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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, 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.
It's a bit more than that. With sovereignty, you lose a large chunk of your internal economy and logistics. A lot of that will not have to be re-acquired, it will have to be rebuilt, from the ground up.
The reason BoB was able to hold on its central Delve systems was that sovereign systems are easy to defend. You have cynos, you have jumpbridges, you have reserves of capitals and super-capitals ready to reinforce. And it helped that Delve was a very rich sector, making it a perfect logistics base.
Those advantages are gone. They have to be rebuilt - and most ennemy corps will not stand idle while BoB regroup. Look at the influence map: BoB has started to reassert sovereignty in pieces, but there's already huge chunks of territory carved. Getting them back... is going to take months. Or a year. Or two.
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
The whole region is already seeing everyone and their mothers moving in to loot and pillage. More than just a strategic loss, they now have to deal with a large number of enemies and random neutrals coming to play in their space.
Also, the Band of Brothers name was claimed by the Goons, so they can't reform under it.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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?
I think the /. i grew up with is dead. This is a huge political upheaval in a Virtual World. The old /. would lap up the meta-game consequences. The old /. would wax lyrical about the shifting social paradigms that would make this a headline. The old /. would figure out how to get the premium client running on a toaster.
The new /. is like a youtube comments page, nothing but vitriol and hate, smart-arse comments by half-wits.
I cite the Boron article yesterday, about 4 million "jokes" using variations on "Boring". I mean...COME ON! People had to then ask for clarification, in the old days people would have searched 1st, asked later. Not now, now its all hate and entitlement culture. Worst of all, no one even knows what the HURD is anymore.
Goodbye /.
billy pilgrim *has* become unstuck in time!
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
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"
It's not 'screwing you over' when I blow up your ACU in Supreme Commander. Nor is it griefing to try and trash your mass economy. The control perspective is unique - you're a 'unit' with a possibility to become a commander at various tactical levels, based on how good you are at it, and how well you can 'lead'.
That's why I like EVE.
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.
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 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.
>> here's really no other game with the complexity and depth of EVE.
Except "Go".
A minute to learn.
A _lifetime_ to master.
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?
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."
EvE has a certain elitist air about it. Losing hurts, as you said. It takes days, if not weeks, to recover from a decisive defeat. Running EvE corporations isn't just running a clan, where you slap together a homepage and organize a raid or two per week. Planning in EvE means that you have your next few weeks pretty much laid down instead of considering that you may have time for some raid in a few days.
That's the biggest load of bull. Yes, you can play that way, but there's tons of players that just log in for a few hours to have a bit of fun before going off to the in-laws.
And yes, I am CEO of a corporation and executor of an alliance.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Probably the old /. is dead. However EVE is amazing game with social aspects unlike any other MMO on the market and has had fascinating scandals in the past. Unlike other MMO's where the big news is expansions driven by the DEVs, EVE's content aside from the world and game mechanics is driven by the players. What you are reading about is some of that drama/content.
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.
In Eve guilds and alliances are like corporations, complete with stocks. This was like a hostile takeover, with the victor liquidating BoB's assets.
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?
You never heard how Nero clicked as Rome.exe crashed?