loot cap boosters, many of the Eagles in our fleet having run through theirs during the fight.

The brawl had distracted us from the Sotiyo for a while and the repair timer had run down as fire applied to it fell below the amount required to pause it.  It had moved from 15 minutes down to under 7.  But now we were able to return our focus to the Sotiyo.

Timer paused again

We danced around the structures defense, though they turned on the point defense system late in the shoot, killing off my combat drone.  But I had gotten a few hits in late enough in the shoot to be counted.  After the brawl the defenders declined to come back and the Sotiyo proceeded to blow up.

Sotiyo erupts

The kill mail showed that it did have a capital shipyard installed.  However, the ihub in the system had already been taken out, meaning that the upgrade necessary to build supers was missing so no construction operations were aborted.  Still, a nice kill and a good, vigorous fight.

The battle report showed things tipped out way pretty solidly.  The structure added significantly to that, but we did okay even discounting it.  The summary below has us in blue, allies in green, and the defenders in red.

The battle report headed cropped for visibility

After the explosion we collected up on the field and then warped off as a group, leaving the wreck behind us.

Sotiyo wreck

From there it was safely back to our staging system to call it a night.  A good start to the month in space.  I suspect we will be visiting The Spire again soon.

Spring Movie League – Wrinkle Player One

And week five of our Spring Fantasy Movie League has now come and gone.

The week five lineup was predicted to finally be able to dethrone Black Panther as Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One stepped up to the plate.

 Ready Player One        $522
 Tyler Perry's Acrimony  $219
 Pacific Rim             $167
 I Can Only Imagine      $153
 Black Panther           $148
 Sherlock Gnomes         $91
 God's Not Dead          $75
 Love Simon              $71
 Isle of Dogs            $69
 Tomb Raider             $65
 A Wrinkle in Time       $54
 Paul, Apostle of Christ $41
 Game Night              $41
 Midnight Sun            $28
 Unsane                  $23

Ready Player One was expensive compared to the rest of the stack, a situation that always leaves me looking for alternatives.

The first option that came up was around Acrimony.  While the long range forecast had it close to $10 million, estimates started coming in putting it in the $15-18 million range.  At that level of box office it was a serious option, especially if Ready Player One stayed in the lower $30 million range.

Of course, what Ready Player One would do was another odd duck.  Most big titles open up on Friday, with Thursday night previews that count as part of the Friday night take.  That gets added into the FML box office count as well, which can be a serious boost and is why, when big movies get split up into three days, Friday tends to be the most costly to pick.

However, Ready Player One opened on Thursday night, with Wednesday night previews.  That meant that Friday would… and the weekend FML count… would not benefit at all from previews.  It also meant that the industry watchers would throw around “weekend” estimates that sometimes would include Thursday and sometimes would not.  So I would see a number like $50 million mentioned for Ready Player One, only to read deeper and find that was a total through the weekend rather than the three day take that matters to FML.

Still, as the week went on it seemed clear that Ready Player One would hit high 30s to low 40s and seemed like a safe anchor unless you believed strongly in Acrimony.  That left the filler, where the best performer discussion lay.

Midnight Sun seemed the early candidate for that, a title priced to be a filler you could stick in many screens.  Then the first forecasts came out and Paul, Apostle of Christ was suddenly the bright star for the best performer slot, though the high end estimates for Acrimony kept it in play as well.  Four screens of that as an anchor looked very good if you could add $2 million per screen.

I still believed in Ready Player One though, and by Tuesday night I had slotted in 1x Ready Player One, 1x Acrimony, and 6x Paul, Apostle of Christ as my selection.  However, in TAGN chatter and across the FML forums that pick began to shape up as the obvious go to selection.  When it came down to it, it ended up being the most popular pick of the week and three people in the TAGN league and one (Liore) in MCats.  I rode that pick until Friday morning, when I decided not to go along with that pick and swapped to my final pick, 1x Ready Player One, 1x Acrimony, 1x Sherlock Gnomes, and 5x Midnight Sun.

Spring Week Five – My Picks

Midnight Sun didn’t have to do that much more than expected to contend.  Unfortunately, it did not even meet forecasts, so was out of the best performer running by quite a margin.

Instead, the Saturday estimates showed A Wrinkle in Time as the likely best performer.  Paul, Apostle of Christ was close in the estimates, with Acrimony not too far behind that, but when the final numbers landed on Monday Wrinkle did better than its weekend estimates, securing the best performer slot.

The perfect pick was 1x Ready Player One, 1x Black Panther, and 6x A Wrinkle in Time, a selection worth $99,306,709.

Spring Week Five – Perfect Pick

Black Panther lost its box office crown, but was in the winning lineup.

While 182 people got the perfect pick, none of them were in the Meta League this week, which kept most of us somewhat close together in score.  The week’s scores looked like this:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $88,805,439
2. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $82,606,738
3. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $79,681,941
4. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $79,681,941
5. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $79,681,941
6. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $79,681,941
7. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $78,335,761
8. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $77,056,420
9. Kraut Screens (T) – $76,381,507
10. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $76,350,834
11. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $76,244,256
12. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $75,972,080
13. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $75,972,080
14. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $75,047,892
15. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $74,970,498
16. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $70,198,601
17. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $69,616,425
18. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $66,266,870
19. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $61,935,922
20. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $61,128,373
21. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $50,864,216
22. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $41,673,527

The Meta League Legend:

• TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)
• MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

Goat Water Picture Palace took first place this week by going in with five screens of A Wrinkle in Time.  Logan got second place by also having some screens of Wrinkle to boost him.  After that we’re into the most popular pick zone with the next four places.  Going with my last minute “let’s be different” changes cost me about $4.5 million at the box office.

Down at the bottom of the pack this week were people who bet heavily on Isle of Dogs.  While I applaud the support of Wes Anderson, and the film did pretty well on a per screen basis, it was not on enough screens to be a player this week.

That left the Meta League scores for the season at:

1. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $503,465,372
2. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $481,185,464
3. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $477,756,057
4. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $471,679,266
5. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $457,166,355
6. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $451,436,538
7. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $450,297,835
8. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $441,234,517
9. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $438,515,148
10. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $429,536,646
11. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $427,190,290
12. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $427,059,478
13. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $425,990,721
14. Kraut Screens (T) – $392,181,689
15. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $368,140,969
16. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $368,034,017
17. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $364,974,424
18. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $352,142,604
19. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $323,656,549
20. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $322,771,818
21. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $267,204,033
22. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $254,685,317

The small gaps in the high end meant that there wasn’t much of a change at the top, with the first six staying the same.  I got bumped down to 8th place by Goat Water Picture Palace and am now pretty close to being passed by Logan if he continues to do well.

Which leaves us looking at the options for Week Six:

A Quiet Place             $460
Ready Player One          $334
Blockers                  $217
Black Panther             $108 
Tyler Perry's Acrimony    $103
I Can Only Imagine        $96
Isle of Dogs              $62 
Pacific Rim               $58
Sherlock Gnomes           $57 
The Miracle Season        $53 
Chappaquiddick            $50 
Love Simon                $39 
A Wrinkle in Time         $39 
Tomb Raider               $34 
Paul, Apostle of Christ   $26

This week Game Night, Midnight Sun, Unsane, and God’s Not Dead fell off the list.

Coming in to the mix are A Quiet Place, Blockers, The Miracle Season, and Chappaquiddick.  That the latter made it to the theaters seems to prove the diminished power of the Kennedy clan these days.  I imagine it will play best in red states, though I imagine few know or remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.

What to pick?  There are three anchor choices, A Quiet Place, Ready Player One, and Blockers.

A Quiet Place is a horror film, a genre I tend to discount, so I don’t trust myself here.  It does star Emily Blunt and was praised after a preview at SWSX.  I just don’t know how that will translate at the box office.

At the other end is Blockers, a teen sex comedy produced by Seth Rogen.  The only recognizable name in it for me is John Cena.  No idea how this will do.

And in the middle is Ready Player One in for its second week at what seems like a reasonable price, even expecting a 50% drop over week five.  So my Monday evening gut pick was 2x Ready Player One and 6x The Miracle Season, the latter also being an unknown for me at this point, but we’ll see.  It is a feel good movie.

Corpses in New Eden

If you don’t play EVE Online you might not even suspect that player corpses are a thing in the game.

Technically the claim for many years that you could not get out of your ship and your pod has been incorrect.  You could, and can, you just have to die to do it.  Not very useful or convenient, but you are out of your pod.

The thing is, it likely isn’t something that happens to people very often.  There are security status and CONCORD complications when blowing up people’s capsules, except in null sec (and wormhole space), and who ever goes there?  So while the outlier empires might pop pods as a matter course, all those people roaming low and high sec probably don’t run into corpses very often.

And even if they are there, you might not see them.  When I started writing this I logged on to look at a corpse in space, only to find that none of my overview settings had them enabled, including the default “All” setting which, true to CCP form, was actually missing A LOT of checkboxes.  Every time they add something it is unchecked by default, because comedy I guess.  And it took me a bit to figure out which checkbox even applied.  There isn’t one for corpses, but down the list there is one for biomass.

Biomass is what we become…

I am not sure why that is under the celestials category.  Probably more Icelandic humor.

To figure that out I had to find a test corpse.  As it turns out, I actually have a couple of corpses in the stash of stuff that has followed me around New Eden.

Corpses in Storage

That gave me the group name so I could search the overview settings for the entry and check it, at which point I could see corpses in space.

Corpse in the overview

I like that little person icon.

I think I have dragged the corpse of Jesus Nazarene around with me for a few years on the off chance it might come back to life and due to the theological implications of it being female.  Where is Professor Robert Langdon when you need him?

Corpses sit there in space when you get podded.  They are not much to look at, though I found if you alt-zoom with the camera you can get a pretty good close up.

Zoomed in… confirmed female I guess…

I actually had to jettison space Jesus to get it on the overview, which you can do because they are just objects 2 m3 in volume as far as the game is concerned.  Corpses don’t end up in a jettison can when you toss them into space, which makes them a little different than other items in your cargo hold… again, I assume somebody in Iceland thought this through… but otherwise they take up space and you can scoop them up.

Running in to pick up Jesus

And that is the key.  You can pick up corpses, and anything people can pick up they start to collect.  I know people who collect corpses, or who collect specific corpses.  Corpses of the space famous are in demand and I have seen people scramble to get to the corpse of a well known FC.  A Gevlon corpse would go for a lot.  The Mittani offered up corpses of himself as one of the initial incentives for the Fountain War Kickstarter until CCP told him that counted as RMT and he had to remove it.

And you cannot even make your own corpses.  Self-destructing does not yield a corpse, you need to be shot by another player.  But if you’re in a battle, at least in null sec, there are generally enough corpses to go around if you want to start collecting today.  A look at my updated overview after a quick drop/counter drop battle with PL in Delve last night.

Lots of corpses… the scroll went on for a bit

All of which might be mildly interesting data points for the outsider.  But I bring up the subject of corpses in New Eden for a few reason.  There is more to this than just a rather macabre thing to collect in an MMO.  CCP has used corpses before and seems to have some plan for the future.

First, there is the Drifters connection with corpses.  The Drifters showed up in 2015 and had an affinity for corpses, collecting stray corpses and, as I seem to recall, even becoming aggressive towards player ships with corpses in their cargo hold. (I might be wrong on that last bit.  Age and memory don’t mix well.)  Corpses were being collected by NPCs for some nefarious purpose.

Second was this year’s CCP April Fools joke, the Upwell Biomass Granulator, and MTU-like deployable that would harvest corpses from space and refine them into raw materials that could be used to make new sorts of boosters.

Corpses go in, but they don’t come out…

There were even faction variations listed that would create special items from specific inputs.  I heard a few people on coms who were excited/disappointed about this April Fools because they wanted it to be a thing.  Corpse collectors unmasked.  In any case, it seems like CCP has corpses on the brain of late because…

The third item is the Blood Raiders capital ships that are going to be hitting New Eden at some point in May.  Among the features of these pirate faction capital ships are special corpse bays.  The Dragon force auxiliary, the Chemosh dreadnought, and the Molok titan will have 1000 m3, 1000m3, and 2000 m3 corpse bays respectively, which will house 500 or 1000 corpses.

Something like the Molok

That was enough to get an article about the ships over at Kotaku, though the size of the corpse bays has been revised since that article ran. (Massively OP covers the likely reason for the change.)

The Blood Raiders have their own grim reputation, and earned their name for a reason.  But I do wonder if the corpse bays are there just for lore/show reasons, or if CCP has other ideas when it comes to corpses in New Eden.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about the humble corpse in New Eden.

Just hanging in space…

Do you have any corpses in your hangar?

World War Bee – What’s in a Name?

When life gives you lemons? Don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! GET MAD! ‘I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?!’ Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am?! I’m the man who’s going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!

— Cave Johnson, Portal 2

Wars in EVE Online tend to pick up names of their own when they reach a certain scale or duration.  Probably the most famous three are:

• The Great War
• The Fountain War
• The Halloween War

Those are pretty much the agreed upon names by all sides at this point, CCP included, and each name says something about the war itself as opposed to the parties involved.  “The Great War” is so named because of its scale and being a war like no other war before it.  “The Fountain War” is named after the region in which the primary conflict took place.  And the “Halloween War” was so named based on when it started in earnest.

We are now in the midst of another war worthy of a name that all will remember.

Over at the Nosy Gamer the start of the attack on Imperium space was dubbed “The Casino War” due to the attackers being funded by the online ISK casino I Want ISK.  That name carries on there through to today.

More recently, the war got “real” with new alliances entering the fray leading to larger and larger battles.  This led to CCP once again seeing such battles as a way to promote the game.  Again, nothing sells the game like epic, large scale battles.  Even The Scope, CCP’s in-game lore focused news service, began doing reports about the war.

CCP initially started calling this conflict The Easter War, due to the proximity of the holiday to one of the battles.  That name seemed somewhat forced.  Certainly I cannot recall anybody using that name before CCP started using it.

The war that started LONG before Easter…

I am not sure where CCP picked up that name, as most common name I saw before that point was the previously mentioned “Casino War.”  However, CCP clearly couldn’t use that name as it would bring into focus, and imply endorsement of, gambling in EVE Online, and along with it the specter of RMT.  (However CCP didn’t flinch at “Moneybadger Coalition,” but the connection with online gambling isn’t apparent unless you know the story so far.)  So Easter seemed to be the plan, despite it being a religious holiday.

Meanwhile another name had begun to gain traction, “World War Bee.”

That name was a rallying cry for foes of The Imperium to unite them into a war against Goons.  The Goon symbol is the Fat Bee after all.

Look for the Goonion label!

Somebody at CCP decided that this was better than “The Easter War” and they adopted that as their name for the war as well, and soon posts about “World War Bee” appeared on the somewhat neglected EVE Updates site.

CCP endorses the name

CCP officially and publicly adopting the narrative of its foes for the war did not sit well with Goons.  That felt like a partisan response to a group that has seen CCP playing favorites in the past. (Roll clips from the T20 scandal, which caused the creation of the CSM, where other issues have come up.

So The Imperium leadership decided to come up with their own name for the war, which The Mittani announced yesterday during his fireside chat. (Streamed on Twitch every Sunday, replay available here.)  After sifting through some suggestions, the proposed name for the war is:

• The War of Sovless Agression

Hrmm…  I mean, I like where it is trying to go, wrapping in a historical reference while taking a jab at our foes for not actually holding much sovereignty themselves.  But it feels like it is too much work for not enough pay off… something of a “try hard” name, which I think is the term of art.  I guess it would be fine for talking point propaganda, but it isn’t something that effortlessly slides off the tongue.  I have to think for a second before I say it, and I don’t like it sufficiently to say it enough to make it reflexive.

And, as with “World War Bee,” it is a partisan name being pushed by one side of the conflict.

In the war between the two names, “World War Bee” is going to win.  It is just easier, funnier, and with official CCP endorsement, not going to be supplanted any time soon.  Maybe after the war is over and assessed another, more fitting, less propagandist name will settle on the conflict.

But for now I think we in The Imperium are going to have to find what comfort we can in “World War Bee.”  Getting all Cave Johnson about the name is going to do anything.

Fortunately, there is some comfort to be found there.

“World War Bee” is clearly and unequivocally a reference to World War Z, the zombie horror novel that was later made into a film.

The story, to sum up, is about society facing an overwhelming zombie menace and hunkering down in order to fight back in order to save themselves and the civilization they built.

It isn’t tough to assign roles in that scenario.  Who has the overwhelming numbers and who is hunkering down to defend themselves?

World War Bee.

I think we should take it and run with it.  Even now over at Something Awful, the latest recruiting drive is headlined “Eve Online: Goons vs Literally The Entire Galaxy,” which is drawing people back to the game.  Goons under siege works with the right optics.