It's a bit more than that. With sovereignty, you lose a large chunk of your internal economy and logistics. A lot of that will not have to be re-acquired, it will have to be rebuilt, from the ground up.
 
The reason BoB was able to hold on its central Delve systems was that sovereign systems are easy to defend. You have cynos, you have jumpbridges, you have reserves of capitals and super-capitals ready to reinforce. And it helped that Delve was a very rich sector, making it a perfect logistics base.
 
Those advantages are gone. They have to be rebuilt - and most ennemy corps will not stand idle while BoB regroup. Look at the influence map: BoB has started to reassert sovereignty in pieces, but there's already huge chunks of territory carved. Getting them back... is going to take months. Or a year. Or two.

I'll translate it into a semi-realworld (fictional) scenario to help out...

"In the world of Business-Politics, the infamous Apple company has been dissolved. It seems that rival Company Microsoft had a [director level] spy in the holding corporation, and he stole money as well as Super-Computers and other assets. The spy then dissolved the company. 'One of Microsoft's stated motivations from their early days as a company was to punish what they viewed as the arrogance of Apple. If they've held true to that ideal, stealing the marketplace out from under Apple effectively means Microsoft has accomplished what they set out to do years ago.' As of 11:00 GMT, Apple lost all its Intellectual Property. (its patents are void now, trademarks are pointless, copyrights are invalid)."

Now if you can imagine the majority of Apple employees were living in their work cubicals when they found out. The next morning all apple employees were then promptly all shoved out into the street with little more than the clothes on their back. Linux and Microsoft gangs bum rushed into the area to quickly rob every apple employee as possible and quickly convert former-apple assets into new workstations and easy cash.

It's probably the biggest zerozero political upheaval in EVE's history.

This story is rather incomprehensible to the rest of us. Could an EVE player explain some terms like sovereignty, ISK reserves, cyno-jammers and capfleet towers, please? Good thing that territorial control [massively.com] was explained...

The article also says

Once assured a place within GoonSwarm, Agamar proceeded to disband the Band of Brothers alliance using his director level access.

...but what powers does the director level access give you, exactly?

Well it matters more than "some city's sports team won vs. another city's sports team". That makes news on non-tech news sites. So hey, why not?

I know what you mean. Here I am stationed in Iraq, I've got people going out every day who are possibly going to get really killed. We find explosives, get shot at, you name it. It's all VERY real. But there are enough people who are so totally insulated from this sort of thing that the EVE Online game is vastly more important to them.

On the other hand, this should spur someone from Darfur to post about the genocide there. Or one of the congo nations where life is so horrible.

What does it say about us as a species that there is such a range of lifestyles? On one end is the people where EVE Online takeovers might be the most important thing to happen to them all year. At the other end are refugees who get killed by the thousands and would have been starving and diseased anyway.

Is this disparity good or bad? Is there any limit to how much disparity is good? Would we be better off if everybody had similar worries and we were all about the same level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

I kinda doubt that it impacted greatly the hobby of 2k+ people, so sorry, no.

It IS a game and it's enjoyable to participate in. There is probably a happy medium for how serious people should take games. On my last deployment I didn't have access to internet (or phones, or tv) so we played frisbee or came up with stupid pranks.

I think a lot of vets feel the way you do. They get back and go wtf is wrong with you people, arguing over childish things? Probably why so many vets become unsync'd with the society they grew up in. But it's probably better this way. Try to keep the innocent.. innocent. No need for my family to REALLY know how shitty the world truely is, eh?

It's not 'screwing you over' when I blow up your ACU in Supreme Commander. Nor is it griefing to try and trash your mass economy. The control perspective is unique - you're a 'unit' with a possibility to become a commander at various tactical levels, based on how good you are at it, and how well you can 'lead'.

That's why I like EVE.

My first reaction was, too, "that's news? How's that relevant? Did something change in the tech world because of it?"

Then I realized that the "real" news are filled with sports reports and celeb weddings, and I realized that this is basically the nerd equivalent thereof.

As someone who plays more traditional and structured MMO's, I find the idea that so much work can be reduced to ruins by one putz to be horrifying, especially given that games are supposed to be a way to escape the real-world.

I investigated further, like someone who just saw a massive train wreck, by reading the forums.

Goons seemed to have been given admin access to and archived the BoB forums as well, and have been posting juicier tidbits.

Having administered a "guild gone stale" in WoW, I can recognize the tone and content of the post. My conclusion is band of brothers had outgrown its purpose and was now as adrift and stale as GM.

The euthenasia of this massive organization will breathe new life into the game, but it may also drive a large number of these people who were screwed out of the game, making a huge dent in the userbase.

I'm wondering whose fault it was that one member of the alliance had that much power.

If there are mechanisms in-game for shared responsibility for assets and BoB didn't take advantage of them, that's BoB's problem.

If the game forced them to structure their alliance so one person COULD take them down, that's EVE's fault.

The euthenasia of this massive organization will breathe new life into the game, but it may also drive a large number of these people who were screwed out of the game, making a huge dent in the userbase.

You get a gold star! ;) Seriously... you 'get' it. Yes... BoB controlled a very large, very rich, area of the game universe. This activity has made a huge 'hole' in space... the richest part of space. Before, all of claimable space had been claimed and had become fairly stable. This 'hole' has opened up a very rich region for land grabbing and the like... and with that, there will be squabbles, fights, and all sorts of new fun!

There will probably be a few who quit over this, true, but I doubt many will... life in EVE is like that... BoB has a bunch of very dedicated and extremely skilled players in it... I'm betting they will regroup and try to take back their space... which will stir up all kinds of drama in itself.

EVE lives for drama. The game *IS* made by the players. 99% of the game content is made by the players... who is fighting who? what regions are 'hot'? who just screwed over someone else? The leader of BoB said, and it was true, that BoB has been providing the game with content since they formed and first took space. Missions and all the PVE stuff is just the ISK printing press to fund the "real" part of the game by supplying money to players to buy stuff. The production (crafting) part of EVE is massive and an integral part of the game. If you're flying a ship, it was made by a player (and you're always flying a ship). If you fit tech2 equipment onto your ship, it was made by a player. And yeah, you have to have miners to get minerals, people to tend moon stations to harvest 'rare' minerals, and someone to take all those things and manufacture stuff.

There's really no other game with the complexity and depth of EVE.

I slogged through two tours in Afghanistan. It was five years ago, and I still don't really like to see news much. After 8 years of Army service deployed four times to such wonderful places (e.g. Bosnia), I feel like I've used up my capacity for dealing with brutal realities. I think it's good that some people have their silly little games to occupy them. Most people can't handle the shit you and I have had to see.

GoonSwarm basically had this PR coup handed to them on a silver platter, they had done nothing themselves to make this happen.

When Kim Philby [wikipedia.org] defected, do you think the media at the time focused on how little effort the Soviets expended to get him on their side?

A coup is a coup.

What part of empire building do you not understand?

To put in perspective how seriously the people involved (not me) take this stuff, the leaders of the disbanded alliance got on flights at 3am to meet in Washington DC (I believe) so they could pick up the pieces and start getting to work on putting together the alliance.

Why? Have they never heard of webcams and videoconferencing? Or just plain telephones?

I don't play EVE. But without commenting on its politics, it seems to me as an outsider that this sort of coup shouldn't be possible in any game designed to have interesting and engaging politics.

The game mechanics (sovereignty allowing construction of major infrastructure) is a proxy for a large government/business bureaucracy who maintains and runs the infrastructure. These guys are abstracted out of the game because they're boring.

In any real human political/business organization, if a leader turned traitor and demanded the immediate destruction of all infrastructure in his control, the people behind the scenes who actually *run* the stuff would say "hell no!"

Imagine if Joe Biden sold out to the Russians and demanded that every U.S. embassy and military base be demolished. Imagine that Steve Ballmer demanded that Microsoft's entire Redmond campus be put to the torch. Not gonna happen. But in EVE, it's done in a microsecond.

Virtual world politics doesn't have to work the same way as the real world, but it does have to be A) fun, and B) functional. The ability for a single leader to nuke his entire nation with a mouseclick is neither.

This is going to be meta as fuck -- but the only preconcieved notions I brought to that post were; that the gist of his complaint(and thus post) applies to just about everything(which a later reply addressed) both on this site and within western cultur, that Iraq is a contentious topic(confirmed by some of the replies), that bringing up your own US military service invariably will send any conversation down certain lines(also confirmed by the replies - thank you for your service, what were you expecting, yada yada), and that as a poster with an ID that low, he knew all of these things and thus knew what he was doing. And of course what is implied by the fact that both darfur, and Rwanda 2, child of rwanda, aka the congo were brought into it as well.

It was utterly irrelevant to the article(or rather only as relevant to this topic as to any other topic), only sort of relevant to the person he was replying to, and not productive except to create a derail, which it did. That's a troll -- oh, and the purpose of a troll is to generate conversation, not necessarily in a bad way. I know that definition has gone out of vogue, but sorry it's the one drilled into my brain.

First off, let me state that I'm a pacifist, and have absolutely no love for the violence and war-porn that infests our society. I've never served in the armed forces, and never intend to. I've met vets whom I've made great friendships with, and I've met vets whom I wish I'd never had the displeasure of meeting - they're human beings, good and bad, just like the rest of us. But I cannot let you attack the soldiers like this so unfairly without offering a different perspective.

They are there because they signed up to serve their country and protect it. They are there because they were ordered to be there to do this. If you have an issue with what the troops are doing then you have an issue with their commander in chief (actually, probably now the ex-CiC) and the politicians who sent them there. The soldiers themselves do not get to choose the battles or the issues they fight for, the politicians do, and in democracies populations choose politicians. (Yeah, broadly speaking, no need to nit-pick/supreme court me here, I know all that crap).

Yes, I think it's a tragedy that so many people have died (hundreds of thousands of civilians, thousands of soldiers) as a result of this exercise in futility. I think the war in Iraq is a mistake, and protested before its beginning, and that the war in Afghanistan has been so badly mis-handled that no good has come of it. But I will never hold that against someone who signed up to serve his country and protect his family. The "selfrighteous pricks" are the ones who sold us the lies behind all this, who squandered our most valuable resources all to further their own personal agendas. The soldiers put their trust in their leaders, offered their sweat, tears, and sadly also blood to serve.

Now I know that this might bring up the usual 'just following orders isn't an excuse' argument. But really, do you think that a soldier has time to sit down and review the evidence in of yellow-cake, to weigh the pros and cons of fighting an insurgency? Yes, you should disobey obviously bad orders (eg 'Shoot that innocent civilian in the head') but for the larger issues like this there is no practical way for that to be possible. And thus I lay the blame at the feet of the leaders, not the soldiers, and I think that's really where you would want to place it too.

I slogged through two tours in Afghanistan. It was five years ago, and I still don't really like to see news much. After 8 years of Army service deployed four times to such wonderful places (e.g. Bosnia), I feel like I've used up my capacity for dealing with brutal realities. I think it's good that some people have their silly little games to occupy them. Most people can't handle the shit you and I have had to see.

I think your perception about the game is not very clear.

Just think of it as a gambler's dream. They've spent all this money and time to improve their virtual character and can finally take advantage of a situation that is so rare that it actually makes Slashdot news. There is also a long history of corruption within this organization which seem to take out most of the air in enjoying this game.
 
This is our nightlife, our hobby, our hour of fun. And you're right we can't handle the shit that you've seen. We're not professionals in armed combat and field work
 
Some of us fight the fight back at home in our spare time and play EVE.

Get. A. Life.

To all the people bitching about this getting "news". This is Slashdot.org. Not foxnews or the BBC. There is no "Wars, Disease, and Killing" sections. This news is posted under the "Games" section. This IS big game news. If you want to read about the atrocities in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, starving children in Africa. Then I suggest other big news sites that DO report on those things. I'm NOT trying to downplay, degrade or otherwise belittle those sorts of news. However, don't belittle this news because its' not as horrific as what you've seen or want to see. And don't take offense that this is being report on either. Eve Online is a worldwide game... This is affects at least 50% of the players of that game... Get over it.

On the contrary, the fact that coups like this *are* possible is exactly what attracts that level of meta-gamer who bothers to spend years of their life building a corp/alliance. If things like this weren't possible, large old alliances like BoB would be fixtures in the game, immovable and unconquerable.

As it was, BoB nearly was invincible due to the network of alliance level infrastructure they built up. The ongoing war between goonfleet and BoB had taken on the character of WWI: static lines that don't move much. That's boring. It's like you and your PvP opponent have both got your tier 8 gear and are no longer capable of killing each other, so you don't bother to fight anymore.

No infrastructure was destroyed; but by disbanding the alliance, they lost sovereignty; by losing sovereignty, they lost infrastructure features that require sovereignty. BoB's core territory in Delve is now conquerable. That doesn't mean conquered--see the post above from a BoB member who's excited about the impending action. What'll happen now is that BoB's core support will have to man the Delve systems continuously and defend them long enough for sovereignty to reassert (about three month). It'll be a long battle where they'll actually have to fight, rather than sit behind their cyno-jammers.

This isn't a glitch. This is exactly why those serious players play Eve, because stuff like this happens.

If you want a real-world analogy, don't think of gov't, think of Enron, where a few key executives were able to build a house of cards that almost overnight put 55,000 people out of work when it all collapsed. It's large-scale, player-driven reversals like this that make Eve interesting for those people.

Not to me, though :) After running some lvl 4 missions in my new Raven, I got bored, and didn't want to get into the politics of it.

Ahem. Second WoW Expansion Launched, Conquered [slashdot.org] We also go the play-by-play when Lich King went live and people were seeing the content. We got notified when Burning Crusade went live.

This is the Slashdot Games section. The people who play these games care. I don't play them. I don't care. That doesn't mean the news isn't interesting to a lot of nerds.

For you. I can't think of anything I want less in my online gaming. Of course, that's the problem with some PvP fans... they can't understand that the preference of every MMO player in existence doesn't line up with theirs, and then deride those who prefer other methods by talking about "lame quests and raids and other pointless garbage". God forbid we learn to appreciate the fact that other people like different things.

I was merely responding to your point that there's no analogy in RL to a single key individual causing a ton of grief for a large institution. No, Enron wasn't good, but for proof that what happened to BoB was good in meta-game terms, read this subthread from a BoB member [slashdot.org]:

I am a member of Band of Brothers and the only thing this has caused is a renewed interest on the part of the Alliance.

If you believe him, this is a minor hiccup that's caused some need for a bit more active play on their parts while they re-establish their alliance-level infrastructure.

See? It's a big reversal that's made Eve exciting for everyone involved. Longstanding static lines have been thrown into chaos. A lot of Bob players think this is an exciting, active phase of the war with goonfleet.

Or I can play a game where taking a break for a couple weeks won't cause me to lose all my shit, and where it's ok to join a crappy/underdog guild of friends without being completely screwed, or where I can pvp when I choose to instead of being griefed, or where there's a skill-based pvp system in place instead of "whoever has the most players online at the time".

Different strokes for different folks.