Another interesting aspect is that almost every in-game item is "player manufactured" by mining raw materials, refining those materials, using those refined materials to make items from blueprints, then sell those items to other players.
Each step in that cycle requires specialized skill trees, so it's usually not one person that does it all.
They don't really have NPC shops and inventory is just what people are making and selling. "What to make" is itself informed by buyer demand and everything from raw material to finished items has a market set price.
Alliances are groups of Corporations (Guilds in many other MMOs) and all are player led groups. Some alliances are based off other online communities, eg Goonswarm (Something Awful) and Dreddit (Reddit). You train up a few skills and then you can create a corporation. You can then join an alliance if you want. It also costs ingame money to keep the alliance going.
I was an alliance director in a small alliance (10 corps, 500 members) and it's hard work. Dread to think what it's like running CO2.
Dreddit is the corp, TEST is the alliance. IIRC (it's been a loooong time since I played Eve) Dreddit was at one point the "main" corp in TEST but that might have changed.
From there I ended up reading the free pages of the associated kindle book and that was incredible. I ended up buying it. The level of politics, backstabbing, jealousy, revenge, complexity is amazing.
I've got no association with any of the above was was quickly drawn into it just to read and consume - not even to play.
In EVE, there are large alliances of play guilds, which do most of the governing/politicking inside of the game. It's one of the major selling points that things like which faction controls what territory is really just a function of which players can keep control of the territory.
(Well, EVE supports the primitives for such activities, by having tools for eg creating player guilds that can pool resources, but the actual guild structure and politics is controlled by players.)
