How Eve Players Pulled Off the Biggest Betrayal in Its History
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
A fun read but having never played Eve I am lost. Sounds like a good time though.
During the last big large scale conflict, an alliance called CO2 defected from its parent coalition The Imperium to the other side. This was a big loss to the Imperium - CO2 were one of their larger and better groups of fighters. It turned the tide of the war and the Imperium were left with emnity towards CO2 due to their betrayal.
In the time since then, Gigx who runs CO2 has (among other things) been annoying people inside and outside his alliance over various diplomatic incidents. One of those was TheJudge who was a leader in CO2 (but subordinate to gigx). Simultaneously TheJudge was being slowly talked into betraying CO2 by a couple members of the Imperium. This was significantly helped by the three of them being on a player elected group of representatives to the developers, that meets in person a few times a year.
TheJudge had enough power and control over the alliance and its assets that when he eventually decided to actually jump ship, he could sell off ships, space stations ('citadels') and other expensive things owned by the alliance. The Imperium are taking credit for this betrayal - they consider it 'revenge'.
Up to now this is all classic Eve - betrayal by people you trust. The postscript is less nice though: gigx in a moment of anger asked in in game chat for real life contact details for TheJudge so that he could 'cut off his hands'. This is obviously not OK and CCP banned gigx permanently. This has the side-effect of putting the final nail in the CO2 coffin.
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.
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.)
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.
Simply being a trader in Eve can be fun.
yes. But it's eerily similar to having an actual day job...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=9WkYqWn3HSQ
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.
He was literally turned against his own alliance whilst under CCP supervision.
This is not quite as good as the old BoB one, but it's still a massive win for Aryth/Imperium. The "Lannister paying their debts" smugposting levels are incredible
Doesn't CCP typically have a vaguely hands-off approach when it comes to in-game politics, as long as it stays in-game? It's not like CCP's job it so enforce loyalty and fairness.
They don't do much handholding.
It's just, you know, amusin :D
And as someone else mentioned, this is really not tech.
In this case, ironically, I think you are confused because of your own language background. Not a criticism, but just pointing that out. Can I guess English is not your native language? I often hear people focus on language issues when language is not usually the actual issue, and usually when they are not native to the language they are talking about.
Jargon is also not something that is necessarily language-specific (I doubt French or Spanish speaking EVE players use different EVE jargon).
Probably should have phrased it as a question, in retrospect -- the reason it is not is that I kind of expected that there were no good answer and that this was a "knee-jerk comments". Sort of the same kind of people who throw (sometimes literally) their hands up in the air and exclaim "I understand nothing about it" when you only mention the word "informatics" (well, the equivalent in my mother tongue).
Me too! What I struggle with most is trying to grasp where human motives fit into the game structure. Each aspect of the game must be a parallel or metaphor for real life situations that engage and appeal to intrinsic elements of human nature. But it's described almost in reverse, as if the names, the battles, the political structures are what matter. No, what truly matters is why each a player voluntarily spends vast amounts of time seated motionless in front of a screen. That's what's truly interesting (and I guess can probably only be really grasped by playing).
Eve is a space based MMORPG. Players are pilots of single player space-ships, though it's more point and click than flight sim. There are multiple categories of ships, from small and fast, right on up to capital ships (think aircraft carrier or bigger.) Ship prices range from peanuts through to "more than you could earn solo in your lifetime".
Players typically earn in-game money (ISK) through mining asteroid belts, manufacturing, trading, "ratting" (shooting NPC pirate ships), running missions, and wormholeing (that one is more complicated to describe)
There's a whole complicated economy built up in game (at one point the developers had a full time economics professor working for them, not sure if he's still there). Raw materials from mining get manufactured by players in game from blueprints into ships, weapons, modules etc that the players need to fight or mine or whatever. The regular destruction of personal property helps drive the economy.
Eve is set in a great big galaxy, made up of thousands of solar systems.
These solar systems are have different security ratings, stretching from 1.0 to 0.0. The higher the security rating, the stronger the presence of the in-game NPC police force (CONCORD).
If you shoot another player character in anywhere but 0.0 space, you'll earn fines at the very least and in the worst case be blasted out of the sky by CONCORD ships. As such 1.0 is pretty safe space. You can largely do what you want, as long as you're not outright violent to other players. It's mostly safe to fly solo in your trade ship without having someone around as a wingman.
The safe space makes up the central core of the galaxy. Generally speaking, as you move away from the core the security rating drops.
The larger majority of space is 0.0. This is where basically anything goes. No rules, but what you make and enforce yourself. It depends on who you speak to, but almost everyone who has ever spent time playing in 0.0 space will tell you that it's there that the real game takes place. It's almost impossible to survive in 0.0 space flying solo.
Players form corporations (guilds in typical MMORPG parlance) together, to co-ordinate and organise themselves. Then, above those, groups of corporations can form Alliances. Working together, they can hold territory in 0.0 space. Out in 0.0 space you'll still find space stations and the like, with hangers you store your equipment in, refit ships etc. Both alliances and corporations have their own hangers, and wallets, access to which is controlled.
Originally alliance territory used to be an informal notion. Wherever an alliance had ships and could fight off other alliances, that was their territory. Then CCP (the developers) introduced the sovereignty mechanism, which more formalises that concept. Alliances can actually own space, and now fights between alliances also include stripping sovereignty of space from them. Alliances can also choose to make space stations for their players to use.
Different alliances take different organisation structures, but the benevolent dictator / military dictator / corporation approach tends to be the most effective. Democracies don't tend to be able to react fast enough to survive. Within those structures players can be given authorities.
Hopefully that's a fair overview of the game. There's safe space (1.0) and dangerous space (0.0). The game is largely a sandbox, in which you can do what you like. The number of actual rules is pretty small. It's up to players to build what they want in that sandbox.
Wherever you get two or more people, politics comes in to play. The game is in constant flux for players in 0.0 space as alliances wax and wane, agreements between them change for various reasons and so on and so forth.
The Judge was the senior diplomat for one alliance, CO2. After constantly having his hard work destroyed and crapped on over and over again, under what he sees as an increasingly erratic or volatile leader, got tired of it and decided to defect in spectacular fashion.
The game, despite having few rules, is quite complicated. CCP decided that it would help to have an elected set of players act as representatives for the player base in general, called the CSM. Future changes to the game are discussed and debated with people in the CSM, all covered under an NDA. They meet a few times a year in Iceland (where CCP is based).
While players were there, stuff started happening in game. Fights broke out, mutual defence pacts between alliances and corporations started getting invoked. From The Judge's perspective, the leader of his alliance continued to be erratic and destroy his hard work and he'd about had enough. People present at the CSM persuaded him to defect, and he agreed.
As a senior person within the alliance, he had high level access to all assets, space stations etc. When he defected he transferred basically everything the alliance had over to another alliance. That would include all docked capital ships, all money etc. Players own personal hangers would be safe, as would the assets contained in them.
This is where a third alliance comes in to play. They saw what was going down, and despite not really liking either of the alliances involved, they particularly disliked CO2, and wanted to see them destroyed. They arranged a temporary truce with the alliance that Judge defected to, to allow them to travel through their space without interference so that a blockade could be set up on the space station they'd just been given by Judge.
The erratic player that had been the leader made threats to the out-of-game safety of the player of Judge, and CCP permabanned him from the game.
That basically leaves CO2 as an alliance without a leader, without assets, and likely the majority of the assets of the players stuck in a space station they can no longer get to or fly safely out of. It's arguably a dead man walking. It's possible it could come back from the dead, but the road is long and hard.
Parent: "I'll stick to solitaire"
The idea behind Eve is extremely appealing but damn if I'm not just done with people screaming into a microphone. I'll stick to reading the postmortems after interesting things happen
As such, things getting loud is always either extremely exceptional, or fitting and unsurprising to the context.
Both of these videos are accurate, and while the second one does happen, the former is the actual norm.
Aside from the huge time-sink that's involved in any MMO, I mostly don't want to have to have a part-time job playing politics. That's what kills it for me; I love that Eve Online exists, but I have zero interest whatsoever building a whole other parallel set of friendships, alliances, etc. outside of my current life. Even if they were the nicest antithesis of League of Legends chat, I just don't have the emotional energy to put into it.
yes, some people call EVE their life, and their irl is just something to get money. It's certainly not for everyone.
With one or two friends, I'd say one could have a blast pirating for a couple years. It's one of the higher doing_fun_things:total_time_playing ratios I've found in a multiplayer game.
The balance is really well done. Two specialized smaller ships > one general larger ship. And coordinating on voicecoms after you've got the normal sequence of actions down doesn't sound that different than a sci-fi series.
"Jumping. Two contacts. Found them on the belt 5. Miners, no escort. In position to warp disrupt. Popping bubble and web. Tackled. Jump, jump, jump." (Plan comes together, fireworks ensue)
And in general, most people keep it in perspective. Hence "it's just internet spaceships" jokes.
To be fair, not all corps are dysfunctional. I had some good times and no one was like that.
I've never played it though.
It's way more fun reading about them.
It takes skill, dedication, as well as some luck (since you can't tell who is in the "system" with you in wormhole space, unlike in regular space). You have to constantly do scan, and entrances and exists shift (so you _can_ get stuck with no way back).
But that's the fun of it!
That's one of the interesting things about EVE from a story perspective.
For most games, you're the "Chosen One": the Dragonborn, the Master Chief, The One. You're supposed to be the hero of a grand and epic story. To succeed in spite of the odds.
And this clashes greatly when you put that same storyline in an MMO. And somehow you have to reconcile being the Chosen One with all the other Chosen Ones running around and doing the same quests for the same rewards.
With EVE, there is none of that. You can be a plain ol' miner, or some other cog in a vast machine. Or you can be a pirate, and strike out on your own. Or whatever. You don't start out special, but maybe you can become special over time. And be part of a story that is talked about for years to come.
I remember back in the day when we had 1,000+ ships in a system attacking LV and basically you used to just sit there and hope that what you were doing was having any effect at all.
I started playing EVE just prior to the Trinity expansion release in 2008, and played up until 2013. During that time I was fortunate to watch the game evolve in so many fantastic ways (walking in stations aside). I owe an unbelievable amount of fond memories to the game, most of which involved treachery (albiet on a somewhat smaller scale).
That said, many of the changes in recent years have left a bad taste in my mouth. For example: Aurum, an in-game currency used to purchase items from the "New Eden Store", such as ship skins and clothing. Radical changes to character progression in the form of skill injectors. Radical changes to the PLEX system, as well as F2P. Innumerable changes to core game mechanics.
Not all of these changes are necessarily bad, but they do tend to foster almost a weird sense of alienation among long-time players, especially inactives. Nobody I know really plays anymore, and it's not because they lack the time. There's this mutual feeling that the game kind of lost its way some years back, and that the golden age is over. That its soul is gone, or at least waning.
I don't know how true that sentiment is, but it certainly feels that way. Of course, it's always possible we're just a bunch of really biased bittervets.
It is true that CCP has had an incredible amount of missteps in the past (walking in stations, Dust 514, vampire game), and that they've inevitably had a lot of turnover in their core talent. Despite all that, EVE is still alive, which in and of itself is impressive.
From a technology and art standpoint, the game is arguably better than ever right now. I just can't shake the feeling that it's stuck in an evolutionary treadmill of sorts, where things are changed just for the sake of change, and not pursuant to a strong overarching ideal or vision that was present in the earlier days of CCP.
On the bright side, at least Star Citizen has no hope of killing EVE. Things such as lifetime insurance are wholly antithetical to the ideal that EVE represents. Namely: you don't get an adrenaline rush flying something expensive if you know there's zero risk involved.
Elite: Dangerous (in my opinion) had the opportunity to kill both games, and failed only due to its unfortunate choice of core gameplay mechanics and P2P networking model. Four years ago it had the most advanced UI/UX of any game in existence, and arguably it still does today. Incredible artistic and technical production values unfortunately can't save a game if it has no soul.
I got the impression that the recent-ish sovereignty changes were enacted with some grander vision in mind, but then again I've been inactive for a while so idk.
I do recall a lot of people being burnt out from sov grinds on the old mechanics. For a while most sov was largely controlled by two major power blocs, so there was quite a bit of stagnation.
Around when TEST collapsed I jumped ship over to NC./PL's side of the fence. It was far more demanding, but the game actually became fun again. When you have (at the time) the largest supercapital fleet in the game on short notice ready to back you up, it was possible to do stupid stuff like take a dozen guys and go kill some dude's titan on a whim.
Sov grinds were oddly more fun as well, because we were incredibly outnumbered in subcap fights. I recall defending one system against about 1200 CFC players, and our numbers were about 300. We'd switch between AHAC/Ishtar/T3 doctrines, with enemy fleets dying faster than they could reship from nearby staging. Good times, but even that turned into a grind after a while.
I'm a very bitter vet myself, so take it with a grain of salt, but you're essentially correct. Space hasn't been as empty as it is today in over a decade, if ever before. Active player numbers are in the basement and falling and CCP is now even advertising starter packs with "More weapon slots, More damage, More tank". They are removing valid complexity and gameplay options left and right to "remove developer burden" (they removed the granular sound options a while ago because "almost nobody was using them" and made the game unplayable for me and many others unless we turn sound off completely).
The EVE of today is not the EVE you once knew. It's lost its soul in favor of making as much money as possible out of an ever shrinking player base.
At least the game's IP should be dirt cheap on firesale after it runs aground.
For what it's worth, this only covers the ship - none of the weapons or upgrades you've put in. It's been a while, but for most of the ships I flew when I played EVE (2007-2012 or so), the fittings cost at least as much as the hulls.
As explained elsewhere, don't expect to find 100% objective reporting anywhere.
Especially not there. imperium.news is a propaganda website first and a news website second.
I know Imperium.news used to be The Mittani and is basically a propaganda outlet for Goonswarm's power bloc.
Likewise evenews24.com at least used to be under the control of NC./PL as a more subtle propaganda outlet, but I've no idea what its deal is today.
I have to admit that when out-of-game news sites serve as a mechanism of information warfare, it speaks very well of EVE's metagame.
The founders: Xander Phoena, Niden, and Jeg Elsker hail from different groups. The corp, Zebra Corp, that the rag gets its name from, has been a part of several different major alliances, ranging from CO2, to Goonswarm, but doesn't appear to have any bearing on the reporting, itself.
EVE is a lot more fun to read about than it is to play it. You aren't missing all that much by not playing it...
That's how I try to play the game and have had so many thrilling moments. I'm not even in a corp, I play solo but have so much fun with the game!
For the non-EVE players: EVE has a system called Time Dilation, TiDi in short, that slows down the gameplay to give the server more time to process. It gets as slow as 10% of normal speed, which doesn't sound all that bad at first, except that stuff tends to no longer work as expected when the server load increases beyond what is manageable on that level. New commands are thrown on a stack and get worked down in order, which causes massive lags between giving a command and the game executing it, if it doesn't get lost somewhere along the way.
Those massive battles with thousands of players sound awesome in writing. They're very boring in reality.
most new players only find out about this aspect of EVE - running grinding missions for petty coin etc - because they've been conditioned by the stereotype of World of Warcraft (and its myriad of copycats).
If you have a few minutes, have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64 - it's one of the best videos explaining this concept.
If it's fun for you, then awesome. But I bet there are other things you enjoy occasionally reading about or hearing about that are still not worth the time investment to actually live through.
This is both a strength and a weakness: the game itself isn't that interesting or challenging without interacting with other people. But you can't really see all the game's content because so much territory is controlled by hostile teams. So unless you have nerves of steel and great skills to fly stealthed, you'll probably never see Russian-controlled Drone Regions, for example.
It would be cool to have a second shard of this universe in "care bear" mode that didn't allow player-vs-player (PVP) so that people could appreciate all the content that CCP created. It might also create pressure on CCP to create more interesting non-player-dependent mechanics and content in the game.
that would not be a game of EVE. It would be World of Warcraft, but in space. And not a particularly good one either.
The uniqueness of EVE _is_ the free-form, non-consensual PVP. Just like in real life, you cannot say no to being mugged, or ganged upon. When making friends, you cannot really know to trust them, and if you do find trust worthy friends, you friend them for life.
It's just another bit in a database and only one aspect of the game. Sure, there are 1,000 experiences in Eve you'll never get anywhere else - from spinning wormholes trying to find a dread enemy, to station spinning out of utter boredom because your station is bubbled to hell and back.
However it's simply not possible to see all the content on-offer in the game because PVP precludes it. I realize for some people the idea of EVE without PVP is inconceivable and that's fine, I'm just saying it's too bad because it would be fun to be able to see all of the game and enjoy other aspects of it that are suppressed by the ever present threat of PVP.
There's not that much to see out in those systems. You're definitely not missing any major story lines or lore because of it and the planets and suns are similar as everywhere else.
Still maybe it's just me being a completionist but I'd love to visit every part of the game. Fark it. Maybe I'll just resub and fly throw away stealth bombers until I do. But I sure as hell won't be able to mission with every faction.
The metagame of Eve is such that you can't really find objective reporting, though. It extends far beyond the game.
Eve Online alliance leader banned after threatening to cut off betrayer's hands | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232168
> thg: Classic gigX.. Not the first time he's got a "permanent" ban for making real life threats.
> xiaodown's personal account: I was sitting on coms when this all went down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232910
> xiaodown: He ... has a history. Plus, I mean, trying to get out-of-game details like address/name is a big no-no in Eve
IIRC Iceland's largest export is aluminum.
http://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/Efnahagur/Efnahagur__uta...
To answer child, the type of electricity production is split 70 hydro/30 geothermal.
From what I understand Eve takes a lot of real-time investment and dedication to succeed.
After you get far you have to maintain the relationships you built with people, and the responsibilities you share with them.
Tribal Wars (unfortunately now pay to win) and Puzzle Pirates are two games I've played that share that aspect, though both have no where near the same amount of mechanics, content, and dedicated playerbase.
But yes, if lack of enjoyment/reward crosses a threshold, players quit. Which often forfeit their position in these kinds of games.
edit: Not sure on the "rejoinability" of Eve, I assume it relies on the player's progress and social standing, multiplied by how lax the in-game trading rules are. (Giving away ships+currency before you quit, getting ships back when you rejoin)
I owe my closest friendships and even my career to EVE. I'll expand on this in a bit.
While I did spend a few years floundering around in the game like most players do, I was lucky enough to get close to the major political action early on when the first alliance I was a part of, ISS, collapsed. The ties and relationships that I built here got me in-system to watch the first (BoB) Titan kill with my own eyes.
A few years later when wormhole space opened up, I jumped on that immediately and got involved with a corporation dedicated to taking advantage of the new resources and PvP opportunities. Within a few months I was an officer in the corporation and we had brought in some local blues doing manufacturing in a merger. I had a pretty good relationship with these guys; a group of three students from Denmark.
It became clear to me right away that my corp's CEO plan here was to screw these guys over and steal all of their assets, as well as the rest of the assets of the corp and do a runner. Without cluing him in, I managed to help everyone in my corporation secure their assets and he got away with nothing but the corp's wallet, which I made an effort to drain (spread out to members) and left only about 8bil ISK.
Immediately after, these students and I joined one of the most well known RP/lowsec PvP corps in the history of EVE and started our own manufacturing corporation on the side which turned into somewhat of a mini-empire. The students were programmers and I now had a practical use for a life-long hobby(but not really the inclination or skills to do professionally at the time).
One of them is probably my closest friend today. We routinely discuss the idea of one of us relocating and starting a real business together.
Other friends that I made in this corporation I still talk to on a daily basis...even after a few years away from EVE. Eventually our CEO had to shutter the corporation, as he took a job with CCP; most of us were getting older and finding it hard to find time for the game anyway and quit, myself included.
My account still has a few hundred billion ISK sitting in its wallet. I resist the urge to pop in and get deep into the game again, but it's frequently there. I've had some breathtakingly beautiful moments and experiences with people in my life because of this crazy game.
I'd done just about everything you could do in the game while I was playing it and had about 4 accounts at any given time. A lot of quitting players complain about not being able to find the real action in the game...while it's hard, everyone who can read the forums can find out who the important, active corporations are in game. Seek them out, be available and make friends and then make enemies.
Ultimately you can spend a whole night trying to find fights in Eve and get 2 or 3 fights that last 20 seconds.
Or you can play 10 matches of overwatch or CS:Go or DOTA that last 30 minutes in the same time.
It still doesn't have a decent competitor though, elite dangerous is rubbish, still waiting on Star Citizen.
Longinius Spear once quoted Ernest Hemmingway, in a presentation at Eve: Vegas, "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."
Edit: Actually I prefer this response: I think how true an EVE player finds the above statement is a good indicator of how effectively they played the game to begin with.
Personally I think that if you believe that you're still in the delusion phase where you're projecting your fantasy of what playing Eve should be like, compared to what playing Eve is actually like. That fantasy lasted a long time for me, like 3/4 years.
In reality battles are copying someone's prescribed fit, click a direction to align, letting your squad leader warp you. Eventually you might actually get a fight, which consists entirely of clicking the first name on an alphabetically sorted list and pressing F1. There's no skill, only the adrenaline rush of losing something you spent 2 weeks grinding for.
And don't forget, you spend 2 hours or even days between each of these battles waiting to even start the fight.
The big contradiction in Eve is that the thrill comes from permadeath, but it's only a thrill because the grinding is onerous. If everyone had infinite isk, no-one would play it because the fundamental combat gameplay is super boring.
If you want the kind of rigid corp structure EVE offers but in a high-action game, I'd say look at some of the dedicated ArmA groups; particularly ShackTac.
The combat side of EVE is best played as more of a situation room. Sit and monitor comms and see what's going on over a wide area of space (read a book or do something engaging while you do this), then plan a surgical strike, execute and get out.
EVE is a role playing game - you play the role _you_ want to play! You live a life in EVE, as though you might live a life in the real world. You choose to trust people and make friends, may be get betrayed, or do the betraying yourself.
You fight an enemy because he/she is trying to steal your stuff, or take over an area that you want to keep owning.
Even though eSports games have more action, it's not the same kind of thing, and there's less thrill because losses in eSports are temporary. There's always a next game. Losses in EVE feels real, because they _are_ real!
For those not aware, Vile Rat, AKA Sean Smith [0], was one of the 4 Americans killed by terrorists in Benghazi, Libya on 09/11/2012.
This is an excerpt from a Kotaku piece on him (which has some good stories about his EVE exploits as well as real life stories [1]):
For the State Department, he was an Information Management Officer. He was an expert IT guy who signed up for postings in places both safe and dangerous. He was in Pretoria and Baghdad, Montreal and The Hague and then—for what was only supposed to be a few weeks—Benghazi, Libya. It is in that last place where he and three other Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to that country, were killed on September 11, 2012, by anti-American militants. It's there that his story was cut too short.
In Eve, Sean briefly was in the top echelon of the game's player-run government. His influence in the game actually grew for more than half a decade. He rose from ordinary player to master spy to diplomat for the mighty GoonSwarm alliance. He toppled rivals with the soft nudge of verbal persuasion. He helped his alliance win a war among player alliances that raged for three years. He even made peace with the Russians.
Again, there's a lot more about him in that Kotaku piece [1]. This [2] piece in Forbes might be worth a look too, to see his diplomatic skills being put to use on reddit (EVE-related).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)
[1] https://kotaku.com/the-extraordinary-mischievous-too-short-l...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/09/13/a-look-at...
BTW, this isn't just some random podcast -- TLDR was a podcast put out by "On the Media" [0], the (US) public radio show that dissects how news is presented to the public, how the media works, etc. This episode was released in Jan. 2014.
A month later, a version of this TLDR episode was broadcast on the actual "On The Media" radio show [0] -- basically it's the podcast-episode with some added introductory material about the Benghazi story, narrated by Bob Garfield, one of the show's hosts.
(BTW, if you listened to the podcast link from emerongi above, there's no real reason to listen to the "On the Media" link below [1], but as someone familiar with the radio show, I found it interesting to see how it was presented on the actual show).
An excerpt -- I added a few paragraph-breaks:
If you play this stupid game, you may not realize it, but you play in a galaxy created in large part by Vile Rat’s talent as a diplomat. No one focused as relentlessly on using diplomacy as a strategic tool as VR. Mercenary Coalition flipped sides in the Great War in large part because of Vile Rat’s influence, and if that hadn’t happened GSF probably would have never taken out BoB.
Jabberlon5? VR made it. You may not even know what Jabberlon5 is, but it’s the smoke-filled jabber room where every nullsec personage of note hangs out and makes deals.
Goonswarm has succeeded over the years in large part because of VR’s emphasis on diplomacy, to the point of creating an entire section with a staff of 10+ called Corps Diplomatique, something no other alliance has. He had the vision and the understanding to see three steps ahead of everyone else – in the game, on the CSM, and when giving real-world advice.
Vile Rat was a spy for the Goonfleet Intelligence Agency. He infiltrated Lotka Volterra; he and I cooked up a scheme where we faked VR blowing up one of Sorenson’s haulers full of zydrine in Syndicate – this was back in 06 when zydrine mattered – and that proved to Lotka Volterra that he had gone ‘fuck goons’. BoB invaded Syndicate, then shortly thereafter GSF went to Insmother, allied with Red Alliance, and plowed over Lotka Volterra’s territory, all with Vile Rat’s aid. He came back in from the cold and became one of the most key players in the GSF directorate.
His influence over the grand game and the affairs of Nullsec cannot be overstated. If you were an alliance leader of any consequence, you spoke to Vile Rat. You knew him. You may have been a friend or an enemy or a pawn in a greater game, but he touched every aspect of EVE in ways that 99% of the population will never understand.
Often people who are leaving will either have their assets moved somewhere they'll certainly have access to later or just liquidate (generally on better than firesale terms).
Citadels (like the keepstar that changed hands) work differently: you can get everything in a citadel moved to the nearest suitable npc station at the cost of 15% of its value and a 20-day wait, worst case (google "eve asset safety" for the full details).
There's a lot to this game and it's not just spreadsheets, that's only a percentage of the game.
This is the thing that absolutely flummoxes me about the "game." Most gamers are geeks, but most geeks I've known into have little patience for political games. Yet, here's one of the most-successful and longest-running MMOPG's, and it's -- from what I can gather -- almost entirely political. I just can't wrap my head around it. I even have a hard time reading these post-mortems. The whole business seems to cater to some sub-sub-sub category of geek that doesn't lie in the direction of Myers-Briggs IN?? types. Does anyone know what those types might be? (All discussion of the usefulness or accuracy of these categories aside.)
Disclaimer: you will die. Lots. The adage is "don't fly what you can't afford to lose". There's no equivalent of "this is my special invulnerable armor and the sword of my great-grandfather", because when someone inevitably comes along and blows you up, it'll be their special invulnerable armor etc.
Also, the concepts of fraud, scams, and so on are unusual in Eve in that they're actively encouraged, or at least explicitly tolerated (with few exceptions, like you can't claim to be an official representative of the game's publisher). This is known as "adding content". As in, if you complain that user Foo defrauded you out of a few hundred dollars of in-game currency, the response will almost certainly be along the lines of "wow, Foo added a lot of content to your game, huh! You should thank them for it. You can't get that kind of entertainment from an NPC, can you?" This fosters a certain level of paranoia.
i dont think that works anymore now? Not sure...but it's human nature to scam! There's been so many pyramid schemes it's not funny!
What changed that disallows it? Did they remove the skill? Can a wallet go negative? Even if they forced the buyer to take the item and give the amount of money reserved to the seller, the scammer could theoretically just make sure that the buy order is close enough to the sell order that the seller still receives less than they paid. (though it makes it seem like a less juicy payout, so people would fall for it less)
Why wouldn't it be perfectly valid to attempt to scare or convince this guy in real life to give back the loot. It feels like it should be part of the game. Bonus points for getting someone fired or sleeping with someone's sister.
Would they have been on friendly enough terms to pull this off if they weren't meeting regularly due to being on the CSM? I don't think so...
https://i.redditmedia.com/E44ciq7vb9r1t9sAzo3giCym74vSloIyK7...
This is Judge posing for a picture with Aryth's alliance leader, The Mittani, at Fanfest.
Every major alliance leader has been to the pubcrawl that CCP puts together, for each fanfest. 99% of attendees pay their own way.
RIP: vilerat. Hope you're somewhere laughing your ass off about this knowing that your legacy lives on.
Does anybody actually have fun in this game? Like, simple this-is-a-fun-game-and-I-am-having-fun-at-the-moment fun?
You make your own fun. Personally I had great times studying the market and finding / executing (entirely on my own) new manufacturing chains, attempting to gain an ever increasing margin and profit-to-effort ratio!
But to each their own :)
The reason you only hear about betrayals and theft are because that's what is the most interesting to write/read about with regards to EvE. While it's really cool, conceptually, that you can make a living in this game by participating in this massive player run economy, you're not going to find a lot of articles about people spending hours of their life mining internet asteroids and occasionally getting ganked by pirates.
And yes, the Keepstar is the biggest of the citadels (the smaller ones are Fortizars and Astrahauses).
Hell we've had single dudes do single corp thefts for more than that.
Check out http://nosygamer.blogspot.com/2017/09/did-judge-really-pull-...
(I read the article and the relationships between the parties vs events vs timeline is still confusing)
You can always create a new sock puppet to rule the world.
It's a sandbox that gives you a safe place to RP some really dastardly, evil shit. If everyone has a level head, you can go and enjoy a beer together afterwards and start over.
Well, the article does say that the victim in this case wanted the perpetrator's name and address and voiced a threat in his direction - things like this can seriously escalate. There have been people killed over events happening in or around video games.
I am watching the video of it all now here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOdXie85VX8