Massive EVE Online Alliance Disbanded 352
tnt001 writes "In the world of EVE Online, the infamous Band of Brothers alliance has been disbanded. It seems that rival alliance Goonswarm had a spy in the holding corporation, and he stole money as well as capital ships and other assets. The spy then disbanded the alliance. 'One of GoonSwarm's stated motivations from their early days as an alliance was to punish what they viewed as the arrogance of Band of Brothers. If they've held true to that ideal, stealing the alliance out from under BoB effectively means GoonSwarm has accomplished what they set out to do years ago.' As of 11:00 GMT, BoB lost all its sovereignty (its outposts are conquerable now, cyno-jammers are offline, jump bridges are inoperable)."
Hello from Meatspace! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hello from Meatspace! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a former player, I can attest.
The game really has it's own politics.
Yeah, never heard of a sysadmin sabotaging (Score:4, Interesting)
BoB got betrayed by one of its most trusted members, it's not unlike a RL CFO running with some company funds.
Individual players lost nothing, but will have a hard time rebuilding under the pressure they'll be under. Everyone is very excited, the big war (about 2 years now) has been a stalemate with both sides deeply entrenched, now there's some hope of a conclusion at last.
And at the very least, lots of boat violence(*).
* EVE meme made famous after a Chinese ISK farmer whose spaceship got caught by players said "Please do not violence my boat"
Re:Hello from Meatspace! (Score:1, Interesting)
Who on earth would voluntarily go to Iraq to defend people against nothing other than the oil-greed of the US?
I couldn't care less who's there or not, actually if it doesn't affect me I ignore it, simple as. Way to many selfrighteous pricks in the military thinking they are actually in Iraq and afghanistan to void terror and not US political and economical interests...
Re:One reason... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but that was in 1998. Virtual worlds were new; anything more sophisticated than a MUD was pure Snow Crash stuff. Events like this were news because it was a virgin territory. Nobody knew what kind of culture would emerge, what kind of unwritten rules and social norms would become established in the new cyberspace communities.
Was Mr Bungle a rapist? Seems quite quaint now, doesn't it? It was a big deal at the time. Yet what he did was small beer compared to what anonymous trolls from ebaumsworld do every day. We know now what people will do in a virtual world given unlimited freedom to create as they see fit. They'll scrawl goatse on every available surface, and code up swarms of flying penises to molest furries. They'll swarm in a hundred Samuel L Jackson lookalikes and block off the exits from the swimming pool. It's just griefing, move on.
Events in-game like this one aren't interesting any more. Been there, done that, bored now. What gets /.'s interest nowadays is the interface between the game world and reality. The economics of gold farming, for instance. Or, player A buys a +5 Sword of Smiting with real money from player B. Player C kills player A in-game and takes the sword. Is player C a real-world thief? Having gained an item worth real-world money, is he liable for tax on it? That's where the unknown is now, where we don't really know the rules, so that's what's interesting.
As for the HURD - again, it's been too long, and we've mostly lost interest. We have a kernel of our own, thanks.
Re:Oh joy (Score:5, Interesting)
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. Honestly, I'm surprised it took almost 36 hours for an article to get on Slashdot.
Re:Oh joy (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing interesting about this whole situation is the "news" coverage it is getting.
It might seem like some sort of big deal because so many people are involved, but this sort of thing is a core element for the higher level play of the game. Maybe if the game didn't focus on this aspect of the gameplay as one of its main selling points to get new players, this would be interesting. This is just a "water is wet" story.
The real headline could be about how one alliance managed to use sites like Slashdot to wave the flag that their rival's outposts are now conquerable. Going so far as to get pseudo news sites with large followings to function as a communications tool and a rallying cry for a virtual world battle is actually pretty interesting.
Re:It wasn't a 'spy'... (Score:1, Interesting)
You conveniently left off a few points
So yes, there are many different ways this plan could have gone cock-eyed or simply resulted in simple corp theft. To deny the magnitude of this accomplishment is foolish.
Speculation is rampant amongst BoB and BoB pets in order to save face. The truth is that the turncoat had access to BoB's secure IRC channel, BoB's ingame channels, and many other things that required different passwords, and he accessed them from a few different computers. If he had been away on military duty, there is no way in hell any of those would have been comprimised.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ex Eve Player here (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't play the game, but is what they did realistic within that universe?
I suppose a spy/saboteur/traitor is certainly possible, but in [alternate] reality could he have got away with what he did without putting himself physically at risk? Would not ships' crews, garrissons etc have some autonomous decision making such that thay might disobey strange orders?
Band of Brothers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
For them to remove us they will need to remove all of our moon mining and sovereignty towers. We have hundreds of capital ships and around 2k people waiting for the morons to come running into the chainsaw.
All of this is a pain, but sovereignty is already ticking to regain control. They have a little over two months to destroy us, before we get sovereignty three to re-acitvate our jammers, bridges and whatnot.
Considering we have war supplies and motivation, they will not be successful and their chest beating is simply propaganda.
In the last 24 hours almost all of BoB and their allies have fallen back to Delve to get ready for the fight. Before we mobilized they were tooting their horns about taking stations and anchoring pos's, but when push came to shove they didn't wish to engage.
This is not newsworthy, but a "Blue Falcon" act by a friend of BoB.
Random Observation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh joy (Score:4, Interesting)
Killing the Sleeper was the EQ equivalent.
a) It was supposed to be impossible by design.
1) It killed a fully geared toon in 10 seconds.
2) It had 2 billion hit points
3) If you did some kind of quest, it woke up, kicked every one's ass in the world and then left the game forever unbeaten.
b) It was beaten on a PVP server-- every server in the game was getting updates as it progressed.
1) They had to have security to fend off any griefers who would try to stop it.
2) They had to prevent anyone from completing the quest
3) They had a lineup of 30 warriors whose job was to step up, get aggro, die.
4) They had a support group big enough to raise those warriors, rebuff them, and get them back in rotation within 300 seconds.
5) It took some ungodly number of *hours* to do this. Every server was getting updates. "7:37pm, Sleeper at 93%" "10:05pm, Sleeper at 52%"
6) A bug or direct intervention by the Developers prevented them from winning the first attempt-- so they had to do it all, then remotivate everyone and do it again after the Devs got jumped on by all of EQ to give them a fair shot.
Still that was only about 600 people (with an audience of a few hundred thousand perhaps). The Eve thing sounds bigger.
Re:Hello from Meatspace! (Score:3, Interesting)
People are bitching up a storm about this, because it is basically an exploit of game mechanics. It takes you 24 hours to leave a corporation that you're in, it takes 24 hours for a vote and then 24 hours of notification before you can go to war, but you can apparently disband an entire alliance in an instant.
At the same time, one of the many sub-games in Eve is spying. A lot of people call it meta-gaming, in that a lot of it takes place outside the Eve client. It's a fact of life when playing the game, and to almost everyone it adds another whole element to the political structure.
Basically, Mittani is considered to be Eve's premier spy, and this just proves it. While not really an end-game move, since there is no end-game in Eve, it's about as close as you can get.
So really, this is the boldest use of in-game spy networks ever. People complain that it just took a disgruntled director to bring it down, but at the same time, consider this:
Mittani's spy network had enough knowledge of the upper echelons of BoB's structure to know exactly *who* to contact. If they had just made a blanket offer to BoB's leaders, they would have been discovered and failed. But they didn't, they knew who their targets were, they identified the weakest link, and went after it.
That's no simple task. So while it's weak that a game mechanic allowed this to happen, it's also a really impressive feat. I can't settle on one side or the other.
(And also, for some context, a Goonswarm director defected last week as well, stealing piles of assets as well as a Titan, and a coupel of weeks before that another Goonswarm director was contacted and defected in a very similar manner, but in that case they only gave up sovereignty of a single solar system, not an entire alliance's holdings)