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The trick is:

> 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?

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> It's unclear why none of the other shareholders voted though. Did they quit the game or something?

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...

Reading the comments, it sounds like the perpetrator somehow first got the shares and this is not normally possible? Sounds fishy.

I don’t know anything about EVE though.

Going theory is that he was a former director or CEO. I think figuring out who he is and how he got the shares is going to be the more interesting story that's going to cause some drama. Your average player couldn't have pulled this off because of how shares work.

It's correct. No one who freshly joined would get shares in any organized corp. Must have been a former bigwig role in that corp.

Would it have been possible they were given shares by another player inside the corp that does have shares? Although I'm sure share transactions are logged and public information, if not through the game then through the APIs, and most Corporations will make some API access required.

That's still an inside job innit?

Fishy stuff is part of the game.

correct

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.

Using shares to gain control of someone elses corp and steal their stuff is an extremely old scam. Like, it was very well understood some 15 years ago. The mechanics haven't changed.

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).

> raiders call a shareholders' meeting but fail to provide other shareholders adequate and timely notice,

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.)

> unknown book, ages past

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.”

little nitpick but it’s where the local council put the notice about bulldozing his house.

The aliens' plans were, if I remember right, posted for display in a nearby star system, with a similar 'it's your own fault if you didn't bother to go look' justification.

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.

... almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ...

The best sentence in the entire book

I think it's tied with "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

I think both of those lose out to the discussion of "grammar in the context of time travel".

this is the stupidest debate that I'd be willing to read an entire transcript of.

Further similar vibes: the DUST short film "Final Offer": https://youtube.com/watch?v=rv8kOzRZK8g

> little nitpick but it’s where the local council put the notice about bulldozing his house.

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.

Entirely unnecessary nitpick: they are Vogons. Had me questioning myself for a moment if I'd consistently misread their name[1]!

[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!

Every time I read that part of the book I am surprised that there was no actual leopard. Somehow my brain stored that scene that he had to fight a leopard in the dark basement with no easy way out because of the fallen stairs. Yet clearly the leopard is only on the sign (or is it?)

Yes. The leopard sign is a non sequitur meant to further emphasise that this is precisely not the place one would expect to look for the item in question. It could have been a sign about anything but the "Beware of the leopard" is perfectly unrelated to the topic. This is the kind of thing Adams had a real genius for.

My understanding was that the sign was an entirely bogus but rather worrisome warning, put there as a somewhat deceitful tactic to dissuade people from reading the real notices (about demolition, for instance).

Maybe they did it over a national holiday for whomever was in the corporation? Maybe the leadership announced a holiday and these guys took advantage? Three days seems like a long time for the leadership to be completely AWOL from a game like EVE but I guess it happened.

It's been year since i played it last. But in the little corp I was a part of the leadership had phone numbers and/or IM on each other to get people online quickly in emergencies. The commitment was unreal.

I’m ashamed to say I played a mobile game for just over a year called Lords Mobile. It’s basically a F2P game where you can only be competitive if you are P2P. You have a castle and can train troops, craft armor, etc., and the more money you put in the more is at stake. The mechanics make it so you have to log-in at least once a day, otherwise an enemy guild will basically set a rally in order to “zero” you. Zero basically wipes out all the real money invested in the game. I wouldn’t call it a gambling addiction, but maybe it’s something to do with the sunken cost fallacy?

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.

I played a similar game (Rise of Kingdoms) for three years, and I agree that the sense of community is a compelling reason to continue to play. When you're in a top alliance, the shared commitment—both money and time—creates an environment where relationships can really flourish. It also drives a great deal of drama and creates great stories. There are certain conditions created in pay-to-win games that can't be replicated in games with fairer monetization models, and those can be a real draw for some people.

> There are certain conditions created in pay-to-win games that can't be replicated in games with fairer monetization models, and those can be a real draw for some people.

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.

I imagine there's a lot of former OGame & Planetarion players who still dread hearing an IRC tone in the night knowing it'll be someone either waking you up to say "you've got incoming!" or "send your fleet!". Planetarion still has quite an active community but unsurprisingly they've geared it to making sure people don't need to survive on 3 hours sleep now.

Yeah I remember a similar game around 2000-4(hazy on timing) called EmpireQuest[0]. All text, ticks happened every few hours. Planets, ships and alliances. Similar time investment.

[0]: https://www.mmorpg.com/empirequest

Do you regret your time/monetary investment?

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'm not OP, but I took my time in World of Warcraft as seriously as them, with similar strong communal vibes, and have absolutely no regrets. Learning to speak confidently and lead a group of 40+ people has proven invaluable in my life. Similarly, getting pay-offs that make you renowned, but that require months of commitment prior to payoff, really taught me a lot about being patient and putting in the effort before expecting the reward.

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. :)

I spent several thousand dollars on a mobile game like this when I was making $12 an hour. I absolutely regret the time I spent and the money I wasted on it. I got fired from another job because I wasted all my time playing the game. Ultimately it was impossible for English Speaking people to win anyway as Japanese players outnumbered us. So all the money we spent was for nothing.

What I was talking wasn't just merely over-investing in a game. This particular part of his comment was the relevant bit:

> 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.

Yeah, the game I'm talking about was like this. I spent 80+ hours a week on it. I spent literal years of my life on World of Warcraft, stagnating my life for almost a decade because of it. I was in one of the top guilds in the world for while. It was a full time job and to my detriment.

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.

You learned how to maintain a membership in one of the top groups of one of the top games. that's not exactly a marketable skill on paper, but you sound like someone who knows how to grind when you set your mind to it. As someone with ADHD who can't stop chasing squirrels, I admire that.

Try to forgive yourself. You can't take it back. The time you spend in regret is more time you are losing to the game. Maybe you can turn your experiences into something that can help yourself or others.

Well, you are probably right. I imagine quite a few people on here had time-consuming digital lives at some point or another.

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.

I'm sorry you feel that way. Do you mind me asking a couple of questions? Did you enjoy it at the time, or was it more numbing or just compulsive thing?

And was it a social thing? Did you make friends, enjoy talking to people etc?

You could have become a medical doctor with that time. Instead, you played a fun game.

Didn't they already say that themselves?

Did you miss out on your ususal chance to kick a puppy on your way to work today or something?

Why rub it in?

It's a lesson to the rest of us. Let it hurt

I remember a classmate played a similar game called Travian with similar dedication (I remember an advanced tactic being launching several raids by different allies with different travel times so they landed simultaneously) in highschool, almost two decades ago.

Numbers games work the same, when people play the same number, they can't stop, because they'd hate themselves if that number was ever drawn! So sunken cost fallacy can definitely be a part of a gambling addiction. (Heard this on a recent 99% invisible episode)

Well, it was the easter weekend last weekend, plenty of people have days off, spend time with family or on a short vacation; I don't know when this went down though.

I used to play the game, like 13 years ago. I recall a similar drama about someome inflitrating a major organisation and stealing everything.

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.

Disclaimer, been an extremely long time since I played as well, I think 12 years in my case. Though I honestly kind of regret quitting. Back then I thought EVE was merely an early progenitor of what would be a bunch of better sandbox MMOs, and was upset with some of the directions CCP was going and potential they were squandering. Little did I know :(.

>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.

>EVE would have been a neat place for smart contracts and programmatic corporate structures and so on

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...

oh noes!

game studios have full control over client and server(-s) who would benefit from a distributed consensus and storage here?

As far as I understand, it is possible for the devs to hand over control over aspects of the game such as the in-game market or the corporation-related contracts to the players via the blockchain. The dev servers would query the blockchain for this information instead of storing it. This allows for potentially massive and breaking changes to the game engine, without players losing any progress they had in the game. Or, potentially, if the dev studio dies for some reason, the community could be given the sources. Or, other games could be developed around EVE which also have access to this blockchain. The possibilities are big. It's similar to how Steam untangled player inventory, market, and mods from the games themselves, but with blockchain, you don't even need Steam to do this.

The players

In what way would they benefit?

> Back then I thought EVE was merely an early progenitor of what would be a bunch of better sandbox MMOs

What would a better sandbox MMO even look like?

What sandbox MMOs do you like more?

My reading was they anticipated better Sandbox MMOs for the near future, but none eventually were better...

Oh I see. Yeah, I read that weirdly

Instead, we have these experiments in digital corporate governance on blockchains instead. Which would be more fun if there wasn't so much hype and fraud.

I couldn't even name any other game that gives as much freedom as Eve.

From reading the reddit comments, I'm not sure there were any other shareholders. Apparently 1000 shares are created upon corporation founding and the person who arranged the heist had 1000 shares so it would seem they had come into full ownership of the corp somehow.

They start with 1k, and more shares can be created via the voting system. You only need 5% of the shares to call a vote, though.

https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203268871-Sh...

https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203268841-Co...

The reason quorums were invented.

ah just $22,000? people do this with flash loans periodically for way more of a bounty, 10s of millions maybe even hundreds of millions in a single takeover

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

Took me a while to find, but yes, the most notable version of this attack was the $182 million one on Beanstalk, about a year ago, where someone used a flash loan (meaning, access to nearly unlimited money as long as you pay it back in the block) to add new assets, issuing themselves a majority of shares, which they then used to vote themselves the project's assets, then redeemed their shares, pulled the assets out, and repaid the loan.

web3isgoinggreat account with sources: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=beanstalk-farms-stablecoin-...

That website is really something else.

Where TF is all this money coming from that gets invested in various NFTs, DeFi projects and exchanges, and more? It seems endless.

If you are talking about large USD equivalents, I think they reflect not necessarily the amount invested (though there's certainly lots of dirty money) but what people would trade these for.

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.)

VCs, retail, prior exploiters, gamblers, it circulates.

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.

The "real" money supply is effectively infinite, as money today is only backed by confidence in the banking system and nothing else.

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.

We recently had a nearly 0% interest rate. That makes capital almost free / nearly endless.

Do you actually need much starting capital for those? I was under the impression that anyone could in theory create a new cryptocurrency (or -product) from their proverbial basement and start selling it to gain (real money) capital.

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.

> Do you actually need much starting capital for those?

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.

https://rekt.news/ is similar and generally does a good job of explaining the "how"

laundry services

yeah I would say that successful phishing campaigns and rugs stay within the ecosystem to make more. they can directly buy into new projects or launder and buy into new projects. the new projects can be specifically launched to sell out to laundered funds, it can even be the same people using different addresses and nodes.

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".

This stuff often happens. I think in 2016 Brave Alliance had a Coup (actually they've had like 16 failed coups by now) where at midnight the CEOs of corporations that make up the Alliance held a vote when the current Alliance leader was asleep to change leadership.

In the Silicon Valley TV show, Richard also gets the Hooli board to sign a document, which Gavin (Hooli CEO) has 2 hours to object to, but he's off doing a triathlon.

Very interesting! What you describe (inaccessible location) is also similar to the German elections after the Reichstag fire:

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire

this is why we have things like shareholder proxies and annual general meetings IRL

And rules requiring a quorum in order to take any kind of binding action.

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).

In the game, the problem is that some gamers quit and the shares are frozen forever, so you need some trick to make it possible to vote with less shares and keep the organization working.

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.

> Since this is Eve, I don't know whether to place the blame on the corp's leadership or on CCP Games [...]

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.

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