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."

Comments

Re:Original

[C0rinthian]

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.

Clarification

[Silver Night]

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.

Re:Clarification

[Silver Night]

Sorry, slight error, UQS did you the methods, tehre is jsut no way to deal with that commited an infiltrator. But people that commited are not the norm. There are ways to prevent theft though, usually. The UQS thing had a high ranking member of the alliance pulling it off, and they manipulated the entire bunch into doing what they wanted so tehy could strike.

Not the biggest eve scam ever

[Daikiki]

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