EVE Online is for some a video game that they play. For the rest of us it’s a thriller An MMO we only ever read about when someone does something shamefuland today’s coverage of the game is another shining example in this genre.
As PC gamer reporttwo players recently planned – and successfully carried out – a massive heist and put them in control of one of them EVEs Business and consequently ownership of some in-game items worth over $20,000. The thing is, it wasn’t a heist at all, as everything the duo did was completely by the book.
The operation-detailed in this Reddit post by one of the bandits, Flam_Hill – began when players banded together with the ultimate goal of taking down a company and upon doing their research discovered that one (Event Horizon Expeditionaires) had a board of directors consisting of a CEO and directors who “were minimally active”.
The game has rules, like real companies, where anyone with shares can trigger a vote for a new CEO. So they bought some shares, called the vote and waited to see if anyone would notice. After a 72-hour wait put in place by developers CCP to prevent such a thing, the “minimal active” board hadn’t responded or didn’t seem to even notice the dialing, and so –as ass Cluesin scenes similar to that Simpsons Episode where Bart loses his class vote – with only two votes cast, Flam_Hill and her partner had gained control of the entire corporation.
They of course had no intention of running it but simply desecrating it as best they could and by the end of their operation they had looted 130 billion ISK of the game’s in-game currency and confiscated another 2 worth of assets trillion. That adds up to around $22,309 in actual US dollars, Flam_Hill estimates, although it’s difficult to give an exact figure as there’s no official way to convert ISK to USD (there are some gray market workarounds though ).
A heist that comes about by…reading a corporation’s rules may not sound particularly exciting in a game like this, but as this shows, why bother going to war and risking it all , if you can just take advantage of the fact that a few guys haven’t checked their email for three days.
