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A Year-Long Undercover Plot to Blow Up Eve Online's Most Notorious Space Station

478 points by omnibrain 8y ago

the_duke 8y ago
That was an exciting read. I'm almost tempted to try out EVE again.
- mabbo 8y ago
  What I remember of playing it 12 years ago was that I became quite adept at spreadsheets.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    That's one aspect of the game, mostly industry or mining IIRC. That's an area that could use some shaking up, because it's pretty much impossible to be profitable if you're a beginning industrialist. Mining works (that's one thing I started off with), but it can get kinda boring if you're trying to optimize it. The game could do with a bit of modernization in the beginning player's enjoyment and positive reinforcement feedback loop (if that makes any sense). I'm wondering how best to achieve that; maybe make the missions a lot more streamlined, add a bit of story to it, some more cutscenes and voice acting maybe. I'm imagining a questline where you end up building your own safe base now; one thing I don't like is how you can't really build your own starbase without constantly having to shut it down or rebuild it due to war declarations. What I'd like to see is something like player owned housing in other MMOs where you can build your own starbase inside of an instanced, unreachable pocket. It would need to have some restrictions, I guess, in e.g. how much you could store there and how much money you could earn there - Eve is all about risk vs reward, and all reward with no risk won't work. But anyway, a questline to eventually build a starbase, and follow-up quests that develop the base in a variety of directions would be neat.
    - jon-wood 8y ago
      I've not played Eve in years, since well before player owned structures existed, but I could see this sort of thing evolving to you owning a hanger space on one of the NPC corp's stations. It would seem to me that gets around the issue of people being able to directly declare war on you, but gives a smaller scale version of actual player owned structures.
    - kriro 8y ago
      How well would it work as a testbed for learning algorithms? I heard that you get good access to game data etc. Would it be feasible to be profitable at mining if you have a great prediction algorithm? I know nothing about the game but that would sound interesting as a nice dev-sideproject for structured data algorithms. Can you automate/script the trading/mining etc. or is that forbidden/considered botting or whatever?
      - seangrogg 8y ago
        Mining is a venture that benefits less from predictive optimization and far more from operational scale. Barring black swan events, having perfect market prediction is nowhere near as valuable as being able to strip mine systems with an Orca/Rorqual account boosting a fleet of miner accounts.
AJRF 8y ago
What an amazing sounding game. I've looked at gameplay videos of EVE before and it looks so boring, but the stories that come out of it are so evidently not boring. Strange dichotomy.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  Sort of like dwarf fortress.
  - dmos62 8y ago
    Or Dark Days Ahead. Ever since I've discovered this, I'm fascinated by the divide between what you see with your literal eyes and what you see with your mind's eye when you're playing this. A good analogy is books. When you read, you see it all, but at the same time it's just symbols on paper. That's where the medium's power comes from, compared to say movies: in a movie, you have to find a way to visualise or audiolise something, so the film-maker's capability to do that is the upper-boundary of what can happen, but in books the upper-boundary is the boundary of your imagination.
    - Insanity 8y ago
      Related to your comment about books (but unrelated to the game): Interestingly, I recently picked up reading fantasy. I picked up "A song if fire and ice" and am almost through the book. When people say that you use your imagination to fill it in, I kind of wonder what that's like. Because I see the words etc, but I don't have a 'vision' of the look of the characters etc. (I've not seen Game of Thrones). If I read about a fight, I'll just.. read about the fight. But I don't imagine the fight. Usually I have like fragments that I can 'imagine' (afterwards, not while I am reading), but most of what I read, I read more as 'matter of facts'. For example how I'd read a history lecture, without imagination. I wonder if other people really do have vivid imagination of the events they read about in these kind of books. :P
      - tlarkworthy 8y ago
        Thats interesting. I feel that i am actually there and have a visual experience when reading. I assumed eveyone did, thats why the GPs expressions make perfect sense to me. I think you might be the outlier
ilamont 8y ago
Hats off to the writer for this epic account. Made it pretty clear how this event transpired even though I've never played Eve.
CJKinni 8y ago
If you’re interested in more of this kind of player-made history of Eve, I highly recommend Empires of Eve, both the book and the podcast series: https://m.soundcloud.com/empiresofeve https://m.soundcloud.com/empiresofeve The podcast is very well produced and has interviews with the major players from the early years of Eve. Occasionally when I get the craving to play Eve, I also end up listening to a few episodes of Talking on Stations, an eve podcast that gives fascinating in depth analysis of a world I’ll never have time for.
- swebs 8y ago
  >$3,165.21 for the hardcover Yikes
  - bausshf 8y ago
    Wow... What the?
    - zethraeus 8y ago
      it's out of print and amazon merchant bots are being merchant bots. https://www.empiresofeve.com/ https://www.empiresofeve.com/ I've listened to the podcast and own the book from their kickstarter. They're both really well done.
  - sascha_sl 8y ago
    Amazon Marketplace! Better wait for the second edition: https://www.empiresofeve.com/ https://www.empiresofeve.com/
    - CJKinni 8y ago
      There’s also an $8 kindle version. Excited to see there’s going to be a second volume!
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Well, it's cheaper than building your own ingame space station ...
tapland 8y ago
I installed the game again during christmas, but on the login screen I was greeted by the happy little message that my carrier is currently parked in space. Will have to get the other account subscribed first just to scout the area out before activating the other.
- UpperBodyEimi 8y ago
  You could run an Alpha character out there now. If you've not played in a couple years there are now free to play account types with ship / skill restrictions. You can't log an Alpha and an Omega (Subscribed) accounts on at the same time, but it could give you an indication if the coast was clear.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Couldn't you just have someone else scout for you? Or you don't know anyone else in the game anymore? Also, is multi-accounting allowed or common?
  - Macha 8y ago
    Multiple accounts is both allowed and common. The only rule is that input broadcasting to control multiple accounts at once or using the alternate accounts to bot is not allowed. (And even input broadcasting was legal until a few years ago). Being logged into 2-3 accounts and alt-tabbing between them is perfectly permitted.
  - tapland 8y ago
    My corp has fallen apart it seems and me telling anyone will make sure that I will be without a ship a few minutes after logging on. When you get into carriers or larger ships having multiple accounts is almost a must. The large ships used to not be able to use jumpgates to move around and the largest still can't afaik, so to move you have to log another character in the location you want to go to and set up at temporary beacon (in a sace place) that you can jump to. What you do is you get a second account and fill your character slots with low-skilled characters who only have the skills needed to fly a cheap 'cyno'-ship and place them where you need them. The negative being that others could figure out who always jumps into system after that one low skilled character shows up.
Hydraulix989 8y ago
This is the fascinating start of an amazing trend -- happenings in massive alternate realities are becoming newsworthy in their own right (because the complexity, scale, realism, immersiveness, and mass-participation of these simulations). RPO is well on its way to becoming real.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  I've gotten into the opposite, quirkly games that alternate your reality. Papers Please, Grow Home, factorio, Minecraft/terraria, steam indie games, etc... Ive already done my time with lengthy MMOs and RPGs and FPS. Next gen gaming may be related to our limited attention spans.
- gaius 8y ago
  I don’t know that it’s the start, supposedly reputable news sources such as the BBC have been reporting on what happened on Twitter as if it was news for years
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  But so far Eve Online is the only game delivering this. All other games are IMHO too much dedicated to be a game, to support such trends, or simply not successful enough. Maybe Star Citizen will one day become a second one?
  - Geforce8472 8y ago
    I think a lot of the difference with Eve vs. other MMOs is that it's all a single shared instance rather than multiple separate "servers"
    - dkns 8y ago
      I like to think about Eve vs. other MMOs as in Eve is an unsupervised sandbox without any adults where all the kids from neighborhood come to play and other MMOs are more like going to a theme park with your parents.
- 8y ago
mwest 8y ago
One of the things about Eve Online that's fascinated me is how "open" they make the game for third party developers. Why bother with a spreadsheet, when you can dial it up a level and use their data export and your favourite "Big Data" analysis tools to look for interesting opportunities? Maybe you enjoy blowing up space ships, but can't think of an in-game method to fund your habit? Build a tool other Eve players will use (and pay for with Isk) instead. https://developers.eveonline.com/resource/resources https://developers.eveonline.com/resource/resources https://github.com/devfleet/awesome-eve https://github.com/devfleet/awesome-eve https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/tweetfleet-slack-invites/ https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/tweetfleet-slack-invites/
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  This. Many years ago, Eve's awesome internal market and (much less evolved) data tools gave me my first intro to quant finance. I had a lot of fun building a TSP-like solver to find profitable trade routes -- before realizing that the real pros maintained inventory and orders at many stations and made the goods come to them.
- cbm-vic-20 8y ago
  The IT infrastructure of some of the more organized groups rivals that of real-world corporations. Industry-oriented groups build ERP and financial monitoring systems, notifications with Slack, "office hours", etc.
  - duxup 8y ago
    Heck Sean Smith (who was killed IRL in Lybia) worked for the State Department IRL and was a high level diplomat-ish guy in game (roles seem pretty fluid in Eve thus the "ish").
  - busterarm 8y ago
    Going down this road is what started my programming career.
  - imdsm 8y ago
    Aye, I spent some time in TEST and ended up working on a whole bunch of projects before canning the lot. There was a market system that was managed by Goons, IIRC, but they pulled it from TEST so I built a similar system which was actually pretty involved. Had it working for a couple of systems and with the success of it, GS and TEST leadership came to some sort of agreement, and my system was dropped in favour of the old one. Well, that was enough for me. Lot of wasted time, so I dropped that and stopped working on the other tools – membership management tools not unlike employee management tools, resource management not unlike typical ERP systems, the lot. This was 2012/13 IIRC.
nearlyepic 8y ago
Don't let The Initiative's propaganda machine disguise it: At the end of the day the biggest coalition in the game blobbed a smaller alliance, having 10x their total characters in their fleets. Somehow this is a great victory? Doesn't add up to me. Only thing this proves is that the problem of gigantic blocks rolling over everybody in their path now extends to wormhole space.
- NelsonMinar 8y ago
  Well a giant block can roll over a wormhole, but only if they spend a year sneaking in materiel first.
- technofiend 8y ago
  >the biggest coalition in the game blobbed a smaller alliance Eh, how do you figure? According to dotlan they're number 11 for space held [1] and number 8 [2] for total number of members. http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/systems http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/systems http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/memberCount http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/memberCount Or are you just bitter vetting in which case carry on.
  - nearlyepic 8y ago
    I was just kinda spitballing that INIT + CONDI form the biggest coalition in the game. Not sure if that's 100% true but when they're fighting an alliance that can field like 200 people maximum it might as well be. They're literally an order of magnitude larger.
    - technofiend 8y ago
      Ah you're combining the goons and init? I suppose you can do that but this is about something init planned and executed, not the goons. And the article says "Over 550 members of The Initiative logged in to answer the alliance’s call to battle. Elsewhere in EVE, allied fleet commanders in The Imperium and in Snuffed Out were asked to provide additional numbers to help the operation." The Imperium is a coalition of corps with the goons but it's not exclusively made up of goons as far as I know. So it's kinda of disingenuous to dismiss this as a goon op when they weren't directly responsible for it.
ubermonkey 8y ago
I have zero interest in playing Eve, but I do enjoy reading about these enormous in-game events.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  Same here. It seems so interesting I don't dare touch it for fear of addiction.
  - tyfon 8y ago
    It's very dangerous. I've been "dry" for about three years now but I still have to fight the urge from time to time!
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    You're not missing much. The game is like war: fucking boring for the vast majority of the time, interspersed with short periods of absolute terror. Watch any Eve online streamer and note how much time they spend sitting around or flying from one place to another. [1] My experience with the game is that the PvE elements are entirely forgettable and uninteresting. The PvP elements could be amazing, but there are too many mechanisms to favor experienced players. It's almost impossible to find a "fair" fight, even as a person with several months of experience under your belt, to the point that it's kind of a joke. Personally, I don't have that much free time, so I prefer games with a higher ratio of fun to boredom. That being said, if I had to pick a game to play all day for a long time, Eve might be a good choice, simply because of the diversity of experiences and complexity of optimization it offers. [1]: I just checked. Out of the top ten streamers, nine are ratting (the most boring form of PvE) and one is doing PVP, but he just got killed by five guys after ten minutes of warping around.
    - Loughla 8y ago
      This was exactly my experience. It was massively boring and time consuming, except for the meta-gaming/data analysis. Then when you finally did deal with people, they were tribal dicks and any battles were 100% lopsided to the benefit of the experienced player. Eve Online is everything great and awful about online gaming all in one lag-filled package.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Reading it like this makes me a bit sad - but only a bit. They managed to survive and maintain the first Keepstar for over two years, and it took a huge and long winded infiltration to finally destroy it. I'd argue that it proves that you have a big tactical advantage in wormhole space, but you're not invincible or safe. Nobody is, anywhere. Which at the same time is a bit of a shame; I wouldn't mind having my own space station in high security space with no risk of losing it by another corporation. I'm more of a casual base building turtling kind of gamer than the pvp type.
- mihaifm 8y ago
  Not really familiar with player owned structures, but how would a small corporation be able to build a station? In high sec I assume that any other corp could just declare war and blow your stuff up. Doesn't the game have any mechanic to encourage small groups of new players?
  - delestria 8y ago
    Prior until very recently, the war declaration mechanic meant anyone could declare war on any player-created group. This meant if you wanted to take a half a dozen of your buddies and form a corporation just so you can mine together, any larger group could declare war on you and camp you until you quit playing. This would force people to stay in NPC corporations because you cannot declare war on NPC corps. CCP finally decided this is not how they want the wardec system to work. Now, a corporation can only have war declared on them if they own a structure in space. Most small corporations have no need for, or enough money, to anchor a structure in space. The idea is if you have structures in space, you should also have the means to replace them if they're destroyed or be able defend them in the first place.
  - swebs 8y ago
    Why would a small corp need to build a station in high sec? You can just keep your stuff in indestructible NPC stations.
    - aquamo 8y ago
anabis 8y ago
>With all of the assets finally in place, there was only one thing left to do. On December 8... So, Pearl Harbor?
- Overtonwindow 8y ago
  One day late… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
janandonly 8y ago
While reading this account with interest (I'm never played this game) I realized this is how it must feel to a non-bitcoiner to read so much jargon and descriptions in just one short account.
remote_phone 8y ago
Was the problem that Hard Knocks didn’t patrol the inside of its wormhole?
- jerf 8y ago
  I don't play Eve. Is it possible to patrol inside the wormhole? If possible, is it practical? (e.g., if there's a lot of volume to be covered it can be possible but not practical.) If so, this is going to be a one-off event most likely.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    It's time-consuming and tedious to monitor every wormhole that is created and destroyed. In practicality, player teams (corporations and alliances) monitor their local wormholes while players are logged in, but most teams don't have enough people in enough timezones for anything like total situational awareness.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Not exactly, but that certainly matters. The problem is that to maintain total control, you have to have players available nearly 24 hours a day who are willing to put in the legwork to find every wormhole in and out of the system as the game auto-generates them. This is tedious work, and so it's basically impractical to have that level of control. The attackers utilized small gaps in the otherwise extensive hand-monitoring of wormholes that HK undertook to move freighters full of ships through wormholes. Then the player controlling that freighter logged out of their account, and when a player logs out, the ship they're controlling warps off "to infinity" automatically and is completely safe. For HK to protect against this attack completely, they'd have to have ships on patrol at all times AND those ships would have to be sufficiently equipped to catch and kill a freighter before its player can get logged off and the freighter auto-escapes. It's a tall order. ... and it's worth noting that even given those constraints, this attack was basically thought to be impossible. The Initiative took a year to make this work with enough freighters to shift the balance of power.
ergothus 8y ago
I wonder why we find stories like this so compelling. We see it time and time again: players work long and hard to destroy things that other players worked long and hard to create. I'm not mocking those that find these stories compelling. _I_ find them compelling. But when I stop to ask myself why, I dont have a good answer. Why is a successful attack (and less so, a successful defense) so much more compelling than the initial construction? Why is an Eve battle that destroys tens of thousands of dollars of value (or more) more gripping than a minecraft world with tons of detail?
- josephpmay 8y ago
  I think part of the reasons is the parallels to real-world war. Humans are naturally pre-disposed to warfare, but (thank god) never have a chance to experience it in day-to-day life. This attack was probably closer to some of the epic battles of history than most real battles today, so reading about it is as interesting as reading about WWII or the Mongol conquests.
- krapp 8y ago
  >Why is an Eve battle that destroys tens of thousands of dollars of value (or more) more gripping than a minecraft world with tons of detail? Minecraft isn't an immersive universe, and it doesn't really have that much detail to draw one's attention outside of gameplay. Eve, meanwhile, has social and political depth and the complexity of its space opera setting, and its stories would make for interesting sci-fi drama even without the real world financial consequences. It's basically the difference between the lore of Super Mario Bros and Game of Thrones.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Instinctively the natural interests of many humans - especially male humans - tend to tribal violence (war) and resource acquisition and exploitation (business and politics). Building stuff is some way down the list, and not nearly as obsessively compelling. We've done well to sublimate some of it into online games and sports without having to act it out for real quite as much as we would otherwise.
- Sargos 8y ago
hkt 8y ago
The politics of EVE are incredible. I just don't understand how anyone finds time, though.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
Once again Eve proves to be much more interesting to read about than to actually play. I love these stories though.
- harshreality 8y ago
  I still have an archive of other people's videos (which I'd guess are still on some web archive or youtube channel, but maybe not) from the earlier days of EVE. The videos are far more entertaining than playing the game was 99.9% of the time. I even discovered some music via player-created EVE videos. What you see in most videos took many months to years of character skill training, a long period of trading or ratting to get ISK, and dozens to hundreds of hours preparing for just the event seen in the video. Most of those requirements (except experience of how to use the ships and equipment you acquire) can alternatively be acquired by spending a lot of money (easily running into the $1000s, at least when I played, and some people would spend that, just to find the whole thing tedious and quit shortly after) on good characters and ships and stuff, but even then PvP is mostly boredom (masked and made "fun" by adrenaline). Someone with the idea that they want to be just like one of those characters they see in a spectacular EVE video, or that they hear about in an EVE story, is like the kid seeing or reading about astronauts and thinking they want to be an astronaut. Except most people who grow up wanting to be astronauts never become astronauts, and same with any particular goal in EVE. And what happens in EVE stays in EVE. Even if you achieve something notable in EVE, something that requires a lot of effort... it's still in someone else's virtual universe sandbox that could be turned off or changed on their whim. The chance that you'll ever be directly involved in corp- or alliance-level "big events", other than as cannon fodder, is almost zero unless you know ahead of time you have what it takes to join or build, and then run and manage that kind of enterprise at the equivalent of the c-suite level. Still, 99.99% of your time will be taken up with ordinary stuff. It's a job.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Have there been any "viruses" or "hacks" within the game?
wingerlang 8y ago
How do you hide ships in EVE? Is the playing field just an infinite space where you can move a ship so far away that they are essentially hidden?
- yetihehe 8y ago
  No, when you are not under attack and log off, ship disappears from world and reappears when you log in.
  - wingerlang 8y ago
    Oh, okay thanks.
pimlottc 8y ago
What's the motivation for this attack? The write-up says this operation was quite costly - 600 billion ISK in resources spent to destroy a station that cost "hundreds of billions of ISK" in the first place. Did the Initiative gain in-game resources and advantages that were worth this costs, or was it mostly just done for the challenge of doing something no one thought possible, and proving their might?
- Veelox 8y ago
  Some men just want to watch the world burn.
- swebs 8y ago
  > 600 billion ISK in resources spent to destroy a station It's not like they lost that money. Unlike cars, internet spaceships retain their full value after leaving the lot. They can just sell those battleships back or keep them around as part of the fleet.
- Triesault 8y ago
  This quote from the article seems to answer your question fairly well. > No one has ever done anything great in EVE without someone else wanting to destroy it.
- fixermark 8y ago
  The primary motivation is that players' understanding of the current meta suggested an attack like this was impossible. This is the kind of thing CCP puts up in-game memorials for.
gtirloni 8y ago
With some games, the earlier you join them, the more virtual wealth you get and the more you can do as a consequence. Is EVE Online something a newbie can join today and not feel just like food for the lions?
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  Even the most oldest, most experienced players are just food for the lions most of the time. The real trick is knowledge and specialization. You play long enough to understand what you want to do, then create a character that specializes in that and that alone. I don't play Eve anymore, but when I did, my favorite character was a solo stealth bomber pilot. I spent most of my days in the game running around nullsec, cloaked, looking for targets of opportunity. Every once in a while I'd come across someone trying to sneak an industrial ship out into or our of nullsec and ruin their day.
baddash 8y ago
Why'd they do this?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eof 8y ago
Is there any other game that has been consistently making "the news" for a decade?
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  Minecraft I would say, but for creations, not stories. Eve Online so far seems really unique in being the only sandbox-game which also hosts a massive number of players in a single instance. Without the impressive numbers those stories would be more casual and less interessting, probably not even happening.
AcerbicZero 8y ago
I quit EvE a long time ago (2005-2010), and these stories remind me why the game got so stale. Meta-gaming mixed with betrayal is fun to write about, and is a great example of bugs becoming features, but being part of it isn't actually all that enjoyable. Its just something to do when you want to do something that has an effect on someone, because the game has no interesting challenges left to offer. In the end game you can highsec carebear, or you can sit in a nullsec blob. WH space was a band aid trying to cover the fact that they ruined the risk/reward system between high/low/nullsec, but it was enjoyable none the less. It was still a great game, and back when I played there was nothing like running around lowsec at -10, or just pulling security for small gang mining operations, or any other small group/solo stuff.

478 points by omnibrain 8y ago

the_duke 8y ago

That was an exciting read. I'm almost tempted to try out EVE again.

mabbo 8y ago
What I remember of playing it 12 years ago was that I became quite adept at spreadsheets.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  That's one aspect of the game, mostly industry or mining IIRC. That's an area that could use some shaking up, because it's pretty much impossible to be profitable if you're a beginning industrialist. Mining works (that's one thing I started off with), but it can get kinda boring if you're trying to optimize it. The game could do with a bit of modernization in the beginning player's enjoyment and positive reinforcement feedback loop (if that makes any sense). I'm wondering how best to achieve that; maybe make the missions a lot more streamlined, add a bit of story to it, some more cutscenes and voice acting maybe. I'm imagining a questline where you end up building your own safe base now; one thing I don't like is how you can't really build your own starbase without constantly having to shut it down or rebuild it due to war declarations. What I'd like to see is something like player owned housing in other MMOs where you can build your own starbase inside of an instanced, unreachable pocket. It would need to have some restrictions, I guess, in e.g. how much you could store there and how much money you could earn there - Eve is all about risk vs reward, and all reward with no risk won't work. But anyway, a questline to eventually build a starbase, and follow-up quests that develop the base in a variety of directions would be neat.
  - jon-wood 8y ago
    I've not played Eve in years, since well before player owned structures existed, but I could see this sort of thing evolving to you owning a hanger space on one of the NPC corp's stations. It would seem to me that gets around the issue of people being able to directly declare war on you, but gives a smaller scale version of actual player owned structures.
  - kriro 8y ago
    How well would it work as a testbed for learning algorithms? I heard that you get good access to game data etc. Would it be feasible to be profitable at mining if you have a great prediction algorithm? I know nothing about the game but that would sound interesting as a nice dev-sideproject for structured data algorithms. Can you automate/script the trading/mining etc. or is that forbidden/considered botting or whatever?
    - seangrogg 8y ago
      Mining is a venture that benefits less from predictive optimization and far more from operational scale. Barring black swan events, having perfect market prediction is nowhere near as valuable as being able to strip mine systems with an Orca/Rorqual account boosting a fleet of miner accounts.

AJRF 8y ago

What an amazing sounding game. I've looked at gameplay videos of EVE before and it looks so boring, but the stories that come out of it are so evidently not boring. Strange dichotomy.

EamonnMR 8y ago
Sort of like dwarf fortress.
- dmos62 8y ago
  Or Dark Days Ahead. Ever since I've discovered this, I'm fascinated by the divide between what you see with your literal eyes and what you see with your mind's eye when you're playing this. A good analogy is books. When you read, you see it all, but at the same time it's just symbols on paper. That's where the medium's power comes from, compared to say movies: in a movie, you have to find a way to visualise or audiolise something, so the film-maker's capability to do that is the upper-boundary of what can happen, but in books the upper-boundary is the boundary of your imagination.
  - Insanity 8y ago
    Related to your comment about books (but unrelated to the game): Interestingly, I recently picked up reading fantasy. I picked up "A song if fire and ice" and am almost through the book. When people say that you use your imagination to fill it in, I kind of wonder what that's like. Because I see the words etc, but I don't have a 'vision' of the look of the characters etc. (I've not seen Game of Thrones). If I read about a fight, I'll just.. read about the fight. But I don't imagine the fight. Usually I have like fragments that I can 'imagine' (afterwards, not while I am reading), but most of what I read, I read more as 'matter of facts'. For example how I'd read a history lecture, without imagination. I wonder if other people really do have vivid imagination of the events they read about in these kind of books. :P
    - tlarkworthy 8y ago
      Thats interesting. I feel that i am actually there and have a visual experience when reading. I assumed eveyone did, thats why the GPs expressions make perfect sense to me. I think you might be the outlier

ilamont 8y ago

Hats off to the writer for this epic account. Made it pretty clear how this event transpired even though I've never played Eve.

CJKinni 8y ago

If you’re interested in more of this kind of player-made history of Eve, I highly recommend Empires of Eve, both the book and the podcast series: https://m.soundcloud.com/empiresofeve https://m.soundcloud.com/empiresofeve The podcast is very well produced and has interviews with the major players from the early years of Eve. Occasionally when I get the craving to play Eve, I also end up listening to a few episodes of Talking on Stations, an eve podcast that gives fascinating in depth analysis of a world I’ll never have time for.

swebs 8y ago
>$3,165.21 for the hardcover Yikes
- bausshf 8y ago
  Wow... What the?
  - zethraeus 8y ago
    it's out of print and amazon merchant bots are being merchant bots. https://www.empiresofeve.com/ https://www.empiresofeve.com/ I've listened to the podcast and own the book from their kickstarter. They're both really well done.
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  Amazon Marketplace! Better wait for the second edition: https://www.empiresofeve.com/ https://www.empiresofeve.com/
  - CJKinni 8y ago
    There’s also an $8 kindle version. Excited to see there’s going to be a second volume!
- pjc50 8y ago
  Well, it's cheaper than building your own ingame space station ...

tapland 8y ago

I installed the game again during christmas, but on the login screen I was greeted by the happy little message that my carrier is currently parked in space. Will have to get the other account subscribed first just to scout the area out before activating the other.

UpperBodyEimi 8y ago
You could run an Alpha character out there now. If you've not played in a couple years there are now free to play account types with ship / skill restrictions. You can't log an Alpha and an Omega (Subscribed) accounts on at the same time, but it could give you an indication if the coast was clear.
CydeWeys 8y ago
Couldn't you just have someone else scout for you? Or you don't know anyone else in the game anymore? Also, is multi-accounting allowed or common?
- Macha 8y ago
  Multiple accounts is both allowed and common. The only rule is that input broadcasting to control multiple accounts at once or using the alternate accounts to bot is not allowed. (And even input broadcasting was legal until a few years ago). Being logged into 2-3 accounts and alt-tabbing between them is perfectly permitted.
- tapland 8y ago
  My corp has fallen apart it seems and me telling anyone will make sure that I will be without a ship a few minutes after logging on. When you get into carriers or larger ships having multiple accounts is almost a must. The large ships used to not be able to use jumpgates to move around and the largest still can't afaik, so to move you have to log another character in the location you want to go to and set up at temporary beacon (in a sace place) that you can jump to. What you do is you get a second account and fill your character slots with low-skilled characters who only have the skills needed to fly a cheap 'cyno'-ship and place them where you need them. The negative being that others could figure out who always jumps into system after that one low skilled character shows up.

Hydraulix989 8y ago

This is the fascinating start of an amazing trend -- happenings in massive alternate realities are becoming newsworthy in their own right (because the complexity, scale, realism, immersiveness, and mass-participation of these simulations). RPO is well on its way to becoming real.

robertAngst 8y ago
I've gotten into the opposite, quirkly games that alternate your reality. Papers Please, Grow Home, factorio, Minecraft/terraria, steam indie games, etc... Ive already done my time with lengthy MMOs and RPGs and FPS. Next gen gaming may be related to our limited attention spans.
gaius 8y ago
I don’t know that it’s the start, supposedly reputable news sources such as the BBC have been reporting on what happened on Twitter as if it was news for years
PurpleRamen 8y ago
But so far Eve Online is the only game delivering this. All other games are IMHO too much dedicated to be a game, to support such trends, or simply not successful enough. Maybe Star Citizen will one day become a second one?
- Geforce8472 8y ago
  I think a lot of the difference with Eve vs. other MMOs is that it's all a single shared instance rather than multiple separate "servers"
  - dkns 8y ago
    I like to think about Eve vs. other MMOs as in Eve is an unsupervised sandbox without any adults where all the kids from neighborhood come to play and other MMOs are more like going to a theme park with your parents.
8y ago

mwest 8y ago

One of the things about Eve Online that's fascinated me is how "open" they make the game for third party developers. Why bother with a spreadsheet, when you can dial it up a level and use their data export and your favourite "Big Data" analysis tools to look for interesting opportunities? Maybe you enjoy blowing up space ships, but can't think of an in-game method to fund your habit? Build a tool other Eve players will use (and pay for with Isk) instead. https://developers.eveonline.com/resource/resources https://developers.eveonline.com/resource/resources https://github.com/devfleet/awesome-eve https://github.com/devfleet/awesome-eve https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/tweetfleet-slack-invites/ https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/tweetfleet-slack-invites/

evrydayhustling 8y ago
This. Many years ago, Eve's awesome internal market and (much less evolved) data tools gave me my first intro to quant finance. I had a lot of fun building a TSP-like solver to find profitable trade routes -- before realizing that the real pros maintained inventory and orders at many stations and made the goods come to them.
cbm-vic-20 8y ago
The IT infrastructure of some of the more organized groups rivals that of real-world corporations. Industry-oriented groups build ERP and financial monitoring systems, notifications with Slack, "office hours", etc.
- duxup 8y ago
  Heck Sean Smith (who was killed IRL in Lybia) worked for the State Department IRL and was a high level diplomat-ish guy in game (roles seem pretty fluid in Eve thus the "ish").
- busterarm 8y ago
  Going down this road is what started my programming career.
- imdsm 8y ago
  Aye, I spent some time in TEST and ended up working on a whole bunch of projects before canning the lot. There was a market system that was managed by Goons, IIRC, but they pulled it from TEST so I built a similar system which was actually pretty involved. Had it working for a couple of systems and with the success of it, GS and TEST leadership came to some sort of agreement, and my system was dropped in favour of the old one. Well, that was enough for me. Lot of wasted time, so I dropped that and stopped working on the other tools – membership management tools not unlike employee management tools, resource management not unlike typical ERP systems, the lot. This was 2012/13 IIRC.

nearlyepic 8y ago

Don't let The Initiative's propaganda machine disguise it: At the end of the day the biggest coalition in the game blobbed a smaller alliance, having 10x their total characters in their fleets. Somehow this is a great victory? Doesn't add up to me. Only thing this proves is that the problem of gigantic blocks rolling over everybody in their path now extends to wormhole space.

NelsonMinar 8y ago
Well a giant block can roll over a wormhole, but only if they spend a year sneaking in materiel first.
technofiend 8y ago
>the biggest coalition in the game blobbed a smaller alliance Eh, how do you figure? According to dotlan they're number 11 for space held [1] and number 8 [2] for total number of members. http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/systems http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/systems http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/memberCount http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/memberCount Or are you just bitter vetting in which case carry on.
- nearlyepic 8y ago
  I was just kinda spitballing that INIT + CONDI form the biggest coalition in the game. Not sure if that's 100% true but when they're fighting an alliance that can field like 200 people maximum it might as well be. They're literally an order of magnitude larger.
  - technofiend 8y ago
    Ah you're combining the goons and init? I suppose you can do that but this is about something init planned and executed, not the goons. And the article says "Over 550 members of The Initiative logged in to answer the alliance’s call to battle. Elsewhere in EVE, allied fleet commanders in The Imperium and in Snuffed Out were asked to provide additional numbers to help the operation." The Imperium is a coalition of corps with the goons but it's not exclusively made up of goons as far as I know. So it's kinda of disingenuous to dismiss this as a goon op when they weren't directly responsible for it.

ubermonkey 8y ago

I have zero interest in playing Eve, but I do enjoy reading about these enormous in-game events.

lordnacho 8y ago
Same here. It seems so interesting I don't dare touch it for fear of addiction.
- tyfon 8y ago
  It's very dangerous. I've been "dry" for about three years now but I still have to fight the urge from time to time!
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  You're not missing much. The game is like war: fucking boring for the vast majority of the time, interspersed with short periods of absolute terror. Watch any Eve online streamer and note how much time they spend sitting around or flying from one place to another. [1] My experience with the game is that the PvE elements are entirely forgettable and uninteresting. The PvP elements could be amazing, but there are too many mechanisms to favor experienced players. It's almost impossible to find a "fair" fight, even as a person with several months of experience under your belt, to the point that it's kind of a joke. Personally, I don't have that much free time, so I prefer games with a higher ratio of fun to boredom. That being said, if I had to pick a game to play all day for a long time, Eve might be a good choice, simply because of the diversity of experiences and complexity of optimization it offers. [1]: I just checked. Out of the top ten streamers, nine are ratting (the most boring form of PvE) and one is doing PVP, but he just got killed by five guys after ten minutes of warping around.
  - Loughla 8y ago
    This was exactly my experience. It was massively boring and time consuming, except for the meta-gaming/data analysis. Then when you finally did deal with people, they were tribal dicks and any battles were 100% lopsided to the benefit of the experienced player. Eve Online is everything great and awful about online gaming all in one lag-filled package.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

Reading it like this makes me a bit sad - but only a bit. They managed to survive and maintain the first Keepstar for over two years, and it took a huge and long winded infiltration to finally destroy it. I'd argue that it proves that you have a big tactical advantage in wormhole space, but you're not invincible or safe. Nobody is, anywhere. Which at the same time is a bit of a shame; I wouldn't mind having my own space station in high security space with no risk of losing it by another corporation. I'm more of a casual base building turtling kind of gamer than the pvp type.

mihaifm 8y ago
Not really familiar with player owned structures, but how would a small corporation be able to build a station? In high sec I assume that any other corp could just declare war and blow your stuff up. Doesn't the game have any mechanic to encourage small groups of new players?
- delestria 8y ago
  Prior until very recently, the war declaration mechanic meant anyone could declare war on any player-created group. This meant if you wanted to take a half a dozen of your buddies and form a corporation just so you can mine together, any larger group could declare war on you and camp you until you quit playing. This would force people to stay in NPC corporations because you cannot declare war on NPC corps. CCP finally decided this is not how they want the wardec system to work. Now, a corporation can only have war declared on them if they own a structure in space. Most small corporations have no need for, or enough money, to anchor a structure in space. The idea is if you have structures in space, you should also have the means to replace them if they're destroyed or be able defend them in the first place.
- swebs 8y ago
  Why would a small corp need to build a station in high sec? You can just keep your stuff in indestructible NPC stations.
  - aquamo 8y ago

anabis 8y ago

>With all of the assets finally in place, there was only one thing left to do. On December 8... So, Pearl Harbor?

Overtonwindow 8y ago
One day late… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor

janandonly 8y ago

While reading this account with interest (I'm never played this game) I realized this is how it must feel to a non-bitcoiner to read so much jargon and descriptions in just one short account.

remote_phone 8y ago

Was the problem that Hard Knocks didn’t patrol the inside of its wormhole?

jerf 8y ago
I don't play Eve. Is it possible to patrol inside the wormhole? If possible, is it practical? (e.g., if there's a lot of volume to be covered it can be possible but not practical.) If so, this is going to be a one-off event most likely.
- fixermark 8y ago
  It's time-consuming and tedious to monitor every wormhole that is created and destroyed. In practicality, player teams (corporations and alliances) monitor their local wormholes while players are logged in, but most teams don't have enough people in enough timezones for anything like total situational awareness.
fixermark 8y ago
Not exactly, but that certainly matters. The problem is that to maintain total control, you have to have players available nearly 24 hours a day who are willing to put in the legwork to find every wormhole in and out of the system as the game auto-generates them. This is tedious work, and so it's basically impractical to have that level of control. The attackers utilized small gaps in the otherwise extensive hand-monitoring of wormholes that HK undertook to move freighters full of ships through wormholes. Then the player controlling that freighter logged out of their account, and when a player logs out, the ship they're controlling warps off "to infinity" automatically and is completely safe. For HK to protect against this attack completely, they'd have to have ships on patrol at all times AND those ships would have to be sufficiently equipped to catch and kill a freighter before its player can get logged off and the freighter auto-escapes. It's a tall order. ... and it's worth noting that even given those constraints, this attack was basically thought to be impossible. The Initiative took a year to make this work with enough freighters to shift the balance of power.

ergothus 8y ago

I wonder why we find stories like this so compelling. We see it time and time again: players work long and hard to destroy things that other players worked long and hard to create. I'm not mocking those that find these stories compelling. _I_ find them compelling. But when I stop to ask myself why, I dont have a good answer. Why is a successful attack (and less so, a successful defense) so much more compelling than the initial construction? Why is an Eve battle that destroys tens of thousands of dollars of value (or more) more gripping than a minecraft world with tons of detail?

josephpmay 8y ago
I think part of the reasons is the parallels to real-world war. Humans are naturally pre-disposed to warfare, but (thank god) never have a chance to experience it in day-to-day life. This attack was probably closer to some of the epic battles of history than most real battles today, so reading about it is as interesting as reading about WWII or the Mongol conquests.
krapp 8y ago
>Why is an Eve battle that destroys tens of thousands of dollars of value (or more) more gripping than a minecraft world with tons of detail? Minecraft isn't an immersive universe, and it doesn't really have that much detail to draw one's attention outside of gameplay. Eve, meanwhile, has social and political depth and the complexity of its space opera setting, and its stories would make for interesting sci-fi drama even without the real world financial consequences. It's basically the difference between the lore of Super Mario Bros and Game of Thrones.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Instinctively the natural interests of many humans - especially male humans - tend to tribal violence (war) and resource acquisition and exploitation (business and politics). Building stuff is some way down the list, and not nearly as obsessively compelling. We've done well to sublimate some of it into online games and sports without having to act it out for real quite as much as we would otherwise.
Sargos 8y ago

hkt 8y ago

The politics of EVE are incredible. I just don't understand how anyone finds time, though.

Taylor_OD 8y ago

Once again Eve proves to be much more interesting to read about than to actually play. I love these stories though.

harshreality 8y ago
I still have an archive of other people's videos (which I'd guess are still on some web archive or youtube channel, but maybe not) from the earlier days of EVE. The videos are far more entertaining than playing the game was 99.9% of the time. I even discovered some music via player-created EVE videos. What you see in most videos took many months to years of character skill training, a long period of trading or ratting to get ISK, and dozens to hundreds of hours preparing for just the event seen in the video. Most of those requirements (except experience of how to use the ships and equipment you acquire) can alternatively be acquired by spending a lot of money (easily running into the $1000s, at least when I played, and some people would spend that, just to find the whole thing tedious and quit shortly after) on good characters and ships and stuff, but even then PvP is mostly boredom (masked and made "fun" by adrenaline). Someone with the idea that they want to be just like one of those characters they see in a spectacular EVE video, or that they hear about in an EVE story, is like the kid seeing or reading about astronauts and thinking they want to be an astronaut. Except most people who grow up wanting to be astronauts never become astronauts, and same with any particular goal in EVE. And what happens in EVE stays in EVE. Even if you achieve something notable in EVE, something that requires a lot of effort... it's still in someone else's virtual universe sandbox that could be turned off or changed on their whim. The chance that you'll ever be directly involved in corp- or alliance-level "big events", other than as cannon fodder, is almost zero unless you know ahead of time you have what it takes to join or build, and then run and manage that kind of enterprise at the equivalent of the c-suite level. Still, 99.99% of your time will be taken up with ordinary stuff. It's a job.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

Have there been any "viruses" or "hacks" within the game?

wingerlang 8y ago

How do you hide ships in EVE? Is the playing field just an infinite space where you can move a ship so far away that they are essentially hidden?

yetihehe 8y ago
No, when you are not under attack and log off, ship disappears from world and reappears when you log in.
- wingerlang 8y ago
  Oh, okay thanks.

pimlottc 8y ago

What's the motivation for this attack? The write-up says this operation was quite costly - 600 billion ISK in resources spent to destroy a station that cost "hundreds of billions of ISK" in the first place. Did the Initiative gain in-game resources and advantages that were worth this costs, or was it mostly just done for the challenge of doing something no one thought possible, and proving their might?

Veelox 8y ago
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
swebs 8y ago
> 600 billion ISK in resources spent to destroy a station It's not like they lost that money. Unlike cars, internet spaceships retain their full value after leaving the lot. They can just sell those battleships back or keep them around as part of the fleet.
Triesault 8y ago
This quote from the article seems to answer your question fairly well. > No one has ever done anything great in EVE without someone else wanting to destroy it.
fixermark 8y ago
The primary motivation is that players' understanding of the current meta suggested an attack like this was impossible. This is the kind of thing CCP puts up in-game memorials for.

gtirloni 8y ago

With some games, the earlier you join them, the more virtual wealth you get and the more you can do as a consequence. Is EVE Online something a newbie can join today and not feel just like food for the lions?

LyndsySimon 8y ago
Even the most oldest, most experienced players are just food for the lions most of the time. The real trick is knowledge and specialization. You play long enough to understand what you want to do, then create a character that specializes in that and that alone. I don't play Eve anymore, but when I did, my favorite character was a solo stealth bomber pilot. I spent most of my days in the game running around nullsec, cloaked, looking for targets of opportunity. Every once in a while I'd come across someone trying to sneak an industrial ship out into or our of nullsec and ruin their day.

baddash 8y ago

Why'd they do this?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

eof 8y ago

Is there any other game that has been consistently making "the news" for a decade?

PurpleRamen 8y ago
Minecraft I would say, but for creations, not stories. Eve Online so far seems really unique in being the only sandbox-game which also hosts a massive number of players in a single instance. Without the impressive numbers those stories would be more casual and less interessting, probably not even happening.

AcerbicZero 8y ago

I quit EvE a long time ago (2005-2010), and these stories remind me why the game got so stale. Meta-gaming mixed with betrayal is fun to write about, and is a great example of bugs becoming features, but being part of it isn't actually all that enjoyable. Its just something to do when you want to do something that has an effect on someone, because the game has no interesting challenges left to offer. In the end game you can highsec carebear, or you can sit in a nullsec blob. WH space was a band aid trying to cover the fact that they ruined the risk/reward system between high/low/nullsec, but it was enjoyable none the less. It was still a great game, and back when I played there was nothing like running around lowsec at -10, or just pulling security for small gang mining operations, or any other small group/solo stuff.