And scams. Or baits, escalations, and war strategies.
I ran my small alliance for a bit. The organization skills corralling 200 active people for an op is insane. Spending days prepping and doing logistics moving tons of ships. Making arrangements and mutual defense agreements. It was arduous work.
Then to have the fight not happen. Or the target not to drop. And having to manage the morale of everyone who devoted the time for it or purposely made sure they were free.
It also somewhat helped curb alts. You couldn’t just have an alt that did a thing in day.
But the isk and resource faucets were a problem from day one. It’s a resource hoarding game and it became too safe.
That era to me was also filled with clever scams and IMO as CCP made it safer for people it took a lot of magic out of the game. You used to have to be smart and attentive to play. Now it throws warnings at you for all sorts of things. Or got rid of some very fun mechanics (like pos bowling and lofty wars)
I also used to love spending 2m to war dec a corp. I would have dozens of wars going. And it wasn’t like small corps. It was fun to war dec all the big alliances at once with your little 5 man corp.