EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off biggest heist in game history
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
> Using a "clean account with a character with a little history," Flan_Hill and an unnamed partner applied for membership in the EHEXP corporation. After the account was accepted, Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO. The conspirators both voted yes, while nobody else in the corporation voted at all.
> This was vital, because after 72 hours the two "yes" votes carried the day. The infiltrating agent was very suddenly made CEO, which was in turn used to make Flan_Hill an Event Horizon Expeditionaries director, at which point they removed all the other corporate directors and set to emptying the coffers.
Which reminded me of this paper I read about Russia in the 1990s:
> In a similar scheme, raiders call a shareholders' meeting but fail to provide other shareholders adequate and timely notice, either by mailing notices to the wrong address, sending the notices only a short time before the meeting, or holding the meeting in a remote, inaccessible location. At the meeting, they exploit the artificially created majority to vote in a new board of directors.
[Criminal Corporate Raiding in Russia, Thomas Firestone](https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con...)
It's unclear why none of the other shareholders voted though. Did they quit the game or something?
Endless arguments on whether this is a feature or a bug. Last time it was more of a sociel engineering and betrayal, this time it's more of a mechanical exploit.
>Endless arguments on whether this is a feature or a bug. Last time it was more of a sociel engineering and betrayal, this time it's more of a mechanical exploit.
One thing I do remember a lot of us being frustrated by though was that while they sunk lots of development effort into "walking in stations" and planet stuff that wasn't space, a lot of the corporate mechanics stayed pretty primitive. I do think it's kind of a bug if more serious corporate structures couldn't be developed. EVE would have been a neat place for smart contracts and programmatic corporate structures and so on, just let everyone go wild setting up constraints and checks within some reasonable computational cap. Interesting options to tie in (or not, depending on reputation, could be another neat set of tradeoffs) to NPC governments as well. But having a lot of corp/alliance aspects be kinda clunky in terms of management, comms, stores and so on always felt like one of the various wasted opportunities.
Wow, amazing how it comes back in pieces. It really is quite the project whatever its flaws. A lot of other MMOs from its era have come and gone. Glad it still exists at all.
I don’t know if you’ll laugh or cry to hear this… last month, CCP accepted an investment led by a16z to develop a blockchain-enabled game.
In the press release, they say: “With key game systems developed on-chain, this new project will also leverage smart-contract blockchain technology, focusing on persistence, composability and truly open third-party development to create a new relationship between virtual worlds and players.“
[1] https://www.ccpgames.com/news/2023/ccp-games-has-secured-usd...
game studios have full control over client and server(-s) who would benefit from a distributed consensus and storage here?
What would a better sandbox MMO even look like?
What surprised me was the sense of community around it. I met people from all over the world who play. We had discords, ran guilds, had actual leadership responsibilities, would call people in the middle of the night when they were being rallied, etc. Before I decided I was done, I was running bot accounts (to act as guild banks and whatnot), and it felt like a part time job. It was very involved for a mobile game. If I’m honest it was probably the sense of community I felt, which I hadn’t felt online in many years, that made me stick around. Still I don’t recommend anyone actually play it.
Sounds like a fun experience to me, like most things like this: it's not a problem until it a problem (aka it affects your life negatively). At least compared to most people vegging out on their couch binge watching Netflix.
> I met people from all over the world who play. We had discords, ran guilds, had actual leadership responsibilities, would call people in the middle of the night when they were being rallied, etc.
Being a serious gamer is often much more than just the game, but the community/social experience and (potentially) personal development in highly a competitive environment. Eve is similarly known for being much more than a game but running pseudo-corporations. Of course the addiction/time/money stuff is where you start risking hitting the live wire.
I hate every time I think about it, I could have been learning to code, advancing my career and doing interesting things that I think back fondly about. Instead there's just a void in my life where I did nothing, learned nothing, and copied other people's builds in a game and hit buttons really fast and stayed out of the red areas during raids while hitting buttons fast. It makes me feel gross.
And was it a social thing? Did you make friends, enjoy talking to people etc?
Did you miss out on your ususal chance to kick a puppy on your way to work today or something?
What you have shown yourself is you can stick with something. Why not try something else now, that you can do for the rest of your life? Carpentry? Guitar playing? Not obsessively, but just regularly. You have time.
It's tough to compare what I got with my time to what I missed out on, though, since I can't live those other lives. :)
Doesn't need to be "pay to win". It might be free, but reward the time commitment or regularity. But it has to matter to the player in some way.
Back in high school, we felt the similar draw and had some similar stories wrt. OGame - a space-themed browser MMO (kind of like dumbed down Stellaris, but with no animation and everything taking hours of real time to happen). There were "alliances", formal and informal. There was exploiting game mechanics to gain the upper hand. Scheduling attacks so that the fleet arrives in the middle of victim's night, hoping they aren't crazy enough to be logged in then (not like us). We paid with nothing, except our own time and attention.
If this were a real-world corporation, this would be a massive failure on the part of whoever set up the organization's bylaws. Since this is Eve, I don't know whether to place the blame on the corp's leadership or on CCP Games (I don't know if it's feasible for an in-game corp to require a quorum or not).
Anyway, IRL many organizations have somewhat similar method. For example the HOA of my building ask for a 50% of the votes at the anual meeting, but if there is no 50% after an hour, whatever votes that are there are enough. In this case, the problem is that most people don't do to the anual meeting because it's boring. Anyway, if they make a very scammy decition, I can go to a jure and they can go to jail IRL.
The rules are broken, but it might still not be a failure of CCP Games: their goal is not to make rules that are good for business, but rules that are good for entertainment and engagement.
Quorums are great rules in the real world, but not having them in EVE might people log in more often? And definitely makes for some great stories.
Pretty much mostly unrelated, but this bit touched a spark.
I remember reading some, unknown book, ages past. And somehow related to the story was one of these Board of Directors meetings. The Board was obliged to publicly announce the meeting.
The board, indeed, publicly announced the meeting. In Chinese, in a small, Chinatown newspaper, nowhere near where the meeting was to take place.
Just one of those clever "letter of the law" gimmicks. Always struck me as funny. (The protagonists organized a massive campaign and managed to find the announcement, so the nefarious deeds were eventually punished.)
Reminds me of Douglas Adams’s description of where the Aliens posted their plans to bulldoze Earth:
“But the plans were on display…”.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
The indie book series Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is entirely unlike Adams' work in most ways but clearly takes some inspiration from the malevolent absurdity on display, uses a similar premise where the demolition-causing aliens let the pharaohs know 40,000 years ago and that serves as sufficient legal notice.
True, but later on we find that the aliens pulled the same trick with the notice to demolish earth.
It was hilarious what the city council did to Arthur, it was even funnier when a few pages later we find you that the Vorgons did the same thing.
[1] this could have been quite likely since it wasn't until I was about 18 years old that I realised Kawaski motorcylces were in fact Kawasaki motorcycles!
The Reddit thread [1] has more info on that:
> So we settled in and watched, gaining an insight into when they were active and latest the most important part, who was active. In this intelligence gathering phase it clearly showed minimal activity, especially by the CEO and Directors. This fact encouraged us!
> Another sign for us that the CEO, the person in charge was barely active.
> We watched and waited, then one evening we set the wheels in motion. I moved enough shares to our agent to create a vote for CEO. The vote came up on my screen and we both voted yes! This now for the duration of the vote locks out the current CEO’s roles, but sadly not the Directors. This was worrisome as we now had a 72 hours wait on our hands before the CEO role and all its power was transferred to our agent.
> Over this time DOTLAN and the Corp description showing the new CEO and still no one noticed! No one in EHEXP or Horde, it was eerily silent. We checked nearly every waking hour to see if our plan would be found out, but it remained slowly moving to the final outcome.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde...
I don’t know anything about EVE though.
you have to be trusted somehow to gain access to these shares in the first place. thou afaik they were never important for anything else than showing of.
I don't remember the details well, it was a long time ago, but there was a step by step guide to stealing a corp away. You had to have roles. I got them via the standard alliance recruitment "need a temp director to run a full corp check via api". Believable, and 24 hours later the corp was mine along with all its assets (a lot less than this).
https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203268871-Sh...
https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203268841-Co...
no 3 day wait necessary, just 1 block
borrow money, buy enough of the governance token, launch a proposal to change treasurer to yourself, pass the proposal, withdraw from the treasury, sell tokens, return borrowed money
web3isgoinggreat account with sources: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=beanstalk-farms-stablecoin-...
Where TF is all this money coming from that gets invested in various NFTs, DeFi projects and exchanges, and more? It seems endless.
There are orders of magnitude more Defi projects than the ones that get exploited and posted about.
And the projects that get exploited go more days without incident, like construction sites.
Think of if as if you evaluated the entire tech sector based on an international headline of a single phishing attack. You would have a skewed view that leads you to ask the same question, because there are always phishing attacks and little coverage of a deeper conversation. That’s kind of how it was 25 years ago in tech. Now people largely ignore that and talk about what organizations build, while the other problems never went away.
and then on the legal side with arbitrage bots (MEV and more), they also like to play around in the ecosystem, chase passive income in protocols and DAOs like everyone else.
speaking of everyone else, there are plenty of people with clearly legal funds, this post is just not about them.
its a whole parallel economy, where transactions simply aren't whitelisted, just as the people spent the last decade building due to the friction involved with whitelisting transactions unnecessarily. its here, this is how it works.
illicit fund users can cash out as well, whenever they want their local fiat money.
were they the person that launched the project (that got bought out by the laundered money)? congratulations.
were they one of the early believers of the project (that they also launched, that also got bought out by the laundered money?) congratulations, they have high capital gains just like any other lucky trader that "did their own research".
If you have a thing that everyone wants today, even if you invested zero dollars in it back in the day, it may be worth a mil. (However, if it turns out the thing is not so great it can cost half a cent the next day.)
In the UK for example, the amount of pounds in circulation has more than doubled in the last decade. This money supply grows with how much banks lend, and 80% or so of that lending is for housing i.e. speculation and investment.
All of that created money needs to go somewhere once it becomes more fungible than real estate, and that's how you got NFTs, Tesla and so on.
Now don't get me wrong, money is debt and always has been, far before the invention of symbolic currency. I'm not one of these gold standard idiots. I'm just concerned that a trust based system doesn't scale very well.
I mean Bitfinex did it with Tether, in two directions as well; they pre-minted loads of this currency, then sold it for USD while at the same time allowing people (and themselves) to buy BTC with Tether, artifically boosting the value of BTC and the BTC that they themselves held, which helped them pay off the debts from their various breaches.
More about the rubes who see some new NFT advertised, and think, "Oh, that's going to go to the Moon!" and plunk down some actual money for it. I guess I'm surprised we haven't run out of rubes yet. Yes, I know human foolishness is a renewable resource, but at some point I'd think most of the easily accessible rubes have been used up (i.e. had their wallets drained), and it would be a while before a new crop of rubes is available in sufficient quantity for exploitation.
> After the Fire Decree was issued, the Nazi-controlled police made mass arrests of communists, including all of the communist Reichstag delegates. This severely crippled communist participation in the 5 March elections. After the 5 March elections, the absence of the communists gave the Nazi Party a majority in the Reichstag, greatly assisting the Nazi seizure of total power.
When I was younger and would just hang out in teamspeak with the crew it was a lot of fun and a lot of just sitting around or jumping for hours trying to catch a fight only to die in an instant or kill them in an instant.
This round of playing I really got into wormholes and exploration and I'm having a blast with that. I only play maybe 7 or 8 hours a week and I find the probe scanning and data/relic site hacking minigames both a lot of fun.
I've also started using mapping tools for wormholes which is something else that's oddly fun. There's just something about sitting in space scanning for wormholes and people could warp on you while you're taking the 2 seconds updating your mapping tool that gives me a thrill. It's also mostly work I throw away when the wormholes close because I live in a high sec area too lol but I still find it fun. Sometimes I'll play two days in a row and visit wormholes I mapped earlier to scan new sites in them.
this is almost always true, so i argue that it is not a good measure of anything.
(note: eve online is probably not fun for most people, lol)
i also try not to spend money on games unless i am sure it's going to be good, or the amount is small enough to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. i'd want to get my money's worth.
whenever i get the feeling that i should be doing something more productive then that means that the game is not enjoyable enough any more and it's time to stop.
Some of the game mechanics, like scanning with probes, are interesting, but once you figure them out it's all tedium. If you want to PvE in a nice ship, you need to be wary every time you undock. If you want to PvP, you need a source of isk to replace your ship and implants, since every time you go there's a significant chance that clone isn't coming back alive. There's so much effort involved in everything, and very little payoff other than the occasional shot of adrenaline or lootbox find. Which is exactly what they count on. Variable reinforcement, rather than consistent reinforcement.
I got a carrier, started thinking about supercaps, and gradually lost interest in the whole progression due to the logistical effort keeping such things. I suppose I could have tried getting involved in corporate or alliance politics, or I could have switched to trading. However, like the lootboxes, those human elements too are constrained by game dynamics to be predictably unpredictable, and not in very interesting ways. Few long-term real-life friendships come about due to in-game friendships, since almost everyone quits games within a few years. So, due to all of the above, I left.
The best part of the game was hanging out in occasionally good, fun voice chats, but you have to be in a well-organized corp or alliance that runs good ops. Unlike real military-style organizations, though, scheduling makes good ops very difficult. People's ships are in the wrong systems, most of the op is just getting organized, and then, as GP said, you might get ganked at the first nullsec gate you jump through. Oh well, time to rat or mine or trade more to finance another ship and clone, so you can organize another op, which will probably also not be that great other than some fun voice chat moments.
At the end of it all, the other people you're hanging out with in corporations and alliances are there either because they've gotten hooked on the game's adrenaline or lootbox reinforcement mechanisms, or because they have a Machiavellian desire to pull the strings of a corp or alliance, and you're cannon fodder or logistical support, there to be kept happy. Or they're there to figure out an angle to scam or gank you.
EvE is more fun to read about, or think about doing things in, than it is to play.
Non-persistent games, like any good RTS, are more fun because they're lower-stress, and because you can see that you're making progress solely because your skill is improving. In a MMORPG, you're progressing only partly because you're developing more skill at playing, and more because the game company rewards you, in skill or lootbox upgrades, for spending more time in game (or spending money buying isk which lets you buy pre-skilled characters and in-game stuff).
Back when skills couldn't be queued, the devs at CCP knew exactly what they were doing. Force people to be logged in when their last skill had been trained, or they'd lose precious minutes, hours, days of training time. Once players are logged in, they might as well engage with other aspects of the game, getting more addicted to grinding.
The implants mechanic is terrible as well. For long-term use, maxing out learning implants is valuable, but that conflicts with playing the game where you want combat-related bonuses, so you have to jump around, which adds logistical difficulties. You have to be able to jump back to your learning clone before logging out for a while. And if you're not looking for an edge with a combat-focused clone, and you fly around with maxed learning implants, you lose billions, in addition to your ship and its modules, if you get podded.
The stakes for having to log out on short notice when you're PvPing in 0.0 or even lowsec can be losing your ship or worse, since you will at a minimum be separated from your gang/fleet, and might even be probed in the minutes before your ship disappears (unless they've changed that mechanic), or trapped if you log back in and warp back to a (same or different) gate camp. Having game mechanics that put a lot of pressure on players to prioritize game time over real life, is not good.
Just remembering the good times make me want to jump back in! I’ve been the same as yourself. Probably tried a dozen times over the years. From mining to pvp, red v blue, tried it all but it always started to feel like work in the end. Exploring and Signal Cartel made me stick around the longest. Eventually got a bit bored with it.
The most EVE entertaining i’ve had recently is Andrew Groen book series Empires of Eve [2]. Basically all the great big war stories bundled into a very engaging 2 series book. It is a lovely read!
Too true. And sometimes you stumble upon the fun. For instance, a long, long time ago (circa 2008 or 9...) I thought Stealth Bombers sounded cool so I started to learn the skills, not realizing they were essentially useless.
Except that they could be used somewhat productively to fuck around deep in enemy territory and be a nuisance to their mining and logistics efforts. Was a I troll? Basically. Did I have any real impact on the war effort? I doubt it. But hey, I did blow up a few mining barges and annoy people.
At some point I made a bunch of outrageously blingy ships and when they ran out I sold the accounts on eBay.
I had a great time while it lasted and hope something like Star Citizen can bring back some of that fun with more immersive gameplay…eventually.
Got to do something while autopilot is running... how about conspire a heist?
(Seriously through, I almost never used autopilot even when in highsec systems. There are some mad people out there and you don't want to know them)
There was a period I did what's called incursions, high-level PvE content that has been min/maxed to optimize how fast you can make money. Other times I did exploration, especially after they rehashed it and added hacking minigames and the like, but the competition there was quite firm.
Last times I played it I was careless; I lost a Loki (a half a billion advanced ship) from going into low-sec to kill things, running out of ammo, going out, and making the mistake of coming back. And I lost a Stratios (another half a billion ship with equipment) by going into new content where you need to clear it before the time expires, but I couldn't because I was harassed by tiny enemies that my ship couldn't hit.
Maybe one day I'll come back to it, but I just don't have the spare time for it anymore.
At some point I realized that this is an financial game with a space setting, not a space game with a rich economy, and I never played again.
Now to me in mmo games EVE players are a BIG red flag as the vast majority of them from my experience will bring their EVE mindset to other games and try the same tactics. Before if someone wasn't happy with the guild they would just leave or form a competing guild but these people might engage with people more, even pretend to be real life friends in order to rise in the ranks and to ultimately steal everything or will try to cause people to turn on each other so that the guild breaks apart. Who wants to deal with that? its crazy.
As fat as I was aware EVE has been stagnant for years, company sold to Pearl Abyss, which is likely to continue this or radically alter the game. Some radical changes were already made.
This seems like a very weak connection.
I'd crypto were "past the peak" the US gov would not be targeting it.
I'm not sure that argument holds. I remember eg Britain doing lots of 'tough on crime stuff' long after crime had peak statistically.
If you mean to compare the monetary gains of these exploits, 22k is nothing in crypto even in this bear market.
Side note, the AUD monthly of $30 - wtaf? I've been away for a while, they seem intent on keeping it that way.
Your account might get banned, but if you cash out to leave the game you probably don't care anyway.
But it's a frequent issue in other MMOs, where these companies will set up bot farms (or even pay people to play) to earn tons of the in-game currency, then sell it online. Officially it's not allowed by most games, but it's only illegal if you get caught.
This dynamic reminds me of unpopular or shady laws being passed in some parliaments in the middle of the night or during major sports events where the representative attendance and public attention is at its minimum to get enough majority votes. This "biggest heist in game history" follows the exact same dynamic.
Not because it’s the game designers “fault” but in cases of anything that can have a permanent impact on someone’s experience of a game without their knowledge it’s probably better to err on the side of caution.
The monetary value associated with Eve Online things is a bit arbitrary, as it's usually the accumulated value of people's efforts in game; we can't be sure if real money was invested in this heist.
That said, it's easy to underestimate the value of assets and property in-game in eve, as it builds up over the years and for a lot of people it's just a video game.
When you create a corporation (aka guild, free company, etc.) in EVE 1k shares are created by default (you can create more, not everyone does). And this corproration hadn't, so if you have 1k share you own every share in the company (and thus have complete control over the company, if you choose to excercise it).
Now, nany corporations don't really care for the share mechanic, and just leave the shares in the posession of the founder, or place it in a locked down corporate wallet. But somehow "Flam Hill" got all 1k shares in this company. They refuse to say how. Some people suspect the original founder of the company quit EVE while still holding the initial 1k shares, in which case Flam Hill is likely the founder, or someone who obtained the account from them. Or perhaps they were a company officer who got access to the wallet and took the shares, etc.
Which means all the writing about how the directors were AFK or whatever is just window dressing. Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company. In other words, there isn't really any obscure rule here or clever tricks. Or rather it is, but it all happened off screen, because the only thing that matters is how Flam Hill obtained control of the shares; once he had it, everything else followed.
It's as if Elon Musk wrote something about how he obtained control of Twitter by the clever gambit of walking up to the HQ carrying a sink. Actually, he obtained control of twitter by buying all of its shares, at which point he could do whatever visual puns he liked because he owns the company.
How come Flam Hill owned every share in the EHEXP? There might well be a fascinating story there of intrigue and theft and betryal there. But this story is just about the boring stuff that followed.
> Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company.
I think this is not quite right. Their 1000 shares were more than 5% of the total shares in the company, not (necessarily) 100% of the shares. 5% of shares can trigger a CEO vote at any time, and a majority of voting shares can elect a new CEO. They won the CEO election by being the only people online and voting at the time, and by having the corporation directors not notice the CEO change in the UI for 3 days until the vote took effect.
The failure of the corp was in not diluting the shares of the founder below 5% after they left the corporation a decade ago, so now they come back (with alt accounts) and rob them blind.
I haven't personally confirmed it, but it seems that there were only 1k shares outstanding, meaning that Flam Hill somehow had the original 1k created when the company was founded.
This would be a slightly more interesting story if someone found a company where, say, 90% of the outstanding shares were owned by inactive accounts, sneakily acquired 6% on the cheap, and then started and won a vote to become CEO, but it doesn't seem like that happened here. (Assuming that pseudononymous Reddit claim was correct, of course.)
If it was real money trading in exchange for the character then they wouldn't want to say it outloud.
So what's the deal with the OP?
"Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO"
Every CEO knows not to give shares away. The only reason to give other people shares is so that they can intentionally take over in case you die IRL and don't want to trap assets.
"The one aspect of the story that some redditors took issue with is the origin of the 1,000 shares in Event Horizon Expeditionaries that made this theft possible in the first place. Some redditors theorized that Flam_Hill is actually the long-departed founder of the corporation, who's been sitting with those shares in his personal wallet for years;
Absolutely possible
"others said they may have purchased a character from a member of the corporation who forget to remove the shares from their wallet before transferring ownership."
They're not supposed to have shares before being sold in the Bazaar, maybe RMT?
Join a corporation. Role play as a newbie. Learn their schedule. A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members.
Taking selling and scrapping all we could.
Truly Eve is one of the best implementations of “community goal/quest” games, in my opinion.
I wonder if it still works to contract for PLEX with a unit of measure missing. (Getting one for 10000000 instead of 100000000)
Still extremely common to get attempted, although due to the current UI it's usually listing something for billions when it should be millions. Also common is describing the contract as "500 plex" but the actual contract content is "1 plex".
> A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members.
Player-owned Upwell structures have largely replaced POSes so that basically isn't a thing anymore. What is a thing is using a Black Ops battleship to conduit jump expensive ships off of tether into a waiting gank. It's honestly a UI/design oversight, if your ship can fit a covert ops cloak and you're close enough to a blops in your fleet, you can get involuntarily yeeted to any system within jump range.
As another example of EVE conventions, in 2012 the biggest trading hub was attacked [0]. This is nominally a safe area, and indeed the NPC security responded to every attack. This was part of the cost-benefit analysis of the attackers, who were aiming to drive up the price of resources that they had hoarded. When other players complained to the developers, the developers found it hilarious, and helped advertise about the attack.
[0] https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/64307/what-is-bur...
Really? The general run of comments seems to indicate that the attack could only succeed because nobody in the targeted corporation noticed a popup warning them about the attack for 72 straight hours.
That strongly suggests that very few corporations should have any guards at all in place to prevent this type of attack, because there's no way for the attack to succeed unless everyone in the targeted corporation has stopped playing the game.
What are people worried about?
You can see corp (clan) history as well as all transactions between players. If you’re claiming to be a new pilot, but a 9 year old or 1 day old account is funneling money to you that would raise a flag.
(Not in-game or specific to the one game, but thought it was worth mentioning just because of the sheer size, and that it probably benefited North Korea. It still boggles my mind…)
But even if I arbitrarily say the heist is 99% crypto and 1% game, it’s still much larger :)
Chars have public history of corp membership or pvp fights etc.
So if you roll a char in an acct with other bigger chars, it will come known that you’re a fraud, not a newbie, or you also play as a character that has “interesting” history.
So you spend a few more bucks a month and create a fresh entire account with new slots, etc.
Wait, if it can't be converted to money then what are they using to generate the $22,300 figure?
Or is it the "legally" part, where there's an illegal way to cash out?
Also, what would even make it illegal? There are actual laws against it or something? Or is it a TOS thing the company tries to enforce, which wouldn't make it illegal but just against policy?
> There's a widely-held feeling that the whole shares system is, if not broken, then at least too easy to exploit
Another case of art imitating life, I suppose.
Absolute moron devs.
Example: My alliance leader basically stole a huge amount of my personal money and several months of work from me.
Background: For anyone who doesn't know eve, wormholes in eve are habitable spaces but they connect in ways that are governed by rules but are fundamentally random in nature. So your wormhole might always have 2 guaranteed connections to particular types of space but specifically what systems it connects to is random and will change every now and then. And also other new connections will spawn and disappear at random all the time. It is also entirely lawless space full of people trying to jump you at every turn, (sometimes) powerful NPCs and (usually) very powerful corporations who will every now and again mount operations to jump into a wormhole and evict the occupants if they are not very careful about defending themselves. All of this makes wormhole space very dangerous and inconvenient in lots of ways, but if you persevere, the game rewards you with very interesting gameplay and valuable rewards. I had a lot of experience with wormholes and was teaching people in my corp the ropes.
I had bought a new higher-class wormhole for my corporation, set up several new stations and a bunch of infrastructure. Because of the randomness above, this kind of logistic stuff is very slow and tedious work and I had spent a month or so of my time and a bunch of ISK (in-game currency) buying the hole, the stations and all the ships and stuff so my guys had stuff to do and didn't have to sweat the logistical stuff.
My alliance leader created a new corporation, transferred all the stations in the wormhole (including all my stuff and all the things I had put in shared hangars etc) into that corp and made the other people in the hole in charge of that corp. I was locked out in the middle of nowhere with no recourse.
He said he had misunderstood a message I had sent about taking a break (for the rest of the day) as quitting the game completely but anyway it fitted his objectives for the alliance so I could just basically stfu and accept it.
I tried playing a bit after that but it really was never the same. I left the corp and tried to restart but never got back to where I was or recouped what I had lost.
This conversion rate is based on the price of subscriptions, which can be bought either with dollars or real money. But why should that establish a conversion rate for every other asset? No one is trying to buy $22,300 of EVE subscription.
I assume there is a market place that offers a currency exchange.
The dollar value is for everyone that doesn’t play the game and doesn’t know if that is a lot or a little of monies.
There is not. There might be a black market for this, but not with anything close to this made-up rate.
I'm not saying you can't make money from in-game assets, but you would make a completely different amount of money. Those assets have never been bought or sold at $22,300, so why do we pretend that's their value?
Because different assets can be bought using both dollars and ISK (and cannot be sold for dollars at all!), we decide that's a conversion rate? And apply it to everything else?
Could you please explain?
There are no "people" in EVE Online. The "people" are supposed to be biological clones suspended in amniotic fluid integrated with the ship, so although they have the thoughts of the person they represent, they never get to leave the ship, and die when your ship is destroyed, so you get to create a new clone. That means you can't just walk around a station after docking, or get off your ship in space and do a space walk around the asteroids. The only thing you see about your persona is your profile photo that you generated at the beginning of the game, nothing else.
I think the philosophy of the capsuleer/ship mechanics is a refreshing one, and there's a cyberpunk feel to being wired up into that hull.
https://evenews24.com/2017/08/15/walking-in-stations-a-farew...
You decide...
> A player known as Flam_Hill in the online game EVE Online orchestrated a heist by exploiting the game's shares mechanic. Along with another player, Flam_Hill observed the 299-member corporation Event Horizon Expeditionaries (EHEXP), which is part of the Pandemic Horde alliance. They discovered that the corporation had minimal activity from its CEO and directors, making it an attractive target for infiltration.
> The duo applied for corporate membership using a clean account with a character that had some history. After being accepted into EHEXP, they initiated a vote for a new CEO, locking out the current CEO's roles. They waited 72 hours for the vote to pass, gaining control of the corporation. After being granted director roles, they systematically removed other directors and emptied the corporate wallet of 130 billion ISK.
> The heist also involved stealing assets from the corporation's high-security offices, which they believed were used to store valuable items. In total, the estimated value of the heist was 2.23 trillion ISK, or approximately $22,309 USD.
Overall 2 trillion ISK isn't that much in the grand scheme of things for a mega-coalition like Pandemic Horde.
If you can find out who the accounts are can you sue in real life?
Yes you can
> You have to remember that a corporation is legally a person.
It has nothing to do with this whatsoever.
> Good recent note from the Harvard Law review here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus...
This is a good note. As they point out: directors owe a duty of loyalty to the corporation and its stockholders, which requires that a director act in good faith and in the best interest of the corporation and stockholders, rather than in the director’s own interests or the interests of someone who the director is beholden to, controlled by, or otherwise dependent on.
Provided you can do this there is no legal problem.
There is no direct analogy for something an in-game thing like switching alliances, but in general courts give a large latitude to CEOs and boards to decide what is best for a company provided there is no conflict of interest.
So you wouldn't be able to sell all the assets and distribute the earnings to the CEO - but selling all the assets and distributing the earnings to all shareholders would probably be fine.