Slashdot Mirror
Massive EVE Online Alliance Disbanded
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)."
Wow, some people must be really heavily into that gamespace. It always amazes me to see articles where nothing in the summary connects to the real world at all.
Bruce Perens.
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"
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You know, I fully respect your right not to care about this news, because it has no affect on you. Sort of like how I don't really care about who is the mayor of Palm Springs or whether Grandville High School won the big football game last night, but like it or not, EVE Online has an active playerbase all around the world, and they're the types of people who read Slashdot. If you played EVE, which I understand you don't, you'd understand that this news is epic. In the scope of the game, it's akin to the fall of the Soviet Union. (Two polarized superpowers, and one of them falls.)
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.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Those 2000+ people signed up for a game where alliances battle rivals through various methods. This didn't impact their hobby, this IS their hobby. What they signed up to is a game where this sort of thing not only can happen, but happens pretty often. If this is the first time something like this happened with an alliance this large, great, they got the high score in their game.
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.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
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.
And then later
I have come the conclusion that the people the poster was complaining about and the poster are one and the same.
Apparently these people post ironic messages on Slashdot after their hobby has been impacted.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
One EvE ISK is worth more than one Zimbabwe dollar.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.