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The Deadly Dollar of Eve Online
The Escapist this week talks griefing and griefers. One of their features delves into the down and dirty economic wars in Eve Online. From the article: "Having transferred the money and placed their trust in these virtual business proposals, the investors realized that they had been duped, but could do nothing to rescue their lost capital. The scam tolled 480 million ISK (EVE's currency), which is almost $1,000 in meatspace money."
Okay, I can't read the article because of a work firewall. However, as a long time Eve player, I know a lot of the major stories that have come out of the game. It sounds like there are two different stories mixed in here. The first, is the long and complicated infiltration/theft/assassination job done by the Guiding Hand Social club. IIRC this is fairly recent. The other story is from way back when the game was new, and a guy conned people into giving him isk to joint buy a battleship blueprint. Once he had finished his scam, the guy transferred all the isk to a noob, and quit the game.
IIRC, The Guiding Hand Social Club did no such thing after they completed that contract. I could be wrong though.
There are some things that are incorrect. The actual amount stolen was some 30 billion in assets. This has an aprox. 'ebay' worth of $16,000, thats with 3 0s. The character was not deleted. It ws that players main character, and they continue to use it, as a member of GHSC to this day. Other points of intrest: The CEO of UQS was killed in a ship that is rare and wirth a couple billion by someone in one of 2 exsisting Imperial Apocalypse class battleships, worth at least 10 billion. To those commenting on the Game, its jsut a game. Ther are ways to make sure this doesn't happen, UQS didn't use them,a nd they paid the price. They do still exsist and have mostly recovered. You can check out peoples backgrounds. If they are new characters, you don't trust them, tahts all. I've been playing for 2.5 years, and I haven't seen many people complain. Its jsut not a fuzzy 0 risk for your reward game like WoW or something is all. Players deal with it. And there are reprocussions to people who do things to you. Merc corps, assassins, bounties, war declarations. All sorts of things.
The "Great Scam" was pretty much entirely fictional, an entertaining story written and inspired by a much more simple scam where someone got investments, paid 50% on top back for a while and then ran off with all the money once he got some publicity and massive investments.
Quote from thread: "Haha, oh Nightfreeze. You wonderful "goon", people still think your piece is real."
The stuff about the Ubiqua Seraph "job" is for the most part true, apart from a couple of minor points, such as the article writer overestimating the rarity of Mirial's Apocalypse Navy Issue (about 2 billion worth), the Apocalypse Imperial Issue used to destroy it is indeed a unique item in the game, only two of which still exist, and no more of which will be released according to the devs (estimated value 15-25 billion isk).
GH-SC's Press Release on the EVE forums at the time; http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topi c&threadID=172529
The heist and assassination were extensively covered by PCGamer UK in the september edition and have been all over the news ever since, here's a link to online scans of the article:
http://eve.klaki.net/heist/
I'm pretty sure that'll stand up to being slashdotted ;p
PS. I'm the CEO of GH-SC.
Err reposted, because I'm a dumbass, can previous post be deleted or something ? :/
Guiding Hand Social Club are great roleplayers (particularly Istvaan Shogaatsu), but the story is always blown out of all proportion. Ubiqua Seraph (UQS) was not a particularly rich corp before the robbery, in fact it was quite poor compared to my former corp (Jericho Fraction, one of the most famous corps in EVE) who were well of by EVE standards but not rich. And the robbery only got corporate assets, the wealth of the players in most corps far out strips that of the corp itself. The worst thing was the loss of limited edition items (such as Mirials battleship) and some Tech 2 blue prints originals (Which are generally lots free money through building T2 ships).
And in reality it only set the corp back a few months. We are happily functioning now just as well as before the robbery. And as Guiding Hand's original statements indicated that they believed it would be a mortal blow (they specialise in griefing corps out of existence), we are quite happy to flaunt our recovery to them. I would also note that the amount lost was high for a theft, but was about average for the amount of ISK damage a good merc corp can cause through combat.
Guiding Hand are great roleplayers, and good at what they do. But they are terrible braggarts.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
This scam was fairly elaborate, true, but it's not the biggest heist ever pulled off en eve, not by a long shot. The guiding hand social club once infiltrated one of the most powerful corporations in the game, Ubiqua Seraph, in order to carry out a 1 billion ISK assasination contract. It took them a year to gain access to almost all of the corp's resources. When all was said and done, they took off with resources valued at 30 billion isk, at the time nearly $15,000 dollars worth. The entire writeup can be found here:
http://www.mmodig.com/?p=155
I want the fire back.