Describing EVE Online to new or non players is torture for an EVE vet. Where do you start? Fortunately, professional journalists have written a few notable articles that really lay out what EVE is. In case you missed them, here’s a recent example from The Guardian:
“Eve Online: How a Virtual World Went to the Edge of Apocalypse and Back”
– Simon Parkin, The Guardian, Tuesday 12 May 2015
This article is framed up with CCP Leeloo’s experience in which she started as a determined player in Ukraine and ended up in Iceland, home to CCP’s headquarters, engaged to another CCP employee. In the odyssey, the author departs from the thread and describes what EVE is and how it works before it comes back to Leeloo to describe her fire juggling as a metaphor for helping to keep the fire of EVE lit.
One of the best parts of the article is when the author talks about the famed “Social Hand Guiding Club” assassination depicted in the September 2005 PC Gamer (UK version) article “Murder Inc.”
One story, above all, illustrates this power. At 5am on 18 April 2005, a character known as Mirial, the CEO of Ubiqua Seraph, one of the largest corporations in the game, warped into the Haras solar system, flanked by her most trusted lieutenant. It was a moment for which the members of the Guiding Hand Social Club, a corporation of spies founded by Istvaan Shogaatsu, had long been waiting. A code word went out across the Shogaatsu’s chat channels: “Nicole”. Within an hour Mirial was dead.
Ten months earlier, Shogaatsu had agreed to take on this contract killing for an anonymous client. The fee was one billion ISK – Eve’s virtual currency, named after the Icelandic króna. It was, at the time, equivalent to about £320. (While it is illegal to sell ISK for cash, CCP sells an in-game currency for real money, so it is possible to calculate an exchange rate.) Throughout the intervening period, Shogaatsu and his agents performed a thorough infiltration operation, orchestrated in private chat channels and on secretive forums. They took on jobs within Ubiqua Seraph and, week by week, ingratiated themselves with other corporation members. Soon the mercenaries had operatives in every level of the organisation.
When the code word went out, the spy network was poised to strike. Mirial’s prize ship was destroyed, along with her escape pod and, finally, her vacuum-frozen body was delivered to the Guiding Hand Social Club’s client. Shogaatsu’s spies looted the company’s hangars and vaults. The combined cost of the ambush and theft totalled more than 30bn ISK, an estimated £10,600 of assets lost through robbery or destruction. It was, at the time, the largest theft of virtual assets in any video game. — Simon Parkin
What is often forgotten about the incident surrounding the assassination is captured in this article: the outcry from players that demanded retribution on behalf of the victim. The author of the original Murder Inc. article, Tom Francis, wrote:
My favourite bit of it, inevitably, is the bit I didn’t write: the responses to the heist from the Intergalactic Summit. Eve players reacted to the hit with genuine disgust or admiration, but also stayed in-character. So their comments are coloured with wonderful subtexts drawn from Eve’s backstory about the slavery of the Minmatar, and subsequent rebellion. – Tom Francis
CCP resisted calls to sanction the assassins since no game rules were broken. Many players quit in protest. As news of CCP’s “hands off the universe” policy spread, new people from all over the world signed up to play in the deadliest virtual world around. That story is a reference point for many of today’s big names in EVE. Players like The Mittani (Goonswarm) and Shadoo (Pandemic Legion) were drawn to EVE by this story of intricate planning and ruthless efficiency. Where else can you kill people twice?
Further down the article, the origin and early days of EVE are described as well as the social construct that binds players to the game long after they have left. Another very interesting story emerges in the context of how competitive and ruthless players can become.
“At other times, players have been known to hold others to ransom in the game for real money. One Russian player once claimed to be a hacker and threatened to cut the power to a rival’s home during play in order to steal his Titan ship, which takes weeks to build and is worth between £2,000-£2,500.” – Tom Francis
The article is filed under The Guardian’s “The Long Read” column for a reason. EVE does not fit neatly in a box. It is ITSELF a box: a sandbox.
