It's extremely odd that the article completely fails to mention the real apocalypse that almost broke Eve, and was the real motivator for the establishment of the CSM years before the Summer of Rage: staff cheating. In an MMO, not having staff play the game often leads to a strong disconnect between the company's interpretation of the state of the game and the reality, but in an MMO like Eve where the entire game is built on forging long term interpersonal relationships on a massive scale, having staff play the game can present a great danger too.
The most successful of the early 0.0 power alliances was fueled in part by having a developer who revealed his identity to the alliance leadership, funneled limited rare items (blueprints) to them which were used to fund the alliance's growth, and abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances.
The revelation was a massive blow to the playerbase's faith in CCP and the CSM was established in large part to increase the transparency and communication between CCP and the playerbase, as some of the foul play was long-suspected but the concerns unheeded.
It is odd that they didnt mention the T20 incident, but, I guess they went for the more well known incidents, and the GHSC and Summer of Rage are more well known outside eve, when compared to say, the T20 scandal or the 4 year unfixed duping bug which resulted in quite a lot of the T2 items in existence being there because of duping.
The T20 incident was massive but I would like to make make some points.
T20 never gave bob the t2s he keep them in RKK yes RKK was in bob and one of the original 4(5) depending on how you look at it.
Originally he just rented them to bob for a cut via his corp (which was very common in bob to share Tech). Yes Bob got access to some T2s they might not have otherwise but in no way is it the reason that bob got where they were in the EvE world. In the upper levels of bob (I cannot say 100% as I only spoke to those in my corp) people were not aware until the incident broke. A few people in his corp knew based on the originally leaked emails. I think CCP did mess up by not removing the T2 BPOs and being slow to deal with the issue but that is not what we talking about now
That being said you say "abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances." I have never seen this claimed or proven, I would be very interested if you can show me anything on this. T20 was never fired from CPP, the idea he was threatening alliances based on his job(GM powers) would have been instance dismissal
On a side note, the T2 lottery had meant that it was very possible he did have these BPOs. I had one friend have 3 alts, 15 research agents and he himself got 2-3 T2 ship BPOs and 10+ items. I got 2 from 1 research agent
The worst out of all of it from my point of view was that this derailed BoB and made us look like cheaters. Bottom line is we did not need those T2s to achieve what we did, they did not give us the edge. What gave us the edge was the trust between us all (Band of Brothers) which started to erode with this incendent and was smashed when bob was disbanded over night a few years later.
All Hail BoB and SirMolly. the true creators of the political/military structure we see today in eve.
I was on my way to being an eve trillionaire once. I hacked the game client to make a network of market arbitrage bots. They had human reflexes and took frequent breaks, ate, slept, even took vacations. I had a quarter trillion isk in assets and cash by the time I was detected and banned. OracleOfJita was my main account. Eve is a pretty crazy game with an insane learning curve. Thanks to being a python veneer over a bunch of network services, it's also very amenable to automation.
Some of the hacks on the eve client you would not believe they were very impressive and who knows what some of these alliances are running now
Now EvE servers (as all MMOs should) log every request from the client but this little hack went for 6 months without it being caught. They used the internal web-server in eve to stream a copy of their display to a website. This is 2005 maybe a little later. I guess now adays this is not that impressive and stuff but 2005 it was so useful.
The idea was that we could have one 'page' where we would collect the feeds from different scouts. It worked
CCP banned the developer once they caught it, they were rather reasonable, if he wanted to reinstate his account they wanted copy of his code. They then told him what rules it broke and even recommended how he can make changes to his code to stop the violation. They were really rather good about it.
The line was at the time that you could modify the client as long as you did not modify the way it handles data between the server and the client.
I did something similar thing with Python and Guild Wars 2, probably not as advanced though. It would place buy orders for under priced wood logs which were brought very quickly, and then sold them when the market price fluctuated higher.
Fifa Ultimate Team is easily gameable as well, the web frontend uses a surprisingly well made API which makes it super simple to automate trading of cards. It was interesting to see how the PS3 and XBox economies differed (a lot).
Python is surprisingly awesome for such tasks I find.
back in 2007 I did something similar on Travian[0], but my bot was made for taking game decisions. The game mechanics was send attacks, gather resources, and develop cities .. the bot was playing so automated that I lost the interest in the game itself, and stopped playing
I will never, ever, ever get sick of watching that video.
I played EVE for a fair while, CEO'd a decent sized corp in a major alliance and took part in some of the biggest battles, and had to stop (aka: winning EVE) because "Life™".. but that video makes me want to get back into it SO badly. It's the most insane, addictive, complex, fun, rage-inducing, adrenaline-charging game I've ever played, but it will CONSUME you.
As a follow up, this "documentary" of sorts of the Rooks and Kings "pipe-bombing" campaigns is enthralling. I've never played the game, but watching this documentary made me feel like I've played months of it.
"Rooks and Kings: Clarion Call 4" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNUu75fH8Uc
> [...] Low Security, a more dangerous patch of cosmos where unscrupulous bandits hijack vessels to sell them on for profit. The third, final and most notorious territory is Null Space, the galactic wild west where even the most well-tooled characters live in a state of constant peril.
When I played a couple years back, low-sec was considered the most "wild west, dangerous, insecure" space you could be in, even when with fiendlies. It was made no safer due to my participation in FW, so Amarr/Caldari FW fighters could be added to the usual troves of pirates and gate campers.
The reasoning was for null sec if you joined a major alliance and stuck to their space, the actual realized danger was no greater than that of high sec. While null and low-sec both don't have CONCORD (NPC police), low-sec was typically teeming to the brim with pirates and gate campers due to the lack of sovereignty and major alliances kicking them out like null-sec has.
FW was major fun in low sec, heard they revamped the system, hope it's been revitalized!
The stories from Eve certainly are awesome. I always feel I want to be part of that, but at the same time I'm also sad that this amount of energy is not put into something more meaningful. The main part is building a huge community right? That you fly around in space ships is secondary at some point. Then why don't people exchange that secondary part with something like organizing free food for homeless people, or building shelters instead of space stations, or making computer cheaper so every school can afford to put one on every desk?
*edit: That nobody has to become defensive here: All time spent on that kind of activity is time lost for humanity at all, in my books. It does not mean someone else need to have the same priorities. I can be sad about it without wanting to tell anyone that they need to change their ways. Keep your ways. But allow me to be sad about it.
It's a good question, but I guess the answer is - people just don't work that way. You can't separate the form (community) from the content (space ships). These are not substitute goods, you can't just replace Eve with World of Warcraft or with helping Red Cross.
And the reasons people choose games instead of life? I guess it's complicated. I am guilty of that too; I could be building real rockets and learning real aeronautics instead of wasting 400 hours in Kerbal Space Program and I'd be probably much more qualified than I am now. But I know that I wouldn't find the strength and willpower to pursue "the real deal" instead of a fun game that approximates it.
I sometimes am sad too, just like I am sad about the world's focus in general. Most people waste even more time on even more useless things that Eve players do on Eve. It took 12 years from first artificial satellite to putting a man on the Moon. If people could maintain that kind of focus and channel it to the right goals - ending poverty, illness and death itself, we'd live in a paradise before the end of this century.
(IMO it's actually a huge mistake that a lot of people in the field of educational games make - they try to make education apps pretending to be games, instead of making games that educate as a side effect)
The main reason is that Play is really, really important to making us better humans, so humans really, really like to engage in the form of Play no matter what the content. One of the cultural challenges that humanity faces is making Play align with bigger goals -- for example, if you love carpentry, you might volunteer with a shelter building program for all the "wrong" reasons, but yet... houses get built and (probably most important) carpentry skill gets developed in humans.
I would agree that Eve might be a complete waste of time, along with soccer and chess and (my favorite) Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but I think the instinct to Play is very real and very productive, it should just be channeled intelligently.
EVE can be played while you do other things, for short intervals during the day and spending $15 or less per month.
How would one organize free food for homeless people during one's commute, for example? Or build shelters in the 1h lunch break? Or make computers cheaper by expending less than $15/m?
My mother is a member of Refood (a org that redistributes surplus food from restaurants to people that need it), but she could never do it if she had a regular 9-6 job plus commute.
I'm not sure how useful it is to pass judgment over whether other people are wasting their time. If I'm doing something that's fulfilling to me, is that really a waste?
Besides, we really don't need most people to spend their time feeding the homeless or building shelters. It takes money, not work, to feed and house people. Our economy can easily sustain enough food for everyone and enough homes for everyone without anyone (including poor people) having to work any harder.
The fact that we're not feeding and housing everyone isn't really a reflection of how hard we're working.
The main part is playing games as part of a team. The community exists to support the game-playing. You might as well make the same complaint about any sports team.
I always am entertained by Eve Online stories. It is always amazing that months and years of work are thrown into battle and the stories of betrayal and demise are epic.
I played in beta for 6 hours and sadly I was done with the game. I am spoiled by RTS and now MOBA were the fun is quick hectic and doesn't require so much patience.
I don't playe EVE anymore because of the (80% preparation 20% fun) rule but I did nearly everything in the game (trading, mining, pirating, exploring) and it was fun but I don't have the time to do so anymore.
Might be a tiny bit exaggerated, losing 1% of your subs is no joke... but it wasn't the edge of apocalypse. Eve had 50k users around the time of this event in April 2005. Losing 500 players isn't exactly the end of the world. In fact, despite subs cancelled, the amount of subs never dropped during that time and grew to 100k before year's end.
I know there's a bit more context to it but this is just another hyperbolic title to an otherwise fun and interesting article :-/
Istvaan Shogaatsu ended up in my WoW guild. Never quite realized the magnitude of what he did in Eve (though to be frank, I never bothered to care at the time). What a badass! Thanks for the nice read, OP.
I guess those "The long read" articles are not for me. That one is a very long article with almost no visible structure. It only has paragraphs, but no sections, summary, or anything like that.
[+] [-] larzang|10 years ago|reply
The most successful of the early 0.0 power alliances was fueled in part by having a developer who revealed his identity to the alliance leadership, funneled limited rare items (blueprints) to them which were used to fund the alliance's growth, and abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances.
The revelation was a massive blow to the playerbase's faith in CCP and the CSM was established in large part to increase the transparency and communication between CCP and the playerbase, as some of the foul play was long-suspected but the concerns unheeded.
[+] [-] Squarel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinfoilman|10 years ago|reply
T20 never gave bob the t2s he keep them in RKK yes RKK was in bob and one of the original 4(5) depending on how you look at it.
Originally he just rented them to bob for a cut via his corp (which was very common in bob to share Tech). Yes Bob got access to some T2s they might not have otherwise but in no way is it the reason that bob got where they were in the EvE world. In the upper levels of bob (I cannot say 100% as I only spoke to those in my corp) people were not aware until the incident broke. A few people in his corp knew based on the originally leaked emails. I think CCP did mess up by not removing the T2 BPOs and being slow to deal with the issue but that is not what we talking about now
That being said you say "abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances." I have never seen this claimed or proven, I would be very interested if you can show me anything on this. T20 was never fired from CPP, the idea he was threatening alliances based on his job(GM powers) would have been instance dismissal
On a side note, the T2 lottery had meant that it was very possible he did have these BPOs. I had one friend have 3 alts, 15 research agents and he himself got 2-3 T2 ship BPOs and 10+ items. I got 2 from 1 research agent
The worst out of all of it from my point of view was that this derailed BoB and made us look like cheaters. Bottom line is we did not need those T2s to achieve what we did, they did not give us the edge. What gave us the edge was the trust between us all (Band of Brothers) which started to erode with this incendent and was smashed when bob was disbanded over night a few years later.
All Hail BoB and SirMolly. the true creators of the political/military structure we see today in eve.
[+] [-] eloff|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinfoilman|10 years ago|reply
Now EvE servers (as all MMOs should) log every request from the client but this little hack went for 6 months without it being caught. They used the internal web-server in eve to stream a copy of their display to a website. This is 2005 maybe a little later. I guess now adays this is not that impressive and stuff but 2005 it was so useful.
The idea was that we could have one 'page' where we would collect the feeds from different scouts. It worked
CCP banned the developer once they caught it, they were rather reasonable, if he wanted to reinstate his account they wanted copy of his code. They then told him what rules it broke and even recommended how he can make changes to his code to stop the violation. They were really rather good about it.
The line was at the time that you could modify the client as long as you did not modify the way it handles data between the server and the client.
Miss eve :( but it becomes life
[+] [-] orf|10 years ago|reply
Fifa Ultimate Team is easily gameable as well, the web frontend uses a surprisingly well made API which makes it super simple to automate trading of cards. It was interesting to see how the PS3 and XBox economies differed (a lot).
Python is surprisingly awesome for such tasks I find.
[+] [-] Squarel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _lce0|10 years ago|reply
I wish to have made a backup :)
0: http://www.travian.net/
[+] [-] twowordbird|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramblerman|10 years ago|reply
Are these just xml/json requests going back and forth with market listings and orders or was it lower level than that?
[+] [-] quickpost|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinhboy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xelfer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andrenid|10 years ago|reply
I played EVE for a fair while, CEO'd a decent sized corp in a major alliance and took part in some of the biggest battles, and had to stop (aka: winning EVE) because "Life™".. but that video makes me want to get back into it SO badly. It's the most insane, addictive, complex, fun, rage-inducing, adrenaline-charging game I've ever played, but it will CONSUME you.
[+] [-] mfringel|10 years ago|reply
The other 95% is spreadsheet manipulation and waiting for your kitchen timer to go off.
[+] [-] Squarel|10 years ago|reply
The article was also one of the better articles written about Eve.
EDIT: Not as emotive as the "This is Eve" video, but the MoMA exhibition video is also fairly good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGuDUbZIo_o
[+] [-] ecdavis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidslv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potench|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_kilk|10 years ago|reply
Back when I used to play Eve, I ran with the BRAVE corp/alliance, they were good people to play with.
Rahadalon is still my spiritual home.
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjslep|10 years ago|reply
When I played a couple years back, low-sec was considered the most "wild west, dangerous, insecure" space you could be in, even when with fiendlies. It was made no safer due to my participation in FW, so Amarr/Caldari FW fighters could be added to the usual troves of pirates and gate campers.
The reasoning was for null sec if you joined a major alliance and stuck to their space, the actual realized danger was no greater than that of high sec. While null and low-sec both don't have CONCORD (NPC police), low-sec was typically teeming to the brim with pirates and gate campers due to the lack of sovereignty and major alliances kicking them out like null-sec has.
FW was major fun in low sec, heard they revamped the system, hope it's been revitalized!
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
*edit: That nobody has to become defensive here: All time spent on that kind of activity is time lost for humanity at all, in my books. It does not mean someone else need to have the same priorities. I can be sad about it without wanting to tell anyone that they need to change their ways. Keep your ways. But allow me to be sad about it.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
And the reasons people choose games instead of life? I guess it's complicated. I am guilty of that too; I could be building real rockets and learning real aeronautics instead of wasting 400 hours in Kerbal Space Program and I'd be probably much more qualified than I am now. But I know that I wouldn't find the strength and willpower to pursue "the real deal" instead of a fun game that approximates it.
I sometimes am sad too, just like I am sad about the world's focus in general. Most people waste even more time on even more useless things that Eve players do on Eve. It took 12 years from first artificial satellite to putting a man on the Moon. If people could maintain that kind of focus and channel it to the right goals - ending poverty, illness and death itself, we'd live in a paradise before the end of this century.
(IMO it's actually a huge mistake that a lot of people in the field of educational games make - they try to make education apps pretending to be games, instead of making games that educate as a side effect)
[+] [-] forkandwait|10 years ago|reply
I would agree that Eve might be a complete waste of time, along with soccer and chess and (my favorite) Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but I think the instinct to Play is very real and very productive, it should just be channeled intelligently.
[+] [-] hnnewguy|10 years ago|reply
Why are you on HackerNews in the middle of the day, lecturing people, rather than feeding homeless people and building shelters?
[+] [-] icebraining|10 years ago|reply
How would one organize free food for homeless people during one's commute, for example? Or build shelters in the 1h lunch break? Or make computers cheaper by expending less than $15/m?
My mother is a member of Refood (a org that redistributes surplus food from restaurants to people that need it), but she could never do it if she had a regular 9-6 job plus commute.
[+] [-] Suncho|10 years ago|reply
Besides, we really don't need most people to spend their time feeding the homeless or building shelters. It takes money, not work, to feed and house people. Our economy can easily sustain enough food for everyone and enough homes for everyone without anyone (including poor people) having to work any harder.
The fact that we're not feeding and housing everyone isn't really a reflection of how hard we're working.
[+] [-] Squarel|10 years ago|reply
Whilst ingame? They do things like this https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/plex-for-good... https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/plex-for-good...
[+] [-] Kiro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulhauggis|10 years ago|reply
But Eve online provides entertainment, happiness, and sometimes a social life to many of the people playing it. It does have many positive aspects.
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
I played in beta for 6 hours and sadly I was done with the game. I am spoiled by RTS and now MOBA were the fun is quick hectic and doesn't require so much patience.
[+] [-] edem|10 years ago|reply
http://www.pcgamer.com/eve-onlines-biggest-ever-battle-trill...
I don't playe EVE anymore because of the (80% preparation 20% fun) rule but I did nearly everything in the game (trading, mining, pirating, exploring) and it was fun but I don't have the time to do so anymore.
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|10 years ago|reply
I know there's a bit more context to it but this is just another hyperbolic title to an otherwise fun and interesting article :-/
[+] [-] FLUX-YOU|10 years ago|reply
Ugh. Way to keep a low profile, CIA: http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/9639/article/glenn-beck-t...
[+] [-] golemotron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkem|10 years ago|reply
http://evehistory.com/
[+] [-] vasticles|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outworlder|10 years ago|reply
Is that counting the Wormhole systems? Don't think so.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vog|10 years ago|reply
I guess those "The long read" articles are not for me. That one is a very long article with almost no visible structure. It only has paragraphs, but no sections, summary, or anything like that.