@vgr @bkam Don't know if you ever heard of EVE Online. It was/is a particularly lawless pvp game, and I once read an interesting theory by a player.
He said coalitions don't break from big defeats, because a big defeat can be spun into a galvanizing narrative. But if you make their lives boring, unpleasant, and confusing, in a thousand small ways, you can drive a wedge between the membership and the leadership, and people eventually just give up and leave.