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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)."
In other news, I just killed Revolver Ocelot in MGS. It was a really tough fight but I managed to pull it out. Can I get my own Slashdot article too?
Wow, this is quite the news. Still though it's all metagame stuff. They will be disbanded for how ever long it takes to reform the alliance. Disbanded game mechanics wise doesn't mean they are out of touch and shooting at each other. They lose sovereignty and some other stuff but in the end they will likely get it back unless goonswarm and friends had a major offensive planned for this occasion.
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.
God have mercy on our souls.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
GoonSwarm basically had this PR coup handed to them on a silver platter, they had done nothing themselves to make this happen.
What is known to have happened is that a player with full director access to the BoB holding corporation, Tinfoil, defected and asked GoonSwarm if they wanted full director access. They obviously replied in the positive, and eventually realized they now had access to the proverbial nuke button on their sworn enemies.
Speculation is rampant in the EvE community, though hard facts are hard to come by. Suggestions include that either this is a case of a hacked account, as the owner was supposedly on some form of military duty when this happened a few days ago. Another, less vocal, minority considers this to be a possible case of someone 'cracking' psychologically, possibly due to the player's military background.
Also, some people feel this event may be due to broken game mechanics, as it seem odd you can just nuke a large alliance into bedrock with a few mouse clicks and 2 minutes of work. Usually it takes either a director vote, or at least a 24 hour grace period, to perform drastic changes to corp policies and organization.
Summary: Not a spy, not GoonSwarm's work. Just a single unhappy defector undoing 4 years of work by some 3000 players in a few seconds.
Disclaimer: I play EvE Online, but am not a member of any of the major alliances in the game.
This whole incident has nothing to do with Goonswarm infiltrating BoB with spies.
The person responsible was "just" a disgruntled BNC director that wanted to go out with a huge bang and GoonsFleet (The Mittani, to be precise) just gave him advice on how to maximize the damage he'd inflict on his way out.
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 was explained...
The article also says
I play games for fun, not to be screwed over by other players, and people wonder why EVE doesn't interest me enough...
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?
Wow, people wonder that?
That's amazing.
I can just picture them gathered around the water cooler, chatting.
One of them says, "You know, I wonder why EVE doesn't interest Larry enough.".
Another one replies, "Yes, I was discussing this with my inflatable girlfriend last night, and both of us were wondering why EVE doesn't interest Larry enough.".
And then a third person says, "Maybe it's because he plays games for fun, not to be screwed over by other players."
Yes, I can imagine people wondering why EVE doesn't interest you enough.
People who have even less of a life than people who take EVE seriously enough to submit lame articles about it to Slashdot.
Or Slashdot editors who post them.
Or people who anonymously comment about them.
Or respond to anonymous comments about them.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Is the 0.0 experiment, travel log of a noob taking off for the wild 0.0 space http://00experiment.blogspot.com/
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"
Actually, I think it would be tamer. _All_ that a guild on WoW has is a few items in the guild banks. There is no equivalent of "sovereignty" or any holdings, etc.
I've actually been in 2 WoW guilds which split, exploded or imploded when half a dozen characters reached level 60 (it was the top back then), and greed kicked in. As in, "OMG, my preciouss epic stuff is all that matters, let's kick out everyone who doesn't/can't grind me my preciouss epic gear." People who had founded that guild got kicked out because they couldn't grind some instance every fucking day.
(Sometimes I wonder if games actually help make people psychopaths after all, or they were psychopaths to start with. Because that level of lack of empathy and judging other people only by how they fit towards gaining your personal status symbols is either psychopathy or an amazing virtual-world simulation thereof. If the impersonality of being behind a screen that makes some people give that little a shit about others, or it's just the medium where they can drop the mask and act as they really are? But I digress.)
Big fucking deal. Most of the affected people just formed another guild which was aimed at casual play and where "epic" was officially a forbidden word. Life went on like before.
Adding guild vaults didn't have changed all that much, I think. Most of the equipment there is at most blue quality (_very_ few people donate purple stuff), the funds can be recovered in a couple of days of grinding daily quests, and... um, actually there's nothing else. There is no estate to lose or anything.
The summary makes it at least sound like it's a much bigger problem for BoB on Eve.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Clearly you are not a gaming nerd
Everyone is acting like this spy has done a horrible thing. I say what they did was neither good nor bad.
It was just playing the game!
BoB had apparently stalled. They had become complacent and just had way too much stuff. So now they are forced to play the game again to try to regain their ground.
It's amazing how much this is like real life, with each side hating the other and thinking the other is wrong to the point that they do things that -could- be considered 'evil'. At least, if it wasn't a game.
I broke my MMO addiction years ago, so I can see more of this than the people in it. I understand the addictiveness, the possessiveness... The pain from having things taken that you think are rightfully yours.
But I also see that it's just a game, and games are to have fun, not to 'win'. Anybody that joined BoB because they wanted to be on the winning side joined for the wrong reason. They're now learning a valuable lesson.
As an aside, I still yearn to play a couple of the games I used to be addicted to, but I realize I'll only have fun for a week or 2, and then I'll just be wasting my money again. So I don't go back. It really is much like a physical addiction in that sense. Thankfully, it's much easier to break again if you slip.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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.
indeed it will... as BoB and basically become invulnerable in their core space - loosing sov breaks that
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Disclaimer: I am not a member of Goonswarm, but I live in 0.0 and am in an alliance that is part of their coalition
BOB should have been disbanded by CCP back when they were caught red handed with CCP Devs in their leadership handing them stuff like candy (the infamous T20 scandal). As has been proven by information "liberated" from their message boards, BOB leadership was WELL aware of what was going on.
Also, BOB was the king of metagaming, account hacking, etc, and to see them fall as a result of it is deserved.
Corporatism != Free Market
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.
that is empire building
>> here's really no other game with the complexity and depth of EVE.
Except "Go".
A minute to learn.
A _lifetime_ to master.
That can be attributed to the fact that it is easier to spy and steal to defeat your enemies in EVE than it is to do it the honourable way due to how strong defenses can be made for the space you hold compared to the options your enemies have to attack. The alliance in question were able to defend their home region from many times their own numbers due to the advantages of having the defense systems like Cyno Jammers and being able to move fleets about Jump Bridge networks. Now these have been taken away for at least four weeks the game will become more about spaceships and less about metagaming. For the time being at least.
Uh, perhaps you can help me? I'm looking for a love-potion aerosol, that I can spray on a certain Penthouse Pet, to obta
Space combat, Empire building, social engineering, people griefing, making idiots suffer, etc. EVE is really a great game.
Some of the "real" news is pretty hilarious though:
Source: Reuters
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
What part of empire building do you not understand?
Well... I meant MMO ;) (Yes, I've played Go as well)
Oh, dear, I hadn't realized that empires have been undone by a few mouse clicks. Indeed, in real life, all it takes is one lieutenant to get the keys to the briefcase with the button, and suddenly everyone follows his orders without question.
Eve-Radio.com did an interview with the respective alliance ceo's of the now disbanded "Banded of Brothers" who I am member of and The Mittani of Goonfleet http://funkybacon.eve-radio.com/dianabolic.mp3 http://funkybacon.eve-radio.com/mittani.mp3 Both interviews offer some insight into the whole story, even if know nothing about eve there is some insight into the mechanics of what happened.
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.
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
Sounds vaguely reminiscent of the double-crosses that would happen in TradeWars 2002. Granted, your BBS'ing community was much smaller, but I wager that TW2002 might be more fun still than EVE Online.
Go Text! It's Best!
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Every one of these stories I've seen regarding "big deals" in Eve has reeked of bad game mechanics. This is no exception and the parent articulates why.
If you were able to do shit like this in any other game, people would cry foul. But in Eve it is considered "oh so realistic and cool player-driven action!!111"
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
For most members of BoB, the game isn't ruined. There's been a dramatic shift in the landscape, but it won't impact their daily lives unless they want it to (i.e., by going to Delve and fighting for it). For people who aren't in Bob or Goonswarm, there's virtually no change at all.
At the corporate politics level, this is a gigantic setback, but those people play the metagame, and just had the equivalent of their cherished Titan blown up. A big setback, but nothing game ending, and indeed, the fact that something like this can happen is exactly why those intense, high level metagamers play it.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
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?
I don't know about that. I don't play EvE, I've never played EvE (nor any other MMO for that matter), and I've never even seen EvE, outside of a few screenshots on stories like this. But, it is still fascinating to me how a virtual world can create its own narrative like this. It illustrates the increasing complexity in online interaction and how seriously people take their online activities.
... I'd argue, yes.
If nothing else, it's interesting because the immersion in online worlds has a very rapid upward tragectory. As a reader of Vinge, Stephenson, etc I am interested and I think those that stopped to think about the future implications of this would probably be more interested then they appear to be. If this is where we're at now, where will we be in 10 to 20 years when graphics and inputdev vastly better than what they are now?
News for nerds... I think this is indisputable - stuff that matters
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
It wasn't a hacked account. It was a coup-de-tat. It is part of the intended game mechanics, and thus within the rules.
The reason people don't want to play eve is that it doesn't have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff. This is apparent by the number of people that don't understand that the game is really this big. It isn't just a space ship sim. Its also a massive real time strategy game, with actual people controlling each unit on the field(at the level of the BoB/Goon war). It is also a market game where you can make billions buying and selling stuff. Its a social game where your reputation really matters. The player that did the deed on BoB will never be trusted with any corporate leadership ever again in that game.
One thing to think about. The person who did this was a BoB player. If he was this bored and upset with the situation that BoB was in, then there were many others in BoB that were as well. Pulling the plug in affect shuffled the deck for the players and broke the stalemate. Most of them are actually happy about it and having fun again.
Now something awful will supplant bob as most dickish alliance. Nothing changes. I am loving to see bob fall, but nothings going to change.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
You never heard how Nero clicked as Rome.exe crashed?
What about "Go"? I've never been excited by its economics model. And Russian griefing is so much better than Japanese griefing.
This entire article is pointless. BoB will simply gain back whatever is needed to begin rebuilding itself from the army of corrupt CCP employed GMs who have their [b]own[/b] characters in a [i]"player ran" organization[/i]. The entire game is ripe with corruption from all angles and leaves little to no room for an honest player or group of players to get anywhere without direct GM assistance.
Well, what the spy destroyed wasn't the chain of command. Just as in real life, that's a social construct. All the member of the corporation are still where they are, with the same ships and standing orders, etc. The only difference is that the technical structure of the corporation has been severely disrupted. It's more like if someone had completely infiltrated the computer systems of a RL corporation and secretly emptied key bank accounts, sold tons of stock, published all IP and cryto keys, and blanked all corporate databases and backups. The physical buildings would still be there, the employees would still show up for work in the morning and look to their boss for direction, but with no payroll database and no corporate resources, things would fall apart pretty much instantly. While it might take more than a single click to orchestrate those things, the point is it could probably be done by one infiltrator, in a rapid, automated way, given enough access.
It wasn't a hacked account. It was a coup-de-tat. It is part of the intended game mechanics, and thus within the rules.
EVE Online: If you don't have guild drama, then you're not playing it right.
Really, though, as a non-eve player, does this not make you want to play the game? Everytime I hear about one of these stories I am tempted to boot up an account.
I'm happy to hear this. It's hard not to hear what goes on in that game, and over the years I got the impression that BoB was strangling the life out of the game. I hope this fosters in new era for people who enjoy this game.
As someone that doesn't play EVE this sounds incredible and makes me really want to play the game.
That players can have such an effect on a game, including as it relates to other people is completely shocking and intriguing to me. I have 0 interest in playing a game, especially an MMO, where things are regulated/scripted to prevent change.
Mitanni wasnt a spy he was a High End Director in the executor corp that controls the whole BoB alliance. He was tired of getting bullied and pushed around, so he did the next best thing and turned his back on the alliance and gave it to Goonswarm, they now own BoB. God I love this game, its gonna be a whole lot better with BoB gone :)
Eve
Months to learn
Impossible to master
try again
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I have heard of EVE before but didn't know what it was about. Just figured it was yet another fanstary MMORPG. Man, I wish I had discovered this game sooner.
Reading this article summary took me straight back to the good ole days, the early to mid 90s, when I was dialing up BBSs and playing Trade Wars 2002. In that game, you start out with a basic little merchant ship which you can use to trade between different starports to make money. There were a number of avenues you could take to advance in money and power in the game, limited only by your imagination, skill, and cunning. You could claim planets, buy starships, mine and fortify sectors, build ports, build 'citadels' on the planets to defend them, etc.
If you were playing against any sort of real competition, you were pretty much required to create or join a corporation so that you could have a hope of surviving and conquering your enemies. There is a real need for teamwork, but also real reasons to distrust teammates. Any member of your corporation could easily betray you and leave your corp in ruin, by claiming all your assets as his own then blowing up everyone's ships while you were out of the game. You could somewhat guard against this by keeping some hidden personal assets off in a corner somewhere, but of course this has trade-offs as well.
So the game consists of strategy, tactics, ship to ship combat, invasion, defense, economy and finance, politics, everything you can possibly imagine. Easy to learn, difficult to master, full of depth, exciting, and a hell of a lot of fun. It seems EVE is pretty much a modern version of this game.
For those of you saying that people will probably quit the game because of this recent development, you are wrong and you don't understand the game. If anything, this will reinvigorate everything. Now there are thousands of little guys flying around out there who suddenly see real opportunity to go out and seize control of something and gain some power. The BoB guys know that even if they lose everything, they can always build their empire back up, through great cunning, strategy, blood, sweat, and tears, and emerge even more glorious than ever. It's exciting.
(for those that play or have played eve you will understand)
OMFG ROTFFLMMFAO!!!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
YOU GOT OWNED!
(only played eve for three months, cool game, quit during the dev cheating scandal)
Awesome!
I was/am an EvE player (currently mostly just upping skills, lacking time). Basically this would have interested me about a decade ago. Today, I guess, I'm too old to care too much about online politics. I'm busy enough trying to keep politics out of my real life, when I come home and want to relax with a game, I don't want to do what I hate doing at work already.
But I'm pretty sure this could be very intersting for some people who want to engage in something like that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is actually a very interesting event. I wonder if the aftermath will mirror real world events where such a large vacuum was created after the fall of a superpower, or if BoB will simply be able to rebuild in a few months.
Since GoonSwarm is now supposedly a lone superpower, it will be interesting to see if they can destroy the remnants of BoB and any other opportunistic alliances.
If they complete the hegemony and essentially control the entire EVE universe, what will happen then? Will they all lose interest, will they subdivide into warring factions, or will they simply weep without any more worlds to conquer?
Eve is the worst game in the world because it brings out the worst in people.
On WOW there is a guild having the same name and same meaning "Band of Brothers" ...
We used to have a domain bobguildof as joke ; which was ran by the previous guildmaster ..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
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 got the impression that quite a few people were either signing up or returning because, well, the euthanasia of that massive organization breathed new life into the game.
It's like an in-character collapse of Rome in space or something. The sheer amount of disorder and fluidity that this set off provides all sorts of opportunity for players to do a variety of interesting things before the dust settles. I don't play Eve myself - MMOs give me soul cancer - but I tend to look over friends' shoulders a lot who do play this particular game, and the stuff going on in the last few days has gotten me closer to considering signing up than, well, pretty much anything else.
(Also, "Alliance" does not map to "Guild" in the WoW sense at all. You're underestimating the scope of the organization that got taken down, I think.)
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
you have 9 interest in playing a game and your reading the gaming section of /.?? doesn't really make sense..
but EVE is completely player driven.. which makes EVE different to carebear MMO like WOW..