EVE Online | Down the Rabbit Hole

[Music] for over 20 years the simulated world of new Eden has run in near perpetuity while information about this world is readily available much of it is indecipherable to the outside Observer replete with jargon and references meaningful only to those who have spent years in the community on occasion mainstream news outlets will write articles about the results of battles involving thousands of players and virtual assets valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars massive exchanges in wars fought for Arcane reasons between belligerent with convoluted backgrounds people who spend their time in New Eden will begin to

discuss their experiences in the game and their participation in historic events but their gravity is often difficult to Fathom for those without the same knowledge or experience others Endeavor to Chronicle particular aspects of its history such as harrowing acts of subterfuge and its ever shifting borders and alliances many who hear about this world agree that while fascinating they would never attempt to join it themselves citing its complexity and depth and so for most a single question remains what is EVE [Music] [Applause] [Music] Online [Music] [Music] during the early 1990s software developers were exploring the possibilities

of the internet a relatively new invention at the time interactive online spaces such as multi-user Dungeons and forums were shared by millions of people but it was clear to everyone using and creating these spaces that there was much more potential internet Tech technology was rapidly improving and changing and developers had to make certain that their Creations could keep Pace even more difficult however was balancing the everchanging needs and desires of users with the services being created as personal computers became more widespread and their rendering capabilities increased developers grew more and more interested in simulated three-dimensional

environments shared over the internet as the natural progression of forums and of these developers there were few as ambitious as the Icelandic company Oz interactive and their creation Oz virtual during the preceding decades cyberpunk novelists had envisaged immersive multi-sensory virtual experiences enabled by powerful computers networked with one another and software developers had used these stories as inspiration to create worldwide web browsers that allowed users to explore exp websites in three dimensions utilizing a coding language called the virtual reality markup language or vermal as opposed to the hypertext markup language or HTML founded in 1992 Oz

interactive sought to expand upon this concept and offer a vermal web browser that allowed users to interact with other users who were visiting the website at the same time with each person represented by their own 3D Avatar and even allowing for simultaneous voice communication a remarkable progression for the time however their location made development difficult Iceland's internet was connected to the rest of the World by a single modem and the country would turn off this modem during the night when few people were using it still development would continue for the next four years until 1996

when they finally launched the beta version of Oz virtual soon other companies began forming Partnerships with Oz interactive including Time Warner Erikson the van go Museum and Atlantic Records to create bespoke worlds within Oz virtual for them most notably Intel cooperated with Oz interactive to recreate a New York nightclub in Oz virtual then utilize a motion capture system on the performers at the club to host a party in both the real and virtual spaces s simultaneously however the company soon realized that the concept of Oz virtual like many others of its ilk was a product

developed too early for the market and a small group of developers and artists as well as a single historian left o interactive to found their own company in 1997 which they named crowd control Productions or as it is commonly abbreviated CCP where this small group had once spent their time developing Tech demos they were now interested in creating a finished product and so they decided that they would develop something remarkably different a board game leveraging the design experience of its initial members they quickly constructed their game which they christened hausel or danger game produced in

conjunction with Alcoholics Anonymous the game Saw players fighting against one another and occasionally making tenuous alliances as they attempted to break the cycle of addiction to various substances core to the game's mechanics was a focus on Sharp consequences for failure and the ability to interfere with others play in the game design documents the first line read death is a serious matter hesel was widely successful in Iceland and soon it had sold a copy to 1/8 of households in the country bringing this small independent company of designers a significant influx of capital but rather than continuing

to make board games the company returned to the concept that had driven them to work together in the first place while the design and Technology they had made for Oz virtual was produced too early for its initial purpose they envisaged a game made with the same Concepts and some of the same technology and so in 1999 using the money they had earned from husel they began work on a space themed massively multiplayer online game at first the designers attempted a two-dimensional style but the team decided quickly that they wanted to create something more reminiscent of

a movie and soon they settled on a three-dimensional style that placed the player in a ship out in space against a backdrop of planets and stars and they began releasing trailers in the year 2000 Publishers were initially unwilling to believe that the graphics in the the trailers were rendered in real time but after they had been convinced CCP was able to secure the funding they felt necessary to make the game that they wanted which they named Eve online the 2 Genesis their Ambitions however were far more than graphical supporting the core gameplay would be a

complicated system of Economics described as hyper capitalistic by its CEO all resources available in the game would be gathered Ed traded processed and utilized by players with little management from the company like their board game he topiel the first line in the design document read death is a serious matter and invoking biblical language this game world was given the name new Eden when development began in Earnest the company had approximately 20 people most of them from Oz virtual While most others were direct contacts of the initial members from Oz including some whose relationship had been

made by playing Ultima Online with them another early MMO RPG one of the most challenging aspects of creating Eve would be its scaling rather than splitting the player base into multiple different instances to reduce the load on servers the team decided that they would Place everyone in the world onto a single massive instance or game world with thousands of stars using different servers for different in game regions in an interview with Gaming magazine IGN the lead designer and art director reer harderson said quote I would say the hardest thing to implement must be the server

backend apart from that the biggest challenges in doing Eve would be that there are so many things that we are doing in the game that have never been done before this means that there are a lot of conceptual problems that we have had to solve without having any reference to in previous games for instance when we started out the only third person space game we had seen was home world and that was a real-time strategy game so that meant that we had no reference whatsoever in how to navigate spaceships from a third-person Viewpoint another example

are uncertainties that rise due to the technical limitation of being a massively multiplayer game how is Collision detection handled on the server how will the physics model run will real solar system sizes work in the game yes they do to an accuracy of 30 cm million security issues ETC end quote during production the team decided upon an iterative process which while effective was arduous early on we saw immediately that this couldn't be done in one go so we decided to do 11 games basically we would do if 11 times over its version progressively uh moving

forward to the main goal but not try to do if in in one step so the first step was very simple just get the basic client server architector up and running and then we moved over to having a 3D client and then we added all the content which has been had been created and then we sort of added on and on uh probably did a total rewrite uh five times and partial re times uh partial rewrites uh about six times and for each rewrite we did there were always some components which were good enough to

make it across the rewrites but uh the first five versions were almost rewrites from uh complete scratch still the developers determined that they would be able to overcome this and every other challenge in due course and with time to spare their confidence however would prove misplaced at first the team at CCP believed that they could deliver the game in late 2001 or early 2002 but as the date approached the conclusion quickly became that they would need twice as much time to complete the first iteration of Eve with no other recourse in mid 2002 CCP called

a companywide meeting and informed their staff that there was no more money remaining and that they were unable to procure any further investors for the moment despite this driven by faith in the project some of the members of the team stated that they would continue working to finish Eve according to Hillmar quote there was a turning point I think around the time the company was running out of money which I think gave people this belief we kind of had this feeling whoo we might actually pull this off of course we believed but there's a difference

between believing and hoping a turn from Hope to belief end quote this team would continue work while management scrambled to find more investment money after 3 months without pay the company was able to reach a deal with Simon and Schuster a Publishing House primarily known for books who was attempting to expand into the field of games this company offered to provide the funding necessary for CCP to finish their game but the development speed necessary would be extreme for nearly a year the employees would all work brutal hours sometimes 100 hours a week desperately attempting to

finish the game before the money ran out again it was during this period that a small Cadre of players were able to test a limited version of the game for the first time for many the concept of Eve and its simulated world of new Eden were a dream made manifest while Eve promised many possibilities there was no prescribed definition for Success leaving players to define success and failure for themselves eager to explore this sandbox space game enthusiasts congregated online to have a chance at testing the game early game development is often divided into three phases

an alpha stage where the developers are still experimenting with mechanics and features a beta stage where the game's core mechanics have been determined and the developers are seeking to refine their game and a final release to the general public some studios allow and encourage prospective players to have access to the game during the alpha and beta stages to test features and search for bug in order to theoretically have a more polished release and this practice is especially common for Space Games whose players are particularly enthusiastic often spending significant amounts of both time and money on

their Hobby and here the space game enthusiasts found a system ripe for exploration and experimentation the first and most important aspect of each ship was its Hull which conferred different benefits depending on its size and specialization among Myriad other smaller factors each Hull also had its own capacitor which like Mana or stamina in other games would be depleted as the ship performed actions such as firing weapons repairing allies or mining asteroids but in order to perform these actions the ships had to be equipped with components and each Hull had a certain number of slots for

these components which were divided into three types High high power slots mid power slots and low power slots the high power slots were typically where the most defining parts of a ship were located here could be found every kind of physically damaging Weaponry such as lasers and projectile turrets as well as logistical components which allowed ships to repair one another in the middle of combat the midow slots were where ships received much of their utility for example most ships were fitted with propulsion modules which cons assumed power in order to drastically increase speed the tools

to ins snare targets were also placed in mid power slots including stasis web aiers and warp disruptors which were necessary for preventing an opponent from escaping low power slots were usually used to help support a ship in its given role for example a cargo ship might have fitted inertial stabilizers in order to travel more quickly and evade targets while a tougher combat ship would fit components to further strengthen its armor or actively repair itself many mid and low power slots simply offered passive benefits to the ship such as reducing incoming damage with no capacitor cost

however each ship also had power grid and CPU limitations meaning that a player could not simply fit the most powerful components rather they had to carefully balance the different components to create the most powerful combinations for the lowest cost possible once completed flying the ship itself was a relatively simple matter nearby objects could be selected in a window on the screen allowing them to approach it orbit it keep it at range or Target it targeting a ship allowed the player to attack heal recharge or disrupt it with whatever modules it had equipped in order to

use these ships and modules the player's character would need the requisite skill points which could only be gained passively over time even when the player was logged out of the game ensuring a more even distribution of progression for players numerous space game enthusiasts petitioned CCP for Access and those who were granted their request began probing Eve and making plans for when their friends clanmates and companions could join them and multiply their strength upon the launch of the game World Eve had not yet been released but already the struggle for dominion and survival in new Eden

had [Music] begun despite Eve's unwelcoming nature the promise of such a cinematic multiplayer experience was enticing to a wide breath of players and Drew a significant audience long before it had been released starting on October 24th 2002 a curb appended to news releases would Proclaim that the game would quote allow up to 100,000 Gamers to compete simultaneously across a full 3d Galaxy of 5,000 solar systems currently Eve online is in phase three of beta testing with thousands of Gamers play testing the game daily trading in more than 300 fan and player Corporation sites to date

there are more than 880,000 games Gamers signed up for the beta test and at least 50,000 are estimated to participate before the game is launched just like in the real world money will be the commodity of choice players can earn cash by accepting work from non-player characters who will reward Gamers with cash which can be traded for goods or other items also Gamers can earn money by working for a corporation these corporations are comprised of Gamers who have pulled their resources and are working together to dominate the universe to date there are more than 200

corporations already established even though Eve online has not yet been published these corporations have elaborate web pages detailing infrastructure location business models and mission statements end quote while this blurb emphasized competition in Eve online many were more excited about the concept of participating in a perpetually running economy where the goods that they harvested or created would be actively used by other players it is really free form you can uh choose from a lot of possibilities you can be a a market operator you can be a transporter Miner you can operate a factory you can research

you can operate a big Corporation you can have uh careers within a corporation about being uh by being the military arm or being the accountant of Corporation and the the current games uh sort of more focus on on having people going up against Monsters maybe in small groups whereas Eve uh sort of focuses on building a society uh and supplying the tools and the rules to operate it at first these news releases announced that the game would be launched in March of 2003 but again the studio needed a delay in a press release the art

director rain harderson stated that quote we have always stood firm on the commitment to release Eve only when we felt it was time although the game is nearly finished we felt it would be best to hold off an additional 6 weeks this will allow us to fully optimize the performance of our new server cluster Implement features we have promised and continue testing to assure the elimination of bugs that would interfere with the player's ability to enjoy the eve experience to its fullest potential end quote these delays likely made prospective players nervous Space games at the

time had a notorious history of ever extending delays and underd delivering on promised features however the iterative nature of MMOs such as Eve meant that any missing features could be added later and because many players were able to test the game early they could see how many features were being tested and what would likely be available as promised the team at CCP were able to meet their release goal and had sent the client to be printed by their partners for physical release in late April and finally on May 6th 2003 players were able to play

the final release of the game which featured a total of 5,21 star systems but those who had participated in the alpha and beta were not novices their months spent testing the game had given them significantly more knowledge and experience than those entering new Eden for the first time and they had spent months strategizing with one another to decide how their first hours days and weeks would be utilized in order to make the most money and establish their presence most solidly as a cheeky nod to their home country the abbreviation for Icelandic croner and the games

currency Interstellar credits was the same isk many of the most organized groups scattered away from one another and prepared to lay claim to their own territory however they could not simply do so anywhere Eve star systems are connected in a webike pattern with Stargates which may be used to Traverse from one star to the next in the center of this vast web is Empire space an area controlled by the non-player empires where people may fly their ships in relative safety the safety afforded to players is determined by the star's security level given a rating anywhere

between 0 and 1 divided into three basic categories high security low security and null security or as they are typically called high secc lowc and NC in high security space the Empire police forces named Concord would intervene in any aggression between players affording some level of safety in these areas in contrast aggression would not summon protection in low security space but the offending players would be granted a suspect status that would make them a Target both for players and Empire forces however for the groups looking to establish their own presence in Space the most tantalizing

area was nulc surrounding Empire space in a large ring here there were no laws no rules and no protections other than whatever the players could enforce and many were eager to establish themselves in this new and vast Frontier rich in the most valuable resources but holding on to these regions would require work and coordination and so the corporations that had organized before the release of the game began to establish themselves in particular regions of space that they found enticing the factors involved in these choices varied from proximity to Empire space to what resources were available

first though the corporations would require ships and to buy and equip these ships they would need resources and money while the eve developers wanted to provide a world where the trade of goods was managed almost entirely by players they realized that in the early stages of the game no player economy would be established yet and so they allowed non-player characters to buy and sell some of the Commodities in order to stimulate the player economy this provided an early Revenue stream to players who quickly devised a plan to make significant amounts of capital during this crucial

early stage this plan was based around the daily server downtime which occurred at 11:00 a.m. UTC Andrew groan detailed what he called The Merchant races in his seminal work on the history of new Eden named empires of Eve quote back in the earliest days of Eve one of the best ways to make money was by buying and selling commodities in different markets across the game later Eve would place all of its emphasis on a player controlled Market but in the early days players could buy items and wees from characters in stations all over the game

and then sell them elsewhere what resulted was a daily series of early morning races along the most profitable trade routes Merchants would log in as quickly as possible after the server came back online from the daily maintenance shutdown and fly down the trade routes to the most profitable destinations end quote trading was far from the only profession that players were looking to exploit the factories required to build ships in eve were a limited resource and so upon the release of the game players scrambled to buy these factories as quickly as possible however there was an

issue due due to its worldwide release players in the UK were able to purchase the physical copies of the game before anyone else and therefore they could buy the factories much earlier than anywhere in the world these buyers were more than just hopeful industrialists many of the factories have been purchased by real estate speculators hoping to sell these factories for a higher price with no intention of constructing ships according to early player ramine Shak rzad quote within days of the retail launch all factories have been bought up and idled by speculators who were charging $300

to $400 per Factory without any way of knowing if they really own the factory or not end quote if speculators were idling the factories then that meant fewer ships restricting players from accessing the core mechanics of the game this Illustrated two challenges that the developers of Eve now faced managing a complicated economy to keep the game fun and interesting and struggling against the black market black market economies for MMOs like Eve are not only common but inevitable while developers typically will include Clauses in their terms of service that stipulate against it players are usually undeterred

from Trading in-game assets for realworld currency and the consequences for doing so only tend to involve an e easily circumvented ban which is only implemented if they're caught and so many of the factories intended to fabricate ships for players remained dormant upon the release of the game but this was far from the only problem that new players faced those who purchased Eve online with little for knowledge were met with a game full of Promise yet strangely empty played primarily through various menus it was difficult for new players to decipher what their next steps would be

what's more the game world was almost preposterously massive especially for the time and players were spread thinly across new Eden but according to Hilmar Pon in an interview for down the rabbit hole this was in part by Design quote Eve is about people sailing into the starry night in ships that's sort of the Inception story of Iceland Vikings escaping taxation from Norway and hoping that there's a new land somewhere you can just imagine being on a quiet ocean in the night looking at the night sky sailing on a Viking ship Eve definitely has those kinds

of feelings you can look up and see the Milky Way and so the Inception of the game and the country are not far apart Iceland is this place that really wants to kill you you get the very distinct feeling of that when you're a child growing up there there's volcanoes there's lava there are earthquakes there are freezing Gale wins unpredictably any month of the year it's a very hostile environment Eve is like that it has the toughest environment but to some extent the nicest people people in Iceland are nice because we've been forced to learn

how to cooperate because the people who didn't cooperate are already Frozen to the ground Eve is kind of like that it forces you to cooperate with others because alone you can't really achieve your full potential in Eve it pushes you to connect with others there are aspects of the game that almost intentionally make you feel lonely when you're alone and that creates the foundation of the Friendship machine as we call it this forced cooperation due to the hoseless of the environment and later on other players that has created a very strong bond between people that

play together in the game end quote this forced cooperation manifested as new players quickly Gathering Together together for safety in this Alien Game World while numerous small corporations endeavored to eventually take and hold NC territory it was much easier in this early stage for players to base their operations in Empire space and venture out into nulc to gather valuable resources from these unprotected systems then return with a hall and sell or utilize what they gathered but with so many players traveling through nulc a clear method of generating profit emerged one that played into the fantasies

of many science fiction enthusiasts piracy traveling together in small bands Pirates began roving the common lanes that Miners and Traders would take from Empire space through nulc seeking quaries to do so Pirates would designate one or more of their group members to act as a tackler tasked with ins snaring their target and to do so they would out outfit their ship with specific modules first was the stasis webifier which when applied to a Target would reduce their speed making it nearly impossible to evade weapons fire second and most important in a pirates's Arsenal was the

warp disruptor which true to its name would prevent a ship from entering faster than light travel and escaping both of these components would be placed in the mid power slots making the tackler more vulnerable than compatriots and so it would rely upon its allies while engaging a Target this however would often be unnecessary as Traders and miners were frequently unfamiliar with combat making them easy prey to counteract this these more peaceful players would chart new routes and learn tricks to evade Pirates initiating an Ever evolving game of cat and mouse an early player named night

freeze recounted their experience on on their first trading run shipping Goods that they had bought with weeks worth of isk quote at the time I naively believed that any security rating above 0.0 would be safe because nobody would be ballsy enough to DARE provoke the Wrath of the 5 in space I turned out to be wrong I knew that something was wrong when my ship started to beep and a red target lock cursor appeared in the Horizon with the name deathbringer the beeping accelerated and a red square appeared around my ship since I hadn't even

bothered trying to fight a training pirate yet I had no idea what the hell was going on he sent a message to me 250k or die I responded to him okay the sweat dripping down my armpits past my side and accumulating in a little puddle at the edge of my shirt five or more seconds must have passed as I fumbled for the micro warp drive hotkey and just as they started to warm up the first missile slammed into my ship the warp gate was 15,000 M away I had to be within 800 M to pass

through it and I was currently flying at about 300 m/ second a second missile exploded against the hull bringing down my Shields and tearing apart my Hull I knew that if one more Missile hit me my ship would be nothing more than space debris and this Fu who couldn't even spelled death correctly would have access to all I had worked for come on you [ __ ] pieces of sh I shouted at the monitor my dog started to bark in the background but I could barely hear it the only thing that mattered was the gate

because I knew that if I had lost that cargo all my weeks worth of hard work and all my finely tuned bull would be down the drain whoosh I hadn't used the micro warp drive since the night before and forgot about just just how powerful they were I was now shooting toward the warp gate at 3 1/2 km/ second and all deathbringer had to account for his two expensive missiles was a trail of dust if you're reading this right now death I'd like to give you a Hardy you I arrived at the specified star base

in the galente region my ship battered and bruised and my ego several sizes smaller I sold the computer hardware for a total of 3. 7 million credits the whole repairs amounted to 100K I felt my heart with my left hand it was still pulsing rapidly and the realization that I had netted 600,000 credits in 25 minutes along with a healthy dose of action sent it shooting up even further I did several more trade routes that morning and by 9:00 a.m. my credit count read 5,780 th000 credits and end quote no matter what tricks were discovered

however piracy remained a lucrative trade due to the heavy traffic in the lanes used to haul ore because of the distances involved in transporting ore from nulc to Empire space and little safe way to store it during the process a mining operation would often consist of one mining ship to pull the ore from the asteroids and five or more transport ships to haul it back to Empire space all of which were easy targets soon piracy was lucrative enough for the first pirate gangs to lay claim to territory in nulc outfitted with various combat ships they

moved into the most valuable star systems seeking flighty Mining and transport ships on occasion groups of pirates would find trade routes frequented by the more economy-minded players and perform one of the most feared and most obnoxious practices to those in Empire SP space a gate Camp essential for Transit between systems Stargates also acted as choke points for players to exploit as there only ever is one linking two systems together and so Pirates would often wait at these combined Ingress and egress points in low security space waiting for unsuspecting players to appear and destroying their ship

sometimes before they could even load the new system eventually CC P were forced to add Auto turrets onto Stargates to prevent routes from being blockaded for long stretches of time in the months following the release of the game CCP was also able to address the issue of those who had bought factories for Resale by a relatively simple method in order to keep a factory the player holding it would be forced to pay a regular maintenance fee for it relative to the amount of money that could potentially be made from its output in essence a land

value tax just as in the real world this made the factories a significant financial burden to speculators who weren't using them leveraging the speculators to either begin producing ships or sell the factories to someone who would in short order the factories were serving their intended purpose the game hadn't even been live for 3 months and already CCP was being forced to adjust their game to contend with the space game enthusiasts notorious for exploiting any system that they could as a part of their fun while simultaneously attempting to complete the systems that they had intended for

the game and these new systems promised to create even more unforeseen and perhaps unmanageable problems [Music] over the following months the more adventurous corporations began to establish themselves in nulc and already The Diplomatic situations in different regions were developing in distinct ways these early groups of players typically no more than a few dozen people would form the first alliances with one another to saave off competition typically naming themselves after the region of space that they inhabited in this early stage of the game there was no way for players to officially lay claim to territory but

over a decade later Andrew groan would resurrect information that had largely been lost by trolling through long abandoned Forum threads and speaking with numerous leaders from the time and by doing so he managed to chart early nulc to the southeast East was the pirate nation of the curse Alliance who frequently wared with the rigid and authoritarian stain Alliance to the west and the north were the fountain Alliance the Coalition of free stars and venol Alliance which boasted more democratic systems of governance between their constituent corporations while a significant contingent of players sought to take and

hold territory in nulc most made their home in Empire space though maintaining a NC presence was lucrative it was also difficult and time consuming and for most this was a distraction from the more specific activities which drew them to Eve this also meant that much of the money within the player economy was held in Empire space and so even nulc Powers would have to enter this safer territory and trade with the players there though many nulc dwellers found them tepid for the industrialists trading with Empire space was not only efficient but necessary AR while the

most valuable materials were in nulc the basic materials required for All Ships could only be found in Empire space and so it was impossible to maintain a NC presence without some sort of supply line to HEC and loc this meant that these two worlds of Eve while in most ways separate were fundamentally tied to one another and while the flow of resources between the two was imperative the most Stark example of this interplace was Illustrated in the mercenary corporations varying widely in terms of background these mercenaries would take contracts to Harang whatever Target was desired

and during this early stage their prices were often cheap with the thrill of the fight being a part of the reward the people or Corporation issuing the contract could also be kept secret at their behest and in this way competitors could be weakened or eliminated without any fighting on the part of the buyer pirate gangs were eager to loan out their services for Interstellar credits but many of them were unaccustomed to attacking targets that fought back and so a niche began to develop for players who had experienced not only trapping vulnerable targets but engaging in

proper fleet-based combat as the demand increased various new mercenary groups were beginning to form often out of ragtag clusters of players who were more familiar with the practice of combat than Theory but sometimes it was simply enough for a player to be familiar with combat to disrupt the supply lines of more economy oriented corporations and allow their competitors to surpass them such aggression meant that most every corporation needed to be prepared for a fight and so they began to learn the methods by which to defend themselves along with hiring their own mercenaries to protect their

ships meaning that anyone paid to disrupt another Corporation had to to expect push back while miners often weren't familiar with the finer points of combat many already had the most important equipment necessary to participate a battleship during this time there were no ships dedicated to Mining and so miners chose the ships with the most available High slots for mining lasers a particular favorite was the apocalypse which boasted eight High slots and a large capacitor all the miners had to do was trade their mining equipment for weapons and they were ready to defend themselves in a

minimal fashion what had once effectively been paid piracy was more and more becoming obsolete and in its place was mercenary work among these early mercenaries were a few corporations that attracted attention unparalleled were the masters of onage or moo who had become infamous after their gate camp in Mara and pasari that shut down trade in the north for weeks weeks but there were a few smaller corporations that were beginning to gain a reputation namely body count Inc this group led by the charismatic Seline was one of the first to dedicate all of their corporations time

to handling mercenary contracts and while they accepted poultry sums to begin their fees grew as both the demand for Mercenaries and the demand for body count Inc increased but as mercenary corporations fought one another there was a surprising effect since Warfare never resulted in the permanent deaths of any of the players it was possible to fight against particular enemies repeatedly and as they did they grew familiar with one another especially those who could fight exceptionally well such exemplary Pilots would sometimes impress their enemies so much that they would be invited to join those they had

fought and so a court tenant of Ivon line was discovered in the words of Seline quote the best way to recruit people is by shooting them and so the best pilots in the game began to conglomerate into groups and charge Hefty prices for their services prices that corporations were more than willing to pay in this key moment in the history of the economy of Eve during the production of the game one of the envisioned roles in Eve online was that of a Trader traveling from location to location in order to find places to buy Goods

low and sell High based on an asymmetry of information players would only be able to see the goods on offer in their current region and then they would have to travel to the station where the good was being sold but as players traded with one another and the player economy began to establish itself the need for a centralized Hub of Commerce grew in order to maximize visibility and convenience many chose one particular system from which to base their trade Uli Uli was a Natural Choice given that it was a high security system with the maximum

value of one meaning that trading there was remarkably safe but more importantly it resided at the precise Center of Empire space making a trip to Uli a reasonable distance no matter where a player was soon all manner of players were traveling to Uli in order to buy and sell goods and almost anything could be purchased there this posed a problem so many players in a system taxed the game servers heavily and if too many people began to use ully as a trade Hub then the servers would be unable to accommodate them but soon an even

greater existential threat to the game would [Music] appear [Music] toward the end of 2003 the deal that CCP had made with its publishing companies was concluding but Simon and Schuster had no intention of renewing the deal and so they reached an agreement that would return the publishing rights to the game developer and while they had no infrastructure or connections to print physical copies of the game CCP had another plan on December 3rd 2003 CCP made an announcement on their website quote CCP the developer of the highly acclaimed mmor RPG title Eve online announced today that

it has regained the publishing right for the title worldwide and will start Distributing it as a direct download from the internet we are very pleased to be in a position where we can contribute equally to both development and Publishing says Ivor Chris yansen CEO of CCP we have reached an agreement with Simon and Schuster Incorporated and vendi international regarding Canada and North America as well as with crucial limited for Europe we expect the downloadable version to increase Global sales sharply our player base has been growing steadily since the launch of Eve online in May our

game servers are in good shape and we are technically ready for much faster growth now says Hilmar V Pon ccp's Chief technical officer the player community is a great source of new ideas for the future development of the game Eve online is an evolving living game and we can't wait to see how the players will react to some of the new stuff we will be adding in the future end quote but this this optimism was undermined by the problems that Uli now presented as mentioned previously the game server architecture was designed so that each region

in the game world was managed by a different server however the newest processors at the time proved to be suboptimal for ccp's purposes and so even the latest CPU Technologies wouldn't help to bolster their servers for the influx of players specifically the growing population in Uli theoretically this could have been solved by changing the regions that each server managed and perhaps utilizing a specific server for Uli but with the volume of players that Uli threatened to host not even a dedicated server for that star system would be enough what's more players were beginning to discover

exploits that threatened their faith in the game to function as it was intended on March 3rd 2004 a corporation named zombies Inc descended upon UL with a single apocalypse Battleship and a bevy of dedicated Logistics ships parking themselves near a Stargate approximately where players would arrive when entering the system or approaching the gate to leave the apocalypse was equipped with a special kind of weapon a smart bomb when activated this Niche weapon would deal massive damage to everything within a certain distance of the user whether Ally or enemy as soon as ships appeared the pilot

the apocalypse activated his smart bombs and his targets were instantly destroyed as Uli was a system with a 1.0 security rating Concord appeared almost instantly in order to destroy the offending player but as soon as they did the logistics ships began repairing it from just outside of the radius of the smart bombs as Concord ships approached and were destroyed in the successive blasts now not only were hapless players being destroyed in Uli but so were the games NPC police while Concord attacked the apocalypse Battleship the logistics ships were entirely ignored this was due to an

oversight that zombies Inc had discovered while attacking another ship in Empire space would Grant the player a wanted status and summon the police repairing another ship would not even if the player receiving the repairs was wanted having estimated the damage output of concord's ships zombies Inc had brought just enough Logistics capability to outpace the damage that Concord could deal making the apocalypse practically invulnerable any players attempting to intervene by attacking the logistics ships would in turn be destroyed by Concord Since By The Game's definition they were innocent and so they were able to continue their

Slaughter in Uli for an unrecorded period of time victims of zombies Inc went to the forums to complain and soon even those who hadn't encountered the small Fleet were complaining to the developers that trade through Uli and therefore in much of the game had been brought to a halt due to an exploit ccp's game Masters contacted the perpetrators and instructed them to cease zombies Inc declined a post made to the Forum by the game Masters describes the incident in full quote as a lot of you are aware a certain Corp willingly exploited a fault in

the game mechanics and managed to kill over a 100 people in the supposedly secure Uli system last night we have decreed that those who were the recipients of this heinous crime will be fully reimbursed for their loss if you are one of those who lost your belongings and still haven't petitioned us please do so and we will see to it that your possessions are returned to you the exploiters have received a ban for their efforts and anyone thinking of following their example should be aware that the the same fate awaits them the GM team end

quote while players were in general glad to have the Uli system cleared this set a new precedent with pompous rhetoric the game Masters declared that they would not allow players to bend the rules farther than CCP dictated but how much was too much was left unspecified in this case a rule was codified and enforced as an event was taking place namely the place ERS were not allowed to survive indefinitely against Concord in high security space anything that allowed them to do so would be considered an exploit and therefore a banable offense however necessary it may

have been and however popular the decision may have been with players it established the company in an adversarial role to many of its players especially the ones most interested in experimentation though trade could once again travel through Uli this this did not lead to the rise of any powerful High set corporations due to a particular mechanic while players were safe from wanting attacks from other players in high sex space and players in low sex space were risking their lives by attacking other players there was a way for players to attack one another safely even while

Concord was present a war declaration by paying a fee every week a corporation could declare war against another and be granted the right to attack any of their ships on site often referred to as bribing the police this meant that whenever a highet corporation became powerful enough other corporations would ban together to check it and prevent it from becoming too powerful and affecting a monopoly even so there were enough individuals and small corporations trading out of Uli that the servers began to lag this was not a difficult threshold to reach despite boasting about High potential

player counts EV on line required less than 100 players to be present in the system before problems began to manifest but as crowd control Productions was contending with Uli the initial powers of nulc were beginning to fracture and soon divisions would spark conflict that would push their server infrastructure to its [Music] limits [Music] to the north bad blood borne from the early Wars over sovereignty was beginning to heat due to the global nature of the game CCP realized that implementing a fair method of territory control would require something more complicated than a simple attack and

hold method otherwise a corporation could simply attack another group's territory during their off hours and then a Counterattack could be launched enacting a never-ending back and forth which would discourage any sort of decisive conflict therefore they designed the reinforcement system in order to capture a star base a faction would have to attack it twice the first time they would simply be able to reduce its Hull to 25% upon reaching this number the star base would enter reinforcement mode during which it could not be damaged for a length of time contingent upon the amount of strum

fuel with which it had been equipped with more strum meaning a longer reinforcement period most importantly since strum gradually was depleted the amount could be manipulated in order to bring the star base out of reinforcement mode during active hours for the defending Alliance in this way holding star bases was feasible without always having players online but these station St were more than just static buildings player owned stations or posses were designed in such a way as to allow a Defender an advantage most immediately a station could be equipped with automatic weapons that required no player

input adding Firepower to any defensive Endeavor even unequipped however the station still boasted a wide Shield which could only be passed if the player had the correct password while the station could be attacked from the outside any ship within the shield could not but similarly any ship inside the shield could not attack any ship outside of it granting a small Armistice zone to which a defending Fleet could Retreat during a battle and placing an onus upon the attackers to either focus enough fire on the station to reinforce or destroy it or destroy any damaged ships

before they could Retreat to the safety of The Shield extra ships could be stored inside of these stations as well allowing allowing players to re-equip themselves for combat if they lost their ship in order to claim a system all a corporation had to do was own the majority of star bases now was a key time to claim and capture territory before anyone else could lay their own claims and force their opponents to rest control for them as while a star base is being constructed it is extremely vulnerable mercenary Coalition even posted a video to the

forums of the time they were were hired exclusively to stand as bodyguards for an infant star base which they affectionately referred to as an egg once claimed the owning faction could place an outpost in the system a significant boom as opposed to paes outposts were indestructible making Goods stored there much safer but they also acted as places where Goods could be listed for sale anything bought or sold there or any minerals refined there would be taxed with the money being placed in the bank account of the corporation taking territory now before other alliances could place

their star bases and claim control over systems was vital and it would lead to a war that the servers of Eve online could scarcely handle the opening engagement of this first large scale war of Eve on line was described by Andrew groan in empires of Eve quote both sides opened fire unleashing a dream of missiles rail guns and Laser Munitions the sheer number of which had never been seen before in new Eden with nearly 300 people in the battle the eve servers strained under the weight of this enormous cataclysm and strange things began to happen

missiles disappeared out of thin air ships exploded seemingly without having been touched Pilots were kicked offline without warning then reappeared in a different part of the solar system and in a different ship end quote such conditions were unfavorable for either side and Fleet commanders eventually learned to ration their pilots and limit the size of engagements in order to manage lag and prevent battles from escalating beyond the capacities of the servers a frustrating yet necessary decision but nulc wasn't the only place where these limitations were manifesting for months the central economic system of Uli in Empire

space had been growing and as it did the servers were struggling crowd control Productions had little ability to control the movements and actions of the people operating in nulc but in Empire space they had far more options and here they took drastic action Uli was a popular trading Hub due to its centralized location which boasted safe passage from all corners of space and so the company took the simplest option they they severed most of the connections in short order the Traders had scattered without a central Hub trade quickly was redistributed into quadrants of Empire space

Loosely based in the four different NPC Empires further destabilizing a market that already was facing the destabilization of vital resources from nulc due to a war raging in the north without the relatively safe routes through Uli Empire space was severed in two by low security choke points through which Traders had to travel choke points that could easily be exploited by Pirates further segmenting the economy but soon a new strain would be placed on the servers in early 2004 the main competition for Eve online Earth and Beyond was ending Eve had already enticed many of its

players away in the beta stages of its game and now as Earth and Beyond was closing its servers a sizable portion of its players were migrating to Evon lime while ccp's digital distribution method was a gamble at the time and it could easily take over 24 hours to download the game with contemporary internet speeds it meant that those moving from Earth and Beyond to Eve online could easily download the client for the game and join relatively quickly attracting a massive influx of players recognizing how many new people were joining and also recognizing how impenetrable their

game was CCP set to work making their game as inviting as possible for this flood of players working with IGN and GameSpy they cheekily offered what they called an upgrade for Earth and Beyond players to Eve online including a personal guided tour of the game in a public release they stated quote the upgrade program will include a no obligation free trial of E Eve online and a walkthrough of the game by a member of the eve volunteer group the eve volunteer will explain to the user the differences between the two games and ease the transition

into Eve from Earth and Beyond end quote these new players were entering the game during a time of extreme instability in the in-game economy and only a few months after these new players joined and were attempting to establish themselves NC was fractured the offer that CC had made to Earth and Beyond players proved to be a resounding success and many groups in the dying game moved wholesale from one game to the other providing them with an immediate source of Manpower however those more aimless players coalesced into a new corporation which they named Celestial Horizon with

thousands of players the already massive Celestial Horizon had a far larger population than the vast majority of other corporations in new Eden and even though they were inexperienced their numbers alone quickly made them into an industrial superpower who spent their early months in Empire space stockpiling liquid assets their size making them largely unassailable this chaos meant opportunity for many new players and some of the loudest were the goons goon is an epithet worn proudly by the early internet users posting on the something awful forums a group known for their irreverent provocative manner as online documentarian

Bernie notes in his history of the s's operator even the name goon originates from the letter of an angry web admin who had been featured on the something awful website and subsequently harassed by its Forum members noticing the extremely accessible method of distribution that CCP had adopted some members of the board began posting threads encouraging other members to download the game and join however due to their inherently chaotic nature it was difficult to Wrangle them toward any common goal and over the months numerous goon Le corporations congealed and collapsed due to Petty infighting Andrew groan

Chronicles the early months of the goons presence in the game where after numerous attempts one leader was able to coax enough of them into a single corporation which was named goon Fleet their capabilities however were obviously lacking given that almost every single player entering the corporation was entirely new to the game with their only qualification being that they were a member of the something awful forums they even paid to have Banner advertisements displayed on something awful encouraging members to join goonfleet hoping to attract a large volume of players regardless of skill when a new member

joined goonfleet they would immediately be given a ship and a personal lesson on how to play the game but even so they were woefully ineffective this was a feature that they owned and incorporated into their Fleet tactics rather than trying to field effective ships they simply would outfit themselves in some of the cheapest ships and modules that the game had to offer and swarm their target the majority of the time this would end in Failure but because so little Capital had been invested the losses were never substantial and so they would throw themselves wly in

into battles declaring their motto in the local chat we're terrible at this game their practices however gave them a particular reputation with the rest of new Eden only those who had an active account at least 3 months old on the something awful forums were allowed into the corporation but those who applied weren't always simply rejected responding to a thread from someone looking to join a corporation one player said in the E online forums that quote goon Fleet don't recruit in-game any advice you get to the contrary will be from a goon trying to Swindle you

out of your assets they'll charge an application fee or some such then when you are successful they will offer to Courier your ships down to nulc after you hand over your property you will not hear from them again end quote another player responds quote if by some strange and bizarre Miracle you do get into goons you will be forever shunned by the rest of the eve Community once you join goons that's it you can never leave to join another Corp or Alliance you simply cannot be trusted in any other Corp or Alliance you might as

well just delete your character and start over if you want to leave goons end quote while this was somewhat hyperbolic it captured the general sentiment of new Eden there were the goons and then there was everybody else while their money wasn't boycotted few wanted much to do with them besides trade as nulc grew more competitive it became clear that the goons would need allies and so they created a larger Alliance under which all goons and those corporations within the game who wanted to join them could participate goons swarm the work the history of the great

Empire of Eve and Outsiders perspective speaks to the reputation of the goons quote to best understand goons swarm you must first understand goons the goons are not native to Eve online but rather are a form of invasive species the defining psychology of the community is that there is us and there is them non-members are inferior to members and many goons Delight in the misery of non-members or pubbies Evon line is not the first game to be visited by the goons nor will it be the last the goons move like locusts between on online games establishing

themselves quickly and attempting to conquer the game in order to inflict the most misery for all those not part of the swarm almost every major competitive online game has a clutch of goons deconstructing the game and their enemies end quote these alliances that established themselves were taking advantage of the final period of time in which a new alliance could feasibly capture and hold territory for years to come and the radical shifts in the fundamentals of the game would establish what would become the first great Empires bending their industrial might for control over weapons that could

decide an entire battle with the Press of a single button on June 29th 2005 CCP announced a bevy of updates most important among them being two new classes of ships dreadnots were a specialized class that wielded Weaponry designed to attack the stations that had become vital for Warfare controlling a station allowed the fighters of a defending or invading Force to shelter in a safe hub from which they could launch their fleets and dreadnots wielded the Firepower to assault such bulky impl placements much larger than battleships formerly the largest class of ship in the game dreadnots

could enter Siege mode which would render them entirely immobile but a significant Firepower increase constructing a dread knot however was a massive undertaking requiring new Starbase modules called capital ship assembly arrays rather than assembling the dread knot in full there were multiple Parts Each of which had to be fabricated separately and then combined to create the completed dreadn in order to move the massive amount of materials required for such a ship the second class that they announced was the freighter significantly larger than their older counterparts these Freighters were capable of moving materials on an unprecedented

scale but while they were typically well armored they would still be obvious targets for Pirates and sabots the implication was clear in order to project power and protect what territory they had alliances now were forced to turn inward and leverage their economies into production but the dreadnots were eclipsed half a year l later with the release of ships that would dwarf all others on December 16th 2005 CCP released an expansion entitled red moon rising this time three new ship classes were released the first was the carrier a massive ship that relied on clouds of Fighters

to perform combat for it intended as support for a fleet of smaller ships on the release page CCP explained that quote the carrier is an affordable capital ship and most major corporations are expected to fund and deploy at least one for their engagements end quot the second was the mother ship a larger variant of the more affordable carriers but these two new ship classes were eclipsed almost entirely by the ship that would come to be synonymous with the game the Titan the sheer immensity of a Titan was difficult for players to conceptualize when it was

announced for the first 2 years of the game the largest ships were the battleships whose volumes hovered between 450 and 500,000 cubic M the largest Titan in contrast was an utterly massive 155 million M cubed well over 300 times as large the capabilities wielded by a Titan were commensurate with its size the first key feature was the ability to open a jump Bridge while Titans were able to utilize the traditional Stargate Network outside of HEC they also could be used to coordinate massive Fleet movements if another specialized ship could light a curro field then the

Titan could use it as a beacon and jump directly to its location whether in the same system or not bypassing the Stargate Network entirely as long as the stars were close enough this meant that although the Titan was a ponderous ship it could still rapid relocate with proper coordination sometimes directly into a fight suddenly Shifting the balance of power what's more other ships could join the Titan in this jump meaning that it could be used to move an entire fleet at once between stars in Great Strides without being forced into the natural choke points of

the Stargate network but the more tantalizing capability of the Titan was the doomsday device while CCP was mum about the specific damage numbers what was known was that a doomsday device would inflict massive damage in a 500 km radius centered on a location of the Titans choosing what's more the Titan would not even need to be present in the fight to launch the Doomsday if another ship could light a sinos shuro field then the Titan could fire its doomsday through it as long as it was still within the same star system many suspected that the

First Alliance to field a Titan would wield unprecedented power and become nigh Unstoppable due to its area of effect the power of AD Dooms Day scaled with the number of Fighters on the battlefield and over time battles involving hundreds of players had become more and more common further emphasizing the imminent importance and dominance of the Titan Beyond these more immediately impressive features the Titan also served as a mobile platform from which war could be prosecuted players who died could respawn inside of the Titan and take a new ship stored in its hanger to join the

fight once again meaning that a player whose pod was destroyed would be able to rejoin combat immediately as long as supplies were available but before their incredible might could be wielded one would have to be built much like the dreadnots before them the different parts of the carrier mother ship and Titan would need to be constructed separately in different capital shipyards then brought together and assembled no power based in Empire space would have the resources or Capital required for such a massive undertaking and even if one did they would have war declared upon them immediately

and their Capital shipyards would be divested from them but even in nulc Andrew groan notes that there were only two alliances who could feasibly produce the first Titan and they so happened to have laid claim to territory immediately medely next to one another the warlike Band of Brothers who had earlier crushed the alliances in the North and the overwhelmingly massive ascendant Frontier consisting of former players from Earth and Beyond of these two ascendant Frontier had the clear advantage while skill and coordination could readily win a battle during this stage of the game there was no

way to outproduce a group with so many members as Gro notes quote ascendant Frontier was not focused on expansion or military Endeavors as Band of Brothers was a sentent frontier had come to own a huge swath of territory in the South but its members true passion was industry ascendant Frontier wanted to create a prosperous Hub of trade and commerce in nulc it was working too it was pumping out space stations outposts and capital ships at a rate many times faster than the next closest industrial powers of the era end quot quote but to accomplish this

feat they would have to overcome a new hurdle Espionage while often neglected in the first few years of Eve online its role in the operation of large alliances had increased as had its notoriety after a particularly high-profile case While most mercenary groups specialized in combat another Corporation named The Guiding hand social club would instead perform contract work for clients looking to subvert their enemies sometime in late 2004 or early 2005 an anonymous client approached the guiding hand with a contract and a massive sum of isk hoping to buy their services to Target uqu serif a

large corporation of the time they asked that uqu sif's coffers be ransacked and their communal hangers emptied of ships but the contractors would be allowed to keep all of what they pillaged the only object that the client and wanted was the corpse of the CEO mural the leader of the guiding hand istvan shogatsu was similarly disinterested in the spoils though he accepted these terms all the same The Guiding hand spent months infiltrating earning positions of trust and Authority they were more successful than their client could have dreamed multiple members found themselves entrusted with much of

the corporation's assets and one agent named zall found themselves as one of mural's lieutenants iston explained quote arenus zall is what we call a valentine operative essentially his job is to seduce and entice an objective into a state of trust and confidence as such we'd call mural's relationship to him moments before the strike endeared end quote on April 18th 2005 the code word was sent to every agent Nicole immediately the corporation was drained of all of its liquid assets and much of its stores of supplies and zall collected the CEO's corpse along with the squad

of guiding hand members who had rendevu to help deliver the killing blow iston made a public announcement shortly after with characteristic flare quote greetings everyone it has been some time since I last stood behind a Podium and made made a public announcement so you'll have to forgive me if I'm somewhat out of form the reason I stand here before you is to announce that my mercenary outfit The Guiding hand Social Club has completed its most ambitious contract to date our Target was assigned to us many months ago mural of UA serif our task was to

carry out that which The Guiding hand Social Club has now become known for to utterly demolish mural and bring all all who followed her to their knees in one Fell Swoop for those many months we toiled secreting our operatives among her ranks steering her organization through a number of insidiously engineered events meant to engender trust and divert their attention from where it should have been early this morning our hard work bore fruit executing a meticulously planned thoroughly Flawless concerto of simultaneous Corp hanger heists attack in open space and facility invasions the uqu serf came to

know the Wrath of the guiding hand Social Club firsthand the result shatters any previous records for sheer scale of such an Endeavor our net gain from this massive Heist is roughly estimated at over 20 billion isk total damages inflicted are estimated at close to 30 billion isk thank you all for your time end quote this would be far from the final major Act of The Guiding hand social club though they would be more covert from this point forward this level of metagaming however wasn't shared by all people most role players for example would attempt to

play the game as a character within the game world but those who didn't roleplay often regarded them with derision and saw them as potential targets either for ridicule or aggressive action while discussing Eve online for her podcast this game changed my life EO Wilson posits that quote the people you're talking to don't know that the Talking part is a game too you're going in you're making friends you're gaining their trust you're spending a lot of time with them they're being nice or whatever and you know you're lying to them to the point of screwing them

over to which her co-host Julia Hardy replies quote when you play a game you are aware of what the structure and the rules of the game are because everyone's playing by the same rules that's how you know it's a game but then if someone comes in and completely changes all the rules but no one else is aware of the new rules then it just doesn't seem like a fair game end quote these early years began to establish the rules by which people would play Eve online where other games of its ilk were played mostly within

the game world and this was generally respected by the other players real world duplicity was gradually becoming a normal and expected part of of new Eden whether the existing players wanted it or not many of the first capital ships were destroyed before even being completed thanks to the Spy networks and scouting work from rival corporations but finally on September 25th 2006 9 months after Titans were first introduced into the game the refugee players from Earth and Beyond an ascendant Frontier completed the first Titan triumphantly their leader cyoc flew it into the capital system of the

alliance allowing everyone to Marvel at the finished Avatar class Titan which he named Steve the origin of this name is in contention most sources believe that it was named after the late Steve Irwin who had died earlier that month but Andrew groan recalls that cyoc attributed the name to a scene from the animated film Over the Hedge released 4 months prior in which the squirrel character hammy comedically proposes naming the massive newly erected Hedges Steve whatever the origin of the name the completion of Steve heralded War immediately their enemies and Band of Brothers invaded But

the power of Steve the Titan blunted their Advance simply with the threat of its presence until December 11th 2006 during a large scale battle cyoc Unleashed his doomsday safely through a cural field field then jumped to a safe Point 20 systems away but what happened next would change the Paradigm of players for years to come and would pit Band of Brothers against the rest of new Eden more importantly though it would also begin a process that would sour the relationship between the developers of Evon line and its [Music] players [Music] game development in the early

2000s was significantly different than it would become two decades later developing a game typically took only a few years at most and once a game was completed it was common for the studio to immediately Begin work on something new MMOs were no exception most of them would run for a few years then die as as the player base moved on to play something else this had already happened to Eve's main competition Earth and Beyond and the developers all expected that Eve would suffer the same fate eventually as a matter of course but as the game

approached the fourth year of its lifetime it seemed that it was only growing CCP had created plans to continue adding features and what's more they were preparing to launch the game in China a massive New Market though China would have its own instance separate from the rest of the world while this was good news for the company many of the original developers were beginning to grow Restless they hadn't expected to work on Eve for more than a few years and a number of them were looking forward to making something new while CCP had plans for

other projects within the eve intellectual property they were in need of new developers and so they decided to hire some of their staff directly from their player base in many ways this was a logical decision hiring players meant that they were passionate and knowledgeable about the game and they would be conscious of Concepts and problems of which an outside hire might otherwise be ignorant it also meant that they would need less training to learn about the intricacies of Eve besides technical knowhow these developers would typically continue to play even after being hired which meant that

they were passively listen in to the information that flows through the undercurrent of new Eden in the form of Word of Mouth rumors and propaganda in this way they could adjust the servers quickly to anticipate battles that were about to take place and reduce the effects of lag as well as gather information for balance changes faster than they otherwise would be able but these new hires created unique problems those players willing and able to accept work at crowd control Productions were often among the most dedicated and active and for many Eve had become a significant

part of their lives deliberately altering their schedules so that they were able to add their Firepower to important battles and assist their corporations and allies real friendships were frequently formed and broken due to in-game conflicts while some were burned for in-game advantages for these players the boundaries between Evon line and the real world were either blurry or non-existent when these players became developers they gained access to the dev tools and commands this power was too tempting for some and they began to utilize these permissions to their own ends creating rare and valuable items for their

corporations and alliances for example blueprint Originals used for building ships and components were an extremely limited Supply as no new ones could be made and so most people had to buy car copies that would be consumed after only a few uses using commands these player developers could create brand new blueprints for their Court mates and themselves Hilmar Pon CEO of CCP noted during an interview for down the rabbit hole that on five separate occasions the problem had become so bad that he had to invite the offender into his office and offer them a choice stop

playing the game or stop working at crowd control Productions twice the developer chose to leave the company so that they could continue playing so great was the role of the game in their lives it was with knowledge of these Bad actors that as growan wrote years later cyoc leader of ascendant Frontier and pilot for Steve the Titan accused a Band of Brothers member of Malin in an interview for a Swedish radio program translated for empires of Eve cyoc said quote suddenly one of the CC CP Interstellar news corpse ships just appeared out of nowhere and

started to orbit my Titan 2 seconds later I was bumped offline a total coincidence I am sure and about 3 seconds after that so was my ALT end quote those who are more dubious of CYO claims noted that after a recent patch it had become much easier to scan for Titans and so while finding Steve by pure chance was unlikely it was still technically feasible what precisely happened is contentious and no definitive proof has been released but however the location of Steve was divined the leaders of Band of Brothers received word that Steve the Titan

had been discovered and they immediately gave the order to mobilize in a matter of minutes a cural field was lit at Steve's location and the entirety of Band of Brothers Fleet jumped in to see Steve alone inert and inactive immediately the dreadnots went into Siege mode and Unleashed their payload into the hull of Steve which could only wait placidly for the end Steve the Titan exploded and was reduced to Rubble the first Titan to be built was now the first Titan to be destroyed the members of Band of Brothers were abiant and soon the loss

of Steve became common knowledge all throughout new Eden to honor its death Steve's ruined corpse would remain in the system of c9n tax CC where it was destroyed so that players may still return to it and pay their respects the death of Steve had made many players suspicious but soon an event would occur that would unite all of new Eden against Band of Brothers and more importantly alter the relationship between the players and the company on a foundational level [Music] in January of 2007 a hacker responsible for releasing private information on goonfleet going by kutsan

approached them offering to hack their enemies for free after his client from the Coalition of the South refused to pay him for his services among those targeted was Band of Brothers and included with strategically important pieces of information he discovered logs proving that one of the members of Band of Brothers was a developer and was granting his Alliance rare Goods while some were dubious at first CCP later confirmed that indeed the accusation was true Hilmar Pon wrote on the subject in a public letter with dramatic Pros quote throughout our history there have been a handful

of cases where our employees or members of our various volunteer and partner programs have taken advantage of the proprietary Powers they are granted through access and knowledge these cases have been investigated prosecuted and judgment rendered usually the punishment has been quite simple termination of employment a pivotal case was uncovered last summer during a routine investigation of developer accounts unfortunately CCP did not act with the same decisive consistency we have used on previous occasions those left at the helm chose to react cautiously as sometimes is appropriate under these circumstances leading to more leniency and understanding than

we are used to in these matters this particular case involving a single developer underlined where improvements needed to be made and we have since focused our efforts on reinforcing rules and processes so that consistent ruling is assured it is no trivial thing when corruption takes place in our case it's no different than the Injustice of public servants in the real world Feathering their own nests rather than ensuring the prosperity of the many living in a country of a comparable population as the world of Eve Iceland only has 300,000 inhabitants I sure know how it can

feel when governance is not balanced and feeling powerless to stop it I am certain that members of the eve Community are now going through similar emotions I am sure that we all appreciate that it is no coincidence that Dante reserved the lowest level of hell for the worst of those who betrayed their benefactors in our case I would regard the eve Community as are benefactors we are not the gods or the masters of Eve online or the eve Community we serve the community you have entrusted us to safeguard your hard work end quote the the

death of Steve the Titan had raised suspicions before and now those suspicions had proven correct Band of Brothers were cheaters many in nulc had long hated Band of Brothers for various reasons chiefly their imperialist aims and elitist attitude but now all of new Eden had been granted a new ideological casus belly while exploits glitches and unintended mechanics are common in games such as Eve online this was different a developer was deliberately abusing his authority and privilege in order to Aid his allies while Band of Brothers as an alliance had already been diplomatically isolated for much

of its lifespan they had now been made a universal Target players all over New Eden were enraged snidle calling them band of developers even though most players weren't present in nulc estimates stay that over half of all players somehow participated in the war that would become known as the first Great War of Eve online with the majority of players in new Eden choosing a side in the war propaganda became more vital than ever and the precise truth was becoming more and more difficult to ascertain altered with flowery embellishments in a blog post from October of

2007 Eve blogger Nate comes writes that quote the propaganda Machinery of the coalitions play a vital role in keeping players informed of the big picture the little guys struggle one ship one system one Corporation and Alliance at a time and read the cues and spin from the mouthpieces up high of this recent turn Band of Brothers has fashioned a very slick propaganda video spinning the retreat in heroic terms in contrast to a more prosaic reality Andy provides detailed analysis for the game World students of these things despite its production polish one will note that its

audience is crisply targeted it makes little attempt to reach more broadly the important takeaway for a general reader might be this how would the foot soldiers in a large scale information complex distributed game spanning the real world globe and 24 time zones have any clue how their system by System struggle fits into the big picture were it not for well something like an E online Alliance propaganda Network end quote for CCP games War meant fun for the players and fun meant more subscribers which meant more profits and while EV on line certainly had a larger

audience than many other games its subscribership was increased even further due to its mechanics which offered its players the ability to easily practice a technique known as multiboxing While most who play massively multiplayer online games tend to only play one character at a time others will sometimes have multiple accounts that they will run at the same time in order to fulfill multiple roles at once compared to other games E online was particularly well suited to this method of play since many of the most important functions such as firing weapons and movement would continue to run

once activated and only required interaction when changing this function even if a particular character underperformed it was almost always worthwhile to have multiple characters rather than only one in any situation this gradually became vital for professions such as Mining and Industry whose activities were much more passive than combat Mining and related professions mostly entailed approaching a resource node pressing a few buttons and waiting until until the node was mined out while watching for hostile ships for these players the most effective way to scale was simply to have more ships which meant multiboxing and so it

was common for players to have multiple windows with the same game open each window running a different character even if a person could have multiple characters on the same account each account was limited to only one of its characters being used at a time and so multiple subscriptions would be necessary this meant that some people rather than only giving $15 a month to play were instead giving many times more some of the most dedicated players would and do run over 10 characters simultaneously given the dedication of space game players and their relatively higher age bracket

the proportion of multiboxers was likely much higher compared to other MMOs what's more word of the war was Contin continuing to grow the player base and ccp's business prospects were looking better than they ever had while the precise player count is difficult to ascertain the total numbers of subscribed accounts had according to the company surpassed 3,000 rather than only pushing money back into the game they began to build their company out anticipating further success while everyone involved with the production of Eve online had believed in the potential of their project it was still difficult for

many of them to believe how successful their game had become but the executives at the company wasted no time looking for ways to grow the IP both to capitalize on the success of the game and grow the resilience of the franchise to compete with other MMOs in 2004 World of Warcraft had been launched by Blizzard Entertainment developers of numerous well-regarded games such as Starcraft the the warcraft series and the Diablo series and much like their other titles World of Warcraft known as wow in Shand was a massive success upon launch and even as the years

wore on its subscriber count was only growing there was some speculation about whether or not wow would swallow the entire Market the foundation of these fears is dubious World of Warcraft and Eve online occupied drastically different niches wow is what is now known as a theme park MMO guiding the player through a series of set pieces in an expected sequential order and progression Eve in contrast is known as a Sandbox granting the player a variety of tools and the decision of what they wish to accomplish with these tools similarly while players of any particular character

level in WoW will typically only be seen with others of the same level bracket it's commonplace for a fleet in Eve to be comprised of players with widely different character skills accumulated still there was a significant fear that the harsh and hostile nature of Eve would push players into the much more inviting World of Warcraft the dedicated Eve player base took to referring to wow pejoratively an of repeated insult was that an eve player leaving for World of Warcraft increases the average IQ score of both games but soon soon crowd control Productions would begin competing

with blizzard in an entirely different way in 2006 CCP announced a new collectible card game named Eve II Genesis identical to its namesake game on launch during this time period many creative companies were looking to emulate the success of such properties as magic the Gathering Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and the developers of Eve online were no exception I hoping to build excitement crowd control Productions organized a 128 player pre-release tournament at genon a large gaming convention at the same convention blizzard was giving a similar sneak preview of their own upcoming collectible card game simply called The

World of Warcraft trading card game then on November 11th 2016 less than a month after the launch of the card game crowd-control Productions announced that they were acquiring white wolf publishing a prolific and wellestablished publisher of tabletop RPG games including the popular vampire the Masquerade in 2005 CCP had quietly approached white wolf looking for assistance creating their collectible card game based on Evon lime later in an interview with sha news white wolf marketing director Kelly Barnes Herman stated that quote because of our history and managing the award-winning vampire the eternal struggle collectible card game white

wolf was able to make suggestions and provide some initial guidance to CCP in the first stages of the game launch and now we are looking forward to working on the first expansion set in 2007 end quote CCP had gone from making their own board game to buying another company to make tabletop games for them what's more CCP also announced that it would be published in new games based on intellectual properties owned by white wolf including their world of Darkness setting home to vampire the Masquerade the immediate Hope was for a sequel to The Beloved Colt

classic vampire the Masquerade bloodlines video game a significant and undoubtedly costly undertaking but a new Bloodlines game would not be as ambitious as another project that they were about to announce in 2007 CCP P announced a new massively multiplayer online game based on the white wolf IP simply titled world of Darkness however details at the time were scaned in an interview with Euro gamer ccp's marketing director Magnus bergson said that quote we're not really hiding any information about it we just don't know the release date yet the actual design and exactly how it's going to

be is being created right now so when we actually know all of that we can guesstimate how long it's going to take these games typically take four or 5 years to make I don't think this is going to be any different end quote now as CCP were attempting to balance and progress Eve on line they were also responsible for the development of an entirely new MMO however this wasn't the only new major project that CCP would announce at their annual Eve FanFest celebration in November of 20 2007 the company showed a trailer for a massive

update to the game that they called ambulation this future update promised players the ability to exit their ships in stations and meet one another in Game Face to Face something that could potentially make the game far more immersive despite the incredible amount of work that the company had promised to deliver they were confident that they could fund numerous projects in part thanks to their growing and dedicated subscribership driven by the chaos churning inside of new [Music] Eden as the wars in nulc raged and Eve's player base grew reporters within the gaming industry were beginning to

take notice consistently stories of battles with dozens if not hundreds of players were beginning to leak out out into gaming forums and early social media websites those hearing about such battles might have acknowledged mentions of the struggles with lag and server instability with which Fleet commanders constantly had to contend but such complaints were quickly forgotten when the scale of certain battles was shared Fleet commanders had learned not to take such large fights unless absolutely necessary due to the chaos introduced by such numbers but their Rarity only made them more or tantalizing what's more these battles

were given context due to the persistent state of the game with corporations and alliances vying for power territory and wealth in a constantly evolving drama to many it felt like a Space Opera playing out in real time in early 2008 one of the first articles detailing the ongoing nulc war was published for PC Gamer UK The Author Jim rosenal open by writing quote there's a war going on it's one of the most bitterly contested conflicts imaginable fought over many months by an international cast of Veteran Warriors an entire galaxy is at stake you probably even

know someone who is caught up in it fighting for his life and those of his comrades as many as 20,000 people have fought in its battles this war is the Great War of EV online the largest virtual conflict ever waged unlike the 20-minute conflicts that characterize other multiplayer games this is a death match that has taken place between fleets of hundreds in a continuous process that has lasted years it is the greatest imaginary conflict yet conducted and in what follows I'll be tracing its glories and mapping its Horrors end quote this sort of romantic Pro

would quickly come to characterize most of the writing about new Eden and while they occasionally would acknowledge the more Technical and practical issues that players and their leaders faced these passages were nearly always diminished in favor of telling stories of Epic campaigns and pitched battles the results and aims of these large battles however were difficult to communicate due to the inherently intricate nature of the game's mechanics what could easily be Comm communicated however was sovereignty territorial Maps reminiscent of War documentaries gave the impression that the Warriors involved in these conflicts were actively making history and

granted the movements of these wars similar weight but perhaps more immediately attractive was the attempt to give a price to ships in realworld fiat currency partway through his article roseno writes a relatively short passage about the loss of Steve the Titan quote it's not hard to see why Band of Brothers would want to attack the biggest Alliance in the game the riches were there for the taking and the alliance leader one cyoc piloted the first and then only Titan class ship in the game it was a giant Behemoth that has been valued in real world

cash at around 4,000 British pound Band of Brothers seized the first Titan kill in controversial circumstances and sealed the Fate of ascendant Frontier end quote this passing attempt at an approximation of price would become a tradition in coverage of the game the daunting complexity of Eve's mechanics and the tangle of relationships between corporations alliances and even corporations within alliances made it nearly impossible to summarize in the space afforded an article in a gaming publication meaning that the conflicts necessarily had to be simplified in order to both be made intelligible and concise enough to fit within

the restrictive word limits many of those who read these articles became enamored with the concept of partaking in such massive record-breaking battles and began signing up for Eve themselves for CCP war was good for business but those who were fighting the war were facing unprecedented problems Nate comes in a blog from 2007 titled nbsi and the great problem writes that quote members within an alliance are marked by varying colors green means that fellow is a corporation member blue he's part of the alliance Etc Degrees of Separation even among buddies red in several flavors distinguishes shades

of bad guy the problem is with the gray one of the trickiest hurting cats problem in running alliances is making sure everyone is on the same page about the Rules of Engagement M go to any Alliance forum and ask what the current rules are and you will hear a number of answers folks get confused about what they should do with the gray and in the absence of knowing what they should do they do what they think is right which can be all over the board inconsistency is a hobgoblin to both sides of the gray divide

the good gray don't like going into areas where they are UNC about who is on the same page and alliances don't like Grays getting into some areas since some Grays may turn out to be bad apples to make the problem worse some alliances may vary their policy towards the gray over time and Circumstance for example when tensions are high an alliance may enter lockdown mode and its policy becomes one of shooting the gray first and ask questions later during more peaceful times the policy may be changed to be nice to encourage trade it gets worse

some of the very large alliances may have different policies for the different regions it controls talk about a headache if you're one of the few players EG traders who might travel great distances another problem with the gray is that it is an alliance SLC Corp Centric perspective it is a firstperson measure you are neutral to me now I may be however enemies to your friend and that can lead to a more complicated relationship end quote these problems were only growing greater trade had been a key element that allowed the early nulc corporations to build their

first Titans but the war raging was now making them more and more weary of neutrals who could be Traders or enemy infiltrators but these problems were being Amplified in an important new way after the collapse of Uli as a trade Hub Traders returned to the four different corners of Empire space in the north south east and west in particular they gravitated towards station that hosted the best Mission givers while trading NPC Goods had gradually been phased out and the player economy was allowed to supplant it players could still earn money from NPCs through missions and

they tended to congregate within the stations that house the highest earning missions entrepreneurial Traders would offer weapons ammunition and ships for sale in these stations hoping to sell to the wealthier mission Runners at these convenient locations however more than just the mission Runners were searching for these goods and soon A Whiter clientele was congregating around these stations as well recognizing this more Traders looking to sell their goods began placing their contracts alongside the others even if they were unrelated to running missions hoping to sell to those visiting the station and so the trade hubs established

themselves and grew of the different trade hubs the one that received the most traffic was the calari Navy assembly plant located around the fourth Moon of the fourth planet of jeta the higher population in the northern regions of Empire space was due in large part to the attributes of characters when creating a character players are allowed to choose between the four different NPC Empires Amar minmatar galente and kalari and of the four kalari were by far the most popular race for players due to their favorable attribute distribution given that attributes determine how quickly a character

can learn skills and skills determine what characters are capable of Performing soon much like Uli before it the system of jeta was host to hundreds of players every day looking to trade and it was growing rapidly but this time crowd control Productions would be prepared since they had broken the Stargate link in Uli they had been working on the server back end as they realized that they would need to prepare for far more success than they had anticipated when they launched Eve online on March 1st 2006 CCP games announced a patch transferring the game onto

new servers which utilized brand new state-of-the-art AMD chips rather than trying to scatter the players again now they would be doing all that they could to accommodate naturally occurring trade Hub soon a single server would be dedicated exclusively to the system of jeta to manage the massive influx of traffic as well as some permanent residents who began to participate in the day trading of Commodities with trade now being allowed to centralize this also meant that if a particular commodity crashed then it crashed for everyone in the game at once with little recourse but while this

new trade Hub was located in Empire space its establishment significantly affected the culture of nulc the northern regions had always been wealthy due to their natural resources and general proximity to HEC but the emergence of jeta guaranteed much easier access to what would soon become the Undisputed center of the economy in new Eden given that jeta was less than 10 Stargate jumps away from the nearest Northern nulc systems trading between Empire space and the northern regions only became easier as time passed but the inverse was true for the southern regions the distance between jeta and

Dell for example was many times longer and where they once have been able to trade with Empire space easily they now had to travel much farther to sell their goods As Time passed those nulc alliances living in the South would begin to develop their own internal economies leaders would encourage their alliance members to trade exclusively with one another in many cases creating not only an economic but a cultural divide between the players in the southern regions and the players in the rest of new Eden but in the in between spaces an entirely new sort of

dynamic was evolving one forgotten by [Music] most over the years the Dynamics of the game had shifted radically as players gained more and more capital and as the merchant races were supplanted by a full player economy piracy was no longer making nearly as much money and often players would lose more money than they gained by hunting other players many such as the aforementioned mercenaries abandoned the practice in favor of fulfilling contracts for clients what's more the noac alliances were growing into Empires and these Empires often patrolled and defended their territory stamping out any piracy not

perpetrated by their own members the only space left for these players was low security space or lowc but when they moved their Paradigm gradually began to shift now that piracy was no longer making the players much money the only ones who continued the practice did so for the love of it in an interview for down the rabbit hole a prominent player and leader named Phantom might spoke to the role that those in loac adopted quote I feel like me killing people in LC isn't piracy I think it's just PVP it's not a profession I don't

really earn any money from it the fact that the game calls what you're doing illegal means that there's some kind of weird dishonor involved that's different to catching a traveler in nulc it's just PVP end quote those players who decided to stay were the only ones dedicated enough to continue their piracy in part due to a particular feature early after the release of the game CCP launched a feature called kill mails which were permanent in-game records of ship destruction issued to both the destroyed party and those involved in destroying them and many players began to

covet these killmails and collect them like trading cards with certain ships or players being more or less prestigious while this wasn't always the primary motivating factor for those hunting other players it did mean that they could keep a record of their experiences doing so ensuring an official method of tracking Prestige but the kill males introduced another Dynamic loss aversion since kill mailes were public one's victories and losses were both available to any who wanted to see them and a loss was often considered a shame in the eyes of the community at least to the player

who lost the ship on this Phantom Mite said quote I feel it is socially unacceptable to lose in this game if you lose a fleet fight to begin with in local The Winning Side will almost always Jer at you and be a bad winner mock you for having dared to lose a fight in Evon line it's not congratulations on winning it's you idiots you lost how stupid do you feel right now especially as group sizes get larger there's a lot of bitterness on both sides end quote on the opposite end of the spectrum a group

of players have been growing in size prominence and role in the greater Eve Community early in the game's lifetime a help chat was implemented so that players could offer assistance to other players learning the game but many found that this limited Forum was insufficient due to the complexity of Eve and so a new player run institution was formed Med Eve University its primary impetus was to assist new players by teaching them the basic mechanics as well as good practices with hands-on experience while other corporations would sometimes invite new players and assist them so that they

could swell their ranks and Achieve greater goals Eve University had few such aspirations rather uniquely it declared itself a neutral body who would not take sides in any wars though it's members known as students or unistas were free to do as they pleased whenever they chose to leave many years later in an interview with the online Eve news site Crossing zebras a new CEO asmodus vear said that quote Eve University exists to give new players a place to learn about Eve in a supportive Community we maintain neutrality so that our students can move on to

whatever section of Eve interests them end quote but this neutrality would quickly come to be a limiting factor in October of 2005 Eve University founded a new alliance called the big blue and sought to hold territory in nulc but after less than a year an unknown client hired mercenary coalition to evict them for unclear reasons another reflection of the growing necessity for corporations to Ally themselves with one another in order to survive the growing turbulence of n Eve University's policy of neutrality wouldn't allow them the Partnerships with the larger groups that they required unwilling to

compromise on this defining feature Eve University decided to base themselves in high security space instead and partnered with other corporations in a new alliance which they named ivy league in part to protect themselves from the vast number of War declarations that they were suffering as a group comprised primarily of new players learning from a smaller number of more seasoned players declaring war on Eve University was an easy way for more aggressive and less Discerning players to gather easy kill Maes despite these hazards Eve University began to grow as a foundational part of new Eden's social

landscape with corporations seeking out those who had spent time learning in it their decision to retire from nulc would become a practically permanent one on June 19th 2009 when CCP released their expansion Revelations 2 with this expansion powerful defensive sovereignty bonuses would be granted to anyone who owned over half of the structures within a system for 28 days once this had been achieved a structure called a Sino Jammer could be built in the system disallowing any player from lighting a cural field within the system while Capital ships could use Stargate they were choke points in

which they could easily be caught and the only practical way of bringing a capital ship into a fight was through the use of cural fields by restricting their use it meant that any Alliance attacking a system with a high enough sovereignty bonus could only do so with subc capital ships an effectively impossible task against any active Alliance this meant that NC alliances were now much more stable in their ownership of Terror as long as they possessed enough Capital ships the major factions in nulc had now been set with the base mechanics the social groups and

the varying play Styles within Eve all growing more complicated and nuanced by the day the development team recognized that they wouldn't be able to keep track of all of them and balance them alone and so in late 2007 crowd control Productions announced the establishment of the the Council of Stellar management a body of players elected by the player base to communicate their interests directly to the company early in the game's lifetime CCP had requested that players join the developers to speak about the game but they had been handpicked after applying as opposed to the more

democratic method of the Council of the 97 applications 33 were rejected for varying reasons including behavioral and Technical leaving 64 to be voted on by the community in a first P the post system where the 14 players with the most votes would be elected a PDF document written by CCP representative Peter Johannes oscarson details the role and responsibilities of the Council of Stellar management but not before spending over half of the document on what he called a comparative analysis of real structural social Evolution with the virtual Society of Evon lime in the opening paragraphs he

wrote quote the only consensus in the study of socio cultural evolution is that no single Theory can aptly describe the universal development and progression of any society Myriad factors ranging from geographical location to religious beliefs and even weather conditions prevailing or rogish all complicated the analysis introducing the most subtle variable could drastically alter the course of two societies that would have otherwise evolved along similar paths thus it is these General paths or unilinear Milestones that this paper will draw real world comparisons from the purpose of the analogy is to establish the foundation for implementing a

deliberative democratically elected Council in Eve this is by no means an endorsement of any social Evolution Theory a comparison with actual civilizations is beyond the scope of this analysis but it will demonstrate the Striking similarities between this theory of real life societal development and the virtual Society evolution of Eve while also relying on one key assumption about individuals in both Realms that they are motivated by the pursuit of value the core of which is driven by their Instinct for survival end quote while this doent was likely meant to help instill within the eve Community the

impression that CCP was taking seriously their responsibilities toward the game it also illustrated The Divide that was growing between the players and their game world's caretakers despite their attempts to the contrary while the majority of the player base was primarily interested in Simply Having Fun by playing the game on the most minute level the developers saw themselves as being on the cusp of a newly developing world that reflected elements of The Human Condition similar to the way that the founding members of CCP had attempted to create a new internet interface with the virtual reality markup

language during their time at Oz virtual oscarson wrote in the document that quote until now comparisons of political philosophy and social structures in the virtual world have been drawn from parallels with the real one but it can not be stressed enough that today with this many people comprising the civilization of Eve and the potential ripple effect of any change in the way this Society is governed further legislative applications based mostly on ccp's interpretation of the real world are likely to cause more harm than good to achieve continued success Eve Society must be granted a larger

role in exerting influence on the legislative powers of CCP governance of virtual world is a unique Endeavor there is no precedence to follow end quote the responsibilities for the Council of Stellar management were more than might typically be expected from a group of player Consultants which perhaps helps to explain the small number of applicants quote at least twice a year CCP will convene multi-day Summit meetings in ruic in addition each year CCP holds its FanFest convention seven members of the CSM attend these events in person Council terms will last 12 months and elections will follow

the expiration of each term this time frame corresponds roughly to the expansion release cycles of ion lime end quote these council members would be privy to restricted knowledge so that they could give their unique perspectives as players what sort of effect they would have on the game however was yet to be seen the important importance of such communication with the player community was exemplified by the proliferation of player-made tools that were seeing widening popularity on July 22nd 2008 a player going by the name warari created a post on the official Eve forums in which he

announced the release of a map of Eve online named Doland quote in the last weeks I created a system to arrange and generate region maps for Eve after some hard work on the backend and positioning the systems I can finally announce a new type of Eve regions Maps the maps are focused to be clean and easy readable with the most important informations for Fleet roaming and planning they contain daily sovereignty and outpost informations for your favorite 0.0 space Also occupancy informations for the new factional warfare are included end quote what's more this tool would be

offered for or free to any Eve player who wanted to use it hosted on its own website importantly this map wasn't updated manually rather it pulled information from Eve online's backend servers in order to update it meaning that they would update in real time and doland's Maps would quickly become the standard and when players wanted to share maps of EV online with one another rather than using the in-game map the clean clear maps on Dot land would almost always be used this was far from the only tool developed by players to help others play the

game in 2006 a group of resourceful coders had released a tool which they named eveon which acted as a way to manage a character and plan their ever important skills which restricted what a character could do and what sort of innate bonuses they wielded like Dolan eveon pulled information from the back and servers of EV on line allowing players to see aspects of their character such as their skills their stats their total skill points acred and their isk balance all without having to open the game these sorts of tools helped further erode the feeling of

separation between the game and real life since the game World could be reflected in places other than the game window rather than fight these tools CCP supported their use and with some times even showcase them on their website it was around this time as well that the listless and much poorer pirates in low security space would be given a new purpose on June 10th 2008 CCP released the expansion imperion age among the other changes the one that attracted the most attention was the introduction of a new opportunity for Players called factional Warfare after signing up

to fight for one of of the four in-game non-player Empires that ruled over high security Empire space they would be given objectives in low security space to capture in the name of the Empire that they had chosen but importantly they would not only be fighting against NPCs they would also engage other players who had sworn allegiance to a different enemy faction in this way players in Empire space could fight with other players in a structured yet accessible f fashion while factional Warfare itself held little interest for the pirate corporations in losc it meant that far

more players would be ushered into their domain as the less experienced players from high SEC wandered into lowc in order to complete their objectives roving bands of lowc pirates would catch individuals and small fleets unaware swooping in to rapidly dispatch those looking to engage in factional Warfare the these Pirates had become a part of the landscape of losek maintaining a level of unavoidable danger to the game and the introduction of factional warfare had reinvigorated them evading Pirates was a skill in which Traders and industrialists prided themselves and it was common to hear such peaceful players

breathlessly recount their experiences avoiding and outwitting them but soon the game would see an addition that would further complicate it Crossing the border between the real world and the virtual world of new Eden in a way that would eventually make its dealings the subject of international attention and [Music] awe in November of 2008 CCP announced the release of a new form of currency as was common practice players could either buy cards at local stores or have cards mailed to them which they could redeem to extend their membership allowing them continued access to the game for

Eve much like other games of its kind the monthly fee was $15 US with discounts when bought in larger increments however CCP was now offering a new function for these cards when a player bought one they would now have the option to either redeem it normally and use it to lengthen their subscription or they could instead exchange their card for a new in-game item called a pilot's license extension or Plex at an exchange rate of one Plex per month of game time if they chose the latter option an in-game item would appear in that The

Hanger of the station in which one of their characters was docked this Plex could then later be expended for the subscription if the player so chose for the player who used the Plex in this way it simply added an extra step to the process of renewing a subscription but there was one major important difference since the Plex was an in-game item it could be bought and sold on the player market and whoever bought the Plex could redeem it for their own character meaning that a player with enough in-game money could effectively pay for their subscription

by buying Plex from other players with in-game money the most obvious effect was that it gave many players a goal make enough in-game money to pay for their own subscription month to month by buying Plex from other players effectively playing for free but for those on the outside looking in it gave something much more important game subscription cards for Eve online could typically be bought for $35 and offered two months of subscription which meant that they could be redeemed for two Plex this gave Plex a stable real world value of approximately $17 since Plex would

be bought and sold in-game for isk the in-game currency and the real world value of one Plex was relatively consistent this meant that there was a way to to track the real world value of the in-game currency without having to refer to the black market price which was subject to fluctuation and which many sources were reluctant to acknowledge or reference because of its inherently opaque nature what's more because of the stability of the price of Plex in the real world the gradual inflation of the value of isk could be tracked as well such aspects only

enhance the interest of mainstream Publications including Forbes a popular and well-regarded business magazine which had already been paying attention to Eve online due in part to the business themed naming scheme of its player structures an article from 2008 by Matthew KY named from MMO to CEO reads in part quote Shan Conover has two jobs one is at a computer forensics lab in Suburban New Jersey the other is in a fantastical Galaxy inhabited by 25,000 intelligent life forms driven by power and greed in one place he takes orders in the other he gives them there are

many more like Conover and with good reason it's in this virtual space where tomorrow's Business Leaders are being born mom may mock video games no more end quote the eve player interviewed for this article was the notable figure Darius Johnson the leader of goon Fleet and the greater goonswarm Alliance for the last year and a half goons swarm and their allies the Russians hailing from the northeastern corner of the map had been continuing their war against Band of Brothers and during that time they had become known for their effective if obnoxious propaganda beyond the posters

which were often photoshopped versions of World War II propaganda posters the matani had taken to regular L posting on his blog about the war both to Rally the goons and guide the public perception to bolster morale and increased membership and this gave mainstream news outlets an easy way to monitor the war albeit through a heavily biased Source even knowing this bias this meant that as Publications such as Forbes and the guardian wrote about ion line it was often through the Paradigm and context of the goons external news outlets also help to personalize the leaders further

in kah's article he writes quote when Conover gets home from his 9-to-5 job he logs onto a virtual world as Darius Johnson chief executive of goon Fleet a corporation comprised of more than 2,800 players in Eve the leadership experience has challenged Conover the same way the modern CEO is challenged he worries about economics employee morale production training and even a succession plan which he's devising after all the next guy has to be able to weather the storm too end quote in particular the term failure Cascade had become common in new Eden popularized by the matani

and quickly adopted by news outlets who were already heavily reliant on his writing when discussing Eve in an article from 2009 the matani wrote quote in the past 4 years I've witnessed more than 20 alliances disintegrate and I've had the benefit of directly orchestrating a good number of those better than just hammering at them from the outside I've been able to witness the process from the inside concurrently by way of our spy Network while watching Loa voltera explode in much the same way Veritas immortalis had I dubbed this death cycle the failure Cascade due to

the way in which the process rapidly accelerates from small errors into thermonuclear drama delightfully enough even our most vehement enemies have chosen to use my nomenclature as well as the more traditional media apparently the term has some pre-existing engineering use but Googling it now turns up mostly yammering about spaceships he went on to define the term quote a failure Cascade is the disintegration of an alliance caused by Collective helplessness in the face of sustained and unrationed adversity through a process of pilot attribution shifting from the alliance to the corporation or the individual end quote both

crowd-control Productions and goons swarm were facing prodigious growth and both were simultaneously taking great risks in attempts to reap great [Music] rewards [Music] it had been over 2 years since the death of Steve the Titan and still the war in nlack continued involving every major power and after numerous movements of the battle line back and forth Band of Brothers had been pushed all the way back into their home region of delve to their North the northern Coalition had recovered from total Destruction retaken territory and went on the offensive after fighting back the forces of mercenary

Coalition who had been fighting the war for Band of Brothers but eventually abandoned them in order to establish themselves in New Territory and continue their existence as guns for hire meanwhile from the East the forces of goonswarm and their allies the red Alliance continued to strike previously the Russians of the red Alliance had joined goons swarm in an effort to defeat Band of Brothers but after this effort failed they retreated to their home regions in the Southeast to live next door to the goons with their forces combined their territory was nearly impossible for any Alliance

to saale typically the Russians were Cy reclusive and distrustful but they had joined goonswarm to defeat their common enemies in Band of Brothers but now that Band of Brothers had been fought back to Fortress delve the war had reached a standstill Del's epithet was well earned it had served as the home region for Band of Brothers for years now and was nigh unassailable due to the coordination of Band of Brothers fleets and the system solid sovereignty bonuses which practically restricted any enemy Fleet from Fielding anything larger than a dreadn in Band of Brothers territory multiple

Titans had been lost by both sides but Band of Brothers still had enough Capital ships to bounce back any assault on its borders and if the smaller Capital ships weren't enough then the combined might of eight simultaneous doomsday blasts from Band of Brothers eight remaining Titans would be enough to turn turn any fight without the ability to field their own Titans the rest of nulc could do little to penetrate into Del but in early 2009 this state of affairs suddenly and radically changed one of the high ranking members of Band of Brothers haroth agamar had

tired of the other leaders and joined goonswarm offering to help them in whatever way they could after some rumination goon swarm's spy master the matani devised a plan of action Andrew groan chronicled what transpired in empires of Eve quote on the night of February 4th 2009 haroth agamar logged into ion line and docked his ship at the headquarters of Black Nova Corporation one of the main member corporations of Band of Brothers from Band of Brothers haroth stole 15 dreadnots and an entire ship hanger containing hundreds of smaller ships he also stole a huge amount of

strum Starbase and dreadn fuel with a few clicks he stole everything his Corporation owned in the empty hanger folders he left just a single item a note with one sentence written on it the matani sends his regards when he was done with his theft he went to work ending the entire Alliance he removed the other directors from their positions and closed the alliance with no Alliance on record named Band of Brothers every one of its sovereignty claims was instantly dropped Band of Brothers had claimed sovereignty four in every system in delve but after haroth agamar

struck there was no longer an alliance called Band of Brothers as a result all of the Star bases owned by Bob went offline without an alliance to control them their Capital systems were no longer invulnerable and they had no way to stop enemy alliances from bringing Heavy Artillery right into the heart of Band of Brothers Empire end quote the rest of new Eden now had a 28-day window to capture enough territory to prevent Band of Brothers from regaining their sovereignty but only goonswarm was in a position to capitalize on this and simply destroying Band of

Brothers was no longer enough for them the leader of goons swarm Darius JN Johnson ordered that all assets in Alliance territory be brought to the front lines in preparation for a fight in delve where they would either drive out Band of Brothers and claim delve as their new home or be left destitute this would also help to fend off enemies at least for a time during the war the general unpleasantness of both the Russian alliances and goons swarm had resulted in enough feuds that they had broken their treaties with one another and a significant contingent

of Russians had joined forces with Band of Brothers sandwiching the goons between the two there were also rumors and accounts of real money being paid to players to alter the political landscape but the complete abandonment of territory by goons swarm guaranteed that the Russians would be preoccupied with claiming all of the territory that had once belonged to the goons as they threw themselves recklessly at Band of Brothers at least for the first few weeks no other Alliance seems to have been warned of this opportunity and it would take time to mobilize now goonswarm would launch

a blitz Creek the likes of which had never been seen in Eve online but as goons swarm was beginning its Invasion the game would see a radical change and the denisons of this particular Edition would soon exist outside of the Paradigm and culture of any other part of new Eden [Music] on March 10th 2009 CCP announced the release of the Apocrypha expansion among other changes including a higher tier of specialized ships this update introduced wormholes these anomalies functionally were short-lived entrances into an entirely new cluster of star systems but the wormholes would only survive for

a maximum of a few days before collapsing permanently and new ones would spawn unpredictably both in new Eden and in this new region these systems boasted no Stargates rather they were connected to one another and the normal stars in new Eden exclusively with a network of wormholes and the transient and unpredictable nature of these wormholes created an Ever shifting Labyrinth despite the vast new territory now made available players were Ted to venture into it for several reasons first finding the wormholes was a task unto itself in order to discover a wormhole a player had to

make use of the new scanning tools which required new skills that took time for characters to learn the systems themselves however were remarkably dangerous much like nlac Concord offered no protection in Wormhole space and so anyone traveling through a wormhole could easily be attacked upon arrival by other players looking for a fight even then however the points of interest found through a wormhole were often remarkably dangerous fighting and looting NPCs would require a well equipped Squad of players and the anomaly sites placed for explorers often were similarly defended what's more if a player lacked the

requisite knowledge and was unlucky it was possible for a wormhole to collapse behind them after entering it leaving them stranded in unknown and hostile territory and the only method of Escape was to wander aimlessly until discovering a wormhole that would take them back to New Eden though likely far from where they had entered most had little interest in investigating Beyond peing out of curiosity but there were others who saw potential in this new unexplored region though the danger in Wormhole space was higher the materials there were commensurately valuable as the gases required to make the

new highest tier ships could only be found there and so mining gas clouds became an important if small part of the eve economy paradoxically due in part to the random nature of wormholes gas became a reliable resource as it was difficult for aggressive players to attack others harvesting gas much like wormholes gas clouds would spawn randomly and had to be scanned down with probes before their location was revealed meaning that a reasonably attentive gas Miner could spot the probes with a directional scan and Escape long before any danger manifested Beyond these more systemic limitations there

was another hard limitation that restricted the use of overwhelming force in Wormhole space the wormholes themselves could only accommodate ships below a certain size and after a certain amount of mass passed through a wormhole it would collapse meaning that the massive Fleet and large ships wielded by the nulc powers were practically useless in this new chaotic region the ease and safety with which gas could be harvested and the difficulty that established corporations would have utilizing their vast wealth and resources meant that this territory was far more accessible to less wealthy players and corporations in contrast

to nulc which was now crowded with belligerent and exclusive factions most large corpor operations were also still embroiled in the ongoing war against Band of Brothers and had few resources left to engage with wormholes given this and the wide breth of territory now available smaller groups of players began to move into these worm holes and establish presences there deploying star bases and storing fleets of ships those who chose to live in this territory were given a simple moniker worm holers the interests of these early worm holers varied widely but all of them were inspired by

a sense of adventure and the excitement of uncertainty many took the time to explore this new space and study the rules by which it functioned and over time the players were able to Divine certain patterns for example many Wormhole systems had what they called a static hole which would always link to the same kind of system a static heack hole for instance meant that there was always always a wormhole leading to high security space in the system and if the one leading to high SEC collapsed then another would take its place leading to another high

security system however such static holes to HEC were at a premium and so sometimes multiple small corporations would deploy star bases in the same system but since few had the resources to prosecute any sort of significant conflict and nobody would benefit from harassing one another many of them entered into gentlemen's agreements to not attack one another unless agreeing to fight for sport these agreements were the first manifestation of the code of Honor by which worm holers would play known earnestly derisively and sarcastically as Wormhole Bushido named for The Code by which Japanese Samurai Warriors would

live but while players were exploring the new aspects of Eve online crowd control Productions was working on an entirely new game in August of 2009 CCP games announced their next project set in the eve Universe a first-person shooter named Dust 514 speculation about the gameplay was overshadowed by the fact that Dust 514 would do more than share a setting with Evon lime events in Dust 514 would directly impact those playing the MMO and those playing the Mo could affect battles in dust the gaming news publication Gamespot quoted Hilmar Pon as saying the primary gameplay features

brutal ground combat that takes place on the surface of planets Dust 514 is the Infantry and an Eve online player can contract a dust team to go in and take control of a planet the fleet does the flying the Infantry does the dying end quote guy Cocker writing for Gamespot went on to say that quote the game has been under development for 3 years at CCP Shanghai with input from other CCP Studios worldwide we questioned peton about the platforms the game is being developed for as well as subscription details but he declined to comment at

this time but it was confirmed that the game was being developed for current generation Hardware end quote after revealing some Gameplay at the annual FanFest in October of that year Hilmar Pon proudly spoke with IGN further about the game quote Dust 514 is first and foremost a first class FPS mixed with realtime strategy elements and persistent World components which are Innovative in their own right still the biggest innovation in Dust 514 is that the outcome of battles directly affects the resource and power controls in Eve online this will significantly enhance the gaming experience that our

current 300,000 subscribers enjoy by adding a whole new level of gameplay elements that they can affect at its core Dust 514 is a firstperson shooter with run and gun gameplay but there is a heavy emphasis on vehicular combat that layers tactical and strategic Dimensions within each battle in addition weapons and modules are upgradable in real time which we believe pushes Dust 514 beyond what has been seen in the market so far end quote notable features were map sizes measuring 5 km squared and perhaps most importantly the ability for dust mercenaries to take control over certain

regions of planets for corporations in Eve online or for dust corporations to take those sections of planets for themselves early gameplay footage shown at FanFest was promising and elicited excited reactions from the crowd despite its limited scope but as players were anticipating the new battles to be had in Dust 514 the yearslong war in nulc was finally reaching its conclusion and the aftermath would permanently alter the social landscape of new Eden after such an extended period of direct conflict the alliances in nulc had grown skilled at husbanding their resources and managing their fleets the latter

of which had grown into affairs often involving hundreds of people on both sides this new method of waging Warfare placed greater importance on management rather than momentto moment battles but managing such a vast number of players was a difficult task unlike an army of professional soldiers or paid employees the people who comprised The Fleets in Eve online were playing in their spare time and the most effective way to form a fleet was for the fleet commander to put out a call to their Alliance asking for people to join for a potential fight the number of

people who joined was never certain the attendance of individuals could change due to real life factors interest in the upcoming battle or simply due to the waxing and waning of Engagement with the game making morale a key factor to the cohesion of alliances if morale dropped low enough then people would simply not answer calls for fleets or even leave their corporations entirely if a corporation leader lost faith in their Alliance then they could take their entire Corporation with them when they left despite the overwhelming importance of morale the most effective ways to wage war in

Eve on line were often far from entertaining for the individual it was common for a fleet commander to call for a fleet form up in position move from location to location or even keep the fleet stationary for hours and then disband the fleet due to a lack of need as fleets grew more expensive and the need for strategic dominance prevailed over the desire for Action the impetus to engage in equal fights or even slightly favorable fights diminished due to loss aversion and given the responsibilities bestowed upon Fleet commanders there was little incentive to risk the

large ships now demanded by War this loss aversion worked similarly for the individual player as it did for the corporation and Alliance few people would be willing to risk their most expensive ships in a large fight where they had little say in the outcome a player who lost a capital ship once May simply have decided that it wasn't worth the risk of joining a fleet to mitigate this many corporations Ina measures called ship replacement programs or srps when a player lost a ship while participating in operations with the corporation they could submit a claim and

be reimbursed for their loss either in part or in full paid with the money gathered from passive income such as Moon mining this passive income was part of the reason why Band of Brothers could fund such an extensive War while fighting on multiple fronts and maintaining morale but now that goons swarm through subterfuge had eliminated the sovereignty that insulated Band of Brothers from its enemies it would soon become nearly impossible to maintain a solid line of defense for its vulnerable economic Center what's more goonswarm had ensured the morale of their members by abandoning their own

territory and claiming that of Band of Brothers as their own drawing from the classic Chinese Treatise The Art of War as translated by Lionel gues one prominent section reads quote throw your soldiers into positions whence There Is No Escape and they will prefer death to flight if there is no place of Refuge they will stand firm if they are in hostile country they will show a stubborn front end quote it is with this tenacity that goonswarm descended upon the territory of Band of Brothers striking at all constituent corporations at once attempting to break their will

before the sovereignty bonuses returned and once again made Invasion impossible this would be expedited by a massive mistake made by Band Of Brothers Andrew groan details the mistake in empires of Eve quote Band of Brothers ordered every one of its capital ship pilots to log off at an open NPC controlled station in PR Tac ACA in delve however goons swarm spies found out about the massive stockpile of Warships and called in their allies to organize a massive blockade of the station they were able to surround the indestructible MPC station trapping every last one of Band

of Brothers dreadnots and carriers inside the blockade around Band of Brothers Fleet held for 30 days straight end quote by the time the Russians came to assist it was far too late delve now belonged to goonswarm as did it vast natural resources and this Readjustment of power would come to shape the game in ways that players could scarcely predict but even as the massive war in nulc was finally calming crowd control Productions was planning massive additions and adjustments one of which coincided with the end of the war in delve up until the end of9 the

presence of a Titan on the battlefield was overwhelming and oppressive due to the sheer power of its doomsday weapon capable of destroying nearly any non- capital ship in a 500 km radius centered on a point of the Pilot's choosing often when a Titan arrived the existence of anything smaller than a dreadnut was invalidated however on December 1st 2009 a significant change was made to the Titan's signature weapon rather than a massive area of effect the Doomsday would now be a focused single Target burst of damage capable of destroying or severely damaging even the largest ships

in a single blast with this change the importance of large populations in battle was re-emphasized a fleet of smaller sub Capital ships was always necessary for Capital and super Capital ships to perform well and now that a sub Capital Fleet couldn't be immediately decimated upon the arrival of a Titan greater population of players could again become a stronger deciding factor but more importantly for most other players who had only a tangential attachment to nulc another promised feature was being touted by crowd control Productions something that they had been planning for the past 3 years ambulation

which had been renamed to walking in stations over the past year the company had released various teasers and discussed their goals for the project and uh what it's about it's about giving the players a full body Avatar and the ability to exit their ships and go into space dision and go to bars and Corporation offices and socialize and play mini games as a an embodied avator however there was some question as to the necessity of such a feature the development time and work required were remarkable but players were already socializing using various out of game

methods that were far more visible and and already established such as IRC chats and even the official forums while there was quite a bit of excitement there was also trepidation that it would be Superfluous or add extraneous requirements to what players could already do as crowd control Productions grappled with how to implement walking in stations other projects were floundering the eve collectible card game which they had produced in conjunction with the recently acquired white wolf Productions had suff offered a lukewarm reception after limited marketing outside of conventions despite positive reviews from gaming Publications the single

expansion released in 2007 had suffered a laborious release reprinted three times before the cards were completed correctly but shortly after a lackluster launch it appears that the entire card game was abandoned the company's other projects were also beginning to struggle a scathing article from the guardian in 2014 retrospectively described crowd control Productions as extremely disorganized when managing the staff from White Wolf quote very shortly after initial development began the company started blurring the lines between the world of darkness and Eve projects repeatedly staff were shifted over from the former to work on expansion projects for

the latter at times our sources say the entire world of Darkness staff was put onto Eve end quote the problems within the team itself were numerous developers interviewed for the Articles cited problems in various areas of development including demands for small changes that required entire rewrites we Crea a vision poor budgeting a lack of managerial responsibility and aggressive hostile design meetings quote most of the sources spoken to for this piece identified the same problematic CCP manager who had little vision for what the finished game would look like not once could he answer any question about

momentto moment gameplay or areas of focus says One Source instead he preferred to deliver buzzword Laden Rambles it was not uncommon for him to communicate in anamia I once saw him looking over the shoulder of a programmer at some bit of user interface the poor guy had hacked together he straightened up put fingers to lips and said no this isn't it at all make it more he hissed on his fingertips like the air coming out of a bicycle tire and then just walked away end quote as the world of Darkness team struggled work continued on

Dust 514 but to properly integrate its game world with that of Eve online the Infantry would need the planets over which they were to fight and on May 26th 200 this prize would be introduced in the tyrannis expansion with this the pilots in Eve online would be able to lay claim to planets and exploit their resources by establishing infrastructure with the intention of being able to contest them with Dust 514 mercenary groups such resources would only increase the wealth of the existing nulc factions and their growing Industries now able to flourish with the end of

the war against band of Brothers but who precisely would fight these battles was still uncertain since 2009 crowd control Productions had been mum about how people would be able to play the game only specifying that it would be made for current generation Hardware a term typically reserved for consoles in June of 2011 the concerns of many players were confirmed Dust 514 would be exclusive to Sony's Playstation 3 and portable PlayStation VA consoles this was a peculiar Choice beyond the difficulty of creating games for the PlayStation 3 the markets for Ev on line and firstperson shooter

games for consoles were remarkably different while both attracted primarily male audiences EES player base skewed older and was more interested in detailed space simulation gameplay while console shooters were typically played by younger men who desired faster more immediate experiences and those in the latter audience were largely unaware of Eve many Eve players who otherwise might have had interest in Dust 514 didn't own a PlayStation or were unwilling to pay for the console specifically for dust still there was hope that others interested in the setting would play Dust to engage with the space sandbox but the

Goodwill and hope of Eve's player base would be shaken during an incident that would capture the attention not only of those in new Eden but the broader gaming [Music] public on June 22nd 2011 crowd control Productions released one of their most anticipated expansions incarna renamed from walking in stations incarna promised a new level of immersion for Eve players by allowing them to control their character avatars directly and after years of advertisement expectations were high this was also an expansion that had drawn significant resources from other projects as many developers had been moved from other aspects

of the game and other games entirely in order to create this expansion blogger Wilhelm Arcturus writes in retrospect that quote to get this feature they had to not only forego working on other more core issues to the game but pretty much had to rob the world of Darkness team of resources as well end quote but the immediate reception to the new additions was mixed many of the features promised within Carno were missing to be added at a later date and what was made available while tantalizing was poultry compared to the scope that crowd control Productions

envisioned and had projected onto the player base the two main features were a new robust character customization process which players could use to update their avatars and the Captain's Quarters which acted as a replacement for the efficient menus that players once had in their hangers instead players were now required to ambulate their character models through a special room where finicki menus could be activated in a game where menuing accounted for much of the experience this significantly slowed the process process what's more computer performance in this area was notably worse than the rest of the game

further hampering a now unfamiliar method of gameplay the loneliness of the space was heightened by a locked door that promised to one day be opened so that players could enter the rest of the station and interact with other players outside of their ships in bars clubs and others rooms while not all players were fundamentally opposed to the introduction of the Captain's Quarters its practicality was suspect and most players opted instead for a more traditional view of their critical menus foregoing the Avatar Centric method of navigation that had been a core focus of this new development

for half a decade however rather than being returned to the hanger view that had become a core part of Eve's aesthetic since its release featuring The Player's active ship in the center of the screen players were instead shown a static angle of of the locked station door removing functionality from what had once been the hanger despite being the chief focus of development the Captain's Quarters would not be the feature that would attract the most attention along with the more robust character creator there were now cosmetic options for players to purchase using currency bought with realworld

Fiat money however the prices for some goods were viewed as egregious Eve news4 wrote quot head over to the Eve online forums or other eve related sites and it won't take you long to figure out how much Buzz has been made over the fact that a monocle or even a measly shirt is worth more than a faction fitted Battleship a couple of plexes or even more than the retail box version of the Eve online game enter the notso noble exchange shop proof that once again CCP loses grasp of reality as is shown by prices on

the new vanity shop with products like a whopping $60 for that now Infamous monocle the $22 shirt or the designer boots all of which might be a bit too much for many reasonable players end quote players began generally expressing that this would only be the beginning of aggressive monetization on the part of crowd control Productions such suspicions were seemingly confirmed that same month when an issue of the internal company magazine Fearless was leaked titled greed is good the first page written by the editor Perry Desai reads in part quote as a subscription based Golden Goose

Eve needs to incorporate the virtual Goods sales model to allow for further revenue revenue to fund our other titles revenue for its developer you a particular article written by the company's principal game designer karton emilson discusses the way that player attachment to Virtual Goods can create Capital quote an interesting aspect of selling experience and identity is that the actual action of paying for it can strengthen their perceived value this is in many ways because of the way we are raised as consumers we shop therefore we are fashion is a beautiful example of this when buying

nice clothes we might feel more desirable and confident and in this way the act of buying can actually be a factor to make your experience more meaningful or your identity stronger and as such it becomes more competitive with other Alternatives the act of buying is a powerful psychological pattern deeply rooted in all of us whether we like it or not the pure subscription model for games even though quite well suited for the selling of holistic experiences takes little advantage of this part of human nature many players will actually voice the opinion opinion that adding any

kind of consumerism to such a game will ruin their experience those same players will buy Plex without any qualms to get instant access to that ship they just need to have right now and they might even go as far as buying a $500 leather jacket that matches the one their Avatar is wearing a balanced approach should acknowledge consumerism as a powerful game design tool amongst others that we need to get familiar with and that should be used carefully and with respect to create more enjoyable experiences and stronger identities for our players if successful this will

result in their increased emotional attachment to our product and services for the benefit of all if not we run the risk of sucking our customers dry and leaving their shriveled corpses by the side of the road to the benefit of none end quote the debate portion featured noticeably little debate both both employees writing for the peace who had been approached and requested to support a given side espouse the value of virtual cosmetic sales for real money disagreeing only on the measure of tangible in-game advantage that should be allowed for purchase the writer for the yes

portion a game designer named Christopher tolberg wrote about his experience with the player base and their opinions on the matter quote I would like virtual Goods sales in Eve in fact I'd like to sell a lot more than vanity items does this mean I'm an evil capitalist that unless stopped will cause the entire company to catch fire and be buried at Sea by a secret team of Navy SEALs let's hope not although that's the impression I get sometimes when interacting with our customers there is a pretty overwhelming perception amongst Eve players that these changes are

bad I think they're brilliant but our players don't we're going to face an uphill struggle and the reason many of us never talk about this publicly is that we'd be burned at the stake by the players I don't really understand the logic behind it end quote a later part of the feature states that the company was suggesting selling faction standings an important limiting aspect of the game speaking of Dust 514 ah header reads next summer people will be flocking to play Dust 514 there will be an entrance fee but we will make sure to also

provide some proverbial free towels we will be charging for the swimming goggles though towards the end it discusses the inevitability of charging players for in-game advantages for the upcoming world of Darkness quote escalation of commitment is another key concept for the value of virtual good sales when a person has put time effort or money into something she's more likely to be attached if players can spend more money directly on our game their enjoyment will heighten and they'll Bond more strongly with it after discussing strategies to allow players to purchase an appropriate amount of in-game power

it concludes by stating the question of virtual Goods sales is not to do or not to do rather it's how do we do this for the yet unpublished world of Darkness the details are foggy but the philosophy is strong end quote when this company magazine was leaked to the public gaming news Outlets immediately began covering it and the community was outraged players took their ships to jeta the Trad Hub of all of new Eden and began firing at a prominent invulnerable statue to show their displeasure in a visible fashion but arguably the more impactful action

was when thousands of players cancelled their monthly subscription some resolved that they would do so for as long as was necessary for crowd control Productions to change the their minds While others decided that with this new direction that the company was taking the good days of Eve online were over and it was time to move on to other games or from gaming entirely when an internal letter from CEO Hilmar Pon was leaked stating that this reaction was to be expected and that the players were simply resisting change the player base was only emboldened and the

protests continued beginning what would be known either as the summer of Rage or the more reductive monacle gate after the exorbitant price of the monacle Cosmetic item in the store despite the hopes and expectations of company management the protest showed no signs of stopping four months later even after a discussion with the Council of Stellar Management in an effort to Plate their player base Hilmar released a long apologetic letter which opened with plaintiff Pros quote dear dear followers of eveonline the past few months have been very humbling for me I've done much soul searching and

what follows is my sincere effort to clear the air with all of you please bear with me as I find my way through the estrangement from CCP that many of you have been feeling of late is my fault and for that I am truly sorry there are many contributing factors but in the end it is I who must shoulder the responsibility for much of of what has happened in short my Zeal for pushing Eve to her true potential made me lose sight of doing the simple things right I was wrong and I admit it end

quote the rest of the letter consisted of points of failure perceived by the player base and copious apologies however sincere these apologies may have been it was not enough to entirely reverse the negative perception of the company a press release 2 weeks later revealed that what they had once internally referred to as a Golden Goose had stopped being quite so lucrative and they would be reorganizing their company significantly including laying off a fifth of their Workforce they explained that quote for the immediate future our mission is to enrich the vast Eve Universe by strengthening The

Continuous development of Eve online while preparing to bring Dust 514 to Market on the PS3 we do this in order to realize our ambitious and challenging plan of joining the two in a cross-platform truly massive online world world of Darkness will continue development with a significantly reduced team this team will continue to iterate and expand on the gameplay and systems they have designed we will also redeploy creative teams in Atlanta to support the launch of Dust 514 end quote but the purported gameplay and systems for World of dark Ness were in a questionable State per

the guardian article quote there seemed to be no Clear Vision on how the various parts would create a cohesive end product sources report that the game effectively reached Alpha the stage at which all the major features have been implemented three times only for each version to be scrapped end quote despite confidently claiming that they still had more Eve subscribers than a year prior it was now clear that the expectations of the executives at the company have been severely curtailed now they would have to desperately struggle to maintain what they still had in Eve online while

the state of the company would have a significant impact on the game as a whole the conflicts in nulc would continue unabated while nestling itself into its new home region of delve goon swarm recognized that it would need allies in order in order to weather any upcoming Wars given their penchant for angering other groups of players and so they organized what they named the cluster Coalition consisting of numerous nearby corporations often gathered together not due to affable relations with one another but rather due to Common enemies the animosity between these groups is difficult to overstate

on the verifiable end of the spectrum players would locate spies and upon tracing their IP addresses would publicly post their identifying information including their full name and address in order to threaten them this became a common occurrence for which certain leaders became known even more extreme allegations would arise over time though their veracity is in question for example in 2009 the matani wrote an article for 10 ton hammer in which he stated about 2 years ago Goons swarm was aiding our allies red Alliance in the invasion of the scalding pass region against Loa voltera and

their Coalition laa voltera had unveiled one of the first Titans against us to catastrophic consequences and at the time these profoundly silly ships were nearly impossible to kill through legitimate in-game means they were essentially invulnerable with the only Titans destroyed through catching the ship while the pilot was disconnected from the game it was determined that the enslaver and his Avatar class Titan had to go I was approached by one of the leaders of red Alliance to help make this happen but almost immediately we were down the rabbit hole much to my surprise the red Alliance

director didn't want in-game information from me he wanted us to use the forensic resources of our intelligence agency to track down the enslaver home address at a Coordinated Time armed with this information a Russian Alliance member would apparently cut the power to the enslaver house in the real world and in Eve a Russian Alliance Capital Fleet would assault the abruptly pilotless Titan yikes as one can imagine I demurred but the Russian Alliance director didn't want to take no for an answer and I didn't fancy telling him that I thought he was completely insane I said

that I'd look into it and that's when things began to get really crazy kutsan got involved kutsan is a French national living in Jakarta Indonesia who was convicted as a teenager in the early 1990s of freaking the FBI's conference call system and running up $250,000 in international calls he coped a ban from CCP years ago for breaking the T20 scandal after penetrating The Band of Brothers director forums but it seems the Banning completely removed all restraint on his Behavior regarding the game he set up his own Forum to cover the hidden news of Eve by

publishing Snippets from the forums of other alliances why didn't I have to deal with the red Alliance trying to cut the power to the enslaver house to kill his Titan because kutsan out of either idle curiosity or malice of forethought traced the enslavers IP addresses back to isand confronted him on LOA vola's TeamSpeak while under an assumed name recorded the convers and then outed him as a GM and a CCP employee end quote but to the Northeast in late 2011 the Russians having once been relatively United had again split due to internal divisions between the

leaders of major Powers often involving what was known as rmt or real money trading another name for the black market economy in which wealthy players would exchange their in-game isk for real money accounts from different players conflict on the prolificacy of this practice with some leaders claiming that it was a rare occurrence While others stated that nearly every person with a leadership position in every major Alliance participated in rmt to some degree the desire to sell isk for realworld fiat currency was heightened for those in leadership positions who had accumulated more wealth than they could

feasibly spend and there was always a temptation to raid a corporation or alliance's assets and sell them many large alliances were making remarkable amounts of money by renting space controlled by the alliance to smaller corporations an article for gamer tribute describes some of the conflicts of interest quote certain players were rumored to make thousands of dollars in real life through rmt operations which meant threatening renters space put real life income sources at risk for some players end quote while it's impossible to say for certain the Russians had a reputation of partaking in rmt far more

than other groups which made a massive heist in July of 2011 only more bitter a trusted and well-known leader in a Russian Corporation stole nearly 1 trillion isk worth of goods and cash including 2,400 Plex valued alone at approximately $42,000 this would not stand and the Russian fed erations who had once been relatively peaceful fractured and declared war on one another as these wars raged Fleet commanders began to experiment with wormholes as tactical tools especially as an escape route in case a fight was going badly however given the relative unfamiliarity with wormholes net corporations would

sometimes make Grievous errors borne from ignorance of this chaotic space for example after losing a fight the elite members of pandemic Legion closely affiliated with mercenary Coalition hid their heavy battle Fleet in a wormhole however the combined mass of their ships was too great for the Wormhole to remain stable and it collapsed behind them none of the 46 characters who made it Through the Wormhole was equipped with the probes necessary to navigate away out of Wormhole space and so with little knowledge of wormholes they decided instead to Simply destroy one another's ships and respawn back

home elsewhere the dissolving of familiar alliances meant that old enemies after the war were far more vulnerable and Wars began to break out all across nulc with wild border adjustments on a regular basis not even goons swarm was able to hold on to its prize of delve as these wars became larger in scope and game related writing began to resemble more traditional news outlets web traffic began to funnel into more professionally produced operations but these Outlets were often controlled by groups with special interests most obviously the matani a website owned and operated by its namesake

with writers creating all kinds of media on November 13th 2012 the blog evag Ganda wrote quote the matani has killed Eve blogging why read through dozens of sites when you can just visit one you get features news opinion and the unquestionable Loyalty of the largest single block of players in game fed daily through Forum support that Rivals none other I've been approached three times to write for the matani the first was back before it launched and the most recent was by the very same Mark scarus that now poses the question of what to do with

these blogging features it is no mistake that other community involved bloggers are also involved in that site by the way I turned all three of those requests down flat personally I can't support the matani or the goons behind him I don't link to the site here nor will I ever do so that is a role-playing Choice primarily but it is also because I knew full well what that thing's coming meant and here we are and it is only natural things change remember Eve is getting close to being a decade old it is as PR predictable

as the sun rising and setting that eventually something like that site would appear end quote but while both media outlets for game news and the alliances in nulc were inexorably progressing toward a greater homogeneity the players in Wormhole space continued to establish themselves over time they had discovered more and more about their chosen home some facts being more esoteric than others and this knowledge would turn this churning chaos iotic hellscape into a verdant home replete with valuable minerals and friendly Rivals one of the most important habits adopted by early players was the mapping of Wormhole

space players from different corporations would be tasked with traveling through wormholes taking note of what existed there such as enemy bases or collectible resources and sharing this information with the others so that the immediate vicinity around their home system would be known the connections spider webbing out with some branches terminating back into normal k space due to the transient nature of the wormholes these Maps would have to be updated constantly and they were closely guarded so as not to be used against their makers however players quickly discovered methods by which they could to some extent

control this space by sending heavy ships back and forth through wormholes in just the right patterns wormholes could be coaxed into collapsing prematurely while guaranteeing that no ship would be stranded on the far side a practice known as rolling a hole these tactics could be used both defensively and aggressively a corporation with access to a static hole could purposefully collapse it again and again searching for targets a static hole that linked to other Wormhole Space Systems could serve as a way to search for new resource nodes from which to gather or it could be a

way to search for other corporations with whom to engage in affable combat for entertainment but those outside of Wormhole space came to know them for a different practice if a wormhole Corporation gained access to a NX static then they could quietly use it to search for ripe targets once a proper Target was spotted a small raiding Fleet would burst forth from the Wormhole and begin raiding the surrounding space destroying ships and looting until a response Fleet could be organized given the relative power of net corporations and the size and mass restrictions imposed by the wormholes

it was common for such response fleets to substantially outclass the raiding bands from the Wormhole corporations and so upon citing them the Raiders would Retreat back through their Wormhole disappearing into the Labyrinth the relative secrecy and aggressive demeanor of the average wormholer placed them at all with the nulc empires and over time the two came to regard one another as bitter enemies the nulc alliances relying on stability and strength and the worm holers embracing disorder and Agility despite the equalizing forces of Wormhole space it still harbored its own Elite and they tended to occupy the

C6 Wormhole systems the most dangerous and also the most valuable the higher class systems tended to have un unique Stellar bodies such as black holes and pulsars which could dramatically alter certain statistics about ships making them even more difficult to assail as their denisons would specialize their ships to utilize these peculiar features fully for defensive purposes their ships funded by the valuable resources there and in the Wormhole systems that tended to link to them these larger corporations naturally became targets for others looking for a good fight the most well-known example was the corporation Rooks and

Kings who delighted in discovering ways to push the game to its limits and their French Corporation Guillotine therapy who primarily lived in Wormhole space their YouTube series named clar and call attracted the attention even of those outside of the game as their stories of frustrating the efforts of much larger corporations became legendary in particular they became known for for a unique tactic pipe bombing by outfitting a small Fleet of battleships with smart bombs and equipping defensive modules that allow them to resist the particular kind of damage that the smart bombs produced they could effectively destroy

any intercepted enemy Fleet while remaining mostly intact this was made possible in part due to the rigid habits of Fleet commanders in net corporations who were predictable enough for these strategies to continue to work work for months but even as great Powers were establishing themselves there was a new unorthodox section of Evon line growing faster than any other the casinos by sending isk to trusted Banker characters players could exchange their in-game money for tokens to be used on gambling websites much like chips at a real life Cino and soon players with vast stores of liquid

assets and nothing else on which to spend them would gamble large amounts for entertainment the money being funneled through these websites was massive and only growing day by day but all of this was contingent upon crowd control Productions managing their game while simultaneously launching further games something that would prove to be a Titanic [Music] struggle on May 22nd 2013 crowd control Productions finally released their firstperson shooter game Dust 514 the game had been given limited beta releases throughout the previous year but it was difficult to gauge what the final game would feel like after it

was integrated into its Parent Game of Evon lime but the nature of its existence made it difficult to penetrate for casual players the links between dust and Eve weren't immediately apparent and while the connection appeared to have worked well the people who were downloading and playing dust often did so not knowing that there was much if any connection to Eve this could likely be attributed to the game's distribution method as the game was made free to play by download on the PlayStation 3 many firstperson shooter enthusiasts downloaded it to test with little further understanding or

research expecting familiar fair but the game that greeted them was significantly less accessible than a typical game in the genre Chris Carter writing for online gaming magazine Destructoid described his initial experience quote for everyone else who is not already an eve fan you're going to see it as another firstperson shooter and it will most likely not blow you away in fact as soon as I actually booted up my first Skirmish I was immediately underwhelmed the environments the guns the visuals everything but the stylized character models was extremely basic to the point where at times it

looks like a previous generation title I experienced major frame rate issues so much so that it affected my ability to see vehicles in the distance at times the game seemed to run well below 30 frames per second I also experienced a decent amount of lag during my time with dust which which is obviously a problem with n FPS especially if you're fond of long range combat end quote IGN's Vince ingenito was similarly unimpressed quote the actual shooting isn't up to Snuff similar games like Battlefield 3 succeeded by making it fun to fight both on foot

and in vehicles but dust struggles to even make firing a gun feel right much less vehicle combat now I don't claim to be an expert Market parman but I had more trouble keeping my sights on Target in dust than in any FPS in recent memory part of this is due to the mushy aiming controls which are too sluggish for quick turns yet too jumpy to track moving targets reliably sloppy protracted firefights result leaving my enemies and I to dance endlessly around each other emptying our Clips without scoring a kill after playing with controls as tightly

refined as those in Call of Duty Battlefield and countless other Shooters dusts feel terribly Antiquated in fact very little works or feels like it should in Dust 514 the maps are laid out well enough for combat with some great verticality at times but the limited detail and variety of the environments keep it from ever feeling like your planet hopping for Glory and profit end quote even Ian Herzberg from 10ton Hammer who reviewed the game positively said that quote so far I felt like I was mostly making contact with Dust 514 players and found very little

influence from Eve online spilling over into the game which is a shame because the idea of the two games interacting seems cool in theory but in practice Dust 514 feels more like a standalone game end quote these limited connections between the games hadn't been solved half a year later when games spots Nick cap zy wrote in December of that year thate dust link to Eve was supposed to provide the context for these endless war games but the bond between the two games remains IL defined corporations the lifeblood of Eve barely receive an introduction in dust

end quote the tepid reception of Dust 514 likely had a severe effect on the morale of employees at the company who had watched 20% of their co-workers be laid off only a few years prior significant resources had been redirected from the highly anticipated world of Darkness MMO in order to complete this game and with the severe impact that the summer of Rage had inflicted upon the revenue of crowd control Productions those who had been assigned to the project were nervous this also boded poorly for other projects that the company had announced in August of 2013

CCP had announced the development of a new space dog fighting game for VR which they named Eve Valkyrie again hoping to act as an innovator in the gaming space as the founding team had with vermal and Evon lime the project was originally a demo developed by employees and now they had been flown to Britain in order to work on expanding it into a full game but Valkyrie was slated for a 2014 release only a year later in comparison the tenuous fate of world of Darkness threatened nearly a decade of work these fears would prove founded

in April of 2014 when world of Darkness was officially cancelled according to the guardian this was unsurprising for members of the team who had been anticipating this decision since the layoffs after the summer of Rage in 2011 allegedly the world of Darkness team had been the most thoroughly impacted an anonymous source stated that quote the 20 layoffs incited a lot of anger a lot I heard it was worse in the ATL office and most of the folks I know down there have never forgiven ccp's management end quote 2013 saw 15 more layoffs leaving 56 team

members going into the following year a poultry number for the production of a new MMO those 56 remaining in April were either moved to other projects or or laid off as well many had come from the original white wolf team when the company was bought not all of the work from the game had been entirely lost for example much of the Character Creator had been adjusted and ported to Eve online for players to update their avatars A system that proved remarkably robust but was only a fragment of the work that had been made for World

of Darkness with the middling release of Dust 514 and the complete collapse of world of Darkness crowd control Productions was now Reliant upon maintaining Eve online which they were struggling to manage after the release of incarna but those on the outside would see little of this struggle instead they would bear witness to the largest conflict that any virtual world had ever [Music] seen [Music] by 2013 the pattern of warfare in nulc had been established as a constant state of conflict punctuated by larger scale Wars between alliances and power blocks and in October of that year

a new war royed to life once again as Goons Wars cluster Coalition or CFC as it was known was expanding Andrew groan writes quote the cluster Empire now mirrored eerily the Dominion of the former Band of Brothers at its peak save for the fact it was a bit larger and more stable for only the third time in New Eden's history half of the nulc territories were controlled by a single organization of players United under a single ruler as October 2013 came to a close it was already becoming clear that a new Block Level War would

soon begin by now few were even surprised as it was clear that in some respects Eve was in the midst of a Forever War the individuals that made up these alliances could not be destroyed and neither could their very real animosity for one another which was compounding Through The Years end quote this animosity exploded in 2013 into what came to be known as the Halloween War as the Russian Coalition attempted to capture space in a border conflict their allies in the CFC sent minor support which quickly expanded into their entire super Capital Fleet uniting to

fight them a massive group of nulc players gathered under the name n3l and prepared for war for 3 months the war raged until January 27th 2014 when an opportunity arose for the CFC due to a bug in the game's user interface a bug in the servers or a clerical error on the part of a player in n3l the payment required to maintain the sovereignty in The crucial staging system of btac R5 RB failed leaving an 8-hour window for them to assail the system before the soo Jammers became active again and no further Capital ships could

be brought by the attackers at first there was confusion but even if it was a trap the leaders of the CFC accepted it for what it was an opportunity to strike at their enemies the likes of which they were unlikely to see again for the rest of the war the call was made and despite being off hours for the CFC fleets were formed few had any conception of what was about to happen writing for crossing zebras player s IND Del pellan wrote quote the reports that were coming in were saying that this was a super

cap fight there was a lot of talk that it would not last that long we just needed to drop TCU again and try to regain control of the station no one not me not anybody could have known what the next 20 odd hours held end quote together the cluster Coalition and the Russian Alliance gathered their fleets and jumped into the beach head system of btac R5 RB on Twitter prog good Legend then leader of founding N3 member noie suaka wrote about what was happening from Denver airport as the two fleets danced around one another non-committed

quote about 500 CFC players in system all Dominic's battleships N3 PL jumped in slow cats and Super capitals off grid Dominic's warped to caps then changed mind and bailed and now now it's a Faceoff waiting for the fight to start all fleets are in system but not on grid with each other end quote the commanders of both fleets knew the location of the other in the system but nobody fighting could see anything except for their allies waiting tensely with the bright nebulas surrounding them the appearances of The Fleets were dominated by the massive Avatar class

Titans whose Silhouettes were immediately recognizable and were the most common of any of the the Titans the onus was on the attackers and so together the CFC Fleet warped to engage with the forces of N3 PL given the amount of resources being invested in this battle it was clear that if the goons could win this fight then there would be nothing standing between them and total control of noek but even before the first shots were fired there was a complication in 2011 a mechanic to compensate for lag in heavily populated battles have been introduced called

time dilation when a server was faced with a load too heavy for it to handle rather than simply allowing lag to Impact gameplay time in the region would be slowed to allow the server to process all of the data moving through it but since time was only slowed in the immediate vicinity of the battle reinforcements could arrive far faster relative to the damage being dealt and so given that the passage of time in btac R5 RB had been slowed to 10% of real time the slowest possible the battle rapidly grew and given the Strategic importance

of the system neither side was willing to concede images and video quickly made their way online even as the battle was raging showing a collidoscope of colors and shapes dominated by the Dark Shadows of the Avatar and arabis class last Titans against a backdrop of blue interdiction bubbles which locked every ship inside of them into combat the rate of escalation only quickened as time passed and players in the Americas were able to log into the game and join the battle which was still raging hours later by this point thousands of players had already participated compared

to their enemies the goons easily had more players in the Americas and soon they outnumbered their opponents by a significant margin after brawling for 12 hours the final result was clear the CFC would be the victors in this massive battle which reportedly had over 7,500 participants at various points with over 2,600 in the system concurrently at its peak this latter number had only been eclipsed by another battle involving the CFC in which they had smothered the Reddit based test Alliance in a battle involving 4,070 concurrently but the result of that battle was a foregone conclusion

fought more for fun than any other reason comparatively the battle for btac R5 RB was far more spontaneous strategically vital and uncertain the question now was only how much n3l could Salvage this number would prove far smaller than they hoped of the 72 Titans that they fielded only 13 survived comparatively the losses of the CFC were minuscule not only had the reserves of N3 PL been broken but so had their Spirit during the 21-hour Long Engagement but from the outside the conclusion looked significantly different the introduction of Plex had given an approximate real world exchange

rate between in-game currency and real world fiat currency and when the damage was t and converted the cost of the entire battle exceeded $300,000 us this number was immediately attractive to news outlets who printed simplified versions of the story to their bemused readers while sheepishly referring to the cluster Coalition only by their acronym NOW the goons were left with the largest Empire in the game and the media attention to make them the unequivocal masters of EV online and they would soon come to embody that status in a familiar way but while the goons were ascendant

the company that made the game they had mastered was struggling with their other game and despite how desperately they wanted success it seemed continuously to elude [Music] them [Music] [Music] since its launch in 2012 Dust 514 had been struggling while the game allegedly had players measured in the hundreds of thousands and its financial success isn't publicly known it's almost certain that the company was dubious of the game's reception shortly after its launch many who had been excited for dust were concerned from the beginning the fact that it was a PlayStation 3 exclusive game severely hampered

its growth as most who were aware of Eve online played games on their PC rather than a console but perhaps more importantly the PlayStation 3 was already nearing the end of its life cycle as dust was being launched typically game consoles have a limited lifespan due to the company's desire to create new consoles with updated hardware and the first iteration of the PlayStation 3 had been released in 2006 this meant that by the time dust was released the console was already 6 years old and many were anticipating the release of a successor console in the

near future these expectations proved correct as in February of 2013 less than a year after the release of dust Sony announced that the PlayStation 4 would be sold during the holiday season of that year frequently console Gamers will leave behind old consoles in favor of new ones quickly and this meant that the future of dust was in Jeopardy the game had originally been announced with a 5-year development plan and ccp's vice president of Business Development Thor Gunderson confidently repeated these claims to gaming publication Destructoid quote we know that our fan base dust curious players are

buying the PlayStation 3 to get into our game what we hear anecdotally is that PS3 sales are increasing Sony have done a phenomenal job of managing console transitions like they did with the PlayStation 2's cost and size reductions we can make the logical assumption that something similar will happen as the PlayStation 4 comes to Market if you look at the large third-party Publishers you'll see that Sony is not falling away from the PlayStation 3 end quote the author of the article Joseph Laray added that quote still CCP will eventually need to develop a PlayStation 4

version of Dust 514 link it to the PS3 version and then tie both of them to Tranquility the london-based server that governs everything that happens in the eve universe and they'll do it I ideally with as little downtime as possible end quote this would require even more development time and effort something that CCP were already struggling to manage after the failure of incarna and the death of world of Darkness the game itself was Rife with issues to which players consistently referred as systemic and fundamental for example players could game the eve integration by joining the

opposite side and manipulating whether they won or lost depending on what was more beneficial at the time in order to acquire territory Xander FEA writing for crossing zebras in June of 2013 discussed his problems further in his article the tragedy of Dust 514 in which he States quote dust had definitely caught my attention and before I knew it I was hooked in the hype 4 years later I wish they had just scrapped the entire project alog together throughout this article Xander discussed many of the fundamental issues including one of its main selling points its connection

to Eve online quote the key feature at the release of dust was planetary Conquest one month later several of the major groups involved with it have announced they've pulled out or will not defend the districts they've taken planetary Conquest in a nutshell took the worst aspect of Eve structure grinding and made it their key feature the other key feature that was sold directly to the Eve online audience was the ability for Eve ships to orbital bombard planets when the feature was first revealed at FanFest 2012 there was a lot of excitement it looked and felt

cool a year later the orbital bombardment mechanic has been watered down there are no launch codes and you're limited to both the class of ship and waiting for ground teams to accumulate a certain amount of of War points before you can launch a strike the novelty wore off very quickly and the interest IDE plummeted there have been a lot of complaints within the dust community that the links to Eve need to be drastically expanded in order to attract more players I disagree wholeheartedly the game itself will never sustain a community if there aren't drastic improvements

to even the most basic gameplay the links will be meaningless if the game itself self is terrible and developing it on both games will be entirely wasted if either game is suffering Eve is in a pretty healthy State dust is on life support forcing interactions between the two when one game is in trouble is a disservice to the other end quote despite the company's confident public rhetoric it appeared less confident when a year later in May of 2014 at Eve FanFest CCP announced that they had had begun development on a new firstperson shooter game with

the working title of project Legion this game would be developed for the PC in contrast to dust's PlayStation 3 exclusivity the opening of an article by Andy Kelly for PC Gamer made clear the broad reaction to the announcement notably referring to Dust 514 in the past tense despite the fact that the servers were still online and as far as the gaming public knew development for dust was ongoing quote Dust 514 was a PlayStation 3 only FPS set in the eve Universe its limitations and flaws were obvious now CCP are bringing a reimagined version of dust

to PC with a greater focus on community customization and emergence it's an attempt to marry the free form story generating magic of Eve to a modern multiplayer shooter Dust 514 and project Legion share a common DNA but Legion is a very different experience says Jean Charles geson executive producer it's a competitive shooter that takes place in a sandbox that mixes PVP and PVE there's also a player-driven economy which is really important if you use the eve name you have to have an economy that's influenced by the players it's all about loot is how godosan puts

it we're going to have these sand box areas planets that you'll drop into where you'll see other players and an ambient threat in high security systems where Concord are present to protect you it's more of a social place here you'll go looting with AI controlled drones trying to stop you end quote even if CCP were unwilling to admit it themselves the message to players of Dust 514 Eve online and the rest of the gaming public was clear to the company dust was a failure and the only question that remained was how long it would be

allowed to continue in the meantime CCP was also driving excitement for their new VR game Eve Valkyrie and much like their other games the visuals were attracting immediate attention and building anticipation with this game CCP were again attempting to entice the general gaming public into the eve setting of new Eden where they had failed before with their various other materials these perceived failures were cemented when in October of 2015 it was announced that CCP games was selling white wolf to another game publisher Paradox interactive known for their intricate strategy and simulation games such as Crusader

Kings Hearts of Iron Europa universalis and Mountain blade despite these struggles by the mid 2010s Eve online had more subscribers than at any other point in its history while the subscriber count would rise and fall with the breath of warfare and peace the overall trend was still positive and even as players burned out on the game after long brutal Wars many would inevitably return despite the lukewarm reception of many new features the basic features of the game had seen continual Improvement and well-received iterations from server stability to graphic and despite the age of the game

and its poor new player experience it continued to attract players due to its continual modernization as it was Evon line still promised to provide CCP with continuous reliable capital for the foreseeable future and the company was intent on building out their library of games and now that they had sold white wolf they resolved that it was time to focus on building out new Eden this was reinforced by another release from CCP titled gunjack an arcade shooter for VR in which the player takes on the role of a gunner for a mining expedition in new Eden

protecting against Pirates while a relatively small release it received positive reviews but the mainstream gaming public seems to have spoken little about it but as crowd-control Productions seem to be entering a new phase of their lifespan so too was the world of Eve online defined largely by a single group of Players whose clear ambition was to dominate all of new [Music] Eden with all other major competitors in nulc eliminated the goons and their Federation had very few enemies with the resource ources to combat them after consolidating their vast new territory their first order of business

was a name change in April of 2015 the matani leader of the goons announced that the CFC would be changing its name to the Imperium something far more palatable to a vast swath of onlookers while perhaps less representative of the attitude of the goons and their allies in the past this was a symbolic representation of their new stated purpose of becoming not only the most powerful but the dominant force in the entire game to the matani whose flare for the dramatic and desire for attention were well documented the exploitive in the cluster coalition's name was

a reflection of the irreverent nature of the goons but a liability to his goal of appealing to onlookers from outside of the game who had been hesitant to even call them by their name articles in National media Outlets such as Forbes had an obviously positive effect on morale and gave the players a stronger incentive to join fleets when called suggesting that they were cementing their place in history later that year he would attempt to crystallize this concept far more clearly on November 3rd 2015 the matani and Military fiction author Jeff Edwards announced the opening of

a Kickstarter to begin production on a book titled the fountain War named for the aonomus conflict in which the CFC had annihilated the Reddit based test Alliance notably crowd control Productions had also chosen to endorse the project the opening of the description read quote the fountain War Book Project brings best-selling author Jeff Edwards together with the matani media and CCP in creating the first ever book about Eve online based on real player experience experiences the resulting novel will be the first book of a completely new genre sci-fi non-fiction on the afternoon of July 28th 2013

the armadas of interstellar Empires clashed Millions died billions destroyed it might have happened in a fictional universe but that doesn't make it any less true this is the fountain War the war that changed gaming history a Galactic Firestorm that culminated in the largest single battle in gaming history the fall of 6 vdt it consumed the players of EV on line it astounded the worldwide Gaming Community and it commanded the attention of the mainstream press rather than allow those memories and fascinating narratives to fade we're going to immortalize those experiences by creating a worldclass retelling of

the fountain War a gut-wrenching Thriller based on Battle archives in-game communication transcripts and the testimonies of combatants from all sides of the conflict combining the remarkable writing Talent of Jeff Edwards with the strength and support of CCP games and the matani media this book is destined to Captivate science fiction action suspense and Military fiction fans everywhere end quote the campaign was asking for 150,000 dollar a number that seemed reasonable to those organizing the campaign for years the goons have been taking sponsorships to push games besides EV on line to the alliance business ventures that have

proven lucrative to both parties similarly this project would be pushed to their constituent members but onlookers were dubious the Project's Kickstarter page included a writing sample near the bottom and a piece of historical revisionism was already immediately apparent though they had been known as the cluster Coalition during the war the name had conspicuously been changed to the Imperium the new name chosen only 7 months prior this change LED many to believe that this project would simply be another piece of goon propaganda but not even the goons themselves seemed terribly excited about the project significantly shy

of meeting their goal the project was only able to raise 39,00 from 758 backers a quarter of what they needed the matan's official statement on the kickstarter's cancellation made clear his frustration it read in part quote in about an hour I'm going to Nuke the kickstarter for the fountain war and announce that it will be relaunched in March without all the stupid and now obvious UPS the 150k funding goal the backer rewards the shipping costs the lack of sample fiction the whole thing was rushed as and an easy win turned into an opportunity for our

enemies to come at us with Long Knives and settle scores the ultimate responsibility is mine we've never listened to outside experts on anything but for some reason on this one even though my intuition was screaming that was wrong I did the what do I know I just run a big space Guild and next thing you know the whole Coalition is attached to AED up version of what is legitimately a really cool project the up was not Outsiders led us astray blame them the up was listening to them at all whose fault mine every one of

you got dragged along behind that mess and I've been kicking myself non-stop since it began and I'm sorry the most obvious [ __ ] up was not making a thread on goon fleet.com saying yo here's what we want to do how should we do this and what rewards and pricing Etc do you guys think would be cool and all this would have been a avoided end quote their Imperial AIMS in game however would remain unperturbed and their boldness and confidence would be Illustrated well in the public demands that they would soon make on November 30th

2015 the matani released a statement titled Mino there's only one way to deal with Rome the naming scheme of the goon's internal bureaucracy mirrored that of George Orwell's book 1984 with many used as shorthand for Ministry the side of the page was adorned with an advertisement for the doomed Kickstarter project the release read in part quote the Imperium is delighted to present a new Department within our Bastion of civilization and prosperity the Ministry of Foreign oversight AKA Mino Fofo the Ministry of Foreign oversight exists to promote Imperial values of unity discipline and victory in Regions

near Imperium space but outside of direct sovereignty control it is our hope that through Mino we can bring civilization and order to a Galaxy which has increasingly descended into incoherent screeching barbarism we will usher in a new era of Enlightenment and opportunity to those who are not yet able to call themselves Imperial citizens or experience the security prosperity and variety we enjoy in the galactic Northwest representatives of the Ministry of Foreign oversight offer loyal Imperial subjects a number of benefits in return for a small bimonthly fee we understand that as a new Dark Age sweeps

across the unenlightened territories of new Eden some will undoubtedly refuse the kind and polite entreaties of Mino in their attempts to elevate their situation to Aid in the establishment of a Dominion the imperium's black fleet has been tasked to ensure that pacification and security are established in a smooth and orderly fashion look forward to civilization look forward to the arrival of the Ministry of Foreign oversight and its smiling polite Representatives help and hope are on the way way end quote this release was dotted with links that left little room for interpretation of the matan's aggressive

and tyrannical intentions for example the words small bimonthly fee linked to a clip from the movie Goodfellas hosted on YouTube titled you pay me in which the extortion and support system of the Italian mafia was explained in basic terms the words black Fleet linked to the Wikipedia page for Black Ships the Japanese name for the European ships used to force open Japanese ports to Western trade and the words smooth and orderly fashion linked to a clip from the television show Firefly in which the captain of the smuggling ship Serenity kicks a bandit leader into an

engine turbine after he swears Vengeance the following day the Imperium announced how this subjugation would take place the vice royalty program the most remarkable aspect of these demands was that they weren't limited to those in nulc this extended to the Twilight regions of low security space as well where Pirates and Griefers plied their ships to the purpose of destroying and claiming whatever they could in a public post the propaganda arm of the Imperium announced that quote the imperium's plan organized under the Ministry of Foreign oversight involves viceo or Governors called contacting Regional Leaders with an

offer that comes with two options the first option is to take the benefits package of the Imperium in return for simple reasonable bonly fees and or tribute the second option is much more violent if a subject Alliance denies the offer the full might of the Imperium will deploy and exterminate the subject alliance's sovereignty and assets at first there will be loads of resist resistance and Rebellion but that is the point resistance Means War and War means everyone gets to shoot spaceships end quote the different benefits and tribute methods were detailed below this but the proposals

were comical in their boldness and almost certainly intended to trigger an aggressive and hostile response Eve news 24 attempted to capture the general sentiment in an article titled Imperium Vice royalty met with defiance quote this announcement has effectively declared hostilities on the rest of new Eden the Imperium has officially begun the vice royalty program and is actively targeting groups in neighboring regions end quote below was included an exchange between an Imperium vicroy and one of the alliances that they intended to subjugate after the Viceroy demanded a 10 billion isk deposit and informed them that their

tribute would be expected every 2 weeks the leader of the alliance mirav venian said 117 billion the Viceroy replied 117 billion I'm sorry I don't follow mirav venian continued 117 billion isk it's what you guys are going to pay us to stop burning your assets to the ground when you come here send mittens my regards end quote here the name mittens is a nickname for the matani used either affectionately or der ly depending on the context it would only be days before the Imperium began their assault on the LC Empires but they were met with

stiff resistance by the largest corporations including snuffed out and psychotic Tendencies who were able to turn fights against them even when outmatched inspired by their first unlikely Victory the rest of losek decided that for the first time in history it was time for the various Pirates Bandits and Griefers to band together and ward off this threat to their way of life creating an entity that they named losc Voltron speaking to Crossing zebras Imperium fleet commander lmba said quote losc entities are ridiculously good at fighting with smaller numbers but with more proficiency the imperium's idea of

nulc fighting is far different from what is needed for LC fighting the first few times including a fight on I commanded we got wasted it doesn't matter how many numbers you bring if the enemy brings a fat comp with perfect logy and implants and outplays you there is nothing you can do but Die end quote if the Imperium was to subjugate new Eden they would have to do so inch by inch and it was clear that this group was more than a match for the forces of the Imperium repelling them in multiple battles against Bad

odds but this war would not be allowed to continue for long for soon a force long believed to be in Repose would suddenly awaken and their actions would drastically alter the fate of new Eden for years while the alliances in n jockeyed for territory and resources Wormhole space churned the loc corporations struggled defiantly for their independence and those in HEC looked on nervously another Force had been openly gaining power with nobody to check them and in fact many of the richest players in new Eden were funding them the casinos far from underground operations these casinos

had become well known and well loved by many players and their advertisements could be found everywhere even on the matan's own website those that ran the casinos were commensurately wealthy and this wealth would sometimes attract attention when it was flaunted one of the most memorable was isk ironbank skill injector incident in 2015 crowd control Productions had introduced a new item into the game called skill extractors which could be purchased with a currency obtainable only with real world money these extractors could be used to draw skill points from a character to make a skill injector and

either injected into the character again to redistribute points given to another of the player's characters or sold on the ingame market for isk these skill injectors were valuable and it was for this reason that they were chosen for a stunt that is still remembered years later as yoen Goldstein wrote for Eve news4 for quote isk ironbank of the isk gambling website I want is.com has just maxed out a 3-day old pilot with every skill in Eve through the use of skill injectors the isk trillionaire created his Pilot under the name of iron bank and injected

all of the skills and points over the course of about an hour on his stream the character now stands at 473 M 344,000 skill points with the the total value of his purchased skill injectors rounding out to around 1.8 trillion isk or 25,000 us should you buy the isk Via Plex ironbank had promised his viewers that in light of the new skill injectors he would max out a new character live on stream quote my reasons are simple I had the means to do it so I did it and I kept my promise to my viewers

end quote but the casinos were in convenient for CCP games who were struggling with real money trading or rmt the practice of selling in-game currency for real life money as writer matal put it in an article from late 2015 quote rmt happens all over Eve and some guilty players try to launder their money through a gambling site instead of directly putting it in their wallet in an attempt to try and hide their tracks CCP probably dis like sites like I want isk since it makes their job much harder and necessitates tracking isk through the web

of deposits and winnings so scrutiny is high from CCP peligro and the security team the I want is Corp wallet is constantly monitored ccpe raids are common leaving suspected rmts isk Frozen or confiscated while they are investigated many times Bankers see money reversed and taken away by CCP the site ensures Bankers losses in these cases to keep the bankers on the job if I want isk left Bankers out to dry the site would collapse end quote despite the way that the casino owners would flaunt their wealth the average player was unaware of the amount of

power that these organizations could project primarily because it was never necessary the casinos would typically react predictably and had little reason to interfere in the Affairs of other organizations ations as long as outside groups wouldn't meddle in their own Affairs but this would abruptly change due to circumstances that at the time seemed relatively minute the public first learned of the disagreement due to a Reddit post which included chat logs between ep the Creator and leader of the famous and fabulously wealthy gambling website I want isk and winnett the director for the Space Monkeys Alliance which

was a member of the Imperium the chat log itself was peculiar after commiserating about their Mutual struggle with stomach ulcers the gambling magnet EP accused winnet and Space Monkey Alliance as a whole of stealing from his Bankers after kicking them out of their corporations when its responses were dismissive he stated that the removal of the bankers from their corporation was due to them stealing large sums of money from noobs Corp their corporation within Space Monkeys Alliance though he was unclear about the methodology used to uncover this information quote noobs no longer wanted them in noobs

after they did some analytical thing and their evidence is 250ish billion is missing from Corp assets end quote he then distanced himself and the alliance from culpability by stating that it wasn't the Space Monkey Alliance that stole from the bankers only individuals within a corporation within the alliance and therefore this wasn't an alliance matter the Space Monkeys would not accept responsibility for what its members did quote SMA leadership didn't scam anyone members within SMA may have and let's be honest here it's eve end quote this was unacceptable to Eep he threatened that if Space Monkeys

didn't pay for what its members had stolen then I want isk woulde constantly hire mercenaries to attack anyone related to Space Monkeys Alliance winnett replied with a map of Space Monkey territory on dotlan as a guide for the threatened attacks and stated that he was unafraid Dustin one of the people who have been allegedly scammed by Space Monkeys saw the trajectory of the conversation and added desperately Winn it you have no idea how powerful I want is is this warning went unregarded the following day the Space Monkeys Al I released an interview with winnit on

their website where he again alluded vaguely to a large theft from the players removed from the corporation and reiterated his doubt about the threat that I want isk posed quote the idea of mercenaries is laughable SMA is a nullsec Alliance and lives solely in null It's Not Unusual to have 20 or more war Decks at a time I personally enjoy hearing we're going to come kill you from people who live in HEC there were some idle threats of 95 carriers moving into range of SMA home that's really about it personally I would love to see

85 caps within range of our super Fleet let alone the Imperium I mean if they want to give us content I'm all for it end quote but this went beyond basic shipping scams and words a day later winnett announced in another interview that members of Space Monkeys Alliance who had privileged access to I want isk were siphoning money from the casino quote to be honest all the hard work from this point onward goes to our Intelligence Division CIT and the person we had infiltrate I want is Corp in game he had some coding skills and

was given access to help code parts of the site discovering major flaws in the back end of their code in the process this code was used to do a few things one of which was to have the coder move in to our main accounts we were not sure if we would be caught here so we decided to play a different way which I won't go into too much but enabled us to win more often the I want is characters most of which are still active were given a better chance at winning in Raffles and jackpots

this code was already written into the I want isk backend and any highlevel Banker had access to it all this took was quiet hours when no major Banker was online to switch the winning accounts to us end quote after they had stolen this money and announced this fact to The Wider Eve community members of the Space Monkeys Alliance teased them as reporter matal wrote later quote at one point Space Monkeys Alliance then jumped onto I want is's TeamSpeak and chanted o o repeatedly the channel admin kicked them one by one like monkeys falling off the

bed until the cluster of noisy chimps became a trickle of individual ooks end quote the more destructive and disruptive action that they took however wasn't stealing money but rather an allegation quote we were dismayed to find that the character of EP was heavily involved in rmt the method on how he carried this out is very simple essentially Eep engaged in rmt with a close circle of friends and other people he had gotten to know over time or via work of mouth they would jump on Skype or TeamSpeak no physical in-game logs and ask to buy

a battery code for one billion isk a battery would cost a player $1 us and anything bought in the thousands was given a discount the money transfers were handled via PayPal and once the money was received I want isk would credit the purchaser's account on their website with a certain amount of isk they would then use low-level Bankers to pay out the PRI winnings in the same fashion as any normal transaction in the two weeks we monitored these activities we recorded around $1,200 of physical cash made by selling isk end quote this allegation was accompanied

with an incriminating audio clip allegedly of bankers and leaders within I want isk apparently discussing real money trading none of this was taken lightly by crowd control Productions who swiftly began handing out bans to numerous players suspected of trading isk for dollars to prevent the continued flow of cash through rmt pending an investigation this had happened before if crowd control Productions could find no evidence of rmt then they would reinstate the account and the funds would be returned even so many of the claims of the Space Monkeys and specifically win it remained uncorroborated in the

conclusion to his article matterall wrote that quote although the story came from SMA originally they were the least Cooperative once the story started turning away from their expectations ironically the I want isk Bankers were incredibly open and helpful with the access and information as was EP I want isk staff sometimes explain things three or four times to make sure the information was understood correctly a few prominent players have confidently told me there is rmt happening at want is's highest level but for one reason or another cannot Supply me with direct evidence if they had it

would be in this report end quote what the public didn't know was that I want isk had already signed an utterly massive 1.2 trillion isk contract with low set Corporation psychotic Tendencies significantly before the argument had taken place tasking the pirates with performing raids on Space Monkeys ter territory and when the details of this contract leaked this disagreement served as retroactive justification what few knew at the time was that this attack had a larger goal to distract the forces of the Imperium to an end that would soon become all too clear [Music] [Music] while the

fate of a portion of iwant is's Bankers was in Jeopardy the organization still had vast amounts of liquid assets and these would be bent to a singular purpose making good on their promise iwant isk offered the fighters of losek Voltron a lucrative contract which would pay out for every space monkey's asset verifiably destroyed the LC fighters of psychotic Tendencies proved more than a match for the quieter less warlike players of SMA and the attacks were so brutal that over a thousand of its players left the alliance representing approximately a fifth of its population and despite

their losses the iium was slow to offer assistance only 2 weeks after the contract had been signed the Space Monkeys had lost 100 billion isk in assets 70 billion of which was due to the alliance psychotic Tendencies the phenomenal success of these attacks was seen by other alliances who quickly became aware of the open contract that I want is had opened on Imperium ships and structures and soon corporations were pushing in into Imperium territory in war bands smashing anything that they could find and sending the resulting kill mailes to IW want isk to collect their

healthy reward this pattern showed no signs of slowing and in fact the website for I want isk was seeing significantly more traffic due to the attention they were receiving it's likely that they were making even more money than before money that could be spent on further mercenaries while the money offered by I want isk was tantalizing the prospect of attacking a group so universally disliked meant that players were arriving from all over New Eden to collect their money while simultaneously biting chunks out of the Imperium the belligerent announcement of the vice royalty program had turned

public opinion sharply against them and their failure in loac had shown them to be more vulnerable than others had expected corporations and alliances not not typically known to take contracts arrived and began drawing battle plans together the war had begun what precisely to name it was and still is in contention many Publications came to call it World War B given the sheer scope and the fact that it was centered around the Imperium whose fat be mascot was instantly recognizable even those in high and low security space were eagerly launching attacks into imp iium territory but

the funding source offered another obvious name one that would often be used colloquially the casino war this latter name was preferred by the Imperium as it placed more focus upon the aonomus casinos and their suspicious money as opposed to the imperium's aggressive and inflammatory disposition and actions that had predicated the war in the first place those who had gathered to attack the Imperium had varying Affinity to one another and were clearly cooperating only because of the money offered and their common enemy and so even if they won it was unlikely that this Coalition of convenience

would remain after the war but still they needed a name given the fact that they were originally Drawn Together due to the money and that nobody disputed that fact they took to self-deprecatingly calling themselves the money Badger Coalition a reference to the Contemporary intern meme Honeybadger don't give a the possibility of eradicating the Imperium had been floated as recently as November of the previous year by I want isk Bankers meos exelan wrote for crossing zebras describing how the matani had been tricked into deploying forces to attack an invasion Fleet that simply did not exist quote

I want isk Banker Lenny Kravitz 2o saw the deployment as a clear sign of the imperium's weakness Lenny determined that if the matani could be so easily deceived by an obvious ruse then the imperium's leader might be losing the situational awareness that had made him so difficult to challenge in the past he could now be tricked this might create a window for Action that the imperium's enemies could exploit Lenny contacted mercenary Coalition leader saber a and asked how much it would cost to bring down the Imperium saber estimated that such a war might take as

much as 2 years and would cost at least 7 trillion isk to pay for the necessary number of mercenaries he was stunned when Lenny blly stated that he could provide that level of funding end quote nobody was certain what to expect never before had such a massive mercenary Force been assembled and the depths of the coffers funding them were unknown to all but their owners neither the SC scale of the Imperium and its Logistics capabilities nor the scale of the money Badger Coalition had any precedent in the history of new Eden but this rapid series

of failures and the vast enemies arrayed against them already had a severe effect on morale and Imperium leadership Was preparing to cut their losses in extraneous areas of their territory David Andrews of just forits tocom wrote that quote after the decision was made to evacuate the Bastion and Lawn out of veil of the silent the tribute region became the front line for the casino war meaning circle of two became the front line for the casino war that's not exactly an enviable position particularly for an organization that doesn't really have any beef with the attackers end

quote the two forces would be tested when an infrastructure Hub in reinforcement mode would become vulnerable again in the system of mtac o E8 the home system for a constituent Imperium Alliance named circle of two on March 28th 2016 nearly 3,500 ships gathered under the money Badger banner and prepared for combat but it was immediately clear that the Imperium was not hopeful for this fight having only sent 1,300 combatants and holding its super Capital Fleet from the battle despite the lack of Firepower the battle was joined and the Imperium quickly began to struggle but something

was wrong first and most obvious the money Badgers were Fielding Capital ships which should have been prevented by Sino Jammers which were conspicuously absent before the battle secondly circle of two the corporation whose territory was being assailed wasn't anywhere to be seen outside of the battle more forces were waiting to join the ancient gaming Noob gave his account of the experience writing I had finally gotten home and clone jumped to our staging system just in time to catch oxygen leading a hurricane Fleet to the battle for the mtac oe8 ihub oxygen got us out to

a Titan within Bridge range of the 1 PTAC vl2 constellation where the biggest battle in ages was playing we landed on the Titan and waited for a bridge and waited and waited end quote then suddenly as this peculiar and losing battle raged the leader of Circle of two made a post to the eve subreddit that stunned the entire player base quote for years now we have been loyal toward the Imperium we as an alliance have for a large part never been seen as a full member by goons swarm Federation as a result we've never been

treated nor represented as such the basis of the Coalition it being a meritocracy became an affront over time in the same time span the list of grievances grew I will not go into detail as the people involved know full well whom and what I'm talking about they can mostly be summed up as goons swarm Federation taking care of their interests and at the same time blatantly disregarding the Coalition policies they claim to uphold over the past few months it has become increasingly clear that we have served only as a meat Shield circle of two is

not a meat Shield we will not stand as the wall that defends Dean from the angry hordes for the benefit of goons we will no longer subject our Pilots to the indecency of watching their hard work burn while goons sit in their Ivory Tower we will no longer stand as an unequal partner in the Imperium for the good of our our members we will be separating ourselves from the Imperium with a full and complete reset of all Imperium member alliances as of March 29th 2016 at o1 Eve Time end quote immediately the Imperium scrambled a

retreat but it was far too late to make a clean disengagement and according to Eve News website Crossing zebras the Imperium had lost over 300 billion isk in the fight as well as the system itself having salvaged what they could of their assets circle of two would now act as the beach head not for the Imperium but their new allies in the money Badger Coalition the matani would later claim that he withheld the Imperium super Capital Fleet knowing that the battle was a trap from circle of two citing the absence of Sino Jammers Xander FAA

writing for crossing zebras speculated that this betrayal quote May Galvanize the Imperium into a singular military force that can dispatch the roughly aligned forces of their enemies but the rest of new Eden were beginning to suspect that the Imperium was seeing the beginning of what goonswarm had managed to Stave off for years something that they had purposefully induced in other coalitions and alliances a failure Cascade what followed after a circle of two betrayed the Imperium was so rapid that there was little time for anyone to react by the end of March the money Badgers had

taken the entirety of veil of the silent and were actively driving the Imperium out of three more regions fade had been entirely abandoned all of this was still being bankrolled by iwant isk whose coffers appeared bottomless the sheer scale of this war had never been seen in new Eden's history and the Imperium were poised to lose it almost immediately but the parameters for victory were unclear those in the money Badger Coalition weren't certain how much longer I want isk would continue to provide money for the war what's more the Imperium was doing all in its

power to make this war as annoying as possible in a discussion for down the rabbit hole Imperium fleet commander Asher compared their strategy to that of Fabius during Hannibal's attack on Rome rather than meeting them directly in every engagement the goal was to annoy their opponents and drag the fighting out for as long as possible to make them lose interest performing ambushes and laying traps while committing few of their own resources the Imperium were unwilling to Simply Retreat and Harry any overzealous attacks either even into May the Imperium lodged deep into the lowc staging system

of saronin using it to lash out and even push back into fade and pure blind even as the money Badger Coalition launched periodic raids after a particularly brutal battle in the system in May Asher told Crossing zebras thate we still are vastly outnumbered there is no strategy where direct conflict works we still plan to deny all ratting in the north and punish all capital usage where the entire money Badger Coalition isn't formed to defend them end quot but even as the Imperium shed allies in the attacks the prospect of destroying them entirely seemed unlikely as

greedy Goblin wrote for his blog in 2016 quote no one can finish an eve Alliance unless their leaders give up you can take their moons their sa their stations you can make the opportunistic members leave but as long as the leaders stay there will be enough core members who stay because of loyalty friends or simply content remember test broken and evicted but as leader stayed they came back and now boldly spam memes against goons while pooping on their lawn end quote also recognizing that they couldn't afford to spread their forces too thin what remained of

the Imperium launched an attack on the Contemporary residents of delve seeking to once again take the region for themselves displacing their current residents with their massive super Capital Fleet however by the time this Conquest was complete the Imperium was a shadow of its former self yinon writing for crossing zebras provided a list in mid July quote I would like to explain why I am calling them the goonswarm Federation and not the Imperium as has been their preferred nomenclature and what I have stuck to calling them these past few months that is because the Imperium even

if GSF does not want to admit it is dead it was a defensive Coalition based around stronghold Holdings in the north counting down the list of gsf's former Coalition mates reads more like a mixed obituary and divorce proceedings than a list of allies at this point SMA almost completely collapsed with only a 300 man dust Corp holding it above the 500 manm Mark CO2 turned to the side of the money Badger Coalition and holding a larger chunk of previously Imperium space Razer functionally wide dotted previously with the acquisition of 4S and fully so with the

leaving of both roving guns and Gladiators of Rage to MC Dot and Chaos respectively fcon left the Imperium on good terms to find a new home within either the Vanguard Coalition or stain wagon depending on what day it is and who you ask TNT seems to have kept relatively steady Bastion down nearly 700 members this month alone this leaves goons swarm Federation almost almost entirely alone in terms of being a strong self-sustaining Alliance within the Imperium and whilst I would expect them to still lug around the alliances and help them to not Cascade to the

point of actually becoming non- entities even the facade of being a coalition of equals is now almost painfully obvious in its falsity to an outside Observer end quote but by the time everything else had been taken from them there were few left on the offensive the LC Coalition had fallen apart over the course of June as is perhaps unsurprising for roving Pirates and while iwant isk was still willing to fund the war with their incredible wealth much of the impetus for the initial Invasion had vanished while ostensibly driven by profit this narrative was undermined when

almost all of the money Badger Coalition abandoned the offensive their members exhausted from the fighting and content with their Victory by the time the Imperium had completed Ed its invasion of delve and lodged themselves in the only Alliance pursuing them was test believing that if the offensive was continued they could Stamp Out the goons entirely but without the support of the rest of the money Badger Coalition there was little hope of cracking the defenses of what remained of the Imperium the super Capital Fleet of the goons was still far too strong and without allies they

were eventually forced to retreat again no SEC was fractured and after half a year they could return to their numerous smaller Wars as was normal but this war had elucidated Myriad problems for crowd control Productions and even as the company desperately attempted to juggle its other projects it would have to continue its custodial duties to Eve online or lose their only reliable source of income even before the war had begun casinos were a contentious topic for more than the players crowd-control Productions consistently had to dedicate valuable and limited resources to monitoring the players involved in

them and bankers were frequently flagged for investigation for real money trading and subsequently banned a detriment both to the company and to the casino the latter of whom would need to dedicate further time and resources to training new Bankers but the casinos represented an existential problem for Eve onl as had been doubted but now demonstrated over the course of the war it was feasible for a faction with enough liquid assets to determine the shape of all of new Eden and these factions already existed in the form of the casinos with the bulk of their money-making

mechanisms hosted outside of the game where it was difficult for crowd control Productions to exert their influence compared to other in-game methods of generating profit the casinos were too efficient this was in part due to their clientele while many less wealthy players participated many of the richest had concluded that there was little to do with their amassed wealth and so would bet and lose large amounts at the casinos while the Imperium barely managed to survive the war with clever tactics designed to prolong conflict and by moving farther away from its enemies it was clear that

any faction not operating its own Casino would be unable to compete financially and by extension militarily but the gambling magnets were not simply content to continue collecting money in Eve rather they were preparing a Total Takeover of the financial markets predicated upon upon an important expansion to the game released initially in April of 2016 during the war citadels these massive static constructs known officially as upwell structures were to incrementally replace the player owned stations that were necessary for War Industry and trade and instead allow players to establish much more entrenched positions while intricate and requiring

significant setup the plan itself was straightforward by creating a web of stations throughout all of new Eden players aligned with the gambling magnets would be able to utilize a special kind of cargo hauling ship called jump Freighters in tandem with the station's unique properties to make themselves Untouchable much like other large ships these jump Freighters were able to asue the Stargate Network by jumping directly from one system to another within a certain range and one potential destination for a jump would be these new upwell structures if the ship's jump arrival was close enough to an

upwell structure then they would immediately tether to it making them completely invulnerable to damage by jumping directly from structure to structure there would be no time during which a jump freighter would be vulnerable making it impossible to disrupt supply lines or trade routes without assaulting these sturdy structures this safety would make their stations the most attractive to Traders and buyers which is where the final mechanism in the plan allowed them to make their profit all goods bought and sold in these stations in which players could dock like existing stations were subject to a tariff collected

By The Station owner if they could become the primary method of trading especially in dangerous regions of space then the gambling magnets could make untold amounts of money this scheme team was given the tongue and cheek name of the new Eden Trading Company their utility extended Beyond acting as hubs for trade however and it was this fact that would conceivably make them nigh Untouchable while the immediate use for this network was to make the transit of jump freighter safer they could likewise be used by any capital and super capital ship allowing for relatively safe passage

and this would require good standing with the gambling magnets if they succeeded in their plan then any party working against them would become a more vulnerable military Target but their dreams of a trading empire would be cut short by crowd-control Productions on October 12th 2016 they made a bold update to their enduser license agreement with one particular section highlighted in an announcement you may not use transfer or assign any game as asss for games of chance operated by Third parties they then clarified this addition to the Eve online EA means that as of the launch

of Eve online Ascension players will be prohibited from using in-game assets and currency as well as the EVP to take part in or promote gambling services or other games of chance that are operated by Third parties with this in mind as of this announcement we have taken action against two organizations that are currently offering third-party services based around gambling and games of chance the third party service I want isk has been shut down in game and all isk and assets have been confiscated after extensive and exhaustive investigation has brought forward compelling evidence of large scale

real money trading permanent account suspensions have been issued against those involved the third party service Eve Casino has been shut down in game and all isk and assets have been confiscated after multiple and sustained breaches of our developer license agreement permanent account suspensions have been issued against those involved as of the launch of Eve online Ascension the hosting of and participation in any form of third-party gambling service that utilizes in-game assets currency or the EVP will be strictly prohibited end quote but there was a major piece of information missing in this press release who had

been banned after investigating them a large number of I want ISS Bankers had been targeted but the most notable names were Lenny Kravitz 2 and Iron Bank The Architects of the war though they continued to protest their innocence Lenny would take to Reddit to inform everyone that the Trade Network would continue as planned but it would face stiff resistance after being beaten back into delve the Imperium lacked much of their old infrastructure but they still wielded one of the most threatening fleets in the game and they would be joined in attacking some of the early

structures in the Trade Network by some of their former enemies in the money Badgers intent on preventing its eventual establishment with such powerful forces AR raay against it and few willing to come to its defense without being paid its fure was in question as the Limitless supply of money from the casinos was now suddenly gone how much money they still had left over was unknown crowd control production's decision to forcibly dissolve the gambling corporations had dramatically altered the shape of new Eden's future which they hoped would improve the health of the game but even as

they did so they would finally lay another part of new Eden to rest [Music] at last in February of 2016 crowd control Productions announced that they would be shutting down the servers for Dust 514 in may only 3 months later this was not a surprise for contemporary players who had been monitoring the ongoing development of the game which had been live for only 3 years 2 years prior when the company announced the development of project Legion players of dust were concerned that this new FPS was being developed because CCP lacked faith in their console exclusive

shooter title in spite of their confident rhetoric this concern was bolstered by the way that project Legion was framed upon its announcement with employees stating that it was a reimagining of dust made by the same team as Hilmar Pon stated to Euro gamer quote it's taking all we learned from dust and almost making a new game from scratch even though it's the same team doing a firstperson shooter so they're very experienced now and we've made good Headway on it end quote with some of the Dust team now working on an entirely different title future updates

were in question another CCP staff member sha Decker stated his dissatisfaction with dust at the same time as he spoke of his hopefulness for project Legion as vg247 paraphrased it quote it's in the same IP same place and all the rest of it but we want to do some fundamentally different things with it that we feel we missed out on and that we didn't do right with dust honestly we didn't make a great game to begin with we tried to do too much end quote even as CCP games proclaim the success of dust their employees

es seem to deride it in favor of their new project the concerns of the players proved correct and after one final major content update in 2014 the game would only see maintenance and hot fixes until its death in May but major changes were happening to Eve online itself as well and the introduction of citadels promised to dramatically alter how Warfare worked in new Eden in contrast to the paes that had come before or the largest tiers of upwell structures could house Capital ships with the Monumental keepstar even able to house Titans meaning that any station

could act as a staging site both for attack and defense perhaps more importantly any friendly ship close enough to an upwell structure would become tethered making them invulnerable to damage until taking an offensive action the tether could be reinitiated simply by refraining from any defensive action for a full minute again rendering the players ship invulnerable the defensive Advantage this afforded to players was immense and their ability to house fleets meant that invading any territory with upwell structures would become significantly slowed if not blunted entirely this was particularly helpful to the Imperium who now had been

granted the space to nurture their coffers and rebuild with their core members waiting for them to return and to bring others into their organization what's more the defensive capabilities of these structures were significant beyond their support role they could be equipped with weapons and modules similarly to a ship projecting power against anything that came too close and being granted reinforcement timers much like other structures keepstars were even granted their own doomsday weapons but the introduction of upwell structures had another unintended effect before the Citadel update the parts necessary for Capital and super Capital ships were

constructed at Specialized passes which could be destroyed in raids if an opposing faction knew where to find them now these production capabilities could be moved into heavily fortified stations this meant that significant resources could now be funneled into the production of large ships with significantly less risk what's more this safety allowed for mining to be performed in nulc at a capacity previously unheard a sudden increase in mining output was precipitated by the rarl A specialized capital ship proficient at rapidly mining asteroid fields and the changes enacted by The Citadel expansion made them far safer to

field and easier to protect the wealth amassed by all nsec powers began to reach what had once been ludicrous extremes what followed was a long long period of stagnation while the existing Powers would occasionally lash out at one another in massive battles territory changed hands more sparingly than before and nulc gradually divided into three large power blocks who had little interest in earnestly attacking one another a state of affairs that came to be known pejoratively as the blue donut referring to the disc shape of nulc around Empire space soon the rapid PR eration of massive

super Capital ships became nigh Unstoppable yet with few targets their use was limited despite the relative power of the upwell structures the potential effects of the proposed Trade Network were too threatening to the nulc powers who lashed out against the citadels which served as its foundation without the money flowing from the casinos the Endeavor was cut short in 2017 for the next few years new Eden was relatively quiet as the powers in nulc amassed wealth and bided their time unchallenged except by one another many agreed that with the introduction of citadels a protracted era of

Peace had begun one far different from the new Eden that most had come to know fueled by the safe income enabled by upwell structures even though the grand Trade Network envisioned by the onetime casino owners hadn't come to pass many players established upwell structures in high security space and allowed players to trade there taking a broker's fee from every transaction in March of 2016 Eve blogger greedy Goblin made a post detailing his concerns over an increase in the amount of money that players could make in these citadels writing that quote there won't be any serious

Wars ever do you remember whining over top down in come because of moons imagine something 10 times bigger without siphons without having to fuel towers without hauling without even logging in remember that if you can rmt 1 billion isk for $7 the trade citadels net you $200,000 per month you don't choose playing a video game over getting such money every major Alliance leader and FC will agree to keep the peace and stomp on anyone trying to disturb it such peace will obviously mean the end of Eve end quote this state of affairs culminated 2 years

later on October 15th 2018 in the establishment of the Tranquility trading Tower a keepstar class Citadel the largest and most powerful available deployed by test and supported by the Imperium This keepstar was meant as a central location for their alliance's traders to sell their Wares where the broker fees could be collected and split between them and their allies the location of this station was also conspicuous it had been deployed in the system of perimeter immediately next to jeta and its all important trade Hub prior to this their enemies in federations NC do and PanAm had

held a monopoly on trade in this vital system but the establishment of this keepstar and tests ferocious defense of it ensured its survival and soon nobody was willing to strike out against the Tranquility trading tower for a time it survival seemed uncertain but soon PanAm the Imperium and Legacy Coalition three of the major power blocks in nulc agreed to split the money generated by the tower despite their shaky relationship this all but guaranteed its survival going forward as these three came to be the dominant forces in n and exerted significant Market pressure on the whole

of new Eden as players reckoned with the effects of these drastic changes skirmishes still would occur between belligerent parties but even if the stakes were less sweeping the scale of combat had drastically changed speaking with down the rabbit hole fleet commander Asher recalled a war in 2018 2 years after the citadel's Patch was released when they launched an incursion into Northern Territory with their refreshed super Capital Fleet this culminated into a massive fight over a vulnerable keepstar in the system of x47 ltac q a fight that ostensibly should have been unwinnable due to the dir

of benefits that the keepstar provided to the defending Fleet not to be outdone however Asher hatched a plam in spite of the powerful modules that could be fitted onto a keepstar its most useful tool was tethering when a player fired their ship's weapons on another player's ship it would begin what was known as a weapon timer which precluded the attacker from utilizing the tether or docking for a full minute once the minute had elapsed the player could again be tethered and dock meaning that while protecting the keepstar all a defending ship would have to do

if targeted was refrained from firing any weapons for 60 seconds and then their ship would become invulnerable until they were prepared to enter the fight once again this problem was exacerbated for the attacking Imperium forces due to a bug when a Titan fired at doomsday a 5-minute weapon timer was supposed to be applied instead of the usual one minute timer but if the target of the Doomsday died to the blast then the one minute timer was applied instead making it difficult to Target vulnerable enemy Titans but there was a way to prevent enemy ships from

from tethering to a station warp scramblers if a ship was warp scrambled Not only was it prevented from engaging its warp drive and traveling elsewhere in the solar system but it would also be prevented from tethering until the warp scramble was broken to this end Asher ordered warp scramblers fitted to a small Fleet of super carriers what had once been known as mother ships these ships typically deployed at long range and dealing their damage through the use of small strike craft would serve a singular purpose they would leap directly into the enemy Fleet and deploy

their warp scramblers on any vulnerable ship delaying the tether for as long as possible beset by this new strategy there seemed to be no correct answer if the defending Fleet attacked the super carriers then they would lose valuable time to damage the main enemy Fleet but if they attack the imperium's Titans then the key defense defensive benefit of the keepstar would be entirely nullified this was compounded by the sheer defensive potential of these super carriers which Asher estimated at the time to be 75% that of a Titan for only 20% of the cost a fantastically

costeffective trade for the utility that these specialized super carriers provided the pressure from the Imperium was too great and they were able to deplete the armor of the keepstar when its Hull was exposed a short time later and the northern Fleet rallied to defend it the pilots fell back behind one another and an attempt to avoid being targeted themselves lest a super carrier arrive to lock them in place and deny them their tether leaving only a fraction of available ships to return fire this second battle was won without a single warp disrupting super carrier deployed

despite this fantastic Victory the territorial gains were minimal and instead of pressing their advantage the Imperium retreated back to their home systems further emphasizing in the minds of players the immortality of the blue donut the sheer size of this battle was beyond what had been seen for years and the number of Titans deployed was Unthinkable a few short years prior but this raised a question if the proliferation of super Capital ships had reached such an absurd level what would an allout War looked like and was one even feasible given the state of the game even

before the Battle of x47 another battle had broken the record for the most number of players in a single fight with over 6,000 as the Imperium attempted to destroy a keepstar held by pandemic horde but given the resources that the different factions had amassed this was clearly far from the level of Destruction that was possible it would take another two 2 years but the answer would eventually be known and it would defy the scale of anything that had been seen in the entire history of new Eden while the players of Eve online reckoned with the

effects of these drastic changes made to new Eden landscape crowd-control Productions continued work on their firstperson shooter title which they renamed to Project Nova and in October of 2018 at a special event for Eve fans in Las Vegas they allowed reviewers to play an early build of the game both in its cooperative and competitive modes reports from reviewers were generally hopeful with much of their articles discussing the history of ccp's firstperson shooter index ERS including the discarded Dust 514 but those who had the opportunity to test it also noted that the game while enjoyable would

require something unique to draw a player base something that was still missing from what was playable gaming journalist Joe scrubbles writing for IGN echoed other reports when he stated that quote it's challenging hectic and it must be said unspectacular what I play is an early build so elements may change but no matter how right it feels under the fingers Nova doesn't quite connect in terms of excitement right now sound effects are oddly muted a space Magnum with exploding bullets shouldn't sound like my oven door closing enemies appear without Fanfare and trapes around the gunmetal Battlefield

unthreatening and even the act of evacuating at the end of a round feels lacking in Peril given that I've criticized dust for ex exactly opposite issue it might seem a little damned if they do damned if they don't but I can't stop thinking that a solid foundation isn't quite enough at this point CCP does have wider plans for Nova and even more hopes but crucially I don't see any evidence of them other than being told they could exist one day it's promised that Nova will bring a level of customization to suit even Eve players creating

custom Clone Trooper builds piece by piece from hundreds of options but what I see are the game's introductory classes built more like the set Heroes currently in Vogue in FPS games end quote the pressure on the company to release a popular title would only increase with time on September 6th 2018 crowd control Productions was bought by another company named Pearl Abyss a game publisher known for the popular MMO title Black Desert online players were nervous Black Desert online utilized a radically different monetization strategy compared to Eve online as chewing the subscription-based model in favor of

the now far more popular free-to-play method with numerous microtransactions selling in-game items such as Weapons consumables cosmetics and most importantly loot Boxes by targeting a small number of players willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money on micro transactions called whales by the industry video game Publishers had managed to drastically increase their profit margins introducing them even into full-priced games to increase their revenue and the most lucrative method of selling in-game items proved to be Loop boxes rather than simply buying the items that they wanted outright players in contemporary games instead were offered these boxes which

would contain a random item or set of items with more desirable items being rarer and a chance for duplicates that the player already owned this would attract not only those with significant disposable income but gambling addicts as well further widening the pool of whales to conceal the chance-based nature of these rewards and to avoid various Count's gambling regulations they would often be veiled or obfuscated in some way with these obfuscations growing more convoluted As Time passed but this method of monetization to many players was anema to the new Eden that they knew one of the

most appealing aspects of the game was the fully player-driven economy in which every object collected crafted and used was made by a long supply chain of players and to damage that supply chain through the sale of microtransactions would potentially destroy what made the game so appealing this was a fear that had been harbored ever since the internal Magazine with the title greed is good was leaked where the company had written extensively about their introduction into the game while Eve online could technically now be played for free by new players the vast majority of content was

locked behind a paid subscription fee and most of the other games that still utilized a subscription fee had been released at around the same time as Eve online a game that had once been a pioneer in gaming technology now seemed outdated at least from a business perspective some items available for purchase with real money had already been introduced such as skill extractors but the greatest fear of the player base was that the company would move Beyond these smaller items and start selling the most vital item in the game ships more than tools ships were a

social item as well and represented great strides for player progression with larger and stronger ships often a point of Pride one of the greatest leaps for many new players was moving from Aventure a small introductory mining ship to a mining barge this early goal is so ubiquitous that new players will often fall for scams involving such barges with pearl abyss' purchase of CCP games the possibility of selling such ships and therefore the destruction of the player economy as the players knew it seemed much closer than ever before the role that crowd control Productions would take

was not immediately clear an article by Chris care for gamed developer.com read in part quote CCP will continue to operate independently as a developer from its studios in rikic London and Shanghai while Pearl integrates the Icelandic outfits development and Publishing expertise into its own pipeline end quote Less Than 3 months after Pearl Abyss acquired crowd control Productions project Nova's web page was altered with a statement it read in part with familiar reassuring corporate pros and cliches quote over the course of project Nova's development we conducted a number of player research sessions with external Partners tirelessly

play tested the game internally and brought community stalwarts in to help us evaluate the project now after taking all this research and feedback into account we see that the gameplay experience in its current form does not live up to our original vision and would not achieve our ambitious goals for this project as a result we will not be moving forward with the upcoming invite only Alpha until further notice we hope you understand that we need to take a step back and return to the drawing board where we will spend more time figuring out how all

this hard work can translate into something better and more meaningful for the eve Universe remaining true to our vision of project Nova's future in connection with Eve is essential Project Nova continues to evolve and we remain committed to delivering a highquality team-based shooter experience to Eve online fans while exploring new and exciting opportunities to integrate the two games CCP is in no rush to release Project Nova until we're satisfied it provides a rock solid G gameplay experience and visuals to match end quote though crowd control Productions had released multiple Standalone single player experiences over the

years eve players remembered the company's failures much more prominently in large part due to their comparatively High profiles as it was the only major product that had managed to survive to that time was Eve online their VR space combat game Eve Valkyrie had been released relased on March 28th 2016 but further development was halted only a year and a half later despite what rock paper shotgun called bullishness about VR only 7 months before the shutdown EV online continued to be the only public facing project that provided returns for crowd control Productions and though it was

public knowledge that the company had been hiring staff for a new action massively multiplayer online game excitement for anything except Eve online had long since been dampened and even that excitement was being tempered by trepidation this pattern continued when on February 17th 2020 massively op published an article titled Pearl Abyss had a strong quarter 4 2019 but ccp's Eve spin-off Project Nova is officially cancelled in it they described an investor call that stated that project no Nova was officially cancelled and that a Dust 514 veterans group had been informed by the Project's game director that

quote we are evolving the scope of Nova beyond our previous plans for Early Access and the development will continue in our London Studio I am personally optimistic about this but also wistful that also means that the Project Nova Cod name is retired and the London team will find a new one this is not a fiscal decision the London team had been working on very interesting ideas and Concepts and adding them to a shooter sounds very promising to me end quote with the public knowledge that Black Desert online was making 6 and 1 half times the

revenue of Eve online players and onlookers were nervous about Pearl abyss' outlook on the game but inside the game World itself a long period of Peace had established itself and the leaders of every faction knew that if they were to to keep their members entertained and playing for them then something would have to change even if the game system seemed uncompromising every Denison of new Eden knew that war was inevitable and when it began the scale would be [Music] unprecedented while much of new Eden had been watching the situation in nulc pensively and bracing for

the effects that a large conflict might have another group was seeing a Resurgence early in new Eden's history when noek was first being colonized two of the major factions the stain Alliance and the northern Coalition have been founded in part by role players looking to play characters within the game World But as time passed this method of play had declined as the players Focus on efficacy took over their space and granted them few options to make an impact upon the game World however individuals would sometimes still engage in the practice and among them was the

character ktia SE while the player had other characters with which they engaged in other sunry activities in New Eden ktia was created with a singular goal in mind to be the first character to visit every solar system in new Eden without losing a single ship when her journey began on December 1st 2009 the Apocrypha expansion had just been released and with it the new systems in Wormhole space meaning that there were 5,201 star systems in normal space to explore and another 2,604 systems in Wormhole space a total of 7,805 systems enough that they knew that

they would need to Pace themselves in an interview with polygon they said quote I only did this for an hour and a half each day just to unwind after work I wasn't killing myself doing this end quote the systems in Empire space were not difficult to visit and ktia only needed to avoid gankers who were generally uninterested in destroying the small ships that they utilized but as they moved into loek and nulc ships with the ability to cloak would be necessary and for a character trained into such a specialized task the skill requirements would be

trivial the player also had the skill set to avoid anyone who might be interested in destroying their ship a kill mail that would certainly be coveted by anyone who could acquire it in an interview for down the rabbit hole Kya stated that with their experience avoiding such Hunters was a trivial affair they would Chronicle their Travels by writing in a blog role playing as the character and capturing images of places that they found particularly beautiful or interesting including the hull of Steve the Titan in c9n taac CC but their roleplaying Endeavors would extend much farther

the Ria expansion in 2014 had introduced a new special Wormhole system named Thea into the game unique to other Wormhole systems and that it featured numerous amenities unseen in other systems such as approximately 12 entrances to normal space and indestructible MPC stations making it an attractive system for players hoping to quickly travel from one location to another in normal space interested in the opportunities that Thea provided a group of explorers gathered together under the name signal cartel with the intention of creating a peaceful outlet for themselves in a highly competitive game their Credo today whose

Spirit has been maintained through the corporation's entire life reads in part quote signal cartel is a Service Corporation to all of new Eden in this role members are encouraged to treat all players with respect regardless of affiliation in challenging situations our goal is to look for a graceful resolution and set an example of dignity and friendship through our actions we embrace the attitude of a true Explorer we are friendly to others in our travels neutral and never initiating aggression and endeavoring at all times to be perceived by the new Eden Community as a non-threat among

our own ranks and with others we are patient and generous with knowledge ideas and experiences end quote this ethos appealed strongly to ktia who was among the first to join and by the end of the first year they had amassed 700 members a remarkable amount for such a niche corporation which was thought to have limited appeal their most public facing activity would be the establishment of Eve Scout a tool that tracked the appearance disappearance and status of the numerous wormholes connected to Thea by utilizing this list of connections players could drastically decrease their travel time

anywhere though its lack of any NPC security meant that doing so was somewhat dangerous given the sheer amount of traffic through it among other things signal cartel's philanthropic aims included what they called rescue caches unn knowledgeable inattentive or Reckless players could sometimes find themselves stranded in Wormhole space and without the proper tools or assistance it could be impossible to discover any route out finding themselves stranded in hostile and unknown territory placed in systems all over Wormhole space these rescue caches were containers equipped with everything that a player needed to chart a route out of Wormhole

space as well as a few other objects that the Cash's Creator might find amusing such as fireworks for the player to launch in celebration of their rescue on November 1st 2018 4 years after the signal cartel's founding ktia say would approach them in need of assistance after 4 years ktia had managed to visit all 5,21 star systems in new Eden visiting many of the planets and chronicling the journey in their blog and had begun visiting every Wormhole system as well still without losing a ship a remarkable feat given the belligerence of the roving bands of

players who made their home in Wormhole space but after visiting the first 2,000 Wormhole systems a problem that ktia had been dreading became an issue the chaotic nature of Wormhole space and its constantly shifting labyrinthine Pathways made it n impossible to find every one of the remaining 600 systems they would need a assistance and their friends in Signal cartel were more than happy to oblige to find connections to the remaining systems as soon as they opened they would crowdsource data from their players to do so they utilize a game tool made specifically for Signal cartel

members that assisted them in tracking the status of their rescue caches but in this case it allowed CA and their small Cadre of trusted players to see when a cartel member was in a remaining system on kata's list speaking with polygon Kya said quote when a system was found we generally had less than 24 hours to get through the pass and depending on how deep it was the more critical it was to get there fast end quote finally on March 9th 2019 Kata announced to the rest of new Eden their accomplishment assisted by signal cartel

the character ktia SE had visited every single star system that could be visited in just over 9 years without losing a single ship the accomplishment was noted even by those who had shunned roleplay and the character came to be one of the most famous in the game's history with a monument created by crowd control Productions in game to celebrate the success sometime after this achievement ktia would become the leader of signal cartel helping to manage it and continue the work of aiding those in and outside of Wormhole space through Thea and their rescue programs but

even as ktia signal cartel and the rest of new Eden celebrated those in nulc bent their aims toward a much different end and they wouldn't have to wait long to see their plans come to fruition and take part in the most intense and expensive war that the game had ever seen a war that would drag out far longer than any could have thought the establishment of the Tranquility trading Tower had ured at least a measure of peace out of mutual economic interest but as the years wore on the fear of member attrition grew in the

leaders of the various nulc Powers many who had joined these factions did so with an interest in fighting in Grand battles and though the super Capital fleets grew their use had dwindled Fleet commanders would take their players on rames through nulc looking for fights but these wouldn't remain enough to saate their desire for battle and there was concern that significant amounts of players would leave if not entertained murmurings of War propagated over the years as more contained Wars forced out smaller alliances and corporations from nulc the political situation simplified itself into power blocks to the

West Was the Imperium operating out of their home regions of delve and Fountain which had historically been the prize of and home to the most powerful factions in the game and this period was no exception to the South and Southeast was Legacy Coalition a group of associated independent states that formed after the war in 2016 and conquered significant territory over the intervening 4 years to the north and Northeast was a larger group going by panda fam consisting of some of the most venerable corporations in June of 2020 as players began to return to Eve online

in expectation of War Eve YouTuber yinon estimated that the Imperium had 50,000 characters Legacy Coalition had 45,000 and pandafam had 62,000 the distinction of characters was important due to the propensity of Eve players to have multiple accounts a practice that crowd control Productions now subtly encouraged through its user interface yinon attributed the growing tension in nulc to the decayed relationship between the Imperium and Legacy Coalition the latter of which was home to test Alliance who had a complicated past with the Imperium at times cooperative and most of the time adversarial having been the final attackers

in the last major war hoping to eradicate the Imperium while they had worked together to fight against their Mutual enemies in the four years prior test attacked a smaller Coalition in the Northwest a coalition that the Imperium was supporting and according to yinon the Imperium and Legacy Coalition fought against one another in small scale battles but the imperium's Allies would fall leaving a dir of territory awaiting capture as pandafam alliances moved into this territory and skirmished with the Imperium however prog good Legend the leader of test Alliance and one of the principal leaders of Legacy

Coalition on the Imperium Southern border made a strong illusion to war at an alliance Town Hall reacting to this and likely other Intel gathered from their intelligence Network the Imperium withdrew from their less defensible territory shipping all stations and goods that they could to their core regions to prepare for what they knew was coming approximately a week after prog good Legend statement a post made to the Imperium News Network s it alleged that quote the past couple of months prog good Legend has run around talking to basically every Alliance who has ever shot at the

Imperium and gotten them on board with the idea of invading us end quote the matani leader of the Imperium announced publicly the strategy that they would employ for what was now understood to be an imminent War he had commanded all members of the Imperium to fall back to Fountain and Fortress delve as well as the the more peripheral regions of Aquarius and period basis where they would establish their defenses at choke points in anticipation of the impending attack soon afterward the leaders of Legacy Coalition announced their withdrawal from The non-invasion Pact which dictated a two-week

grace period before an invasion would be permitted by the agreement though as was perhaps to be expected various breaches of this stipulation were ignored by both parties the goal of this war was clear one that echoed the goals of the War 4 years prior currently there are well over 400 Titans converging from all over Eve and that will combine with our Titan fleets from Legacy and fire and all of our allies and it will be the largest Titan Force ever assembled in Eve online most of Eve is Unified around one goal that this time goons

must finally be destroyed all of the alliances joining forces today have agreed that we will not make the same mistake we made at the end of world war B we will see this through to the end and months from now when this war is won we will finally be looking at an eve that is worth playing once again the vast forces of nulc and Beyond gathered together but this time there would be no outside funding using the resources aass during the years of Peace the United forces of Legacy Coalition and panda would fund this war

themselves with the express purpose of destroying the Imperium once and for all this temporary alliance between these two massive coalitions against the goons would be called papy a portmanto of test alliance's abbreviation tapy and pandafam while the goals of the previous war were more nebulous this time victory was singularly defined the complete eradication of the Imperium the roles of the participants in this war were also clear the Imperium had willingly nestled themselves into just a few regions preparing to act as the Defenders against the invading forces of papy this concentration of military might was a

boon all of the resources of the Imperium were now centrally located and any ships or modules necessary could be moved from one front to another with relative ease and speed their centralized autocratic organ organizational structure also meant that making important decisions would be a rapid process something that had historically proven vital in new Eden despite the defender's Advantage the war seemed to be almost a foregone conclusion papy's forces constituted the combined populations of Legacy Coalition and pandafam and together they outnumbered the population of the Imperium 2 to one at this stage in new Eden's history

when population was vital for any Alliance these numbers seemed insurmountable but the imperium's defenses were Stout if defended tenaciously enough any gains made by papy forces would be incremental and costly in an unprecedented show of solidarity and mutual effort multiple alliances on the attacking papy side moved their Titans into position prepared to Siege the home systems of the Imperium but if papy forces were to successfully attack the primary home systems of Fountain and delve a multi-prong defensive would be necessary attacking from the southern systems would be brutal if not impossible the Aquarius and period basis

regions were separated from their easterly neighbors by a massive distance too far to make a jump but the only other option was in practice unacceptable moving fleets of capital ships through the traditional Stargate network was a dangerous proposition due to the pattern in which ships arrived through them making them extremely vulnerable to attack and such a decision was considered out of the question in the vast majority of cases and so the Invaders from the south decided to take a different route instead coming through heac through the system of fwst tac 8 technically neither this system

nor a few nearby systems belonged to the Imperium but rather they were irrevocably claimed by a one player pirate faction called the blood Raiders meaning that defensive structures such as Sino Jammers couldn't be deployed either side would have the freedom to deploy Capital ships to fwst tac 8 as they so chose forcing their way through this route however would be brutal and costly and The Fleets were harried by the forces of the Imperium constantly and the entire time the Imperium Fleet commanders were studying papy's Fleet movements carefully finally after months of grinding battles The papy

Fleets made it to their destination the goal of papy forces was to Anchor a keepstar as a base out of which they could prosecute the war on the Northern front a boon that would make raids and attacks into Imperium territory far easier if the Imperium could blunt this attempt then Victory would almost be assured papy would attempt to Anchor the first keepstar in the beginning of October and the Imperium were ready with hundreds of dreadnots prepared to bring their heavy weapons to Bear against the keepstar before it could come online when the Imperium arrived they

were significantly outnumbered by the papy forces a trend that would continue to repeat itself throughout the war and they had little hope of driving their foes from the battlefield however their definition of victory was not to push back the enemy Fleet rather they needed only to destroy the keepstar a goal that superseded any concerns over cost as the dreadnots focused their fire they in turn were targeted by enemy ships and they began to drop one by one but the damage output of these Siege batteries was too great for the keepstar to weather and the structure

would be destroyed before it could come online despite achieving their objective the toll was extremely heavy for the Imperium with 250 of the attacking dreadnots destroyed significantly more valuable than what papy had lost and so they tried again but the response from the Imperium would shock both new Eden and The Gaming Community at large on October 6th the second keepstar was deployed papy ships surrounded it ready to defend it against what the fleet commanders expected to be a massive response from the Imperium super Capital Fleet by stationing their own Titans around the keepstar but what

they received instead was an unbelievably massive swarmm in an offensive that mirrored the old strategies from the beginning of goons swarm thousands of players from the Imperium arrived in Raven battleships armed with long range missile weapons and charged headlong Into The Fray what would come to be known as the fury of fwst tac 8 had begun as the battle escal ated and more and more ships arrived time dilation automatically activated reducing the speed of all actions to 10% of their normal values and allowing support ships to arrive much faster relative to the pace of the

fight further increasing the scale as the hours wore on and more and more battleships arrived to replace those lost papy leadership realized that the damage was too great for the keepstar to bear and forces were scrambled to intercept Imperium ships as they arrived but the flood of incoming Imperium forces was too great to stem as the fight spilled into the following day the keepstar disintegrated and papy seeded the field whether they knew so or not those who attended the fight had made history according to CCP the battle in fwst t 8 had broken a record

with 8,825 characters involved more than had ever been seen in the game's history while losing two keep Stars was a heavy toll the losses suffered by the Imperium were even greater but unlike previous Wars the vast acrude wealth of all sides made such losses far less impactful than they had been in the past at this stage the three more important factors were strategic objectives available population to fight and as always morale for Imperium leader ERS such monetary losses helped to show their resolve but papy would not relent three more times they would attempt to deploy

a keepstar as a forward base of operations and each time the Imperium swarmed with their battleships to batter it with missiles and prolong the assault but finally on the 19th of October in the system of yz9 TAC F6 they would find purchase Imperium forces once again arrived in their missile Laden Raven battleships but this time papy were prepared rather than allow the enemy Fleet and their reinforcements to arrive at a safe range they surrounded the nent keepstar in warp disruption bubbles which pulled the arriving enemy ships into range of the entire defensive Fleet by calling

their targets carefully battle groups could pick off the battleships one by one with little trouble the Imperium was forced to seed the field Frosty op an eve player and YouTuber chronicling the war estimated that about 140 warp disruption bubbles were deployed for the purpose Each of which was then destroyed by the papy forces so that they could enter their newly anchored keepstar in reference to a popular science fiction show the method by which it was defended and the number of attempts to Anchor a station this new structure was dubbed bubble on 5 the tactic of

bubble wrapping a station was not a new idea but according to Asher this tactic had been explicitly banned by the game masters of Eve online until special permission was secretly given to papy forces to perform it in response to this claim prog good Legend Made a post to Reddit which read despite what matani is pinging to you placing 140 anchored bubbles on a grid is not an exploit whatever the case may have been bubble on five would stand the war had dragged on for three months from the summer into the Autumn of 2020 and there

was Hope from most of new Eden that this keepstar would perpetuate a swift end to the war one that would again see the Imperium defeated and this time obliterated such wishful thinking would prove comedically wrong shortly after this keep star was anchored the Russians of the red Alliance announced suddenly that they were changing their Allegiance from papy to the Imperium bolstering the forces of the Defenders who were suddenly taking losses to their infrastructure and facing incursions that disrupted their resource harvesting operations damaging both their reserves and their morale in order to preserve some of their

industry the Imperium made the decision to enact a gate camp in a choke point leading to a large deadend area of delve now vital for resource harvesting a situation likened to Helms Deep as long as the defenses held and the Sino Jammers were active to prevent any Capital ships from jumping in the industrialists could continue to gather their resources and produce the tools for war but there was now no question delve was under siege while significant assets were being lost direct fights were uncommon as neither side was willing to commit to risky decisive battles instead

choosing to fight only over major strategic objectives such as Balon 5 and papy continued to spill from the north into Aquarius as well foregoing the southern connections entirely the next major fight however would once again break records and the price of the war would reach absurd levels toward the beginning of the war Asher had bragged that not a single keepstar had been destroyed but after the establishment of bubon 5 papy had specifically chosen to Target the numerous keepstars to break the defenses this effort was proceeding at a grinding Pace compared to other wars in the

past it had already been raging for over 6 months which dwarfed most other wars in the game and at the turn of the year the Imperium was making an effort to take back Key Systems in delve to do so they lashed out against the Sino Jammers that papy had deployed in numerous systems while they sent A Major Force to a system they simultaneously attacked the Sino Jammer in the nearby system of M2 Tac XF in a lightning strike with the Sino Jammer destroyed the Imperium were finally able to bring their super Capital Fleet to bear

and immediately the signal was given a beacon was lit and a fleet of hundreds of these massive ships moved into position to defend their vulnerable keepstar left behind some time time ago for tense minutes they were silent as papy brought their own Fleet and began firing on the keepstar unable to Target the imperium's fleet due to the protection of the tethers but suddenly the Imperium forces all opened fire at once in a massive Cascade to take the initiative even as they traded blows in a somewhat conventional battle the keepstar was forced into its reinforcement timer

meaning that there was no longer an objective to take but in a move that surprised onlookers neither side was willing to seed ground and the fighting continued at first papy appeared to be taking the fight but server downtime was coming meaning that all of the fighters would be logged off and wouldn't appear again until they logged back in according to frost the papy forces failed to make the proper preparations to affect a retreat from the fight and after downtime the Imperium pounced placing Warp disruption bubbles on the location where papy's Titans would return when they

logged back in papy's ships were trapped as long as the Imperium continued to place warp bubbles these ships would be out of position when the reinforcement timer finished and the keepstar would be vulnerable again papy spent the intervening days bringing more Titans to the front lines to assist the attack on the keepstar and when the time came to jump into position they decided upon a bold strategy they would jump in directly above the keepstar just out of range of the enemy accepting a small sacrifice of titans in order to bring the full weight of their

ships to bear at once the previous battle had attracted attention and according to PC Gamer magazine over 13,500 players were in position for this second battle prepared for a fight this was a tactic that had never been implemented on this scale and with good reason with so many actors operating in the same area at the same time the eve servers had a tendency to react in unpredictable ways that were almost always more detrimental to the attacker than the defender making it difficult for an attacking Force to assail a position with too many enemies still the

leaders of papy decided that this was a risk that they were willing to take the call was made and this unprecedented Fleet made the jump simultaneously the servers for Evon line buckled and strange things began happening the jump was taking over 45 minutes to complete and while the players waited to load the system their Titans would arrive without them completely bare of any modules The Waiting Imperium jumped at the opportunity sending the heavy fighters of their super carriers to destroy these vulnerable naked Titans many of the Titan pilot Pilots of papy reappeared in the system

from which they left with their Titan and all of their modules intact others however were not so lucky and ships continued to trickle into M2 Tac XF for the Imperium to annihilate this fight broke a new record when converted to realworld fiat currency it had cost over $350,000 catapulting the total estimated cost of the war well past 1 Mill million Us by any metric and still there was no end in sight because of the failure of the attack those approximately 300 papy Titans which had been caught by the Imperium were forced to stay in limbo

ready to be destroyed the moment that they returned but they wouldn't be abandoned by papy Titans were of particular importance because while expensive to build they also needed over a month to produce compared to the over night builds of battleships further increasing the importance of retrieving as many as they could Steve mesner writing for PC Gamer interviewed Titan pilot dran Arana about the plan to break them out quote when I asked dran what the next step would be he gave a vague answer about continuing the fight elsewhere until the right moment presented itself to Stage

a jailbreak what I didn't know was that moment had already come the day before Pilots received a personal message from villy papy's military commander good afternoon or evening it read your Titan SLS super has been noted to be in bubbles please be available to be online starting between 0430 and 0600 Wednesday Eve time Tuesday night usz do not share this message with anyone end quote when the time came almost a month after the camp had begun approximately 100 70 of the Titan Pilots were prepared and as they logged in papy suddenly jumped sub capitals into

position who began slamming the imperium's camping Force the Imperium responded quickly bringing a Titan Fleet of their own to Bear but papy were prepared and they snuck a fleet of over 400 dreadnots close to the Titans as papy Titan pilot Tony told PC Gamer quote it forced the Imperium to choose continu shooting our extracting Titans who weren't shooting back and take extreme losses in their own Titans or only shoot our Titans with doomsdays but Ed their guns to save themselves from the onslaught of dreadnut fire they chose the latter the Titans were gradually able to

worm their way out of those warp disruption bubbles that weren't destroyed by the arriving papy forces and only six Titans were lost a number shared by the Imperium in the meantime time red Alliance was striking back in the South pulling significant papy forces away from the front line in the imperium's capital of Fortress delve the centralized command structure of the Imperium meant that resources could be distributed where they were needed with primary consideration given to the survival and good of the alliance as a whole but papy were far more splintered and while they had been

able to work together well enough in delve such distractions placed pressure on those living in the southern regions to protect themselves and leave the Frontline from delve sending liquid assets to the red Alliance for their fight could create outsized value what's more other small alliances pounced on the weakened home systems of papy Corporations striking and taking territory while their defenses were away suddenly papy alliances were losing territory and the longer that they fought in delve the worse their losses became the Imperium Fleet commanders were also learning the patterns of their opponents in a way that

opened up opportunities after studying the way that their super Capital ships jumped together in a tight formation they hatched a plan known internally as operation enho but known to others by another name the boson trap of yz9 TAC F6 it would be an ambush the likes of which had scarcely been seen before such a tight grouping of ships left them vulnerable to a particular kind of Titan doomsday weapon a bosonic field generator or as it's commonly known a bosom this weapon when activated dealt damage in a cone in front of the ship and while not

nearly so oppressive as the original doomsday weapon from years prior its damage was still incredibly high for a weapon of its kind while requiring careful coordination and tight restrictions on communication to prevent information from leaking the plan in its Essence was straightforward when the super Capital ships of papy jumped into a fight a fleet of Titans all spread out across the solar system would warp into predetermined locations aim their bons and fire all at once dealing enough damage to wipe out the Titans clumped together while it wouldn't be enough to turn the tide of the

war it would be an incredible victory the day of the battle came and everybody was prepared at first there was concern that papy's super capitals wouldn't even show or they would jump into the wrong location but such worries suddenly fell away when every sinos shural field was placed on top of one another unprotected by warp Bubbles as Asher wrote after the battle the load in for their supers took forever our Titans were creeping closer in warp eventually they started started hitting grid and no supers had loaded but the warpin were perfect I thought again if

it works we had executed the warp in perfectly a beautiful spread a fleet killer I keyed up to all my fleet members and said if you believe in a deity we could use a few prayers right now end quote finally all of the super Capital ships from papy arrived and the bans were fired all at once capturing the helpless ships in the crossfire in a fantastic display but as the Boon spooled down their targets continued floating in space barely scratched due to a bug only a tiny amount of the damage from the bans have been

applied with the entirety of papy's Fleet now in fighting position and the imperium's Titans all in awkward locations the only thing that the Imperium could do was Retreat such a tactic would not be allowed by papy again months wore on as papy systematically destroyed the keep stars of the Imperium and the gradual pressure even allowed them to lash out against the defenses in Helms Deep and over the course of months system after system of delve fell soon the Imperium was locked in one final constellation of seven systems with their capital of 1 dq1 Tac a

as a choke point the sheer defensive ability of the Imperium and the key choke point that allowed them to maintain sovereignty in the constellation meant that attacking directly would be fool Hardy for papy even given what they had learned in M2 Tac xfe about the effects of massive numbers of players in a single system though they had the Imperium surrounded there seemed to be no way to break into their capital and the longer they took the more chaos brewed in their home systems and the worse morale became the purpose of the war was clear from

the outset demolish the Imperium but the Imperium refused to budge the longer that papy took to achieve total Victory and the more losses they took on the home front the more morale dipped for the attackers in contrast the imperium's morale was only building as every day that they survived was another day that they defied the enemies that sought to eradicate them entirely from the game the Imperium continued to hold until summer when they finally began to strike back out and papy could not afford to leave delve without losing territory that they had fought so desperately

to take and hold the deciding event of the war however wouldn't be military but economic as papy had been laying Siege to delve they had relied on the continuous income from the Tranquility trading Tower but suddenly crowd control Productions announced a change that would reduce the taxes that players faced when buying and selling Goods at NPC stations making it more profitable to sell in jeta rather than at the neighboring Tranquility trading Tower meaning that the income for these corporations relying on the trading fees was suddenly and drastically diminished while far from the only Factor it

would prove to be the final one the call was given papy alliances were ordered to unanchor their citadels and leave different Outlets would blame different factors including splintered interests among papy leaders the loss of territory low recruitment numbers and waning resources but it's most likely that all had some role to play in the decision after a long and arduous year the war was over the Imperium now stood Victorious and defiant but while noek returned to a relative state of equilibrium the game itself would undergo turmoil after Pearl Abyss purchased crowd control Productions there was concern

in the community that they would eventually begin to offer purchases for items that had traditionally only been available to those who worked hard to earn them in game and these fears were made far more tangible when in March of 202 2 they announced a special pack for sale that they called the prospector pack while many different things were offered among them was a mining barge the retriever the sale of this ship was a shock to almost everyone in the game those who started playing Eve online often began by mining in HEC saving in order to

afford a new retriever so that they could mine more efficiently and its existence was symbolic of the struggle for success in new Eden for new and old players alike the ability to purchase this ship felt like a betrayal the Council of Stellar management said as much in an open letter it reads in part quote one issue that is been a perennial player concern is that of monetization from the 2011 summer of Rage to the monthly complaints from players over different ads and new monetization schemes no one can argue that the core player base in Eve

online cares deeply about monetization and is highly skeptical about the direction CCP monetization has been going the one line we have always said should never be crossed is the selling of fitted ships this has been consistent it has been long held and passionately held by most core players none of us have talked with any of our fellow CSM members who believe that selling fitted ships was an acceptable means of monetizing the game any sale like this would have a negative impact on the in-game economy for a variety of reasons but most importantly because it would

both set the in-game price for ships as a function of the real life cost of the sale as we see with skins and because it would Edge out producers by introducing free ships that did not require in-game time and materials to produce we cannot in good faith tell any player concerned with this sale that this is as far as the line goes because we have seen twice now CCP willingly cross a line that we were confident was strictly off limits end quote after a coordinated effort by Eve content creators to draw attention to this issue

that they called Eve blackout and significant pressure from the player community the prospector pack was removed the question for players now was simply how would they attempt to monetize the game next it was clear that that they wish to move away from the monthly subscription model but it wasn't clear how precisely they would do so in a game that prioritized player effort so highly what precisely the company will do with the game in the near future is difficult to predict but the players are passionate enough to stay even in the face of profoundly unpopular decisions

and fight for the virtual world that they have made their second home both against one another and the company as this video is being completed a new war has broken out involving much the same belligerent as the war that preceded it and its trajectory will chart yet another chapter in the history of the game after two decades Evon line not only refuses to die but continues to thrive and its stories will continue to be told in characteristic n incomprehensible jargon by players passionately recalling their time spent in new [Music] Eden this has been an incredibly

incomplete overview of the history of Evon line every aspect discussed from the way that ships are fitted to every subculture of the game is Rich with history and complexity and to gather all of it would be more than a lifetime's worth of work and it is still growing a single aspect discussed could have filled multiple videos of the same runtime this is true for the maneuverings of high SEC corporations the drama swirling in LC the intricate politics of NOC the history of evictions in Wormhole space the growth and evolution of Industry the history of day

trading Commodities and economic hubs the regular tournaments between skilled combatants factional Warfare the lore of the game the science of fitting ships and creating Fleet doctrines and a Cavalcade of other topics not least of which being the stories of individuals such as the maneuverings of the late vile rat the resignation of the matani from Imperium leadership and the efforts of Jade Constantine to create the first nulc trade Hub the harrowing Tales of spies sabur defectors and Fleet commanders cannot be overstated either all leaving their mark on new Eden special consideration goes to Andrew growan and

his work empires of Eve without which the creation of this video would have proven far more daunting his effort to Chronicle the history of the nulc empires has not only been foundational to this video but its knowledge is essential to all those hoping to understand the complexities of those factions Eve University and its Wormhole campus also deserve mention without whom the game would have been far more mystifying and impenetrable I wish to personally thank Rogue flight who patiently sat with me and explained the most bare of Basics multiple times much of what was discussed in

this video was knowingly incomplete for the sake of viewer comprehension and runtime and there are almost certainly inaccuracies due to error or ignorance I have presented this work knowing that these deficiencies exist and I both hope for your forgiveness and for your enjoyment regardless thank you for your [Music] time but you I the O I will see your I open my eyes and [Music] I [Music] the I close my eyes and I take it [Music] [Music] [Music] the lost in the [Music] sky black and BL and S [Music] for a COR the he the [Music]

sky make my [Music] [Applause] way [Music] oh the place where [Music] are you of the I stay here forever forever and my St and the sky [Music] me I [Music] so [Music] my and the ey of [Music] stole [Music] [Music] s