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EVE Player Loses $1,200 Worth of Game Time In-Game
An anonymous reader writes "Massively.com has reported that an EVE Online player recently lost over $1,200 worth of in-game items during a pirate attack. The player in question was carrying 74 PLEX in their ship's cargo hold — in-game 'Pilot's License Extensions' that award 30 days of EVE Online time when used on your account. When the ship was blown up by another player, all 74 PLEX were destroyed in the resulting blast, costing $1,200 worth of damage, or over 6 years of EVE subscription time, however you prefer to count it. Ow."
...and nothing of value was lost.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Is there a reason an out of game object is stored within the game like this? Can you buy them in the game?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
hope that guy can shoot first....
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
...that it must be a slow news day.
The account wasn't attacked. It was an in-game happening that cost out-of-game money, apparently.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
This wasn't a hack. This was a legitimate in game activity (essentially just an in-game PvP attack) which caused the destruction of cargo worth real world money.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I thought Ultima Online was unforgiving back in the day...jeebus.
Living With a Nerd
6 years of someones life has just been gained?
I think with 'pirates' they meant the players in this virtual world that belong to some type of real 'pirate' faction intent on hijacking goods from other ships and destroying stuff for their own benefits. Kinda like having your base camp Zerg rushed in StarCraft.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It wasn't hacked. When they say pirate, they literally mean an in-game swashbuckling space privateer.
By making extensions like that items, EVE has made it possible that people could literally pay for nothing.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Oh my, this is fantastically hilarious. Doofus traveling alone with GInormously valuable cargo - dude, hire a serious escort! Pirates blow up ship and get nothing - maybe, next time, just go for a crazy ransom amount and you'd at least get something. Lose-lose for everyone except for ccp. Seriously, a kestrel solo in Jita? That's not safe with just crap for loot. I sure don't miss Eve, but I do miss stories about Eve like this.
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
Never keep all your... ...PLEX in one cargo hold ...Eggs in one basket
Don't spend real money on fake crap.
All your PLEX are belong to us.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
The account wasn't hacked. It's a game mechanic. It's a trade item that the user can either apply to their own account, sell, or receive goods in turn.
http://support.eveonline.com/Pages/KB/Article.aspx?id=495
I'll pay back Jabba with THIS shipment, I swear!!!
Wow, that seems pretty harsh. It's one thing to destroy in-game things that took time to build, and call that a loss of the real-world assets that you had to spend in order to build those objects. But to create a game such that your future assets are vulnerable to in-game attack is really too harsh. It's as though in Street Fighter II you could execute a special move that would decrement your opponents' Credits, instead of their health meter.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Well, as I read the story, the blowing up was a normal in-game action (with unforeseen consequences). No hacking, as far as I can see.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This must be what developers mean when they say pirates ruin gaming.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
massively is blocked where i'm at. Is there a link to the killmail?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
No money changed hands. Cops have no jurisdiction.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
They should made so the only way to lose it was trade or useing it for time this opens the door for the law to come in and for real world jails and courts for in game stuff.
Nothing here was done illegally. Odd design and user oversight combined to create the situation at hand. Read TFA.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
The summary spells out what a PLEX is, so I did not have to google PLEX. Geddit? Ha.
This may fail under them and the lost ones may have to be given back to him.
No. That is not something they should ever do.
This is not WoW.
This is not a game for pussies.
This is not a game for you to play so don't try to change it so it is.
This is a game where getting killed HURTS, especially if you've not used any of the mitigation methods and safe practices that you should have used.
The only reason I even started playing EVE was because its not a pussied out game where you basically do nothing but grind and even death has no real loss to it.
You do not want to die in EVE. You lose skills, you lose implants, you lose your usually rather expensive ship and you lose your cargo.
There are methods to avoid it:
Stay in more secure areas.
Travel in well armed groups.
Travel in a ship with protections against warp disruptors so you can always get the hell out of dodge when something bad happens.
DO NOT EVER USE AUTOPILOT TO TRAVEL BETWEEN STAR SYSTEMS as it INTENTIONALLY leaves you wide open for a large portion of the travel time.
Most of these methods mean you earn less money, but take less risk so you have to figure out the balance.
The fact that there is an actual cost to being killed makes not being killed worth something.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
A fool and his money are soon parted
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times:
First pillage, _then_ burn.
It wasn't a "pirate attack", it was a sanctioned war in a trade hub where hundreds of players are on at any time and it's difficult to spot war targets in local.
Also the PLEX cards survived, but to stop scavengers that are all over the trade hubs the wreck was immediately destroyed.
Quite the red-letter day.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The right headline for this article is, "CCP takes $1200 from subscriber."
I'm trying to imagine if Blizzard created a World of Warcraft monster that could eat your monthly subscription if it killed you. Players would be furious, and accuse Blizzard of stealing from them. By setting up the system so that PLEX can be destroyed, CCP is doing the same thing.
But in the cutthroat capitalism uber alles world of EVE, it's all part of the game.
This is just one isolated incident, but I assume ships carrying small quantities of PLEX get destroyed all the time. Can anyone estimate how much real money CCP earns from this?
CCP? ISK? PLEX? Can someone maybe translate this into English? Or at least give some sort of three line tutorial so those of us who've never ventured into the game can at least know what's going on. That article is clearly written for people who play the game regularly. If you want me to be indignant, angry, belligerent, uncaring, etc. about it I'd like to at least understand what's going on.
Help?
OK, no hack, just an "unfortunate in-game action." However, what is stopping the game designers from coding it so such valuable cargo has less chance of surviving an attack? In this case, the pirates saw the loot before they attacked, and hoped they could scoop it after destroying the cargo ship. What if the game was designed to trash the $$$ so it couldn't be recovered?
Did Wally just decide to "write himself a new minivan?"
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
I am the only one who thought that writing an article, and one of questionable news value for that matter, from the point of view of some one who has played that game for years was a bad idea?
How is "some guy does some thing, apparently, dumb in-game" news that is interesting or relevant to non-players of that game?
Yeah, I've got nothing...
... I failed to get the 1-up and go down the pipe at the beginning of level 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers. Every time I played it. Seriously... I thought it was impossible until I saw someone do it. How much is that worth?
It wasn't hacked, he was killed and the destruction of his ship resulted in the destruction of the PLEX items.
He wasn't hacked, he got blown the fuck up because he didn't have a good escort to protect him while carrying roughly 23.3 billion ISK. This is just part of the game.
As a note, GOOD income rate in safer areas with the right equipment and grinding your heart out can earn you about 10 million ISK an hour. Thats roughly 97 days of solid game play to accumulate enough ISK to buy the 74 PLEX he lost, assuming that the lost of those 74 PLEX doesn't effect the cost of PLEX in the game much. I haven't been playing long enough to know if that low of a number will actually effect the economy but I suspect it won't since they are easily replaced by just spending $15 for one on the website.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
This is one of the more condescending and snotty memes out there, like "FTFY" it exists only to mock. Basically it is saying "I militantly don't care about this, and neither should you." Value is a funny thing, by definition it means whatever you want it to mean. There is no 'value' outside of the human mind. In your own mind, you are the absolute master of value, you can place whatever valuation you like on anything you like. So, when you say "Nothing of value was lost" All you are saying is that nothing you value was lost. Which is likely just as true of, oh say, those floods in Pakistan, nothing you value was lost.
But obviously, these PLEX were valuable to quite a few people, not to mention a gaming company.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It is designed specially for people who love to make others miserable. It is a griefer's paradise. One of the main things would be the destructibility of so much in the game that takes so much time to get. You can lose nearly everything under the right circumstances. It would be like a single player game that goes and deletes your saves if you screw up. Also there's a real caste type system in that it takes real time to increase skills, as in you set the game to increase a skill and after a fixed amount of Earth time has passed it does. As such those that got in early have a permanent advantage.
It is a kind of game that most people would really hate, however it appeals to a small subset of gamers. Those that derive their pleasure from causing pain to others love it.
I can't explain why people like that kind of thing but there you go. For them, there is EVE. For everyone else, there is WoW :D.
Last night, players from Method Of Destruction corporation became the first to prove just how dangerous it can be to transport PLEX in a ship's cargo hold. After scanning the cargo of a lone Kestrel in Jita, "slickdog" and "Viktor Vegas" discovered that the ship was carrying a whopping 74 PLEX. Unfortunately for the trigger-happy duo, all 74 were destroyed when they blew the ship up.
Unfortunately? Really? OK maybe just a little but I really doubt that slickdog and Viktor Vegas are crying in their beers right now. I'd be more inclined to bet they've got sore cheeks from having huge, shit-eating grins plastered on their ugly, pirating, mugs. They may be a little disappointed they were not fortunate enough to get some of those PLEX back but it is almost certain that they're completely fucking ecstatic at the impotent, butthurt, rage that must be pouring unabated from the fool they ganked and cost over 1K USD.
I'm not sure what a titan costs in ISK now as I haven't played in well over a year but I'm thinking that the economic pain they just dished out is probably at least the equal of destroying one titan, if not more than one titan.
this opens the door for the law to come in and for real world jails and courts for in game stuff.
How? The fact that the guy paid for the cargo with real money doesn't change anything.
The rules of the game weren't even broken, let alone the law.
Seriously, he is an idiot for taking them out of station. EVE only a few weeks ago made the change to allow players to physically move the PLEX between stations, because previously they were treated as a special item, where-in you could only convert a ETC (Extended Time Card), into PLEX (extended pilot license or something like that) in permanent station (i.e. not player controlled, or destroyable by players or other actions), and you could not leave the station if you had the PLEX in your cargo hold. But, EVE really didn't want to have to have all that extra checks to inforce these things, and let everyone know they were taking away the checks against moving of PLEX between stations, but it was at the players own risk.
No one even needs to move the PLEX, you can use them from ANYWHERE (i.e. you do not have to be in the same station as the item, or even in the same region of space, to convert the PLEX into play time on your account). The person moving them was an idiot for doing so. The only reason to move them is so that they are closer to you so you can more easily sell them in the game for in-game money (which is also the main reason to convert them from an ETC to PLEX in the first place).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
... I'm out of milk. Maybe I'll have to ask mommy to get me some because I don't like touching the real world or going out of my basement for that matter :(
The guy was a leader of his alliance, he was investing the money in these items, in order to flip them. He left the station completely undefendable, with no way to hide, in a very weak ship. Thought is he was trying to push them to a different station to flip them for profit all at once. He has petitioned to have this reversed. They shouldn't/probably wont reverse it. He was trying to claim that the killers were exploiting the lag that was present, but he knew the risks when he undocked, or at least should of.
This guy did this in "empire space" which is supposed to be safe if you are not at war. However the two guys who got him, scanned his cargo, saw what he had, and suicide attacked him, because the amount of the cargo was worth getting blown up by the games AI (penalty for attacking in empire). If there fast enough, and his cargo had survived, they could of taken those PLEX's for themselves and sold them, or cashed them in for gametime.
Over the weekend a worse kill was made, to the tune of 4x the above amount. Becuase it wasn't PLEX though it probably wont appear on peoples radars.
Well, except for the guy carrying the PLEX in his ship. Typically you're only suppose to have those activated while you're docked safely at a station.
In essence the person carrying all these in open space circumvented the normal protections designed to keep you from losing the PLEX. That was the "hack" if you want to call it that.
The items destroyed, so called 'plex', are purchased with real money. A player may either trade in plex for game time or sell them to other players for game money. When selling plex it is advantageous to place the items on the market near likely buyers. This creates incentive to move the items around as cargo in ships.
Ships can be attacked by other players in Eve. If the victim happens to be carrying a few grand worth of plex then so be it; they are forfeit. No hacking involved.
Until recently (1-2 months approximately) it was impossible to move plex around as cargo. Plex where tied to the station in which they where created. This was done precisely to protect naive players loses of plex to PvP. That restriction was lifted because protecting players from their own mistakes is counter to CCP philosophy. That change made this story inevitable.
Something to note: cargo randomly survives ship destruction. I believe the odds are 50/50. Poor pirates; they've gotten nothing but a shocking "killmail." The victim character will probably not be able to resume whatever scheme he had in mind; many pirates will monitor him from now on. Stalking mechanics are deliberately provided for this purpose in Eve.
Eve is harsh.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The rules changed recently, and is/was wrong to begin with. You can not, nor could you ever convert a time card into PLEX outside of a station. However, the rules recently changed so that you can now put a PLEX into a cargohold and leave the station with it, but you are an idiot if you do, as this guy just found out. You can still activate a PLEX that you own FROM ANYWHERE IN GAME. You do NOT need to be in the same station as the item! You can also create a sale/auction contract on a PLEX FROM ANYWHERE IN THE GAME (not from the station you are located), so again, no reason to ever move a PLEX. Keep it in a permanent station. I can't see any reason at all to move them. Maybe if you are dedicated to playing in Wormhole space where there are not space stations (unless you built one), and don't want to spend the whole 5 minutes it takes to scan down a wormhole exit (not like you don't already have 5 or 10 already known to you since you are living in there to begin with), and don't want to exit/re-enter for some stupid reason...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The article is blocked for me, but how much ISK does this convert to? Last I remember one PLEX was something like 300million ISK?
No odd design. It was user idiocy that caused this. Everyone who plays the game knows that you don't need to move PLEX to use or sell them. CCP (the EVE developers) didn't want to continue to have the stress on their servers for constantly checking a ship's cargo when it left station to see if there was a PLEX card contained in the hold and keep the ship from departing from station. They put up HUGE WARNINGS all over the place that the game rules were no longer restricting PLEX to only stay in station and were going to treat them like any other item in the game, asside from the fact that you could still convert them to game play time from anywhere in the game (i.e. you didn't need to be at the same location as the item, like you would with anything else).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
You'd think in the fantasy future someone would have invented the credit card and the bank account.
Charlie Stross wrote an excellent novel, Halting State, which revolves around a criminal investigation of an in-game robbery of a bank in the game. Headlines like this seem to make that sort of situation more and more plausible. It makes me worry if some of Stross's other novels might happen too. Considering that The Atrocity Archives revolves around using math to accidentally summon Cthulhu and other nameless horrors, and some of his other works focus on really nasty AIs arising from bad-Singularities, I certainly hope not.
They should made so the only way to lose it was trade or useing it for time this opens the door for the law to come in and for real world jails and courts for in game stuff.
No money changed hands. No real, physical items were lost.
Somebody originally purchased a game time card. They redeemed this card for a couple in-game PLEXes. At this point they basically have no monetary value. You can redeem them for a couple months of playtime, but you can't turn them back into cash.
As far as any police are concerned, those game time cards have been spent/redeemed. They no longer exist.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
The IRS does not think that way!
Why was the pillock bothering to haul Plexs around? The price (I know as I just picked up a couple) is pretty much the same in most of empire space, and our bit of 0.0 even had some around the right price...
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
The guy was in a dangerous area of space.
With $!200 worth of items
In a tier 1 ship (Kestrel) that I got in my first day of playing. It simply can not be made safe enough to carry that kind of loot or safe in that area really.
He was stupid.
He got what he deserved.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It would sounds like a scam in most other settings...
You pay for 6 years of golf club membership, but if you lose a game with your membership card on you, your card will be canceled with no refund.
Not that I ever played the game or know its lingo, but why would anyone link account subscription onto in-game items that can be destroyed in the course of the game?
Then again, maybe they are trying to be a casino... you lose your chips and you can gtfo.
Are you kidding, I played Eve for a while and grinding was pretty much ALL there was to do. You either mine, trade, or fight pirates. All of those are just grinds, and that's pretty much all there is to the game (unless something has changed since I played). It's not like there was a storyline or interesting sidequests to pursue. It was mine, trade, kill pirates--over and over. Every now and then some corps would fight it out over some assets they had acquired by mining, trading, and killing pirates. But even that was very rare, and pretty tedious. And, as soon as it was over, it was back to mine, trade, and killing pirates to replace the lost ships.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The point is to be condescending. What the grandparent is saying basically is "EVE is a stupid game and you waste your time playing it."
I think they would rather have the 20+ billion ISK that they could have sold that cargo for, but sure i bet they are satisfied that they ruined someones day. I know i would be.
Money does not have to change hands for police to get involved. For example, police could get involved in a harassment charge where all harassing was done in-game and possibly in-character.
I think things like "destruction of property" or "theft of time"-like charge would not likely ever happen due to events that happened in a game, but you never know. American society is increasingly litigious and prosecutorial, and if the cops are out to get you, they will get you. Just look at the charges levied against Lori Drew. She was prosecuted using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for accessing Myspace against its terms of service agreement (in order to harass another user.) Five years ago, I would have laughed if someone had suggested that sort of situation to me.
This is not a game for pussies.
This is not a game for you to play so don't try to change it so it is.
People keep writing this. Let me get this straight. EVE is not a game for pussies. So it's a game for toughguys? Given the choice between categorizing players of a sci-fi MMO as toughguys or pussies, I'm forced to go with pussies. You're playing an MMO for crying out loud, you're not engaging in street fighting.
I think the term you EVE toughguys are looking for is "casual player" not "pussy". But whatever makes you feel tough about playing a SCI-FI MMO. From what I hear, EVE is for pussies and UO or Lineage are for toughguys. You see what I did there?
Did he pay with them using real money?
He could have bought them with ISK in game just as easy.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The restrictions placed on the PLEX item were recently lifted and so they are now treated like any other in-game item; you can transport them to other stations to be used elsewhere, for example - nullsec. There was no hack involved.
you cant take a SHIP out of dock with a plex in the hold, they are station only items. guys full of shit.
Sounds familiar. Bond movie plot?
This is sort of like robbing Fort Knox with a nuclear weapon.
The idea isn't so much to take the loot, but to destroy it and in the process make your OWN all that more valuable.
If Viktor and slickdog are PLEX dealers, this might actually work in their favor. Well...judging by their mugshots, they probably just blew up the most money they will ever see.
Or...maybe slick and vik are CCP employees with a specific task. Gives the term "corporate raiders" a whole new meaning.
Ah! The wonders of Alternate Universes! The Drama!
let me tell you about them...
silly apsbergers' obsessing about playing spaceman...
This is why most games provide a reset/extra lives/resurrection feature where you don't lose all of you equipment, skills, or attributes when you die.
Diablo II multiplayer had a hardcore mode where once you died you could no longer continue with that character. I played it and got to level 30 where I lagged in a dungeon. When my connection came back I was dead. I never played hardcore after that.
The point is that a lot of time is wasted when a game doesn't have decent reset features. In this case, 6 years.
what is this I don't even
CCP didn't 'take' anything from him!
He WILLINGLY put it in a situation where he KNEW that they might be lost! Essentially, he gambled.... and lost!
EVE is, to the horror of many people used to WoW's way of packing their players in wool and protecting them against the horrible, HORRIBLE chance of losing their precious internet belongings, a game in which you can actually lose whatever you undock from stations in and with.
Your ships, and their cargo, including PLEX if you're so stupid as to undock with them, can be destroyed, and they don't respawn with you in your cloning station.
EVE is a game for people who accept risk... Which is why you'll find so many EVE players has a huge disdain for WoW.
Also note that this loss was nothing special... Any time a player lose one of the biggest ships in the game, a titan, (s)he usually lose 3-5x as much value as this player. There's no difference between losing a 22m ship, and losing 22m worth of PLEX. In-game, they're worth the same, and one can be traded for the other
You should have tried leaving safe empire space. Lots of stuff happening around the universe away from the main mission hubs.
this is how eve has always worked. your losses are losses that's your death pently. you ship blows up its gone granted some insurance payout to help you rebuild if you insured it and if totally screwed the noob ship is givin back to you. the player knew this and moving plex even if eve now allows it is simply a stupid move. i bet his corp is pissed wile the guys they where waring with are having a party.
I wonder... If it's a virtual action that causes real world damage... Does that make this a criminal offense that is legally prosecutable? And since it's about 1k in damage, does that break it past petty larceny into full-blown grand theft? I can see the lawyers gathering now, and subpoenas for the perpetrators' real names and contact information being drafted now...
It could be that EVE did it. They are the pirates. Or at least the little bird that told them about this (a parrot?).
It seems like there have been lots of incidents of Eve developers playing the game in various alliances. It'd be interesting if an Eve developer destroyed a ship that was carrying PLEX, since they'd essentially be directly increasing their subscriber income.
Except you can carry them on a ship just fine. No hack involved.
Interesting post.
I had an idea in 1995 about a game. Once I saw Quake with its true 3D, and gib-then-spawn gameplay, I knew one day it could be possible.
And that vision was a game similar to Battlefield etc, but when you got killed your game license terminated. You had to go to the store and purchase another copy.
I know its sounds grossly unfeasible, but I always wondered if a tiny market would stand in the store, holding the box, and think "Holy crap, thats too badass. I am gonna try it."
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
And a way to keep the details in sync across many, many light years ...
Welcome to the troubles that face sea captains in real life, and space captains in every science fiction setting.
The only reason I even started playing EVE was because its not a pussied out game where you basically do nothing but grind and even death has no real loss to it.
Indeed.
Games these days seem to be getting easier, simpler, less challenging.
I remember getting killed in EverQuest and being welcomed back to my previous level because I'd lost enough XP to de-level. And then I had to run back, naked, to recover my corpse.
These days getting killed is barely even a speedbump. If you get killed in WoW it'll cost you some in-game gold, and nothing else. No time lost. No gear lost. No real pain at all. Hardly any real reason to avoid dying. Hell, folks will even use the death mechanics to travel through areas that would normally be impassable. Can you imagine stripping off your armor and dying repeatedly just to make it to the next town in EverQuest? You'd be back down to level 1 by the time you made it there.
EVE not only makes it hurt to get killed again... But gives you plenty of tools to avoid that fate. If you die, it really is your own damn fault. And this is coming from someone who has died plenty of times.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Your post outlines the reason I stopped playing EVE. Is that it is anarchy. Even staying and mining in 1.0 space, one can get ganked by a suicide mob using clones or expendable toons. There is even a specific day for killing mining vessels. I like the mining side but there is no reason to pursue it if half the mineral, and it is the most profitable half, are only available in lowsec. I like the industrial side, but there is no reason to pursue it if the market price for an item is less than the cost of the minerals that go in to it, let alone the cost of production. I liked the idea of industrial and business sides of the game, but they have just become a way to get gear for PVP. Mining ships are under armed and under armored, unless one wants to give over most of the mining capabilities. Freighters are completely unarmed in a universe with no law enforcement. By the way, have you ever looked into the transportation trade side of the game? I don't think I saw a single transportation job that wasn't a setup to be ganked so one would lose both one's deposit, one's freight, and one's freighter. CCP touts the multifaceted nature of the game, but it has turned into nothing but PVP.
Leave him alone, you're going to make him cry.
1. He could have contracted the item to be couriered and put a collateral of isk that was worth more than what the item was worth. If the courier loses it he loses nothing.
2. He couriered something while he was at war with another corporation.
3. He did not set up an instant warp bookmark for exiting the station.
4. He did not put a cloak on this ship.
5. He was in Jita. The biggest trade hub in the game. He did not have to pick up plex there.
6. There is no six (Monty Python and Eve University reference).
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
I wonder if any of his insurance packages would cover it?
maybe he can hire some lawyers and sue?
Or he might be able to get a grant from one of the many Obama economic stimulus funds.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
This is such a non-story. Who cares about this?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
are belong to /dev/null
That's the beauty of EVE. No pampering, no hand holding.
It was his own decision to leave the station with such a valuable gargo.
Devs made the right choise to let players do stupid things if they so choose. There's enough other games for stupid players to choose from, EVE doesn't need to be one.
It is SO totally AWESOME that the karma of warfare is massive loss! Yay!
All Rights Reserve Without Prejudice, Angela Kahealani. All information + transactions nonnegotiable + private.
They can sell PLEX to their player base, and then other players blow it up, and CCP never has to deliver on the subscription time it sold.
Money for nothing, and the chicks are free.
If it's not a game for pussies, then I guess it must a game for dicks or assholes... which one are you?
This comment does not speak well of EVE players.
Better yet, make it a machine. Put money into the machine. Play it until you run out of lives. Do you want to continue? Put more money into the machine.
Now we just need to come up with a name for this device...
So ... how does one travel? How should you travel between systems without the autopilot? I played a demo of EVE a long time back, and never went anywhere dangerous, but it didn't really seem terribly intuitive as far as how safe travel was intended to work. The things I read online about creating in-system waypoints were so much busywork for "make me a random waypoint" that it quickly grew both frustrating and unwieldy.
EVE seems (to me) like the MMO-equivalent of "I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game": I'd love to be bad-ass at it, but every interaction I've ever had with it has conveyed a deep-seated malevolence (disdain?) that the game has for me as a player. It hates you, and so does everyone else in the game. Yikes. Kudos if you like it, but it's not for me.
So it's a game for toughguys?
No. Internet tough guys. The sexually-frustrated, obese, pasty nerds who come home after working their menial IT job and think they are being hardcore by having macros mine and fight for them while munching on Cheetos in their parent's basement.
Outside of Slashdot, I don't know anybody who has ever played EVE, and only one person I know has actually heard of it. If this article isn't the definition of 'not news', then nothing is.
Plus, if you're stupid enough to invest hundreds of dollars of real money into a game, you shouldn't whine when it goes poof. That money is pretty much forfeit when you turn it into bits on a server anyway.
make you pay tax for that in game cash!
Sorry dude, take a look at the killmail. The PLEX was not dropped when the ship was popped.
I'm aware of at least one player who lost a titan (a very expensive ship) that was funded almost entirely through the sale of pilot license extensions (PLEX). Currently a $34.95 USD PLEX (two pack) will net you about 600 million ISK (the EVE currency). A titan will run you somewhere around 80 billion ISK. Do the math on that. There are also rumors that entire in-game alliances have been funded through the sale of PLEX (or game time cards which existed for a while before PLEX), which could represent tens of thousands of dollars.
Its actually bullshit, you cant actually take those ingame subscriptions out of the station. so you cant lose them to pirate attack... there are also very strict rules about scamming and destruction of those in game subs.
I'd say it is a game where death has consequences (in time and effort). I'm not some elite PVP type player in the game, and I've often been what people in game would term a "carebear", but the danger is what makes the game thrilling (in those moments, it can be boring like any MMO as well). You don't have to be a griefer or pirate type to enjoy that they are in the game trying to screw you any way they can. The portion of industry people in the game who want to do away with danger by having CCP change the game... I really wonder why they joined the game in the 1st place. It's not like they weren't told what they were getting into. I'd also like to say it isn't a matter of more or less hardcore, or that one type of game is better than another. It's just what style of game different people prefer. If death has little consequence in WoW, and that is part of what most of the player base really enjoys about it I don't think PVPers should try to change WoW into a different game at the expense of the majority of the player base. They should find a game that fits their play style more. Likewise with Eve... screwing people over is a cornerstone of the whole thing, and protecting people from that will change the game in a way that I believe (maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so) most of the player base would be dissatisfied with.
Doritos.
PLEX was introduced by CCP to counter macro farmers funding large RMT organisations, the ones you can find by googling "eve isk". PLEX is legal within the game, whereas ISK bought from the many, many dubious webites that offer cheap ISK is not. However, the return on a PLEX is significantly lower than buying the ISK off the internet. For example, 2x 30 day PLEX costs you around $35. This will give you around 560 million in game ISK. Buying ISK online, however, will get you around 1 billion in game ISK for around $30 according to google. The larger RMT organisations are also pretty good about keeping the entire real transaction out of the game (no in game communication), and legal within the game - you "sell" them junk items for enormously inflated prices in game, which is next to impossible to tell apart from the regular, legal in game scamming that goes on all the time. They also apparently have numerous in game methods of laundering in game farmed ISK, so as to make it difficult to track back to the original RMT'er.
Of course, if you do get caught by CCP, they'll ban you from their game, but there's not much else they can do.
Additionally, Eve and CCP have the source of some pretty big scandals recently, with many of the older players quitting the game because CCP refuses to commit to fixing any of the large number of bugs and imbalances. The biggest bug is extreme lag in systems where many of the older players in big alliances play, and the player rage has made a large number of player feel that CCP is wasting their subscription money to develop new features (a la SWG:NGE) that the players do not want at the cost of ignoring more pressing problems.
I love how the rabid EVE fanbois tout the game as being this ultra-hardcore experience that's "not a intended for pussies".
I've played this game before, starting back during the original client days (when you could fit heavy missile launchers on a Kestrel). I've tried picking it up again a few times as the game has developed and every time I've returned hoping to find some redeeming aspect of the game. And I've always been disappointed. EVE was, is, and probably always will be a perpetual grind-fest that is completely and utterly devoid of any entertaining content. Unless, of course, your idea of entertaining content is spending the first 3 months of your game life learning your "learning skills" and parking in front of a Veldspar asteroid in 1.0 space to mine the cheapest, most worthless mineral in the game to scrape together enough cash to buy the next skill or stupid looking ship.
The only reason EVE Online's death penalty has any meaning is because every step you take forward in the game is an agonizing, soul draining, punishing experience. Getting killed and losing that expensive cargo, implant, or those skill points that you went through five keyboards, three mice, one monitor, and a trip to the ER for a concussion received from bashing your head into your desk in frustration to get isn't "hardcore". EVE is little more than a 3D accelerated spreadsheet program (EVE = Excel with Visual Effects). The first poster for this story was right in saying that nothing of value was lost.
CCP already released the perfect response to this incident back in October of last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgvM7av1o1Q (warning: NSFW).
This is the kind of world you enter when you sign up for an account in Eve. It's the second most popular MMORPG behind WoW and there's a reason it's as brutal and unforgiving as it is.
See, when you have to actually risk something that means something to you (even if only the product resulting from your time and effort), you get an adrenaline rush you'll never experience playing safe games where you're protected. You learn to play smart and you learn to accept loss or you go back to WoW. NEVER fly what you cannot afford to lose. Most Eve Online pilots learn this lesson within weeks, if not days.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Thanks for the insight~ your comment almost makes me want to start playing this game. Then the reality of the whole subscription thing comes into play and it a total buzz kill though :\
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
This is not a game for pussies.... a pussied out game
Wow... You sure must hate pussy. Fortunately, being a hardcore EVE player, you'll never have to worry about encountering it.
So you're telling me that your time spent in EVE is ever so much more important then my time spent in WoW? Aren't they both just a waste of time?
And surprise, newer games are getting more players. You don't have to have a terminal case of testosterone poisoning to play anymore.
$47 million, using RIAA methods.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
so if I lose a bunch of money in online poker, I can sue to get my money back?
nobody broke the rules of the game they were playing. buddy went "all in" with a pair of deuces and someone called his bluff. Best he can do is claim that eve is a form of online gambling and try to get it banned in his area. That is if gambling is illegal where he lives.
Ha ha!
wanting to play a game that doesn't "hurt" you doesn't make you a "pussy" it makes you a well adjusted person.
wanting to play a game that DOES hurt you, makes you a masochist.
personally I'll just stick to starcraft. I can play a game and within about 20 minutes I either have won or lost. And it doesn't give people who've played longer any advantage other than the skills they've leaned. To me, games where players who've invested more time get an advantage over people just starting are for pussies. The truly hardcore are willing to leave everything up to their own skills.
If I started playing eve right now you'd be sure to completely own me. But only because you've done the grind long enough to increment some numbers in a database in Iceland.
So here goes: From various resellers you can purchase what is known as a GTC (game time code) - this is a code much like a CD-key that you can apply to your account to give you 60 days of playtime. This code costs 35USD. In addition to the above option of converting it [i]STRAIGHT INTO GAME TIME[/i], you can also decide, if you so wish, to redeem the code in-game, using up the code and turning into two in-game items known as PLEX. (short for Pilot's Licence EXtension). Each of these in-game items can be redeemed by you or [i]any other player[/i] to add 30 days of real world play time to your account. You would do this in situations where either: -You have 2 or more accounts and wanted to split the 60 days between them. You can trade the PLEX directly from one account to the other and redeem one per account, giving 30 extra days to each account, or -You wish to trade them in-game so that you can make some ISK (in-game currency). While not a HUGE amount of ISK, it is certainly a substantial amount. However, it is one of the quirks of EVE that these items, as well as pretty much anything else, is sold by players to other players - that is, the price of said items is set based on a real economy, from human to human. Once the item is in-game, as above, then as long as the game mechanics are not exploited in any way or a bug is not exploited in any way, they are free game for anyone to take, were they presented with the opportunity to do so. Until a few weeks ago, this would not have been possible as there was a special condition on these items that meant that once you turned the GTC into a PLEX, you were unable to take them away from the station that the item was redeemed at. Now, bearing in mind that in space, in EVE, anyone could decide to shoot you at any time, though based n the particular system in question there may well be repercussions from local police forces that would come and blow your own ship up, this particular situation was fair game. There were no hacks. There were no exploits. The system in question has over time developed to be the main trade hub in-game - most trading is done here. If you want something, you will find it on sale here. Quite simply the person undocked, carrying 74 of these items, 2 of which equate to 35USD were you to buy them from scratch, and because of the mechanics of the game, he was [i]fair game[/i] for anyone that decided they wanted to shoot him. In the system in question, the aggressor would have had his/her ship blown up, but to cause such damage, that is quite frankly a small price to pay. Now you could go "this person has just lost $1200 of money, he should sue!" But you must remember that this situation came about through one of two scenarios: 1) The player or he and his friends/corpmates paid RL monies for a number of GTC's, but instead of converting said codes straight into game time, elected to try and make an in-game profit by selling these codes as in-game items, where said monies could be used to fund anything their alliance wished. 2) The player or he and his friends/corpmates paid in-game monies for a large number of PLEXes, and then decided that they could resell them in a different area in-game thereby making them a large in-game profit. In BOTH scenarios, the player is made fully aware that by playing the game and just by not being in a station they are potentially vulnerable to attack. The stupidity is made more apparent by the fact that the corp/alliance that the victim was in was at war with another corporation, (essentially the aggressors pay the police to look the other way for a week at a time so that they can attack in "secure" areas without having their own ships blown up by the authorities), and he was going into space in the [i]busiest system in-game[/i]. Because you at no point [i]had to[/i] convert the GTC's into in-game items, as well as at no point ever having to [i]put yourself in a situation where you could be at risk[/i] before you could convert said codes/items into real game time, there is no case to answer. Something that I have also n
It would appear that Slashdot hates paragraphs. Otherwise the above would be WAY better formatted. It even had newlines and everything! Apologies for offending any potential readers with such a wall of text...
As there are no actual full English words in TFA, I'll take your word for it, but then it begs the question as to exactly what the fsck kind of moron spends $1300 on a video game subscription.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Try using for your HTML next time, rather than []
Well no shit, that's why I wrote "hack" in quotes and said "if you want to call it that."
Reading comprehension, get some.
So there's no secure bank at all in Eve? Ships are pretty much the place to store your items?
they do this every year, so they can get some news.
I bet the VB macros weren't written by pussies either!
You'd have to keep it fairly cheap to start though. Maybe charge like a quarter for a handful of lives?
And if you widen the machine, you could have two, even four people at a time playing cooperatively or competitively, each popping in additional money in order to assist or best their peers...
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
So if I spent $100,000 with CCP to buy... whatever amount of PLEX that is, how much ISK would I have?
What's to stop me from just going into EVE with that value of ISK (seriously, I'm curious--what would that be about for market value?) and just dominating the world fiscally? If I was insane and had money to burn I could buy my own Galactic Empire, right?
Dude, where's my packet?
Now see, you've gone and commented about something you know absolutely nothing about.
The game mechanics of Eve provide little inherent benefit to playing "hardcore" versus casually. If you started a week ago and I started 5 years ago, depending on the ships we're flying and how they're equipped, you could easily destroy me without me being able to do a thing about it. And I'm not talking about lottery odds either. A week is more than enough time to get a T1 battlecruiser up and running and fully equipped without any help. I can be in a T2 stealth bomber, interceptor, etc equipped with the best stuff money can buy. You happen across me, stick a point on me, web me, and go to town on me, and I'm dead inside a minute.
If you're talking about a totally even one-on-one match with identical ships and similar equipment, the real life skill and experience of the players will make more a difference than most of the stuff the longer-playing person could train or buy.
If you want to comment about what's fair, who gets an advantage, and other such hypotheticals, maybe you should have at least a sliver of knowledge about the game first. If you just don't know anything about it, then don't type up some ridiculous, factually bankrupt post and hit the 'submit' button.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Imaginary property is imaginary.
I do feel sorry for their loss, but in the end, it's all in the game.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
What absurd drivel.
Couple weekends ago, I made enough ISK to buy a half dozen fully equipped battleships while riding roller coasters and not even thinking about the game. How does one manage such amazing feats, you ask all doe-eyed? My gf used my laptop for about 30 mins on the way to the theme park and put up some orders for me.
Eve is a sandbox. If you're grinding day-in and day-out trying to scrape out a living, it's because you haven't learned how to play smartly. Only thing I see anyone experience doing in terms of grinding would be missions for standing. Even then, if you have a corp or alliance buddy who enjoys doing the missions, you can simply fleet up with them wherever you are and enjoy the standing increases while you do what you enjoy.
It isn't CCP's fault that in all your attempts to play Eve, you never found a way to do what you enjoy in the game. CCP just provides the venue; it's up to you to figure out what you want to do and how to go about doing it. If you can't find anything you enjoy doing or can't figure out how to get to where you can, quit and go do something else. Eve's the second largest MMORPG behind WoW. It'll be just fine without you.
Everyone starts out not quite sure what to do or how to do it. Eve isn't geared toward making it simple for you to pick up and go, but it is geared toward making it possible for clever players to quickly advance. It took me a couple months of doing dull stuff to figure out what I was doing wrong and how to get into what I really enjoyed doing. Frankly, if you're finding yourself stuck grinding in Eve, you're doing in wrong. Learn to do it right or quit and go play something else. But don't pretend there must be something wrong with the game design simply because you couldn't figure it out.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Now go outside and play like i did when i was a kid!
....i've never seen so many ignorant comments on EVE as i have today.
People love EVE because it's one hugeass PVP arena. If you're controlling a system in EVE, it's yours. It's not an irrelevant instanced copy on your local server, it's actually something worth fighting for (some more, some less). And you own that system because you've fought for it. Not in a game mechanic-ish way where your clan has scored the highest amount of points or something, but because you tell other people to gtfo or you'll shoot them (actually, just shoot them). The game is the other players and what you do with them. Anything goes.
The biggest fail in EVE is the absolute lack of documentation. This is also what makes it really frustratring for new players to enjoy PVP. Timers, Sec standing, (module) penalty stacking. It's quite hard to figure out without googling forums or using something like EVEHQ.
I'd wage and say it's an even bigger problem than waiting for skills to train. A good EVE player can be usefull right away with a new account, but a new player with year old account can still suck.
Are you stupid or something? Why do you think "hack" is written in quotes?
And surprise, newer games are getting more players.
Which isn't really relevant.
Different strokes for different folks and all that.
I enjoy a game where I feel like there's a real challenge. I enjoy the cutthroat environment that EVE provides. Others don't.
I don't have a problem with that.
I'm not going to suggest that all games should be built like EVE. I wish other folks (not necessarily you) would stop suggesting that all games should be built like WoW.
You don't have to have a terminal case of testosterone poisoning to play anymore.
What does testosterone have to do with anything?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Seriously, a kestrel solo in Jita?
That's why i call BS on this. No player I know would risk such a ginormous loot on a T1 frig, no cloak, no backup, no insta-warp, no nada, on possibly the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in the entire cluster?.
The cynic in me could say this is a sort of publicity stunt/political smokescreen from CCP to deflect attention from that recent PR bomb.
For those unfamiliar with it: CCP years ago, after *another* PR snafu, designated a group of player-elected players to form a committee, called the "council of stellar management" (CSM) to allow players to elevate grievances and petitions to CCP's top brass, CCP supposedly even bestowing on them "shareholder" power or something of the sort (Pure BS if you ask me). Couple of weeks ago(last week even?), CCP essentially slipped that they didn't give a rat's ass about the CSM...
wanting to play a game that doesn't "hurt" you doesn't make you a "pussy" it makes you a well adjusted person.
I never claimed that there was anything wrong with playing a game that doesn't hurt you. I never called anyone a pussy. I lamented the lack of challenge in modern games, nothing more.
wanting to play a game that DOES hurt you, makes you a masochist.
Trust me, playing EVE does not make you a masochist. There is absolutely nothing masochistic about internet space ships.
personally I'll just stick to starcraft. I can play a game and within about 20 minutes I either have won or lost.
I also enjoy quick and simple games... Although I've never been much of a Starcraft fan. I do enjoy Gratuitous Space Battles though.
And it doesn't give people who've played longer any advantage other than the skills they've leaned.
And neither does EVE, but you wouldn't know that, since you don't play it.
To me, games where players who've invested more time get an advantage over people just starting are for pussies. The truly hardcore are willing to leave everything up to their own skills.
If I started playing eve right now you'd be sure to completely own me. But only because you've done the grind long enough to increment some numbers in a database in Iceland.
This is one of the least-accurate things folks think they understand about EVE.
There is a finite set of skills that is actually beneficial at any given point in time. If I'm flying around in my frigate blasting people in PvP, there's only so many skills I can use. All that time I spent training battleships? Useless. All that time I spent learning how to mine? Useless. All those trade skills? Useless. Only that small set of skills that relate directly to flying and fighting in a frigate are useful.
You can max-out a finite set of skills pretty quickly. You can be damn good at flying and fighting in a frigate within a few weeks. And you'll do just as good as somebody who's been playing for years (aside from the real-world knowledge that they've gained).
Playing for years opens up more possibilities. Maybe you can fly a frigate, or a cruiser, or a battleship, or a titan... So you have more things to pick from. But once you're actually flying something specific, all those other skills become meaningless.
And somebody who's only been playing for a couple months, but they've focused on frigate skills, can kick your ass just fine.
EVE's mechanics actually make the whole "hardcore" versus "casual" discussion largely irrelevant.
In most MMOGs you only progress while you're logged in. So somebody who is willing to log in and play for 12 hours a day has an advantage over someone who only plays 1 hour a day.
In EVE, training happens in real time. If the two of us start a skill training at the same time, and then you play for 12 hours a day and I only play for 1 hour a day, we'll both finish training that skill at the same time (assuming our stats are the same). You can even earn ISK while you're offline.
So, unlike most MMOGs out there, I don't have to log in every single day to make progress.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
meaning 1 Million dollars worth of money ends up in CCP's pockets without anyone gaining anything out of it.
In the real world... that's UNHEARD-OF!
*koff* Microsoft Enron Goldman-Sachs Madoff etc etc etc etc
Probably because you're an idiot who doesn't realize that this isn't anywhere close to any definition of "hack", unless yours happens to be "undocking". Because that's all the player had to do to get his shit broken, no circumventing of anything.
For an accurate sim, there has to be a tangible penalty for performing the wrong thing. If that is "You die, lose a bunch of work, cannot get any of it back, and may even give something to the guy killing you." It triggers a very real adrenal response to get the fuck out, or fuck their shit up. And no, people who can't deal with that should go play Star Trek, aka "click+space" as even SWG would be too much for them.
And yes, I'm a fucking elitist Meridian 59 player. That game was good because of the reasons you won't play eve. It made you not want to die. It made it more REAL than any fucking crappy plotline did. If I died in that game I was out 6-8 hours of work, sometimes 10x that if I was on a fully built character. You should see the aversion tactics used in that game to avoid death. But it is all fight or flight, you don't really have option to stick around and take the death, dealing out as much as you possibly can before (you knowing full well) get killed. Half the time you saw an enemy the same moment he was disabling your ability to run (blind, hold, etc.) And you had to stand there and lose 6-8 hours of 'hard work' or try and escape somehow. It somewhat limits your options, but it also causes a boost in adrenaline you don't get from other games.
Let me translate what hes saying for you:
Casual Player = Wife and kid, plays a few hours a week. Very capable of being hardcore.
Pussy = Someone who gives up at eve.
Eve is hardcore. You will have an adreneline rush the first time you need to fight for your life. You will feel the fight or flight response and you will get a kick from it. The kick is why people play eve. Real pvp, real consequences. fo reals. You dont have to be a tough guy to get in a fight, or avoid one.
Picture fight club, in space....
and mining.
-
I'm a bit baffled by this news.... Last time I checked I found this about PLEX on the official website:
30 Day Concord Pilot License Extensions
What is a Pilot License Extension and how does it work?
What is PLEX?
A Pilot License Extension (PLEX) is an item that adds 30 days of game time to your EVE Online account. It can be converted from any game time code and, like any other item, it can be traded on the EVE market. Please keep in mind that PLEX cannot be moved between stations.
So explain to me, how did this happen again?
Click, click, click. I'm a big man now.
Dude, if you want to play a game that isn't for pussies, go play Rugby. get multiple black belts, or take up light-pack hiking. All you're doing is clicking a mouse and typing some keys.
Actually, you raise a very interesting point. As soon as you can convert real money to not just game time, but chips(PLEX) and then gamble them using odds(which depend on your ship and stats), you have a casino... and not just any casino, a casino where you can only spend your winning on other games in it and never cash out. Made more interesting by the fact that other players can gamble without any chips and yet take all of yours, like in this story... It's like a medieval arena in a bad fantasy novel - somebody challenges you to a fight and you can't refuse it... and if you lose, you lose everything, if you win, you get nothing, just more battles until you eventually lose.
In real life, ship the sea-lanes off Somalia and you don't just risk some money (or virtual currency); you risk your own LIFE! A real-time pirate can take your life, and rape your wife.
If your lucks fully down the plumbing he may just rape YOU (as well) before he takes your life!
Its not just $1200 you'd have lost, but your intestinal fortitude, and your continuing existence!
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Your post outlines the reason I stopped playing EVE. Is that it is anarchy. Even staying and mining in 1.0 space, one can get ganked by a suicide mob using clones or expendable toons.
Sir, I only suicide gank on my main. It's more exciting that way! Also, high sec. space is not safe space.
There is even a specific day for killing mining vessels.
"Hulkageddon" is an in-game event organised by, funded by and supported by players. It's exactly the sort of emergent gameplay that EVE's all about. A properly-run mining operation in 1.0 with decent fit barges and support ships is 100% safe from any suicide gankers. Mining in deep alliance 0.0 is also pretty much completely safe from suicide gankers. If you lose ships to Hulkageddon, you should (a) pay better attention to the news and (b) make some friends.
I like the mining side but there is no reason to pursue it if half the mineral, and it is the most profitable half, are only available in lowsec.
Join a corp, move to 0.0, profit! Look ma, no "???"!
I like the industrial side, but there is no reason to pursue it if the market price for an item is less than the cost of the minerals that go in to it, let alone the cost of production.
Train reprocessing skills, by under-priced ships, reprocess them, sell materials, profit! Look, still no "???"!
I liked the idea of industrial and business sides of the game, but they have just become a way to get gear for PVP. Mining ships are under armed and under armored, unless one wants to give over most of the mining capabilities.
...join a corp, use an Orca, watch local. Or mine in a Rokh. It's a trade-off: greater income, at the expense of greater vulnerability. If you choose to fly a ship you can't afford to lose, then it's your fault when you inevitably lose it.
Freighters are completely unarmed in a universe with no law enforcement.
There is law enforcement; it's called CONCORD. Choose your mode of transport appropriately to your cargo. If you need to transport high-value items in high sec, use a collateralised courier contract or use the corp hangar on an Orca. If you need to transport bulk low-value items in high sec, use a freighter -- because it has ludicrous HP, suicide gankers won't attack it if they can't get enough profit to cover the ships they'll lose. If you need to transport items in low sec or 0.0, use a blockade runner and a scout (avoid transporting bulk low-value stuff around there, it's not worth it)! Since the insurance nerf, the likelihood of being suicided has gone way down, if you take basic precautions and don't AFK.
By the way, have you ever looked into the transportation trade side of the game? I don't think I saw a single transportation job that wasn't a setup to be ganked so one would lose both one's deposit, one's freight, and one's freighter.
"If it looks too good to be true, it probably is." Corps like Red Frog Freight are doing really well out of bulk transport, and they're always recruiting freighter pilots, so it clearly can be done.
CCP touts the multifaceted nature of the game, but it has turned into nothing but PVP.
When you click "Undock" you're consenting to PvP. It's what EVE's about. Even so, unless you do something blindingly stupid (like flying a cargo expanded cargo rigged officer fit Hulk during Hulkageddon, or undocking in a cyno Kestrel with 74 PLEX in the hold while wardecced), then it's dead easy to avoid PvP, and you'll never lose something you can't easily replace.
Pirate Party UK
All negatives aside, it sounds like he learned a very expensive lesson. Or at least here's HOPING he learned a very expensive lesson. I once got scammed in Ultima Online in a way that I never saw it coming. Learned an important lesson that I never allowed to repeat itself. Almost quit the game that day, but then realized it was just a game, people can be crappy, and you just have to move on or let it consume you to death. At first, I thought the "pirate" attack in this story was piracy, as in someone using code to steal his stuff, but this was just a part of the game, so can't say I have a lot of compassion for the lesson that should be learned here.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
Wait a minute ...if I buy time to play this game of yours, and you put my gaming time on some card INSIDE the game, and someone steals it, I do not think I would play your game....what sort of stupid game is that anyways? I paid for time to play, I must have an account associated to this time I purchased, that would be like saying all your bank info for how much money is on your ATM card, so if someone steals your atm card, then they stole your money.
Eve creators must fix this and immediately associate any play time won within a game (that gives more time to play the game) to the actual account, and not the character in the game...so if something gets destroyed, the account still shows extra game time, seems pretty simple to me.
EVE is a game where player death in the game has consequences in the game. But it still up to the player how much consequences he wants to have. And you can't take risks if there are no consequences to match them. This in contrast to for example with WoW, where player death in the game basically has almost no consequences, so consequently, where's the real risk there? In this example, the victim didn't have to move those PLEX. He could not have undocked with them. In fact, he probably shouldn't have. He could have used other means of transporting them for example. But he didn't. He took a huge risk, and it didn't pay off for him, and that had consequences.
Now, if you don't want to make choices like that in your game, fine; play a game where they don't exist. Personally, I do like those type of things in the games I play. And that has nothing to do with griefing, or being a toughguy. I just find it more exiting. It maybe a game of hard knock lessons, but to me, that makes the experience of achieving things just more rewarding.
I do not know, maybe the OP has some sort of special keyboard - maybe it has spikes for keys, he has to take steroids just to get enough muscle strength to push the keys, his computer is powered by a treadmill that he runs on to play, or some other thing to make him a "tough guy".
Though I guess that would make him stupid instead of a tough guy.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
foreach(cargo_item) if item != PLEX & chance_50_percent put_in_wreck(item) else destroy(item)
Every destroyed PLEX means free money for them. ;)
it's a commonality among Eve players to consider themselves above the average "care bear", closer to the "elite" or "I IZ SO GOOD I AM 2 SEXY 4 MY SHIP" status. Hence the distinctive choice of "pussy" vs "casual player".
Whether the meme is acceptable or not, the meaning is pretty clear. The only thing of value was the $1,200 USD before it was spent on in-game PLEX. Once it was spent, it only has value to one person; the player that owns them. CCP, the company that develops and hosts EVE Online, didn't lose a dime... they got $1,200... see what they did there?
In that light, what OP says is true... anyone on /. could not care less about one gamer's loss. The rest of us haven't lost anything here, and what we have is a valuable lesson on how to handle virtual-world items that cost (but are not *worth*) real-world money. Something like, "Don't go all-in on a blind bluff."
But wait... there's more...
Let's say you go to a local Dave & Buster's (FYI: a prominent restaurant/bar/video-arcade chain) and load-up a card for the arcade with a thousand bucks. Nobody steals your card. Nobody "makes you lose" the card. During a game of Whack-A-Mole, you happen to drop it into the machine and it gets shredded. I don't think you'll get one lick of sympathy from the manager. He still gets to report your $1,000 as revenue.
So where's the evil here? It's in the way the gaming company continues to gain real-world revenue from a player's virtual losses... whether it's part of the game or not. Yes, it's the player's fault for making such a dumb move, but that money represents real-world efforts... this isn't Vegas we're talking about. It's a virtual world that people pay (often, hard-earned) money to enjoy.
The PLEX are meant to open the door to monetize additional subscription time within the game-world itself (I think there's an existential paradox there somewhere...) but does that mean that they are to be treated the same as "found", "harvested" or "quested" items? They weren't imagined-up as part of the world, they mean something real to each and every player that possesses them. They have worth, more-so than "monopoly money" and more-so than a virtual spaceship, even if there is no cash value.
With enough persuasion (and a quick look inside the Whack-A-Mole machine) it would be fair for management to provide another card loaded with the last-known amount. I think something like that should happen for this player in EO as well.
The entire PLEX idea is flawed... it shouldn't be represented as an actual in-game item. While it can be possible to barter subscription time (don't know *why* it should be possible, tho') it should be tied to a player's master account... not represented as a destructible, vulnerable game-world item.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
This isn't anywhere close to any definition of "hack", unless yours happens to be "undocking". Because that's all the player had to do to get his shit broken, no circumventing of anything. Writing skills, get some, fuckhead.
Not for pussies?
So you can go out, stake your own claim, and through your own skill and effort become successful?
Oops. No. Everything is controlled by cartels and entrenched organizations. You play by their rules or not at all if you want to "get ahead" It's a game for lairs, sycophants, and toadies. The game exists for it's existing entrenched population and thus it's growth is extremely limited. It exists the feed the egos of those at the top, and for those personalities that think they might get personal gain for submitting their will to powerful people.
The game is not for people with moral fiber. Frankly, we're glad you're trapped in that game and not out annoying us in others.
I'm pretty sure Excel auto saves -- at least my copy of Excel 2007 does every 10 minutes. So, if Satan was "well ahead", even if Jesus saved right before the power went out, his 5 minutes of extra data entry would not be enough to overcome his inefficiency and Satan would win.
I'd highly doubt he'd understand any of this. Nevermind the fact I thought the same thing you said when I heard it.
This is a perfect metaphor for what's happening to the United States.