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EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off biggest heist in game history

326 points by galleywest200 4y ago

ChoGGi 4y ago
Flan_Hill or Flam_Hill You decide...
remram 4y ago
I'm sick of those "real money" conversions every time something happens in EVE Online. Probably, those in-game assets were acquired by playing the game, not by paying dollars for them. Additionally no one would buy them for that amount. Why show a dollar value if that is not what it's bought or sold for? This conversion rate is based on the price of subscriptions, which can be bought either with dollars or real money. But why should that establish a conversion rate for every other asset? No one is trying to buy $22,300 of EVE subscription.
- itake 4y ago
  I don’t see why “playing a game” can’t earn you money. There are many “play to earn” crypto games where 3rd world country gamers grind coins for people who don’t want to grind for money. Before crypto, world of Warcraft had gold mining groups. I assume there is a market place that offers a currency exchange. The dollar value is for everyone that doesn’t play the game and doesn’t know if that is a lot or a little of monies.
  - remram 4y ago
    > I assume there is a market place that offers a currency exchange. There is not. There might be a black market for this, but not with anything close to this made-up rate. I'm not saying you can't make money from in-game assets, but you would make a completely different amount of money. Those assets have never been bought or sold at $22,300, so why do we pretend that's their value? Because different assets can be bought using both dollars and ISK (and cannot be sold for dollars at all!), we decide that's a conversion rate? And apply it to everything else?
throwaway_65432 4y ago
I haven't played for a while but Corp creation and access mechanics were always incredibly frustrating and buggy and these "heists" are almost always people exploiting mundane software bugs in the platform rather than being clever and/or sneaky in carrying off anything daring. This makes for really boring and unpleasant consequences for the victims of these actions which basically just drive people from the game. Example: My alliance leader basically stole a huge amount of my personal money and several months of work from me. Background: For anyone who doesn't know eve, wormholes in eve are habitable spaces but they connect in ways that are governed by rules but are fundamentally random in nature. So your wormhole might always have 2 guaranteed connections to particular types of space but specifically what systems it connects to is random and will change every now and then. And also other new connections will spawn and disappear at random all the time. It is also entirely lawless space full of people trying to jump you at every turn, (sometimes) powerful NPCs and (usually) very powerful corporations who will every now and again mount operations to jump into a wormhole and evict the occupants if they are not very careful about defending themselves. All of this makes wormhole space very dangerous and inconvenient in lots of ways, but if you persevere, the game rewards you with very interesting gameplay and valuable rewards. I had a lot of experience with wormholes and was teaching people in my corp the ropes. I had bought a new higher-class wormhole for my corporation, set up several new stations and a bunch of infrastructure. Because of the randomness above, this kind of logistic stuff is very slow and tedious work and I had spent a month or so of my time and a bunch of ISK (in-game currency) buying the hole, the stations and all the ships and stuff so my guys had stuff to do and didn't have to sweat the logistical stuff. My alliance leader created a new corporation, transferred all the stations in the wormhole (including all my stuff and all the things I had put in shared hangars etc) into that corp and made the other people in the hole in charge of that corp. I was locked out in the middle of nowhere with no recourse. He said he had misunderstood a message I had sent about taking a break (for the rest of the day) as quitting the game completely but anyway it fitted his objectives for the alliance so I could just basically stfu and accept it. I tried playing a bit after that but it really was never the same. I left the corp and tried to restart but never got back to where I was or recouped what I had lost.
Cardinal7167 4y ago
Incredible. What an under appreciated game. I’ve played a little bit of it and the world is absolutely enormous.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Some people wonder if we live in a Matrix-like simulation. Others voluntarily spend the lives in the same situation
- sedatk 4y ago
  Not underappreciated at all. It's 20 years old and still among the TOP 20 most popular MMOs. Not everyone likes that kind of gameplay though. I was an EVE beta tester before it was released openly, and I finally decided that it wasn't for me. (I don't like the turn based mechanics, or "the ship is actually the person" kind of narrative)
  - eru 4y ago
    > "the ship is actually the person" kind of narrative Could you please explain?
    - sedatk 4y ago
      Maybe I put it wrong. I should have said "your avatar is the ship." There are no "people" in EVE Online. The "people" are supposed to be biological clones suspended in amniotic fluid integrated with the ship, so although they have the thoughts of the person they represent, they never get to leave the ship, and die when your ship is destroyed, so you get to create a new clone. That means you can't just walk around a station after docking, or get off your ship in space and do a space walk around the asteroids. The only thing you see about your persona is your profile photo that you generated at the beginning of the game, nothing else.
      - Jiocus 4y ago
        Nowadays, you can actually leave the ship and stretch your legs in a 1 room station quarters. And I'd say in the social sense there are people almost everywhere, they will be present in the many chats or 'in person' in space, even when you hope you'll be left alone.. I think the philosophy of the capsuleer/ship mechanics is a refreshing one, and there's a cyberpunk feel to being wired up into that hull.
jimsparkman 4y ago
I don’t know anything about the game, but I’m guessing the new account was created to protect his identity, should the ploy fail?
- MereInterest 4y ago
  EVE is famously anything-goes, with corporations (EVE equivalent of guilds) being very careful about who they accept specifically to prevent this type of attack. I would be very surprised if there were any moderator intervention about it, as joining up with corps in order to drain their bank accounts is expected behavior. As another example of EVE conventions, in 2012 the biggest trading hub was attacked [0]. This is nominally a safe area, and indeed the NPC security responded to every attack. This was part of the cost-benefit analysis of the attackers, who were aiming to drive up the price of resources that they had hoarded. When other players complained to the developers, the developers found it hilarious, and helped advertise about the attack. [0] https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/64307/what-is-burn-jita-and-how-will-it-destroy-the-economy https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/64307/what-is-bur...
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > EVE is famously anything-goes, with corporations (EVE equivalent of guilds) being very careful about who they accept specifically to prevent this type of attack. Really? The general run of comments seems to indicate that the attack could only succeed because nobody in the targeted corporation noticed a popup warning them about the attack for 72 straight hours. That strongly suggests that very few corporations should have any guards at all in place to prevent this type of attack, because there's no way for the attack to succeed unless everyone in the targeted corporation has stopped playing the game. What are people worried about?
- XorNot 4y ago
  No it's that corporate membership history is immutable and public on characters. So it's a bad look to be an old character with a string of now bankrupted, stolen or overthrown corps on your history.
- 4y ago
from 4y ago
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&context=til 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?
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  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.
  - xoa 4y ago
    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.
dmix 4y ago
TLDR: > A player known as Flam_Hill in the online game EVE Online orchestrated a heist by exploiting the game's shares mechanic. Along with another player, Flam_Hill observed the 299-member corporation Event Horizon Expeditionaries (EHEXP), which is part of the Pandemic Horde alliance. They discovered that the corporation had minimal activity from its CEO and directors, making it an attractive target for infiltration. > The duo applied for corporate membership using a clean account with a character that had some history. After being accepted into EHEXP, they initiated a vote for a new CEO, locking out the current CEO's roles. They waited 72 hours for the vote to pass, gaining control of the corporation. After being granted director roles, they systematically removed other directors and emptied the corporate wallet of 130 billion ISK. > The heist also involved stealing assets from the corporation's high-security offices, which they believed were used to store valuable items. In total, the estimated value of the heist was 2.23 trillion ISK, or approximately $22,309 USD.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  Will the Pandemic Horde Alliance retaliate against them?
  - lz400 4y ago
    The neat part is there isn't a good way to retaliate. These players by now are gone from the corp, as is the money, so they can't do anything directly to them anymore. If they were "burner accounts" they might never know who did it. If they identify the players and they belong to some collective they could attack that collective but at that point it will probably be seen as petty and getting laughed at might be more trouble than it's worth. These heists are seen as cool for the most part. They could try to stage a counterheist, that would be exciting but very difficult to pull off. Overall 2 trillion ISK isn't that much in the grand scheme of things for a mega-coalition like Pandemic Horde.
JCharante 4y ago
The CEO voting mechanics is hardly obscure, every single CEO knows about it. Also hard to believe the biggest heist is 2 trillion, stealing 10 titan BPOs that have been researched sometime in the past 20 years would be worth the same.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  This makes much more sense than the OP. If OP's tactic really worked, it would have been happening constantly for years all over Eve. So what's the deal with the OP?
  - JCharante 4y ago
    So basically this line describes that it's an inside job "Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO" Every CEO knows not to give shares away. The only reason to give other people shares is so that they can intentionally take over in case you die IRL and don't want to trap assets. "The one aspect of the story that some redditors took issue with is the origin of the 1,000 shares in Event Horizon Expeditionaries that made this theft possible in the first place. Some redditors theorized that Flam_Hill is actually the long-departed founder of the corporation, who's been sitting with those shares in his personal wallet for years; Absolutely possible "others said they may have purchased a character from a member of the corporation who forget to remove the shares from their wallet before transferring ownership." They're not supposed to have shares before being sold in the Bazaar, maybe RMT?
HWR_14 4y ago
I feel like fun stories like this from EVE fell off as the same skillset was used in crypto exploits. Is the fact that people are returning to EVE a sign that crypto is past the peak?
- kromem 4y ago
  It could also be that a security model exploited in crypto has now been corrected for, and we are seeing similar attacks spread out to other vulnerable infrastructure that is lagging behind updated threat models.
- LMYahooTFY 4y ago
  Is this a fact? As fat as I was aware EVE has been stagnant for years, company sold to Pearl Abyss, which is likely to continue this or radically alter the game. Some radical changes were already made. This seems like a very weak connection. I'd crypto were "past the peak" the US gov would not be targeting it.
  - eru 4y ago
    > I'd crypto were "past the peak" the US gov would not be targeting it. I'm not sure that argument holds. I remember eg Britain doing lots of 'tough on crime stuff' long after crime had peak statistically.
- vagab0nd 4y ago
  > The robbery was quick, quiet, and clean, and netted more than 2.2 trillion ISK—that's $22,300 in real money. If you mean to compare the monetary gains of these exploits, 22k is nothing in crypto even in this bear market.
  - MagicMoonlight 4y ago
    Stealing 2.2t of something which is effectively worthless sounds like crypto
fdhfdjkfhdkj 4y ago
[dead]
schemescape 4y ago
Biggest in gaming history? What about Axie Infinity? https://rekt.news/ronin-rekt/ https://rekt.news/ronin-rekt/ (Not in-game or specific to the one game, but thought it was worth mentioning just because of the sheer size, and that it probably benefited North Korea. It still boggles my mind…)
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Is that more akin to a typical crypto sfyl than an hack using game mechanics?
  - schemescape 4y ago
    Yes, that was what the last part of comment meant to convey. But my understanding is that Ronin was closely tied the game, and some of the “optimizations” (vulnerabilities) were motivated by the (popularity of the) game. But even if I arbitrarily say the heist is 99% crypto and 1% game, it’s still much larger :)
ilamont 4y ago
Org rules can go the other way, too. A regional nonprofit I once belonged to stated in its bylaws that any amendments required 2/3 of all members to vote in person at the general assembly.
denlekke 4y ago
some questions i have: why was the secondary character needed ? could the original character with the shares have done this themself ? why did no one else vote ?
- eru 4y ago
  The secondary character was perhaps there because the original character would have aroused suspicion?
- flandish 4y ago
  Accounts have character slots and when you join a corp, you are often required to provide an api key to show all chars on this account. Chars have public history of corp membership or pvp fights etc. So if you roll a char in an acct with other bigger chars, it will come known that you’re a fraud, not a newbie, or you also play as a character that has “interesting” history. So you spend a few more bucks a month and create a fresh entire account with new slots, etc.
650REDHAIR 4y ago
I love the idea of Eve, but man… what a boring game day-to-day. When I was younger and would just hang out in teamspeak with the crew it was a lot of fun and a lot of just sitting around or jumping for hours trying to catch a fight only to die in an instant or kill them in an instant.
- remram 4y ago
  That was my experience as well. The power difference between players is too great. I would get killed by randos in cloaked ships using missiles worth several time my ship and its entire loadout. What's the fun in that? At some point I realized that this is an financial game with a space setting, not a space game with a rich economy, and I never played again.
- evandale 4y ago
  You really have to be a self starter and find something you like. I've tried so hard to get into PvP but I just can't do it. I might have tried mining once. I've played maybe 5 times in the past 8 years and could never get into it even though I desperately wanted to. It seems so fun! This round of playing I really got into wormholes and exploration and I'm having a blast with that. I only play maybe 7 or 8 hours a week and I find the probe scanning and data/relic site hacking minigames both a lot of fun. I've also started using mapping tools for wormholes which is something else that's oddly fun. There's just something about sitting in space scanning for wormholes and people could warp on you while you're taking the 2 seconds updating your mapping tool that gives me a thrill. It's also mostly work I throw away when the wormholes close because I live in a high sec area too lol but I still find it fun. Sometimes I'll play two days in a row and visit wormholes I mapped earlier to scan new sites in them.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    > You really have to be a self starter and find something you like. Too true. And sometimes you stumble upon the fun. For instance, a long, long time ago (circa 2008 or 9...) I thought Stealth Bombers sounded cool so I started to learn the skills, not realizing they were essentially useless. Except that they could be used somewhat productively to fuck around deep in enemy territory and be a nuisance to their mining and logistics efforts. Was a I troll? Basically. Did I have any real impact on the war effort? I doubt it. But hey, I did blow up a few mining barges and annoy people.
crazygringo 4y ago
> Flam_Hill estimated the total value of the heist at 2.23 trillion ISK, which works out to more than $22,300 in real money. ISK can't be legally cashed out of EVE Online, but it can be used to buy Plex(opens in new tab), an in-game currency used to upgrade accounts, purchase virtual goods, and activate other services. Wait, if it can't be converted to money then what are they using to generate the $22,300 figure? Or is it the "legally" part, where there's an illegal way to cash out? Also, what would even make it illegal? There are actual laws against it or something? Or is it a TOS thing the company tries to enforce, which wouldn't make it illegal but just against policy?
- vinyl7 4y ago
  You'd have to buy $22.3k worth of Plex, which can then be traded to ISK, to be able to buy those assets in game. Because you can buy plex with cash which can be used to obtain in-game-currency, it gives the in-game currency to a real world dollar value.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Oh that makes sense. Got it, thanks!
scrame 4y ago
So, does anyone ever cash out with these big heists? Like is there money leaving the ISK ecosystem in cash? I get that you can measure ISK since it is pegged to subscription costs that are solid objects that can be traded or destroyed, but does anyone heisting 22k of eve online ships actually ever turn that into money at that rate? Who's the buyer, vs WoW goldfarmers?
- singron 4y ago
  Trading ISK for real money isn't allowed by CCP. You are exactly right that describing an amount of ISK as if it was worth some amount of USD doesn't tell the whole story. It's likely that if the market were truly bidirectional, ISK would be worth less USD than it seems now.
  - xapata 4y ago
    Wasn't there an exchange rate in the past? If so, why'd they end it?
    - Talanes 4y ago
      The exchange rate is based around PLEX: an in-game item that can be exchanged for subscription time. People who want to buy in-game currency spend real money for PLEX, and then sell it in the game to other people.
- nubinetwork 4y ago
  $22k worth of plex would last you the rest of your life in free game time.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    Equates to roughly 150 annual payments, so that's enough for your main and two alts for 50 years. :) Side note, the AUD monthly of $30 - wtaf? I've been away for a while, they seem intent on keeping it that way.
  - 4y ago
Lazare 4y ago
This is a bit less interesting than it sounds. When you create a corporation (aka guild, free company, etc.) in EVE 1k shares are created by default (you can create more, not everyone does). And this corproration hadn't, so if you have 1k share you own every share in the company (and thus have complete control over the company, if you choose to excercise it). Now, nany corporations don't really care for the share mechanic, and just leave the shares in the posession of the founder, or place it in a locked down corporate wallet. But somehow "Flam Hill" got all 1k shares in this company. They refuse to say how. Some people suspect the original founder of the company quit EVE while still holding the initial 1k shares, in which case Flam Hill is likely the founder, or someone who obtained the account from them. Or perhaps they were a company officer who got access to the wallet and took the shares, etc. Which means all the writing about how the directors were AFK or whatever is just window dressing. Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company. In other words, there isn't really any obscure rule here or clever tricks. Or rather it is, but it all happened off screen, because the only thing that matters is how Flam Hill obtained control of the shares; once he had it, everything else followed. It's as if Elon Musk wrote something about how he obtained control of Twitter by the clever gambit of walking up to the HQ carrying a sink. Actually, he obtained control of twitter by buying all of its shares, at which point he could do whatever visual puns he liked because he owns the company. How come Flam Hill owned every share in the EHEXP? There might well be a fascinating story there of intrigue and theft and betryal there. But this story is just about the boring stuff that followed.
- bscphil 4y ago
  Some (purported) details here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde_corporation_looses_2_trillion_isk/jesfr2a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde... > Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company. I think this is not quite right. Their 1000 shares were more than 5% of the total shares in the company, not (necessarily) 100% of the shares. 5% of shares can trigger a CEO vote at any time, and a majority of voting shares can elect a new CEO. They won the CEO election by being the only people online and voting at the time, and by having the corporation directors not notice the CEO change in the UI for 3 days until the vote took effect. The failure of the corp was in not diluting the shares of the founder below 5% after they left the corporation a decade ago, so now they come back (with alt accounts) and rob them blind.
tech_times_ 4y ago
In the US outside of the game you couldn't do this even if you owned 100% of the corporation because it would be a violation of corporate law. You have to remember that a corporation is legally a person. Good recent note from the Harvard Law review here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confusion-realigning-controlling-stockholders-and-controlled-boards/ https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus... If you can find out who the accounts are can you sue in real life?
- nl 4y ago
  > In the US outside of the game you couldn't do this even if you owned 100% of the corporation because it would be a violation of corporate law. Yes you can > You have to remember that a corporation is legally a person. It has nothing to do with this whatsoever. > Good recent note from the Harvard Law review here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confusion-realigning-controlling-stockholders-and-controlled-boards/ https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus... This is a good note. As they point out: directors owe a duty of loyalty to the corporation and its stockholders, which requires that a director act in good faith and in the best interest of the corporation and stockholders, rather than in the director’s own interests or the interests of someone who the director is beholden to, controlled by, or otherwise dependent on. Provided you can do this there is no legal problem. There is no direct analogy for something an in-game thing like switching alliances, but in general courts give a large latitude to CEOs and boards to decide what is best for a company provided there is no conflict of interest. So you wouldn't be able to sell all the assets and distribute the earnings to the CEO - but selling all the assets and distributing the earnings to all shareholders would probably be fine.
flandish 4y ago
Played back in 2011. I miss the “Suddenly Ninjas” days - glad to hear stories like this are still happening. We used to roll new accounts, prep a small history, sometimes even a social media presence. Join a corporation. Role play as a newbie. Learn their schedule. A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members. Taking selling and scrapping all we could. Truly Eve is one of the best implementations of “community goal/quest” games, in my opinion. I wonder if it still works to contract for PLEX with a unit of measure missing. (Getting one for 10000000 instead of 100000000)
- ThrustVectoring 4y ago
  > I wonder if it still works to contract for PLEX with a unit of measure missing. (Getting one for 10000000 instead of 100000000) Still extremely common to get attempted, although due to the current UI it's usually listing something for billions when it should be millions. Also common is describing the contract as "500 plex" but the actual contract content is "1 plex". > A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members. Player-owned Upwell structures have largely replaced POSes so that basically isn't a thing anymore. What is a thing is using a Black Ops battleship to conduit jump expensive ships off of tether into a waiting gank. It's honestly a UI/design oversight, if your ship can fit a covert ops cloak and you're close enough to a blops in your fleet, you can get involuntarily yeeted to any system within jump range.
jakkos 4y ago
Bookmark
fastball 4y ago
Surprised EVE Online has a corporate structure system with shares and boards of directors and voting but left out the concept of quorums.
wudangmonk 4y ago
I remember liking read the drama about alliances and betrayals in EVE and even though I never played the game I always enjoyed reading about it. That is with the condition that everything is done in game, I'm not a fan of the whole social engineering outside the game to rip people off angle. Now to me in mmo games EVE players are a BIG red flag as the vast majority of them from my experience will bring their EVE mindset to other games and try the same tactics. Before if someone wasn't happy with the guild they would just leave or form a competing guild but these people might engage with people more, even pretend to be real life friends in order to rise in the ranks and to ultimately steal everything or will try to cause people to turn on each other so that the guild breaks apart. Who wants to deal with that? its crazy.
einpoklum 4y ago
The story reminds me of that old maxim: The best way to rob a bank is to own it. > There's a widely-held feeling that the whole shares system is, if not broken, then at least too easy to exploit Another case of art imitating life, I suppose.
dschuetz 4y ago
The main reason that this was possible is inattentiveness of other players. That is a usual thing when people are playing a game and then turn to other more important things in life. What grinds me most about this is the waste of money and time. Whoever puts thousands of dollars into a game and then leave it seem to have no sense of responsibility or value of money. And then cry out it was stolen. Well, it wasn't. It was taken. This dynamic reminds me of unpopular or shady laws being passed in some parliaments in the middle of the night or during major sports events where the representative attendance and public attention is at its minimum to get enough majority votes. This "biggest heist in game history" follows the exact same dynamic.
- hnarn 4y ago
  I agree, but from a game perspective I’d say it’s pretty odd that these types of events does not at least result in more alerting to the people concerned. I don’t know if emails are already sent out in this situation, but even if they are it would make sense to have push notifications via an app, or SMS notifications, or anything in addition. Not because it’s the game designers “fault” but in cases of anything that can have a permanent impact on someone’s experience of a game without their knowledge it’s probably better to err on the side of caution.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  > Whoever puts thousands of dollars into a game and then leave it seem to have no sense of responsibility or value of money. The monetary value associated with Eve Online things is a bit arbitrary, as it's usually the accumulated value of people's efforts in game; we can't be sure if real money was invested in this heist. That said, it's easy to underestimate the value of assets and property in-game in eve, as it builds up over the years and for a lot of people it's just a video game.
AndyMcConachie 4y ago
This is why quorum exists.
b3lvedere 4y ago
Amazing what impact EVE Online has in the real world. The hardcore dedication of its players is very impressive. This article also reminded me of the sad sad story of Vile Rat ( http://www.davidkushner.com/article/vile-rat/ http://www.davidkushner.com/article/vile-rat/ ) years ago.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
That’s a really stupid mechanic. Why would it not require a minimum number of votes to pass? So you could go on holiday with 90% of the shares and they can just vote to take your shares and win with 10%? Absolute moron devs.
- eimrine 4y ago
  Suppose devs use to fix it and now the minimum is 10 votes or any other number you like. Then somebody gets banned, someone gets mobilized to army and someone is hit by the bus. Guess what? Lots of wanna-be-wit comments about "absolute moron devs". 2 votes is decent to be honest, but in my opinion 3 days is too little.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    One way to handle this is combine those two mechanics: the quorum gets lower the more time has passed. When I was playing GitHub Nomic [1] we decided you needed one fewer player to vote for each day that had passed since the proposal was initiated. [1] https://www.jefftk.com/news/nomic https://www.jefftk.com/news/nomic

326 points by galleywest200 4y ago

Flan_Hill or Flam_Hill You decide...

I'm sick of those "real money" conversions every time something happens in EVE Online. Probably, those in-game assets were acquired by playing the game, not by paying dollars for them. Additionally no one would buy them for that amount. Why show a dollar value if that is not what it's bought or sold for? This conversion rate is based on the price of subscriptions, which can be bought either with dollars or real money. But why should that establish a conversion rate for every other asset? No one is trying to buy $22,300 of EVE subscription.

itake 4y ago
I don’t see why “playing a game” can’t earn you money. There are many “play to earn” crypto games where 3rd world country gamers grind coins for people who don’t want to grind for money. Before crypto, world of Warcraft had gold mining groups. I assume there is a market place that offers a currency exchange. The dollar value is for everyone that doesn’t play the game and doesn’t know if that is a lot or a little of monies.
- remram 4y ago
  > I assume there is a market place that offers a currency exchange. There is not. There might be a black market for this, but not with anything close to this made-up rate. I'm not saying you can't make money from in-game assets, but you would make a completely different amount of money. Those assets have never been bought or sold at $22,300, so why do we pretend that's their value? Because different assets can be bought using both dollars and ISK (and cannot be sold for dollars at all!), we decide that's a conversion rate? And apply it to everything else?

throwaway_65432 4y ago

I haven't played for a while but Corp creation and access mechanics were always incredibly frustrating and buggy and these "heists" are almost always people exploiting mundane software bugs in the platform rather than being clever and/or sneaky in carrying off anything daring. This makes for really boring and unpleasant consequences for the victims of these actions which basically just drive people from the game. Example: My alliance leader basically stole a huge amount of my personal money and several months of work from me. Background: For anyone who doesn't know eve, wormholes in eve are habitable spaces but they connect in ways that are governed by rules but are fundamentally random in nature. So your wormhole might always have 2 guaranteed connections to particular types of space but specifically what systems it connects to is random and will change every now and then. And also other new connections will spawn and disappear at random all the time. It is also entirely lawless space full of people trying to jump you at every turn, (sometimes) powerful NPCs and (usually) very powerful corporations who will every now and again mount operations to jump into a wormhole and evict the occupants if they are not very careful about defending themselves. All of this makes wormhole space very dangerous and inconvenient in lots of ways, but if you persevere, the game rewards you with very interesting gameplay and valuable rewards. I had a lot of experience with wormholes and was teaching people in my corp the ropes. I had bought a new higher-class wormhole for my corporation, set up several new stations and a bunch of infrastructure. Because of the randomness above, this kind of logistic stuff is very slow and tedious work and I had spent a month or so of my time and a bunch of ISK (in-game currency) buying the hole, the stations and all the ships and stuff so my guys had stuff to do and didn't have to sweat the logistical stuff. My alliance leader created a new corporation, transferred all the stations in the wormhole (including all my stuff and all the things I had put in shared hangars etc) into that corp and made the other people in the hole in charge of that corp. I was locked out in the middle of nowhere with no recourse. He said he had misunderstood a message I had sent about taking a break (for the rest of the day) as quitting the game completely but anyway it fitted his objectives for the alliance so I could just basically stfu and accept it. I tried playing a bit after that but it really was never the same. I left the corp and tried to restart but never got back to where I was or recouped what I had lost.

Cardinal7167 4y ago

Incredible. What an under appreciated game. I’ve played a little bit of it and the world is absolutely enormous.

monero-xmr 4y ago
Some people wonder if we live in a Matrix-like simulation. Others voluntarily spend the lives in the same situation
sedatk 4y ago
Not underappreciated at all. It's 20 years old and still among the TOP 20 most popular MMOs. Not everyone likes that kind of gameplay though. I was an EVE beta tester before it was released openly, and I finally decided that it wasn't for me. (I don't like the turn based mechanics, or "the ship is actually the person" kind of narrative)
- eru 4y ago
  > "the ship is actually the person" kind of narrative Could you please explain?
  - sedatk 4y ago
    Maybe I put it wrong. I should have said "your avatar is the ship." There are no "people" in EVE Online. The "people" are supposed to be biological clones suspended in amniotic fluid integrated with the ship, so although they have the thoughts of the person they represent, they never get to leave the ship, and die when your ship is destroyed, so you get to create a new clone. That means you can't just walk around a station after docking, or get off your ship in space and do a space walk around the asteroids. The only thing you see about your persona is your profile photo that you generated at the beginning of the game, nothing else.
    - Jiocus 4y ago
      Nowadays, you can actually leave the ship and stretch your legs in a 1 room station quarters. And I'd say in the social sense there are people almost everywhere, they will be present in the many chats or 'in person' in space, even when you hope you'll be left alone.. I think the philosophy of the capsuleer/ship mechanics is a refreshing one, and there's a cyberpunk feel to being wired up into that hull.

jimsparkman 4y ago

I don’t know anything about the game, but I’m guessing the new account was created to protect his identity, should the ploy fail?

MereInterest 4y ago
EVE is famously anything-goes, with corporations (EVE equivalent of guilds) being very careful about who they accept specifically to prevent this type of attack. I would be very surprised if there were any moderator intervention about it, as joining up with corps in order to drain their bank accounts is expected behavior. As another example of EVE conventions, in 2012 the biggest trading hub was attacked [0]. This is nominally a safe area, and indeed the NPC security responded to every attack. This was part of the cost-benefit analysis of the attackers, who were aiming to drive up the price of resources that they had hoarded. When other players complained to the developers, the developers found it hilarious, and helped advertise about the attack. [0] https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/64307/what-is-burn-jita-and-how-will-it-destroy-the-economy https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/64307/what-is-bur...
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > EVE is famously anything-goes, with corporations (EVE equivalent of guilds) being very careful about who they accept specifically to prevent this type of attack. Really? The general run of comments seems to indicate that the attack could only succeed because nobody in the targeted corporation noticed a popup warning them about the attack for 72 straight hours. That strongly suggests that very few corporations should have any guards at all in place to prevent this type of attack, because there's no way for the attack to succeed unless everyone in the targeted corporation has stopped playing the game. What are people worried about?
XorNot 4y ago
No it's that corporate membership history is immutable and public on characters. So it's a bad look to be an old character with a string of now bankrupted, stolen or overthrown corps on your history.
4y ago

from 4y ago

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&context=til 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?

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
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.
- xoa 4y ago
  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.

dmix 4y ago

TLDR: > A player known as Flam_Hill in the online game EVE Online orchestrated a heist by exploiting the game's shares mechanic. Along with another player, Flam_Hill observed the 299-member corporation Event Horizon Expeditionaries (EHEXP), which is part of the Pandemic Horde alliance. They discovered that the corporation had minimal activity from its CEO and directors, making it an attractive target for infiltration. > The duo applied for corporate membership using a clean account with a character that had some history. After being accepted into EHEXP, they initiated a vote for a new CEO, locking out the current CEO's roles. They waited 72 hours for the vote to pass, gaining control of the corporation. After being granted director roles, they systematically removed other directors and emptied the corporate wallet of 130 billion ISK. > The heist also involved stealing assets from the corporation's high-security offices, which they believed were used to store valuable items. In total, the estimated value of the heist was 2.23 trillion ISK, or approximately $22,309 USD.

GalenErso 4y ago
Will the Pandemic Horde Alliance retaliate against them?
- lz400 4y ago
  The neat part is there isn't a good way to retaliate. These players by now are gone from the corp, as is the money, so they can't do anything directly to them anymore. If they were "burner accounts" they might never know who did it. If they identify the players and they belong to some collective they could attack that collective but at that point it will probably be seen as petty and getting laughed at might be more trouble than it's worth. These heists are seen as cool for the most part. They could try to stage a counterheist, that would be exciting but very difficult to pull off. Overall 2 trillion ISK isn't that much in the grand scheme of things for a mega-coalition like Pandemic Horde.

JCharante 4y ago

The CEO voting mechanics is hardly obscure, every single CEO knows about it. Also hard to believe the biggest heist is 2 trillion, stealing 10 titan BPOs that have been researched sometime in the past 20 years would be worth the same.

hgsgm 4y ago
This makes much more sense than the OP. If OP's tactic really worked, it would have been happening constantly for years all over Eve. So what's the deal with the OP?
- JCharante 4y ago
  So basically this line describes that it's an inside job "Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO" Every CEO knows not to give shares away. The only reason to give other people shares is so that they can intentionally take over in case you die IRL and don't want to trap assets. "The one aspect of the story that some redditors took issue with is the origin of the 1,000 shares in Event Horizon Expeditionaries that made this theft possible in the first place. Some redditors theorized that Flam_Hill is actually the long-departed founder of the corporation, who's been sitting with those shares in his personal wallet for years; Absolutely possible "others said they may have purchased a character from a member of the corporation who forget to remove the shares from their wallet before transferring ownership." They're not supposed to have shares before being sold in the Bazaar, maybe RMT?

HWR_14 4y ago

I feel like fun stories like this from EVE fell off as the same skillset was used in crypto exploits. Is the fact that people are returning to EVE a sign that crypto is past the peak?

kromem 4y ago
It could also be that a security model exploited in crypto has now been corrected for, and we are seeing similar attacks spread out to other vulnerable infrastructure that is lagging behind updated threat models.
LMYahooTFY 4y ago
Is this a fact? As fat as I was aware EVE has been stagnant for years, company sold to Pearl Abyss, which is likely to continue this or radically alter the game. Some radical changes were already made. This seems like a very weak connection. I'd crypto were "past the peak" the US gov would not be targeting it.
- eru 4y ago
  > I'd crypto were "past the peak" the US gov would not be targeting it. I'm not sure that argument holds. I remember eg Britain doing lots of 'tough on crime stuff' long after crime had peak statistically.
vagab0nd 4y ago
> The robbery was quick, quiet, and clean, and netted more than 2.2 trillion ISK—that's $22,300 in real money. If you mean to compare the monetary gains of these exploits, 22k is nothing in crypto even in this bear market.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  Stealing 2.2t of something which is effectively worthless sounds like crypto

fdhfdjkfhdkj 4y ago

[dead]

schemescape 4y ago

Biggest in gaming history? What about Axie Infinity? https://rekt.news/ronin-rekt/ https://rekt.news/ronin-rekt/ (Not in-game or specific to the one game, but thought it was worth mentioning just because of the sheer size, and that it probably benefited North Korea. It still boggles my mind…)

quickthrower2 4y ago
Is that more akin to a typical crypto sfyl than an hack using game mechanics?
- schemescape 4y ago
  Yes, that was what the last part of comment meant to convey. But my understanding is that Ronin was closely tied the game, and some of the “optimizations” (vulnerabilities) were motivated by the (popularity of the) game. But even if I arbitrarily say the heist is 99% crypto and 1% game, it’s still much larger :)

ilamont 4y ago

Org rules can go the other way, too. A regional nonprofit I once belonged to stated in its bylaws that any amendments required 2/3 of all members to vote in person at the general assembly.

denlekke 4y ago

some questions i have: why was the secondary character needed ? could the original character with the shares have done this themself ? why did no one else vote ?

eru 4y ago
The secondary character was perhaps there because the original character would have aroused suspicion?
flandish 4y ago
Accounts have character slots and when you join a corp, you are often required to provide an api key to show all chars on this account. Chars have public history of corp membership or pvp fights etc. So if you roll a char in an acct with other bigger chars, it will come known that you’re a fraud, not a newbie, or you also play as a character that has “interesting” history. So you spend a few more bucks a month and create a fresh entire account with new slots, etc.

650REDHAIR 4y ago

I love the idea of Eve, but man… what a boring game day-to-day. When I was younger and would just hang out in teamspeak with the crew it was a lot of fun and a lot of just sitting around or jumping for hours trying to catch a fight only to die in an instant or kill them in an instant.

remram 4y ago
That was my experience as well. The power difference between players is too great. I would get killed by randos in cloaked ships using missiles worth several time my ship and its entire loadout. What's the fun in that? At some point I realized that this is an financial game with a space setting, not a space game with a rich economy, and I never played again.
evandale 4y ago
You really have to be a self starter and find something you like. I've tried so hard to get into PvP but I just can't do it. I might have tried mining once. I've played maybe 5 times in the past 8 years and could never get into it even though I desperately wanted to. It seems so fun! This round of playing I really got into wormholes and exploration and I'm having a blast with that. I only play maybe 7 or 8 hours a week and I find the probe scanning and data/relic site hacking minigames both a lot of fun. I've also started using mapping tools for wormholes which is something else that's oddly fun. There's just something about sitting in space scanning for wormholes and people could warp on you while you're taking the 2 seconds updating your mapping tool that gives me a thrill. It's also mostly work I throw away when the wormholes close because I live in a high sec area too lol but I still find it fun. Sometimes I'll play two days in a row and visit wormholes I mapped earlier to scan new sites in them.
- Arrath 4y ago
  > You really have to be a self starter and find something you like. Too true. And sometimes you stumble upon the fun. For instance, a long, long time ago (circa 2008 or 9...) I thought Stealth Bombers sounded cool so I started to learn the skills, not realizing they were essentially useless. Except that they could be used somewhat productively to fuck around deep in enemy territory and be a nuisance to their mining and logistics efforts. Was a I troll? Basically. Did I have any real impact on the war effort? I doubt it. But hey, I did blow up a few mining barges and annoy people.

crazygringo 4y ago

> Flam_Hill estimated the total value of the heist at 2.23 trillion ISK, which works out to more than $22,300 in real money. ISK can't be legally cashed out of EVE Online, but it can be used to buy Plex(opens in new tab), an in-game currency used to upgrade accounts, purchase virtual goods, and activate other services. Wait, if it can't be converted to money then what are they using to generate the $22,300 figure? Or is it the "legally" part, where there's an illegal way to cash out? Also, what would even make it illegal? There are actual laws against it or something? Or is it a TOS thing the company tries to enforce, which wouldn't make it illegal but just against policy?

vinyl7 4y ago
You'd have to buy $22.3k worth of Plex, which can then be traded to ISK, to be able to buy those assets in game. Because you can buy plex with cash which can be used to obtain in-game-currency, it gives the in-game currency to a real world dollar value.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Oh that makes sense. Got it, thanks!

scrame 4y ago

So, does anyone ever cash out with these big heists? Like is there money leaving the ISK ecosystem in cash? I get that you can measure ISK since it is pegged to subscription costs that are solid objects that can be traded or destroyed, but does anyone heisting 22k of eve online ships actually ever turn that into money at that rate? Who's the buyer, vs WoW goldfarmers?

singron 4y ago
Trading ISK for real money isn't allowed by CCP. You are exactly right that describing an amount of ISK as if it was worth some amount of USD doesn't tell the whole story. It's likely that if the market were truly bidirectional, ISK would be worth less USD than it seems now.
- xapata 4y ago
  Wasn't there an exchange rate in the past? If so, why'd they end it?
  - Talanes 4y ago
    The exchange rate is based around PLEX: an in-game item that can be exchanged for subscription time. People who want to buy in-game currency spend real money for PLEX, and then sell it in the game to other people.
nubinetwork 4y ago
$22k worth of plex would last you the rest of your life in free game time.
- sundvor 4y ago
  Equates to roughly 150 annual payments, so that's enough for your main and two alts for 50 years. :) Side note, the AUD monthly of $30 - wtaf? I've been away for a while, they seem intent on keeping it that way.
- 4y ago

Lazare 4y ago

This is a bit less interesting than it sounds. When you create a corporation (aka guild, free company, etc.) in EVE 1k shares are created by default (you can create more, not everyone does). And this corproration hadn't, so if you have 1k share you own every share in the company (and thus have complete control over the company, if you choose to excercise it). Now, nany corporations don't really care for the share mechanic, and just leave the shares in the posession of the founder, or place it in a locked down corporate wallet. But somehow "Flam Hill" got all 1k shares in this company. They refuse to say how. Some people suspect the original founder of the company quit EVE while still holding the initial 1k shares, in which case Flam Hill is likely the founder, or someone who obtained the account from them. Or perhaps they were a company officer who got access to the wallet and took the shares, etc. Which means all the writing about how the directors were AFK or whatever is just window dressing. Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company. In other words, there isn't really any obscure rule here or clever tricks. Or rather it is, but it all happened off screen, because the only thing that matters is how Flam Hill obtained control of the shares; once he had it, everything else followed. It's as if Elon Musk wrote something about how he obtained control of Twitter by the clever gambit of walking up to the HQ carrying a sink. Actually, he obtained control of twitter by buying all of its shares, at which point he could do whatever visual puns he liked because he owns the company. How come Flam Hill owned every share in the EHEXP? There might well be a fascinating story there of intrigue and theft and betryal there. But this story is just about the boring stuff that followed.

bscphil 4y ago
Some (purported) details here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde_corporation_looses_2_trillion_isk/jesfr2a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde... > Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company. I think this is not quite right. Their 1000 shares were more than 5% of the total shares in the company, not (necessarily) 100% of the shares. 5% of shares can trigger a CEO vote at any time, and a majority of voting shares can elect a new CEO. They won the CEO election by being the only people online and voting at the time, and by having the corporation directors not notice the CEO change in the UI for 3 days until the vote took effect. The failure of the corp was in not diluting the shares of the founder below 5% after they left the corporation a decade ago, so now they come back (with alt accounts) and rob them blind.

tech_times_ 4y ago

In the US outside of the game you couldn't do this even if you owned 100% of the corporation because it would be a violation of corporate law. You have to remember that a corporation is legally a person. Good recent note from the Harvard Law review here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confusion-realigning-controlling-stockholders-and-controlled-boards/ https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus... If you can find out who the accounts are can you sue in real life?

nl 4y ago
> In the US outside of the game you couldn't do this even if you owned 100% of the corporation because it would be a violation of corporate law. Yes you can > You have to remember that a corporation is legally a person. It has nothing to do with this whatsoever. > Good recent note from the Harvard Law review here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confusion-realigning-controlling-stockholders-and-controlled-boards/ https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus... This is a good note. As they point out: directors owe a duty of loyalty to the corporation and its stockholders, which requires that a director act in good faith and in the best interest of the corporation and stockholders, rather than in the director’s own interests or the interests of someone who the director is beholden to, controlled by, or otherwise dependent on. Provided you can do this there is no legal problem. There is no direct analogy for something an in-game thing like switching alliances, but in general courts give a large latitude to CEOs and boards to decide what is best for a company provided there is no conflict of interest. So you wouldn't be able to sell all the assets and distribute the earnings to the CEO - but selling all the assets and distributing the earnings to all shareholders would probably be fine.

flandish 4y ago

Played back in 2011. I miss the “Suddenly Ninjas” days - glad to hear stories like this are still happening. We used to roll new accounts, prep a small history, sometimes even a social media presence. Join a corporation. Role play as a newbie. Learn their schedule. A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members. Taking selling and scrapping all we could. Truly Eve is one of the best implementations of “community goal/quest” games, in my opinion. I wonder if it still works to contract for PLEX with a unit of measure missing. (Getting one for 10000000 instead of 100000000)

ThrustVectoring 4y ago
> I wonder if it still works to contract for PLEX with a unit of measure missing. (Getting one for 10000000 instead of 100000000) Still extremely common to get attempted, although due to the current UI it's usually listing something for billions when it should be millions. Also common is describing the contract as "500 plex" but the actual contract content is "1 plex". > A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members. Player-owned Upwell structures have largely replaced POSes so that basically isn't a thing anymore. What is a thing is using a Black Ops battleship to conduit jump expensive ships off of tether into a waiting gank. It's honestly a UI/design oversight, if your ship can fit a covert ops cloak and you're close enough to a blops in your fleet, you can get involuntarily yeeted to any system within jump range.

jakkos 4y ago

Bookmark

fastball 4y ago

Surprised EVE Online has a corporate structure system with shares and boards of directors and voting but left out the concept of quorums.

wudangmonk 4y ago

I remember liking read the drama about alliances and betrayals in EVE and even though I never played the game I always enjoyed reading about it. That is with the condition that everything is done in game, I'm not a fan of the whole social engineering outside the game to rip people off angle. Now to me in mmo games EVE players are a BIG red flag as the vast majority of them from my experience will bring their EVE mindset to other games and try the same tactics. Before if someone wasn't happy with the guild they would just leave or form a competing guild but these people might engage with people more, even pretend to be real life friends in order to rise in the ranks and to ultimately steal everything or will try to cause people to turn on each other so that the guild breaks apart. Who wants to deal with that? its crazy.

einpoklum 4y ago

The story reminds me of that old maxim: The best way to rob a bank is to own it. > There's a widely-held feeling that the whole shares system is, if not broken, then at least too easy to exploit Another case of art imitating life, I suppose.

dschuetz 4y ago

The main reason that this was possible is inattentiveness of other players. That is a usual thing when people are playing a game and then turn to other more important things in life. What grinds me most about this is the waste of money and time. Whoever puts thousands of dollars into a game and then leave it seem to have no sense of responsibility or value of money. And then cry out it was stolen. Well, it wasn't. It was taken. This dynamic reminds me of unpopular or shady laws being passed in some parliaments in the middle of the night or during major sports events where the representative attendance and public attention is at its minimum to get enough majority votes. This "biggest heist in game history" follows the exact same dynamic.

hnarn 4y ago
I agree, but from a game perspective I’d say it’s pretty odd that these types of events does not at least result in more alerting to the people concerned. I don’t know if emails are already sent out in this situation, but even if they are it would make sense to have push notifications via an app, or SMS notifications, or anything in addition. Not because it’s the game designers “fault” but in cases of anything that can have a permanent impact on someone’s experience of a game without their knowledge it’s probably better to err on the side of caution.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
> Whoever puts thousands of dollars into a game and then leave it seem to have no sense of responsibility or value of money. The monetary value associated with Eve Online things is a bit arbitrary, as it's usually the accumulated value of people's efforts in game; we can't be sure if real money was invested in this heist. That said, it's easy to underestimate the value of assets and property in-game in eve, as it builds up over the years and for a lot of people it's just a video game.

AndyMcConachie 4y ago

This is why quorum exists.

b3lvedere 4y ago

Amazing what impact EVE Online has in the real world. The hardcore dedication of its players is very impressive. This article also reminded me of the sad sad story of Vile Rat ( http://www.davidkushner.com/article/vile-rat/ http://www.davidkushner.com/article/vile-rat/ ) years ago.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

That’s a really stupid mechanic. Why would it not require a minimum number of votes to pass? So you could go on holiday with 90% of the shares and they can just vote to take your shares and win with 10%? Absolute moron devs.

eimrine 4y ago
Suppose devs use to fix it and now the minimum is 10 votes or any other number you like. Then somebody gets banned, someone gets mobilized to army and someone is hit by the bus. Guess what? Lots of wanna-be-wit comments about "absolute moron devs". 2 votes is decent to be honest, but in my opinion 3 days is too little.
- jefftk 4y ago
  One way to handle this is combine those two mechanics: the quorum gets lower the more time has passed. When I was playing GitHub Nomic [1] we decided you needed one fewer player to vote for each day that had passed since the proposal was initiated. [1] https://www.jefftk.com/news/nomic https://www.jefftk.com/news/nomic