Doubt Thou The Stars Are Fire

How PvP works:

Step 1: Global war between bitter enemies rages for years and years and years

dinc-noammo-ruinyourlife

Step 2: As part of that war, someone tries to join one of the warring parties, and after paying his entry fee is told “thanks, no thanks” (this being a common scam, since the side in question is, well, griefing the entire game as a hobby).

goonad

Step 3: Said someone says “No, wait, I’m actually an alt of one of the leaders of your enemy alliance. I can help you.“

haargoth

Step 4: Response to said someone: “Hmmmm…. You don’t say.“

mitanni

Step 5: Weltanschauung

mittanisendshisregardsat425

Step 6: Kriegsnachwirkung

swarm

Step 7: Ragnarok

step1

The day before…

step2

And the day after.

I’m sure there’s a few design, development, and community implications to be learned here. Just how much power do you want to give your players to screw each other over, anyway? Because with unlimited power comes unlimited hijinks.

Newer Comments →
  • http://lost-war.org Mist

    Like a hojillion people I know (myself included) reactivated just to see the hijinks first hand, so I imagine the implication learned from CCP’s perspective is hijinks = moneyhats. Doesn’t necessarily make it right, but it sure makes it funny.

  • Georgia

    BAHAHAHAHAHAHA… love it. I read about all this last night. Awesome!

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    This Eve thing has so much potential…

  • Random Poster

    My only problem with this (and kind of Eve as a whole) is there is no real repercussions to someone who does something like this. All the tools in the world to screw other players over but no way to in fact make those same people accountable.

    Maybe i’d “get” it if I every actually joined a player corp in Eve but since I don’t know anybody who plays the game and the rampant paranoia i’ve basically sat in the noob corp for the past 3 years off and on. But for some reason I just won’t cancel the game. I’ve done nothing but sit in a station for the last 6 months and train when I remember its time, pretty sure there was a month or so period where I forgot >.< (15m SP or so and doing nothing with them, go me).

  • http://www.crymore.de EpicSquirt

    Network of trust failed, simple as that.

    I’ve played EVE Online from beta 6 to early 2005. The first thing I did to earn money via PvP was to pay a real player to join a player corporation. He then revealed the positions of the players of the corporation for me and I went to take them out one by out. Eventually the members of that corporation started to leave the corporation, so I’ve made the deal with the CEO: I’ve sold the spy (revealed his identity).

    Later I’ve joined the Space Invaders, led by the famous Setec, who were the original pirates of EVE. We were into extortion, allowed players to keep their ships for a fee or bought the ships of the enemy players for cheap and sold them for market value. At some point we took part in the first power struggle in the universe (TTI + SPVD versus first Venal Alliance) which would have effects on the northern regions for years.

    Space Invaders were hated, loved and respected. We didn’t just go for the weak, we fought against superior odds, with one motto only: never break the word you’ve given.

    Evolution and friends (which became BoB later) were one of our arch enemies. SirMolle of BoB has been involved in many political maneuvers and twists, one shouldn’t have any sympathies with the falling empire. I know Evolution from day 1, I saw them and their allies running home like little girls against entities like m0o and the Forsaken Empire, then the meta gaming took control over EVE, the moon exploits made some parties way too rich and the whole player owned station stuff the game utterly boring (hello blob warfare).

    EVE without all the other ways to make PvP in the game would have been dead boring *and* if you pay attention, you will not get your ship blown up, you will not get scammed.

  • Merkwurdigliebe

    This is why all I did in my 2 years of EVE was mine ‘roids, jew in empire, and write lesbian fanfic.

  • Delmania

    What’s the problem here? This kind of stuff is what Eve’s designers aimed for when then built their game. Sure, people can grief and screw each other, but so long as the people know it can happen, and nothing but virtual stuff is hurt, who cares? If I remember correctly, Eve is the only MMO that has had consistent population growth, other than WoW, so they must be doing something people like.

  • Merkwurdigliebe

    True, this is what makes EVE great…that and the lesbian fanfic.

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    I played Eve in two separate spurts plus some beta time but it just never struck me as “my game”. If they had been marketing THIS, however, I might have stuck around. Being on the periphery of epic shenanigans could have been mighty fun.

  • Robin Kestrel

    Great example of what I envision when I think of player-generated content, and why it is even easier to do in a PvP game. BoB and Goonswarm essentially just released an expansion pack that required no additional effort from CCP. There was no need to give them scripting tools and have them write quests…the content arose organically from interactions built into the game mechanics.

  • David

    There has to be a rollback. Maybe not of the money and ships lost,but of the system sovereignty being lost, because that’s just an exploit of the game mechanics, not actual loss by BoB. I would be rightfully pissed if i was them, and i bet a lot of BoB’ers will quit.

  • Klaitu

    This really is the only reason to play EVE. One day you’re just minding your own business, then the next day one of the big players just disappears.. POOF!

    Personally, I think it’s awesome.

  • http://www.crymore.de EpicSquirt

    @David
    Do you know that exploit also means “heroic deed” :-) ? I despise both Goon and BoB (useless propaganda twats more or less), so this is like the ultimate outcome, now if some of EVE’s Russians would shut down Goon.

  • Arthur_Parker

    The war wouldn’t have dragged on for so long and provided so much content for the players if interactions had been limited to prevent griefing, spying, corp theft etc etc.

  • Jeremy Preacher

    I’m confused – why is this an “exploit”? I don’t play EVE at all, but from everything I’ve read, this sort of treachery is expected behavior. Is there a nuance I’m missing?

  • David

    Oh, i hate both Bob and the goons, they both are metagaming pricks. Didn’t some of BoB’s corps heavily exploit the POS issue that was uncovered a few months ago?

    But yes, I think this is an exploit of the game mechanics that any one director can arbitrarily disband a alliance spanning hundreds of worlds and trillians of ISK with just a few mouse clicks. Yes, the loss of the ships and the loss of the ISK from his corp should stay, but losing sov is a bit too much in my book.

    But i won’t cry if there is no rollback. ;)

  • http://keithneilson.co.uk Mandrill
  • Halibut Barn

    It’s a weakness in the organizational structure, but it was by-the-rules as they are and you respond to it by demanding that the structure be improved, not trying to pretend that it never happened in the first place. It’s not like it’s an exploit in the game’s engine that allows something that should be impossible by the world’s “physics”.

    Weaknesses are often found only when put to the test, and in a game that involves a lot of espionage, you shouldn’t send the message that finding weaknesses in your enemy will be rewarded by not being allowed to use them.

  • http://keithneilson.co.uk Mandrill

    oops seems like I snafu’d the html there, sorry.

  • David

    Mandrill :
    I’ve countered the “Waah its griefing, roll it back, fix it so it can’t happen.” argument over on Tobolds blog so I’m not going to do it again here.
    In brief though:
    @random poster: you’re wrong.
    @D-0ne: you are so right.
    @EpicSquirt: You’re right too, nice background story, maybe see you in space sometime and you can do me the honour of podding me

    If anything, this ultimately is the fault of CCP for bad design of the way alliances are managed. Any one director should not have the power to destroy the work of so many people for so many months and years with two mouse clicks. That’s bad game design. There was no fail safe, no 24 hour waiting period where the action of one rogue could be stopped.

    From a games perspective, this is fundamentally unfair to the players. Out of game spying, tricking and thieving is one thing, but this is quite another.

  • Ashendarei

    hrm, that articles seems more like good writing then good game content IMO.

    Player run content typically trends between “mountainous pile of shit” and “single flower in a septic tank”. While the article was good (albeit wordy) I wonder how much of the actual game is as epic as the article describes it to be.

  • http://lost-war.org Mist

    The funny thing is, this got me to resub for a month, despite EVE being about as fun as punching yourself in the privates. I never did understand this game.

  • http://emergentfuture.com Arrakiv

    I have a really hard time getting into EVE Online.

    This is distinctly not the reason why. Actually, I praise EVE for being different and allowing payers to do things like this. It isn’t for everyone – I couldn’t pull off something like this, I’d feel way, way too guilty – but there’s clearly enough people out there who do enjoy it.

    The only thing that really turns me off from EVE is the actual gameplay itself isn’t engaging enough (even though the overarching aspects of the game are), and the atmosphere is too glum for me.

  • Random Poster

    “But yes, I think this is an exploit of the game mechanics that any one director can arbitrarily disband a alliance spanning hundreds of worlds and trillians of ISK with just a few mouse clicks. Yes, the loss of the ships and the loss of the ISK from his corp should stay, but losing sov is a bit too much in my book”

    Thaqts not an exploit of game mechanics thats lack of adequate corp tools by CCP if that is all it takes. It is no different than say a Guild Leader in WoW saying screw you guys taking everything from the Guild Bank and disbanding the guild. Most MMO’s all have this same problem where eventually it comes down to one person and that one person can greatly screw over a bunch of others. The difference in this case is that in Eve once you get to the big corps you are talking hundreds of people.

  • http://ve3d.ign.com/ Apache

    I think all of these crazy stories is what makes EVE so compelling

  • Delmania

    To me, this is another example of why the concept of virtual property and tacking dollar amounts to in game items is just stupid, and why I don’t like the so-called pay2advance games. If you start tying together the virtual worlds in which you play with the real world in which you live, you’ve annihilated immersion. People are so hyped up on the whole time=money thing and keeping up with the Jonses they forget that these things are meant to be nonproductive entertainment.

  • http://www,damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Melissa Gira is starting a new weekly column for the SF Bay Guardian’s SexSf, and Eliza Gauger’s back at Dtoid. (And, hey, the Goons finally took over EVE. Nice.)

  • http://www,damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    The above quote from WarrenEllis.com.

  • Freakazoid

    EVE is a spectator MMO. It’s a lot funner to read about than to participate in. Really, there’s nothing about EVE that engages you unless you like mining or killing mobs all the time, except on the rare occasion you land a big victory like this one.

    I’ve always viewed the whole meta-gaming thing as a copout. Rather than code an engaging espionage system, it’s a lot easier to tell your players to pretend to be someone else, and to carry this beyond the game. Clearly, it’s worked out for the 10,000 or so players who participate, but I can’t help but wonder what kind of psychological problems they’re going to take from this. Some of those players must be paranoid as fuck.

  • http://www.sharingatwork.com Daniel J. Pritchett

    Perhaps guild disbandment should require multiple leaders to “turn the key” before the decision goes through, say one guild officer per twenty active guild members or something.

    The BoB story illustrates the obvious problems behind having a single person with the authority to disband the guild. A smaller guild (say 20 members) might be okay with one person being able to disband the guild but a larger guild obviously is not.

    Maybe CCP, Blizzard et al might want to force the involvement of game masters or CSRs in guild disbandments for cases when the cumulative hours played by guildies in the past month exceed a certain point.

  • Kemor

    While I am completely amazed at the level of sophistication EVE has attained as a possibly very realistic and human (yea, good and bad) science fiction world (with little help from the gods once in a while, CCP), there is one big flaw: It’s not a game anymore, it’s an extension of the real world’s market.

    How many so called spies received real money for their work?
    How many so called “operations” involved real money?
    How many so called “blue prints” were dealt for hard cash?
    Since when what you earn in real life should define your power in a game?

    Some might say that you have this in every MMO. True, but the items purchased then are there to enhanced your play experience, they do not define the core of it.

    I still remember when I was trying to play EVE as some “Space trucker” only to realize 3 weeks later that it wasn’t a game, it was real world chat and economics with a new graphic layer and no rules or laws and nothing to make anyone accountable for anything…Then I stopped playing :)

  • http://www,damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Tamir Lenk’s story on the official forums (Lum’s “You don’t say” link) is the most fun to read out of the whole fiasco.

    “ok, you’re cool, I won’t scam you, here’s your isk back. HOLY SHIT UR BOB hold on a sec afk”

  • http://goonfleet.com The Mittani

    Holy fuck, Warren Ellis gave us a shout-out.

    A++, would obliterate bob again~

  • http://www.crymore.de EpicSquirt

    @Kemor
    EVE is also a lot about real world money, yes, one of the reasons why I’ve quit. Technically you are able and ALLOWED (CCP provides the platform to do it) to buy game time cards for real world money and sell them in game for the game currency (ISK).

    So in addition to the zerg, which is accumulating resources faster (which is okay really, a bigger company has different possibilities), you can buy progress and power in the game for real world money. You could buy 10 game time cards for real money and sell them in game and buy services of other corporations to make the life miserable for someone or just use the ISK for recovering from your losses. CCP has de facto legalized gold selling if you want, but it’s going into their pockets.

    And then there are the players running 7 or more accounts on one machine doing power mining or running 3 accounts and missioning.

    The alts and additional accounts are the real problem. The game would be better off with 1 account per machine and one character per account. The conflicts would be harsher, as it would be harder to hide ones identity or pull such a stunt twice. Legalization of character selling has made the game less appealing for me too for me, it’s just not right to have new players sitting in a Mothership.

    As EVE is a class-less system I don’t see a real problem with 1 character per 1 account. If you want to change your career, you can do it, it just takes time.

    I loved the game and I am still proud of CCP that they’ve found a niche and grew from 3k players on one server daily in 2003 to 45k in 2009.

    Some design decisions should have been corrected though, to make the game even more unique.

  • http://www,damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    lol hi2u mittenz <3

  • Veritas Gax

    Pure awesome from an emergent gameplay standpoint. If a bunch of BoB players threaten to bail I wonder if they’ll cave and do a rollback / bailout.

    I knew those CCP guys were on to something with that free market economic simulation… I wonder if some of the players in this little drama aren’t rich New York investment bankers by day ;)

  • Nirgal

    @Mittani: How is the fuzzy part of your campaign going?

  • GreyPawn

    This is endemic of The Great Design Flaw of a fully realized PvP game. Shadowbane could not answer this question. EVE Online has managed, to its credit, to delay the question. Darkfall by my estimate will have 6-7 months, if a launch success, to *deal* with this question.

    That pesky question is, when your core mechanics are constructed in such a way as to permit the unfettered consolidation of power (numerically, economically, or otherwise), how do you keep the goal of high-level endgame from being “Force the enemy players to log off and never log back in.”?

    At this point, you are likely to see a wholesale diaspora of BoB, followed by an even greater power grab on the part of GoonFleet. BoB membership will decline, EVE will lose subscribers. Because to BoB corp members, what’s the point of logging in anymore? Revenge? The tides have turned, the song is sung. All they can hope for now is putting up a mild resistance in conquered territory, or wholesale joining previous allies.

    This same mechanic happened in Shadowbane. In effect, a single well-formed alliance could actually -win- the game for all intents and purposes by establishing a stranglehold on a given server. A secondary side effect of forced elimination is the stagnation that follows on a more macro level. If Goon has won, and this is well known, then what is the point in continuing to play? Or worse, what’s the point in trudging through the tutorial as a new player if endgame is a set of two options? A) Join GoonFleet. B) Leave the game disgusted and beaten.

    This is going to be intriguing to watch.

  • Boanerges

    Quite amusing drama. Always interesting to watch. That having been said…

    1. “Exploit” is in the eye of the MMO devs. Always has been. I call it the “Oh CRAP” clause. You always need to make sure that, if UNEXPECTED BAD THING X happens, you can go “Do over!”. Because, you know, you have THE POWER.

    2. I’d be leaning towards “design flaw” if I had to guess. I mean this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can test for in beta and it seems like the sort of thing you’d overlook in designing.

    The bottom line is that a LOT of people look like they got screwed by Disgruntled Guy X, who pulled the pin that had the label “DO NOT PULL”. I don’t envy CCP in their task ahead. If you revert, you deny the Goons their (silver platter?) victory plus days of playtime lost. If you don’t revert, you find that half your revenue is GONE because everything that kept those people in their world is also GONE. This is just like permadeath as far as EVE goes, right?

    In other news, I found this quote on the dev blog amusing

    We are proud that we are realistic and nice (or cool) enough to know that people have a life outside EVE (shocking, I know)

    Something tells me that the irony of this statement got driven home in a way heretofore unprecedented…

  • http://lost-war.org Mist

    BoB isn’t have their revenue. It’s like 400 people.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    GreyPawn :
    This is endemic of The Great Design Flaw of a fully realized PvP game. Shadowbane could not answer this question.

    Yeah, I dunno, in many ways this just seems like the first two months post-release of Shadowbane, just a lot more drawn out. The saving grace is that there are still a lot of people who like playing Eve, and now that the two major colossi have clashed and one emerged the victor by very anticlimactic means, there’s a lot of lull time left to gain a new foothold and perhaps do some things that are fun and interesting.

    And then the devs will manage to cock it up somehow, because this is CCP we’re talking about.

  • http://lost-war.org Mist

    @GreyPawn
    The whole “Goons won EVE” is a bit exaggerated. “It’s like saying Rick Astley won the internet.” They pulled off a good trick but they didn’t win anything, they don’t automatically get to claim all of Delve. They’re moving in their resources in a desperate bid to get a hold of Delve before someone else does, or before BoB gets it back. BoB might have lost sovereignty, but they still have all sorts of assets in or near the region.

    If anything, this should make CCP ask whether sovereignty was a good idea in the first place; this whole event broke up the stagnant warfare that was causing people to leave the game, and now people are interested again.

  • Vetarnias

    And to think I was considering picking up EVE at the time of the next expansion.

    It’s occurrences like that which always made wary of that game — the scamming, the spying, the rampant paranoia. From that first link: running the guy’s IP? Asking for his phone number? What does it matter where someone lives — or are these guys so paranoid that they’d turn down someone from, say, Juneau because one of the rival corp’s leaders is known to be from Alaska?

    Now, it is possible for one individual to wreck an entire organization almost overnight. The example of Barings Bank in the mid-1990′s comes to mind, so it’s possible to go to bed wealthy one night and be woken up by the sound of creditors banging on your door. What is more difficult to believe — and that’s the case with BoB — is when not only is your money gone, but that there’s not even a single trace of the company left. Stealing the money is one thing, but being able to disband an entire organization because one guy (out of how many?) decided to sabotage it, that should be impossible.

    Let BoB implode after much internal bloodletting, let the financial blow take its toll, but don’t just say the organization doesn’t exist anymore because one guy walked away with the keys.

    And CCP definitely needs to address a few important questions, the most crucial of these being: “What now?” If BoB doesn’t rise from its ashes, and that the Cult of Lowtax has indeed won the game, could it mean the beginning of the end of EVE, just before a major expansion? Any uberguild winning a game is bad enough, but here we’re talking about a group that notoriously exists only to grief other players.

    Because as a prospective new player I read this and wonder: What will my experience be in EVE? Will I be recruited by any corporation out there, or will they be so afraid that I might be a mole instead of a bona fide new player that they will leave me stranded on EVE’s version of docks? How much will I need to disclose about myself (phone number is definitely out of bounds) to participate in that aspect of the game? Will I be scammed in any attempt to join a corporation?

    On this last question, I can already predict the answer: If players can openly boast on the official forums of scamming, or trying to scam, other players with impunity, that means CCP is already turning a blind eye to this — that it’s seen as normal and accepted procedure, as it would seem to be with GoonSwarm.

    I’m not sure I fully understand the real money connection in this game (based on EpicSquirt’s post above), because I’m not sure how those game time cards are supposed to grant their bearer any sort of advantage, unless it has to do with this game being alt-ridden. However, if real money = in-game advantage, I have another equation to suggest: Widely discussed and openly accepted in-game scamming by players + company-facilitated gold selling = Time for the authorities in Iceland to start paying attention.

    Also, I don’t swallow the reasoning according to which you can avoid being scammed if you’re careful, and that therefore scamming isn’t that bad. The fact that three-card monte is so blatantly fraudulent that anyone with a brain the size of a plum wouldn’t fall for it doesn’t make it any more legal — while that application-fee scam in EVE seems not only to be common knowledge but not interfered with in any way by the makers of the game.

    If I, as a new player, got scammed in such a fashion because I didn’t know of the scam (how many new players can really be expected to read the forums before starting out?), and that I petitioned CCP to take action not only by banning the scammer but also by giving me my money back, would they bother doing anything? As much as they could throw the “you only have yourself to blame” line at me, it doesn’t answer the question — do they regard scamming as perfectly OK in their universe?

    What a way to expand the player base. If the GoonSquad victory doesn’t kill the game first by ending the political struggle, that is.

  • Queso

    Just so you guys know, New BoB has taken back most of their space.

  • Queso

    Vetarnias :
    And to think I was considering picking up EVE at the time of the next expansion.

    Okay brah. You wont last long in Eve.

    It is a game about having a little level of Street Smarts. You cant trust people in it.

  • http://www.gawaintheblind.com GTB

    I think this meta-game shit is the only thing eve has going for it really. Its the only thing that really sets it apart from everything else, and it makes it AWESOME. Its not a downside at all, rather its a feature that is largely unique to eve, and it should be applauded. It isn’t an exploit, it’s working as intended. If you give somebody that much power over your corporation, you had better be prepared when they turn on you.

    Vetarnias: If one guy had the power to do that, then BoB made an error in trusting that one guy. And it’s their fault for doing so. The game rules are the same for everyone.

    If the skill system wasn’t pure crap, I would still be playing eve.

  • http://lost-war.org Mist

    There’s another big thing EVE has going for it besides the meta-game: spaceships.

  • Nirgal

    When goons arrived on the scene, BoB was the uncontested power in 0.0. As it stands now, Goonswarm is fighting against Russians that were allies in the ‘Great War’. Organizations come and go, but the players in them are never truly destroyed.

  • http://mikedarga.blogspot.com Mike Darga

    You have to admit, letting human nature balance your game for you is a pretty interesting idea.

    I’ve seen a few people say how this is obviously a really bad thing for EVE and they’ll be hemorrhaging players, but from where I’m standing it looks the other way. Every person I know that was on the edge of the game has suddenly jumped back in to be part of this gold rush.

    It’ll be interesting to see if anybody actually quits, but I have a feeling this will just ignite an interesting new war and and bring back a bunch of lapsed players.

    mikedarga.blogspot.com

  • Vetarnias

    Hmm, I’ve been reading up on that incident elsewhere. It would seem that the BoB situation is really a Catch-22 moment. If CCP does roll back its server to help BoB out, it’s just begging to be reminded of the old “Band of Developers” incident (which some EVE players are already resurrecting); if it doesn’t, it will have to live with whatever consequences the recent events might lead to, including perhaps the dominance of one group of players which never cared about the game anyway.

    The consensus, even from Goon opponents, seems to be that BoB deserves no pity because they used to do all the things the Goons are now doing to them.

    Queso :

    Vetarnias :
    And to think I was considering picking up EVE at the time of the next expansion.

    Okay brah. You wont last long in Eve.
    It is a game about having a little level of Street Smarts. You cant trust people in it.

    Just out of curiosity, what makes you think I wouldn’t last long in EVE? Because of what you might see as my lack of street smarts, or because I would quickly be overwhelmed by my moral and ethical concerns about the game which apparently aren’t shared by many in the “community”?

    These aren’t the same thing. Any problems I might have in EVE would probably be the result of the legendarily steep learning curve the game has, but on an interpersonal basis, I’m so distrustful and guarded that I’d probably smell a scam from miles away. Whether I’d want to play a game in which those things are considered OK by the developers is another matter.

    @GTB
    EVE seems to be the classic example of the game where the metagaming has been allowed to run amok to the extent that the actual game doesn’t really matter anymore. EVE now seems a game played from password-protected Internet forums and voice chat channels, and reliant on multiboxing. I get the sense that a new player (with a single account) would be missing out on much, and that only old regulars will get kicks out of any addition to the game.

    Since it now seems to have become a travesty of a sandbox game, how does EVE keep on attracting new members under such circumstances?

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