Players have several options when playing Eve in regards to how they interact with the community. Every activity is possible for solo players but larger and more complicated tasks become more feasible for groups, for example pirate clans or corporations.
Corporations and alliances
Players can organize themselves into corporations (similar to guilds or clans in other MMOs). Corporations are run by one CEO who controls the corporation's assets. The CEO assigns roles to corporation members such as director, accountant and personnel manager. Corporations may also band together to form alliances. Corporations and alliances come in different shapes and sizes. Some player groups write press releases about new business openings and send out IPO information to potential in-game venture capital investors. Alliances can control enough star systems that their territory can be plotted on the Eve game map. Alliances based in lawless space often group into political powerblocks, such as "The Greater BoB Community" and "Providence Holders", for the purpose of joint operations and logistics. Currently, the largest of these political blocks is "The Southern Coalition", consisting of alliances such as "Goonswarm" and "Red Alliance".
Corporations take up numerous business models such as mining, producing ships or "ratting" (raiding NPC pirate bases, as NPC pirates have bounties depending on their class of ship). Normally members contribute a portion of all business proceeds to a pool and receive help in the form of cash and equipment. This is by no means the only model though many operate in this fashion as it helps to build loyalty amongst corporation members.
Players also form corporations for the exclusive task of pirating other players - these corporations are normally referred to as pirate clans. They for example stake out jump points and jump gates waiting for other players to arrive, then destroy and loot their ships. Few groups "pod-kill" players in this way, except accidentally, as it's considered needless. Such pirate groups are hunted viciously, even by other pirate groups. Pirate clans almost never prey on beginning characters as operating after passing a certain bounty level means they're fired upon by CONCORD security ships (which guard areas where new players usually are found). See the Combat section for more information about bounties.
While attacking another player in secure space will result in a loss of security standing and the risk of the attacker losing his ship to CONCORD, there is a way to conduct warfare in high security space. A corporation or alliance can declare war on another corporation/alliance at the cost of a weekly fee, thus allowing for combat in all regions of space without the fear of standing loss or the intervention of CONCORD. However, if the target of a corporate war elects to make the war mutual, there are no fees involved for either party.
Demographics
As of October 2006 the average age of an Eve Player was 27 of which 95% male, and 5% female. The average weekly playtime is 17 hours, or just under 2.5 hours per day.
On 9 December 2007, Eve Online achieved a new record for the maximum number of simultaneous pilots online with 41,690 concurrent accounts logged on to the same server.
As of 31 December 2007, Eve Online has 220,000 active subscriptions and 45,000 active trial accounts.
Beginning in March 2006, CCP and its partner Optic Communications started working to bring Eve Online to the Chinese gaming audience. Closed alpha testing was held on a small cluster for some time, with about 3,000 players chosen from an initial pool of 50,000. The Chinese open beta test began on June 13, 2006, and proved to be very popular, gaining numbers comparable to Eve Online's main server cluster.
The code base between Serenity (China) and Tranquility (Iceland) is strictly in sync, so that software development is distributed to both server clusters, but the game worlds are not connected. Eve Online fully supports Unicode and has a back-end system to enable localization of each and every aspect of the game's content and UI.
Player tournaments
During two weekends in July 2006, a live streaming video production called Eve TV covered the events of the 2nd Caldari Alliance Tournament. The tournament pitted five-man teams from the top alliances against each other. Eve TV provided live in-game footage of the battles along with expert commentary. Analysis of the teams and strategies, interviews with CCP staff and behind-the-scenes specials were also aired between battles. Eve TV was produced and hosted primarily by DJs from Eve-Radio (a player-run streaming radio station) with resources provided by CCP. A total of 95 matches were scheduled, with the Band of Brothers alliance emerging the winner on the final day.
The first two weekends in December 2006 saw the 3rd Alliance tournament. This was once again broadcast via live streaming video by Eve TV The tournament saw 40 Alliances pitting five-man teams against each other. Once again, the Band of Brothers alliance emerged as the winner. Of particular note in this tournament, was the fielding of an Imperial Apocalypse by the Interstellar Alcohol Conglomerate. The ship was destroyed in the semi-finals of the tournament.
The fourth Alliance tournament in September 2007 brought several exciting upsets, with Star Fraction defeating Band of Brothers in the second round, using only tech 1 cruisers, and a relative unknown, Hun Reloaded, sweeping both the semifinals and finals to win.
The two weekends starting February 29, 2008 and March 7, 2008 saw the fifth Alliance Tournament. EveTV provided coverage via live streaming video. During the six days a total of 40 teams competed in 95 matches. The last tournament's winner, HUN Reloaded, made its way into the quarter-finals were it lost to Ev0ke alliance who later became tournament champion after having won all of its eight matches.