I love Eve Online, and I’ve never played a minute of it.
Whatever you might think of Eve’s gameplay or steep learning curve, the space sim MMO is undeniably one of gaming’s best anecdote generators.
In the decade since it’s release, Eve has been responsible for some of the wildest incidents of subterfuge, spycraft, and straight up malicious deception the gaming world has ever seen, and with its robust simulated economy and massive player-run corporations, it’s arguably less a video game and more a social experiment.
Chronicled below are some of the most incredible moments, incidents that rocked the Eve world with such explosive force that news of them burst the insular bubble of the Eve community and trickled all the way down into the gaming mainstream.
The Trillion Isk Scam
In 2011, Eve players Eddie Lampert and Mordor Exuel brought one of the real world’s most venerable scams to the world of MMOs: the ponzi scheme.
Promising payouts of 5% or more on invested isk, the pair convinced over 4,000 of their fellow players to sink their virtual currency into a venture called Phaser Inc. After weeks of spreading their duplicitous message and convincing converts to recruit for them, the two shuttered their shell company and absconded with over 1 trillion in ill-gotten isk.
For perspective’s sake, with the way that Eve allows players to purchase game time with in-game currency, a trillion isk is roughly equivalent to $35,000 real world dollars.
The Guiding Hand Social Club Affair
A truly devious plan a year in the offing, the pillaging of the Ubiqa Seraph corporation and assassination of CEO Mirial was one of the most ambitious and devestating acts ever committed in the history of online gaming.
Agents of the Guiding Hand Social Club, an organization that specialized in industrial sabotage and assassination, infiltrated every level of Ubiqa Seraph, eventually securing positions on the corporation’s board of directors and a leadership position for lead saboteur Arenis Xemdal.
The long months of scheming and climbing came to fruition on April 18th, 2005 when Xemdal lured the Seraph CEO into an ambush in deep space while simultaneously sleeper agents throughout the corporation thoroughly cleaned out the company’s coffers and hangers.
When all was said and done, Mirial’s ship was destroyed, her escape pod annihilated, and her frozen corpse delivered to the Guiding Hand’s employers, and over $16,000 real-world dollars worth of assets had been looted from the shattered corporation.
The Battle of LXQ2-T
Back in 2010, developer CCP Games had already had some experience with massive space battles and the strain they could put on Eve’s servers, having dealt with collosal brawls involving more than 500 players on either side. But even those conflicts couldn’t prepare CCP for the events of October 30th, when two massive player conglomerates, the Northern Coalition and a group of primarily Russian alliances from the “drone regions”, met in open battle in the LXQ2-T system.
At it’s peak, over 3,100 players were engaged in the battle, leading to massive lag as servers strained to keep up with the overwhelming activity. In the end, the affair was fairly one sided, with the Russian alliances losing close to a thousand ships as compared to a mere 100 or so losses on the Northern Coalition side, but it was one of the most massive player-vs-player battles ever and demonstrated the scale of possibility in the Eve universe.
The Battle of Asakai
In response to lessons learned from the battle of LXQ2-T and other similar, massive engagements, CCP implemented time dilation for battles that reached such an epic scale that the servers couldn’t keep up with events at full speed (time dilation is very similar to lag in that it slows everything down, but it allows the servers time to properly process things in order, rather than the random chaos of actual lag).
This innovation came in very handy around the beginning of the year, when a single errant click of the mouse on the part of a Titan captain triggered one of the largest battles in Eve’s history.
The Titan, representing a powerful player alliance called Goonswarm, was acting as a warp bridge for other ships intent on carrying out raids on rivals from the Honeybadger alliance. However, instead of just bridging the smaller ships in, pilot error led to the massive, expensive Titan ship warping directly into an enemy formation that immediately attacked. A domino effect of S.O.S’s and emergency communications drew countless other pilots from the groups’ parent coalitions into the battle, until finally thousands of ships were engaged in a sprawling, chaotic melee in the Asakai system.
When the dust had finally settled, six massive Supercarriers, three Titans, and a host of smaller vessels had been destroyed, while the Titan that started it all escaped relatively unscathed. Estimates indicate the total damage inflicted during this single battle exceeded the 700 billion isk mark, close to $24,000 USD.
Published: Jul 15, 2013 01:50 pm