More EVE Online Shenanigans: GoonSwarm Ganks Band Of Brothers

Virgil

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Jun 13, 2002
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domicius said:
Just another example of how EVE's basic org mechanics are open to abuse time after time.
To be fair, I don't think the mechanics here were really open to abuse. This is, for the most part, the same thing as a major guild leader in WoW (or most other MMOs) clearing out the guild bank and hitting the disband button. Or, in a slightly less destructive scenario, a guild officer clearing out the bank and leaving the guild.

It's just a bigger event in EVE because their corporations/alliances can grow to many times the size of a traditional MMO guild, and can have much more impact on the game, so when one of the giants goes away it leaves a much bigger hole.
 

corporate_gamer

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Things like this make me want to join the game, zero punctuation says its horrible to play. I'm still erring on the side of not, mainly because i just wouldn't care enough to put the time in.
 

WingedFortress

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Feb 5, 2008
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I hope I keep hearing news from this twisted little part of the universe. I'll never play this game in my life, but it's intriguing as shit.
 

CUnk

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For anyone that wonders how CCP feels about such colossal in-game events being orchestrated through out-of-game channels just read the comments in this and every thread regarding this coup. They're filled with people expressing a desire to play the game (or at least a curiosity about the game). Eve has been steadily growing since its inception and stories like this are the primary reason.

Eve is a great game as long as you put yourself in the right situation. I don't think I can enjoy another MMO that doesn't give you the same freedom to shape its world the way Eve does. I wish I could have been there for the end of BoB but I stopped playing almost 2 years ago (too may late nights participating in operations). No way I could have lasted that long. But the 2 years I played with GF were some of the most fun I've ever had in an MMO and at least I was during some of the most exciting times -- well, other than this one.
 

Anniko

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domicius said:
Hmmm... sounds like another exploitation of faulty hierarchy mechanics.

In real life, it's would be a bit harder for Google (say) to get Bill Gates (say) to hand over the Redmont Studios and all the cash (say) just by "turning him" (that you really really love me).
Umm, no. That can't be done since Microsoft's assets are distributed among thousands of people with no single person able to access all of them. This can be done in Eve by restricting what permissions you give them. BoB gave Haargoth the keys to the empire and said "Have fun!", they then went about scheming, bitching, backstabbing and in general being pricks. This is simply BoB getting arrogant, thinking that they're invincible and giving power over the laws of physics to a single guy.

Just because the mechanics are in place to put a dictator in charge, doesn't mean you need to put a dictator in charge.
 

Naterstein

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Oct 18, 2008
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fullmetalangel said:
Why does a game as boring as EVE sound so damn interesting? Well, there's politics for you I guess.
Best things about EvE: PC controlled economics and politics. Extremely large playerbase on ONE server. Add-ons (even the huge graphics overhaul) and expacs have be free so far (non of that BS Blizzard $30 for a lil new content). Characters level even while you are offline.

Worst things about EvE: Mostly ganking PVP (pple rarely try to find fair combat); mining is MORE tedious than grinding in other MMOs; Pirates (see ganking pvp); 80% of the time, if not more, you will be bored out of your mind even while looking for PVP targets, etc. Steep learning curve.

I really enjoyed EvE for my time in it. Sometimes I flirt with goin back, but I dont think I ever will. BTW, EvE is the last MMO I ever played and it is the standard to which I base all MMOs on (due to the Player controlled aspects of the universe).
 

NDWolfwood5268

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Naterstein said:
fullmetalangel said:
Why does a game as boring as EVE sound so damn interesting? Well, there's politics for you I guess.
Best things about EvE: PC controlled economics and politics. Extremely large playerbase on ONE server. Add-ons (even the huge graphics overhaul) and expacs have be free so far (non of that BS Blizzard $30 for a lil new content). Characters level even while you are offline.

Worst things about EvE: Mostly ganking PVP (pple rarely try to find fair combat); mining is MORE tedious than grinding in other MMOs; Pirates (see ganking pvp); 80% of the time, if not more, you will be bored out of your mind even while looking for PVP targets, etc. Steep learning curve.

I really enjoyed EvE for my time in it. Sometimes I flirt with goin back, but I dont think I ever will. BTW, EvE is the last MMO I ever played and it is the standard to which I base all MMOs on (due to the Player controlled aspects of the universe).
Quite correct run down. But I find the PvP ganking an interesting part of the game to keep you on your toes. Plus wars. I love wars :D
 

Oswald D Grant

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I was a member of Goonswarm for a year, joining in its first few months when it was still Goonfleet. It started as a way for goons to get a foothold in the Eve universe, which is notoriously hostile to solo players.

A poster above asked if it was possible to stay out of all the subterfuge; it is, but it means staying in the tutorial zone where the markets for everything are saturated and there are few real opportunities to accomplish anything. Still, some people manage to make it big in 1.0 space, mostly by providing meta-services such as escrow and gambling. Look up Chribba sometime. He's the best player in Eve; he's become rich and famous without lying, scamming, or stooping to politics.

But I digress. Goonfleet started out in the system SU-8A4, which is unusual in that it is open PVP but unlike most of the open PVP systems it has indestructible NPC stations you can hide inside. So if someone came to fight us we could choose whether to fight or just log off for a bit. Most of the people who could seriously crush us didn't want to occupy our system long-term, because it wasn't worth much compared to their other holdings (which also needed protection).

We were lead into SU by Remedial, who was a very funny man but also a huge tosser. Once he and FNLN (another tosser notorious for his ADHD) re-enacted the RL death in a traffic accident of another Eve player in front of the station where his father was docked. Don't ask me what was wrong with those two because I don't know. This came back to haunt us later, and rightly so, as BoB put us in the position of having to defend the indefensible on the forums.

Anyway, early on Goonfleet was like a little frontier community. Everyone did their own thing. Some mined, some ratted, some ran missions, some came up with elaborate investment schemes. I went into manufacturing, specifically large scale manufacture of cheap, necessary items. I was the Wal*Mart of SU. Eventually keeping track of everything I was selling became too much for me, and I hired five employees to watch the market and update prices. I compartmentalised everything so that at worst somebody could steal a few million units of minerals from me if they decided to go rogue. By the time I left I had two employees manufacturing goods for me as well, and in theory I could have quit the game and continued to run my business empire entirely via email if such had been my wont.

Again I digress. We had this nice little community going. We went on mining ops with the directors. We laughed at the other corps with their obsession with being popular and their strict rules. We were getting rich, we were free, and most of all we were untouchable. We could have spread out across the Eve cluster in this way, a spider's web of non-conquerable systems connected by jumpclones and carriers.

Things changed with the infamous 'Not Just a Game' speech by the CEO. Our success had largely come because goons are cynical jokers who don't take things seriously; we realised Eve was just a game, and played it for fun. We didn't get too upset at anything and we didn't overextend ourselves. Most corps in Eve treat it as an extension of real life. If you wrong the corp in the game, you get shunned as a person, not just as a character.

In this speech Remedial weighed up the question of whether Eve was 'just a game'. He concluded that because he had hundreds of goons counting on him, it wasn't. This was the wrong conclusion. Football, for instance, is still just a game even if your team is counting on you. So from then on Goonfleet gradually turned into just another alliance on the map, with people being ordered here or there depending on who the directors want to make war on today. This is a great deal of fun for the directors like the Mittani, who get to effectively play Galactic Civilisations with real people. For the individual player... Well it's good if you like being gangwarped places.

I remember one incident where some prick we were allied with blew up a hauler full of valuable blueprints belonging to some people who had been our allies much longer. This prick was named Starbuck77 or 78 or something equally unimaginative. I don't want to get into the details but basically our old allies were leaving the alliance to move elsewhere so they weren't flagged as 'friend' on the HUD, and Starbuck69 considered this to be adequate reason to kill them, even though he knew well that they were not hostile.

The general consensus was that Starbuck13 ought to eat a bowl of dicks, but the directors were terrified of offending our faithless allies and bade us not speak of it. So I waited until they weren't watching and stoked the discontent in the alliance channel. Soon we had fashioned a bowl of dicks out of a shuttle full of creatively named bookmarks and put it up on escrow for Starbuck. The Mittanni and the other directors, to my delight, were furious, and pre-emptively began grovelling before Starbuck's Directors. They also fined the guy who sent the bookmarks 15 million isk, which I had made sure wasn't me. I then paid this guy 20 million isk (pocket change for me) to cover his costs and conveyed my thanks. I was later vindicated when our faithless allies joined our enemy of the month and started shooting goons in earnest.

It was just a token 'fuck you, told you so' to the Directors, but it made me realise I could have torn the fleet apart if I'd wanted to. I had the resources, and the discontent was there to be exploited. (There were, in fact, splinter groups, such as The Greater Goon run by Hoegaarden.) I could have been the Tom Zarek of Goonfleet, but I wasn't interested in political power. I was a businessman and I really wanted to someone else to handle all that governmental bullshit.

The Mittanni sucks, although he does have an awesome Dr Strangelove icon on the boards (or used to anyway.) When he arrived Goonfleet became obsessed with spying and scamming other corps; in his position as spymaster he glorified this sort of activity as the most devastating form of PVP in Eve, which it is. The trouble is, if you glorify scamming and infiltration then you're basically glorifying Istvaan.

Scamming isn't hard, it's just boring. All scamming requires is spending a lot of time socialising with people you don't like. Given that it's a game and specifically a social game, why would you do that, whatever the rewards? It's only an attractive proposition for a player with something to prove. Like a certain pink-haired merchant-banker, for example.

So I'm rather glad to hear BoB got theirs, they were pricks. The scale of the accomplishment is truly impressive, and it's been four years in coming. But we should not lose sight of what the accomplishment actually consists of: Talking some guy into changing guilds in a MMOG. It's not something to put on your resume, although it says a lot about Eve that the results can be so world-changing.

It's a good game, but it's a sandbox - you get out what you put in. During my time there I was a tycoon, a low budget pirate, and even an explorer. I'll never forget the heartpounding tension of my first one-on-one fights, or the tone of dismay in the admiral's voice when he realised I'd turned up to a battle fleet in an EW hauler of my own design. Once I even flew from a planet to its moon for charity using only sublight drives. It took three realtime days of constant flying. I was convinced someone was going to shoot me down in the last hour for the lulz.

In the end I left to spend more time with the girl who was helping me through an unpleasant breakup and who I'd been obnoxiously talkative about on the forums (thought I had the decency to confine it to Spacetime FYAD where obnoxiousity was par for the course). When Goonswarm moved to Red Alliance territory (a move I never approved of - RA were exploiters obsessed with winning at any cost, and our alliance with them seemed emblematic of the loss of the more light hearted and enjoyable attitude to the game we started out with) I couldn't spare the time to move all my minerals and blueprints and inventory and start over in the new system. I handed all my assets over to someone I trusted and bade him sell them off and divide the proceeds amongst my shareholders.

Thus ended my adventure in Eve. It's a huge time sink. I would recommend it to anyone who needs to escape from their lives for a time. There are more productive things to do with your time, but I was in a bad way when I joined up and it gave me some good memories and something to pass the time with until I was ready to rise again.
 

Royas

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Gormourn said:
Awesome. Goonswarm finally finished kicking BoB's arse =)

And yes, to the poster above, all the Goons- in MMOs are usually the guys from Somethingawful one way or another.

Edit: Talk about being late =(
If the Goons had flown into BoB space and blown them to hell with lasers, that would be kicking their arse. This, this was just cheap.
 

Asehujiko

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Feb 25, 2008
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Wolvaroo said:
...what you want from EVE...
I want it to stop clogging up the news here. Somebody high up screwed over pretty much all of his underlings for no reason at all. Keep that to your own forums and stop the fanwank over here. We don't give weekly reports on WoW's raid progress nor do we maintain an updated list of WAR's faction balance and i don't see any reason why EVE should get a special treatment.
 

Kross

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Sep 27, 2004
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For anyone interested, here's the story from the guy who recruited the defector into GF: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=991219

Defeated with the power of love!

Edit: I can confirm Oswald did indeed slowboat across a system, although I thought it was from one station to the next. It did take about 3 days of real time though.
 

NDWolfwood5268

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Asehujiko said:
Wolvaroo said:
...what you want from EVE...
I want it to stop clogging up the news here. Somebody high up screwed over pretty much all of his underlings for no reason at all. Keep that to your own forums and stop the fanwank over here. We don't give weekly reports on WoW's raid progress nor do we maintain an updated list of WAR's faction balance and i don't see any reason why EVE should get a special treatment.
This is getting attention because it's like if they removed the Forsaken or Dwarves as playable WoW races. Don't try to tell me that wouldn't make headlines here and cause multiple discussions. This isn't trivial like WAR's factions and WoW's raid progress. This is a political shift the likes of which will change the game.

But, if I'm not making sense then you shouldn't even be here unless you're that dedicated to trolling :p
 

Oswald D Grant

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Kross said:
I thought it was from one station to the next.
You are correct, I flew from the Intaki Space Police station at S-U8A4 planet V to the Ishukone Factory at its moon. It's nice someone remembers, the marker cans I left are long gone.
 

geldonyetich

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Kross said:
For anyone interested, here's the story from the guy who recruited the defector into GF: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=991219

Defeated with the power of love!

Edit: I can confirm Oswald did indeed slowboat across a system, although I thought it was from one station to the next. It did take about 3 days of real time though.
Interesting.
[01:32:46] Harkani > ok I am going to be completly honest with you
[01:32:52] Tamir Lenk > uh oh . . .
[01:33:10] Harkani > my main character is in bob, director, full access to forums and irc and I am sick of the **** there
[01:33:19] Harkani > so Im willing to be a spy for you guys
[01:33:35] Tamir Lenk >
This wasn't so much "awesome social engineering, Goonswarm" as it as, "whoops, look who we left with the keys, some guy who's sick of our crap and completely biting at the bit to tear our out guts and hand them to Goonswarm."
 

Anniko

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Asehujiko said:
Wolvaroo said:
...what you want from EVE...
I want it to stop clogging up the news here. Somebody high up screwed over pretty much all of his underlings for no reason at all. Keep that to your own forums and stop the fanwank over here. We don't give weekly reports on WoW's raid progress nor do we maintain an updated list of WAR's faction balance and i don't see any reason why EVE should get a special treatment.
Oh boo fucking hoo. You get a news post once every 10 or so hours. Is it really that hard to see "Oh, something about Eve, I should ignore it since I don't like it", but no, instead you go "WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK!?!?!?!?!?! THIS SHIT SHOULDN'T BE ON MY FORUM!!!!!!!! I'MA GO ***** AND MOAN!!!11!11one!!1".
 

DeusFps

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Epic. To all of you saying eve is boring. Try getting involved in the game insted of wanting everything spoon fed to you. Come to think of it just keep playing wow. It keeps the eve community in a state of awesomeness.
 

Oswald D Grant

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DeusFps said:
Epic. To all of you saying eve is boring. Try getting involved in the game insted of wanting everything spoon fed to you. Come to think of it just keep playing wow. It keeps the eve community in a state of awesomeness.
You're right actually, I play WAR now because I want to be spoonfed. I want short doses of balanced PVP and some fairly sedate PVE content. Eve is a big time commitment and you'll only get out of it what you put in.

I do get annoyed when people ***** about Eve though because in an ideal world we'd have a balance of 'theme park' and 'sandbox' MMOGs; as it is Eve is pretty much the only sandbox around, and that's pretty sad.
 

Echolocating

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As someone who can't commit to playing EVE (or any MMO for that matter), I feel like I'm playing the game vicariously through these news posts. Thanks, Escapist. My marriage thanks you as well. ;-)