EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off biggest heist in game history

https://www.pcgamer.com/eve-online-player-uses-obscure-rule-to-pull-off-the-biggest-heist-in-the-games-history/

by galleywest200 • 3 years ago

326 178 3 years ago

pcgamer.com

Cardinal7167• 3 years ago

Incredible. What an under appreciated game. I’ve played a little bit of it and the world is absolutely enormous.

monero-xmr• 3 years ago

Some people wonder if we live in a Matrix-like simulation. Others voluntarily spend the lives in the same situation

sedatk4• 3 years ago

Not underappreciated at all. It's 20 years old and still among the TOP 20 most popular MMOs. Not everyone likes that kind of gameplay though. I was an EVE beta tester before it was released openly, and I finally decided that it wasn't for me. (I don't like the turn based mechanics, or "the ship is actually the person" kind of narrative)

eru4• 3 years ago

"the ship is actually the person" kind of narrative

Could you please explain?

jimsparkman• 3 years ago

I don’t know anything about the game, but I’m guessing the new account was created to protect his identity, should the ploy fail?

MereInterest• 3 years ago

EVE is famously anything-goes, with corporations (EVE equivalent of guilds) being very careful about who they accept specifically to prevent this type of attack. I would be very surprised if there were any moderator intervention about it, as joining up with corps in order to drain their bank accounts is expected behavior.

As another example of EVE conventions, in 2012 the biggest trading hub was attacked [0]. This is nominally a safe area, and indeed the NPC security responded to every attack. This was part of the cost-benefit analysis of the attackers, who were aiming to drive up the price of resources that they had hoarded. When other players complained to the developers, the developers found it hilarious, and helped advertise about the attack.

[0] https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/64307/what-is-bur...

thaumasiotes• 3 years ago

EVE is famously anything-goes, with corporations (EVE equivalent of guilds) being very careful about who they accept specifically to prevent this type of attack.

Really? The general run of comments seems to indicate that the attack could only succeed because nobody in the targeted corporation noticed a popup warning them about the attack for 72 straight hours.

That strongly suggests that very few corporations should have any guards at all in place to prevent this type of attack, because there's no way for the attack to succeed unless everyone in the targeted corporation has stopped playing the game.

What are people worried about?

XorNot• 3 years ago

No it's that corporate membership history is immutable and public on characters. So it's a bad look to be an old character with a string of now bankrupted, stolen or overthrown corps on your history.

650REDHAIR3• 3 years ago

Eve has a really robust API that allows corporations to use third party apps to gather background checks before a new member is admitted.

You can see corp (clan) history as well as all transactions between players. If you’re claiming to be a new pilot, but a 9 year old or 1 day old account is funneling money to you that would raise a flag.

from• 3 years ago

The trick is:

Using a "clean account with a character with a little history," Flan_Hill and an unnamed partner applied for membership in the EHEXP corporation. After the account was accepted, Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO. The conspirators both voted yes, while nobody else in the corporation voted at all.
This was vital, because after 72 hours the two "yes" votes carried the day. The infiltrating agent was very suddenly made CEO, which was in turn used to make Flan_Hill an Event Horizon Expeditionaries director, at which point they removed all the other corporate directors and set to emptying the coffers.

Which reminded me of this paper I read about Russia in the 1990s:

In a similar scheme, raiders call a shareholders' meeting but fail to provide other shareholders adequate and timely notice, either by mailing notices to the wrong address, sending the notices only a short time before the meeting, or holding the meeting in a remote, inaccessible location. At the meeting, they exploit the artificially created majority to vote in a new board of directors.

[Criminal Corporate Raiding in Russia, Thomas Firestone](https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con...)

It's unclear why none of the other shareholders voted though. Did they quit the game or something?

ClumsyPilot• 3 years ago

I used to play the game, like 13 years ago. I recall a similar drama about someome inflitrating a major organisation and stealing everything.

Endless arguments on whether this is a feature or a bug. Last time it was more of a sociel engineering and betrayal, this time it's more of a mechanical exploit.

xoa• 3 years ago

Disclaimer, been an extremely long time since I played as well, I think 12 years in my case. Though I honestly kind of regret quitting. Back then I thought EVE was merely an early progenitor of what would be a bunch of better sandbox MMOs, and was upset with some of the directions CCP was going and potential they were squandering. Little did I know :(.

Endless arguments on whether this is a feature or a bug. Last time it was more of a sociel engineering and betrayal, this time it's more of a mechanical exploit.

One thing I do remember a lot of us being frustrated by though was that while they sunk lots of development effort into "walking in stations" and planet stuff that wasn't space, a lot of the corporate mechanics stayed pretty primitive. I do think it's kind of a bug if more serious corporate structures couldn't be developed. EVE would have been a neat place for smart contracts and programmatic corporate structures and so on, just let everyone go wild setting up constraints and checks within some reasonable computational cap. Interesting options to tie in (or not, depending on reputation, could be another neat set of tradeoffs) to NPC governments as well. But having a lot of corp/alliance aspects be kinda clunky in terms of management, comms, stores and so on always felt like one of the various wasted opportunities.

Wow, amazing how it comes back in pieces. It really is quite the project whatever its flaws. A lot of other MMOs from its era have come and gone. Glad it still exists at all.

jandrese• 3 years ago

Maybe they did it over a national holiday for whomever was in the corporation? Maybe the leadership announced a holiday and these guys took advantage? Three days seems like a long time for the leadership to be completely AWOL from a game like EVE but I guess it happened.

tokai• 3 years ago

It's been year since i played it last. But in the little corp I was a part of the leadership had phone numbers and/or IM on each other to get people online quickly in emergencies. The commitment was unreal.

Cthulhu_9• 3 years ago

Well, it was the easter weekend last weekend, plenty of people have days off, spend time with family or on a short vacation; I don't know when this went down though.

airstrike• 3 years ago

this is why we have things like shareholder proxies and annual general meetings IRL

JonathonW• 3 years ago

And rules requiring a quorum in order to take any kind of binding action.

If this were a real-world corporation, this would be a massive failure on the part of whoever set up the organization's bylaws. Since this is Eve, I don't know whether to place the blame on the corp's leadership or on CCP Games (I don't know if it's feasible for an in-game corp to require a quorum or not).

whartung• 3 years ago

raiders call a shareholders' meeting but fail to provide other shareholders adequate and timely notice,

Pretty much mostly unrelated, but this bit touched a spark.

I remember reading some, unknown book, ages past. And somehow related to the story was one of these Board of Directors meetings. The Board was obliged to publicly announce the meeting.

The board, indeed, publicly announced the meeting. In Chinese, in a small, Chinatown newspaper, nowhere near where the meeting was to take place.

Just one of those clever "letter of the law" gimmicks. Always struck me as funny. (The protagonists organized a massive campaign and managed to find the announcement, so the nefarious deeds were eventually punished.)

jachee• 3 years ago

unknown book, ages past

Reminds me of Douglas Adams’s description of where the Aliens posted their plans to bulldoze Earth:

“But the plans were on display…”.

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Tommstein• 3 years ago

The reason quorums were invented.

selcuka• 3 years ago

It's unclear why none of the other shareholders voted though. Did they quit the game or something?

The Reddit thread [1] has more info on that:

So we settled in and watched, gaining an insight into when they were active and latest the most important part, who was active. In this intelligence gathering phase it clearly showed minimal activity, especially by the CEO and Directors. This fact encouraged us!
Another sign for us that the CEO, the person in charge was barely active.
We watched and waited, then one evening we set the wheels in motion. I moved enough shares to our agent to create a vote for CEO. The vote came up on my screen and we both voted yes! This now for the duration of the vote locks out the current CEO’s roles, but sadly not the Directors. This was worrisome as we now had a 72 hours wait on our hands before the CEO role and all its power was transferred to our agent.
Over this time DOTLAN and the Corp description showing the new CEO and still no one noticed! No one in EHEXP or Horde, it was eerily silent. We checked nearly every waking hour to see if our plan would be found out, but it remained slowly moving to the final outcome.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde...

thrashh• 3 years ago

Reading the comments, it sounds like the perpetrator somehow first got the shares and this is not normally possible? Sounds fishy.

I don’t know anything about EVE though.

ummonk• 3 years ago

From reading the reddit comments, I'm not sure there were any other shareholders. Apparently 1000 shares are created upon corporation founding and the person who arranged the heist had 1000 shares so it would seem they had come into full ownership of the corp somehow.

Operyl• 3 years ago

They start with 1k, and more shares can be created via the voting system. You only need 5% of the shares to call a vote, though.

https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203268871-Sh...

https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203268841-Co...

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

ah just $22,000? people do this with flash loans periodically for way more of a bounty, 10s of millions maybe even hundreds of millions in a single takeover

no 3 day wait necessary, just 1 block

borrow money, buy enough of the governance token, launch a proposal to change treasurer to yourself, pass the proposal, withdraw from the treasury, sell tokens, return borrowed money

SilasX• 3 years ago

Took me a while to find, but yes, the most notable version of this attack was the $182 million one on Beanstalk, about a year ago, where someone used a flash loan (meaning, access to nearly unlimited money as long as you pay it back in the block) to add new assets, issuing themselves a majority of shares, which they then used to vote themselves the project's assets, then redeemed their shares, pulled the assets out, and repaid the loan.

web3isgoinggreat account with sources: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=beanstalk-farms-stablecoin-...

opyate• 3 years ago

In the Silicon Valley TV show, Richard also gets the Hooli board to sign a document, which Gavin (Hooli CEO) has 2 hours to object to, but he's off doing a triathlon.

mejutoco• 3 years ago

Very interesting! What you describe (inaccessible location) is also similar to the German elections after the Reichstag fire:

After the Fire Decree was issued, the Nazi-controlled police made mass arrests of communists, including all of the communist Reichstag delegates. This severely crippled communist participation in the 5 March elections. After the 5 March elections, the absence of the communists gave the Nazi Party a majority in the Reichstag, greatly assisting the Nazi seizure of total power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire

JCharante4• 3 years ago

This stuff often happens. I think in 2016 Brave Alliance had a Coup (actually they've had like 16 failed coups by now) where at midnight the CEOs of corporations that make up the Alliance held a vote when the current Alliance leader was asleep to change leadership.

dmix3• 3 years ago

TLDR:

A player known as Flam_Hill in the online game EVE Online orchestrated a heist by exploiting the game's shares mechanic. Along with another player, Flam_Hill observed the 299-member corporation Event Horizon Expeditionaries (EHEXP), which is part of the Pandemic Horde alliance. They discovered that the corporation had minimal activity from its CEO and directors, making it an attractive target for infiltration.
The duo applied for corporate membership using a clean account with a character that had some history. After being accepted into EHEXP, they initiated a vote for a new CEO, locking out the current CEO's roles. They waited 72 hours for the vote to pass, gaining control of the corporation. After being granted director roles, they systematically removed other directors and emptied the corporate wallet of 130 billion ISK.
The heist also involved stealing assets from the corporation's high-security offices, which they believed were used to store valuable items. In total, the estimated value of the heist was 2.23 trillion ISK, or approximately $22,309 USD.

GalenErso• 3 years ago

Will the Pandemic Horde Alliance retaliate against them?

lz400• 3 years ago

The neat part is there isn't a good way to retaliate. These players by now are gone from the corp, as is the money, so they can't do anything directly to them anymore. If they were "burner accounts" they might never know who did it. If they identify the players and they belong to some collective they could attack that collective but at that point it will probably be seen as petty and getting laughed at might be more trouble than it's worth. These heists are seen as cool for the most part. They could try to stage a counterheist, that would be exciting but very difficult to pull off.

Overall 2 trillion ISK isn't that much in the grand scheme of things for a mega-coalition like Pandemic Horde.

JCharante4• 3 years ago

The CEO voting mechanics is hardly obscure, every single CEO knows about it. Also hard to believe the biggest heist is 2 trillion, stealing 10 titan BPOs that have been researched sometime in the past 20 years would be worth the same.

hgsgm• 3 years ago

This makes much more sense than the OP. If OP's tactic really worked, it would have been happening constantly for years all over Eve.

So what's the deal with the OP?

JCharante4• 3 years ago

So basically this line describes that it's an inside job

"Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO"

Every CEO knows not to give shares away. The only reason to give other people shares is so that they can intentionally take over in case you die IRL and don't want to trap assets.

"The one aspect of the story that some redditors took issue with is the origin of the 1,000 shares in Event Horizon Expeditionaries that made this theft possible in the first place. Some redditors theorized that Flam_Hill is actually the long-departed founder of the corporation, who's been sitting with those shares in his personal wallet for years;

Absolutely possible

"others said they may have purchased a character from a member of the corporation who forget to remove the shares from their wallet before transferring ownership."

They're not supposed to have shares before being sold in the Bazaar, maybe RMT?

HWR_14• 3 years ago

I feel like fun stories like this from EVE fell off as the same skillset was used in crypto exploits. Is the fact that people are returning to EVE a sign that crypto is past the peak?

kromem• 3 years ago

It could also be that a security model exploited in crypto has now been corrected for, and we are seeing similar attacks spread out to other vulnerable infrastructure that is lagging behind updated threat models.

LMYahooTFY• 3 years ago

Is this a fact?

As fat as I was aware EVE has been stagnant for years, company sold to Pearl Abyss, which is likely to continue this or radically alter the game. Some radical changes were already made.

This seems like a very weak connection.

I'd crypto were "past the peak" the US gov would not be targeting it.

eru4• 3 years ago

I'd crypto were "past the peak" the US gov would not be targeting it.

I'm not sure that argument holds. I remember eg Britain doing lots of 'tough on crime stuff' long after crime had peak statistically.

vagab0nd• 3 years ago

The robbery was quick, quiet, and clean, and netted more than 2.2 trillion ISK—that's $22,300 in real money.

If you mean to compare the monetary gains of these exploits, 22k is nothing in crypto even in this bear market.

MagicMoonlight2• 3 years ago

Stealing 2.2t of something which is effectively worthless sounds like crypto

schemescape2• 3 years ago

Biggest in gaming history? What about Axie Infinity?

https://rekt.news/ronin-rekt/

(Not in-game or specific to the one game, but thought it was worth mentioning just because of the sheer size, and that it probably benefited North Korea. It still boggles my mind…)

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Is that more akin to a typical crypto sfyl than an hack using game mechanics?

schemescape2• 3 years ago

Yes, that was what the last part of comment meant to convey. But my understanding is that Ronin was closely tied the game, and some of the “optimizations” (vulnerabilities) were motivated by the (popularity of the) game.

But even if I arbitrarily say the heist is 99% crypto and 1% game, it’s still much larger :)

ilamont• 3 years ago

Org rules can go the other way, too. A regional nonprofit I once belonged to stated in its bylaws that any amendments required 2/3 of all members to vote in person at the general assembly.

denlekke• 3 years ago

some questions i have: why was the secondary character needed ? could the original character with the shares have done this themself ? why did no one else vote ?

eru4• 3 years ago

The secondary character was perhaps there because the original character would have aroused suspicion?

flandish2• 3 years ago

Accounts have character slots and when you join a corp, you are often required to provide an api key to show all chars on this account.

Chars have public history of corp membership or pvp fights etc.

So if you roll a char in an acct with other bigger chars, it will come known that you’re a fraud, not a newbie, or you also play as a character that has “interesting” history.

So you spend a few more bucks a month and create a fresh entire account with new slots, etc.

650REDHAIR3• 3 years ago

I love the idea of Eve, but man… what a boring game day-to-day.

When I was younger and would just hang out in teamspeak with the crew it was a lot of fun and a lot of just sitting around or jumping for hours trying to catch a fight only to die in an instant or kill them in an instant.

evandale2• 3 years ago

You really have to be a self starter and find something you like. I've tried so hard to get into PvP but I just can't do it. I might have tried mining once. I've played maybe 5 times in the past 8 years and could never get into it even though I desperately wanted to. It seems so fun!

This round of playing I really got into wormholes and exploration and I'm having a blast with that. I only play maybe 7 or 8 hours a week and I find the probe scanning and data/relic site hacking minigames both a lot of fun.

I've also started using mapping tools for wormholes which is something else that's oddly fun. There's just something about sitting in space scanning for wormholes and people could warp on you while you're taking the 2 seconds updating your mapping tool that gives me a thrill. It's also mostly work I throw away when the wormholes close because I live in a high sec area too lol but I still find it fun. Sometimes I'll play two days in a row and visit wormholes I mapped earlier to scan new sites in them.

MuffinFlavored• 3 years ago

i get too much anxiety investing time into something like this, i feel like there are more productive things i could be doing

harshreality2• 3 years ago

I used to play EvE as well, earlier on, and it all eventually got so boring I couldn't continue.

Some of the game mechanics, like scanning with probes, are interesting, but once you figure them out it's all tedium. If you want to PvE in a nice ship, you need to be wary every time you undock. If you want to PvP, you need a source of isk to replace your ship and implants, since every time you go there's a significant chance that clone isn't coming back alive. There's so much effort involved in everything, and very little payoff other than the occasional shot of adrenaline or lootbox find. Which is exactly what they count on. Variable reinforcement, rather than consistent reinforcement.

I got a carrier, started thinking about supercaps, and gradually lost interest in the whole progression due to the logistical effort keeping such things. I suppose I could have tried getting involved in corporate or alliance politics, or I could have switched to trading. However, like the lootboxes, those human elements too are constrained by game dynamics to be predictably unpredictable, and not in very interesting ways. Few long-term real-life friendships come about due to in-game friendships, since almost everyone quits games within a few years. So, due to all of the above, I left.

The best part of the game was hanging out in occasionally good, fun voice chats, but you have to be in a well-organized corp or alliance that runs good ops. Unlike real military-style organizations, though, scheduling makes good ops very difficult. People's ships are in the wrong systems, most of the op is just getting organized, and then, as GP said, you might get ganked at the first nullsec gate you jump through. Oh well, time to rat or mine or trade more to finance another ship and clone, so you can organize another op, which will probably also not be that great other than some fun voice chat moments.

At the end of it all, the other people you're hanging out with in corporations and alliances are there either because they've gotten hooked on the game's adrenaline or lootbox reinforcement mechanisms, or because they have a Machiavellian desire to pull the strings of a corp or alliance, and you're cannon fodder or logistical support, there to be kept happy. Or they're there to figure out an angle to scam or gank you.

EvE is more fun to read about, or think about doing things in, than it is to play.

Non-persistent games, like any good RTS, are more fun because they're lower-stress, and because you can see that you're making progress solely because your skill is improving. In a MMORPG, you're progressing only partly because you're developing more skill at playing, and more because the game company rewards you, in skill or lootbox upgrades, for spending more time in game (or spending money buying isk which lets you buy pre-skilled characters and in-game stuff).

stwr• 3 years ago

You should join Signal Cartel[1], the wormhole ‘rescue service’ it is a lot of fun and they provide some great tools for exploring.

Just remembering the good times make me want to jump back in! I’ve been the same as yourself. Probably tried a dozen times over the years. From mining to pvp, red v blue, tried it all but it always started to feel like work in the end. Exploring and Signal Cartel made me stick around the longest. Eventually got a bit bored with it.

The most EVE entertaining i’ve had recently is Andrew Groen book series Empires of Eve [2]. Basically all the great big war stories bundled into a very engaging 2 series book. It is a lovely read!

[1] https://signalcartel.org/

[2] https://www.empiresofeve.com/

Arrath2• 3 years ago

You really have to be a self starter and find something you like.

Too true. And sometimes you stumble upon the fun. For instance, a long, long time ago (circa 2008 or 9...) I thought Stealth Bombers sounded cool so I started to learn the skills, not realizing they were essentially useless.

Except that they could be used somewhat productively to fuck around deep in enemy territory and be a nuisance to their mining and logistics efforts. Was a I troll? Basically. Did I have any real impact on the war effort? I doubt it. But hey, I did blow up a few mining barges and annoy people.

650REDHAIR3• 3 years ago

I had fairly infamous lowsec and nulsec PvP runs throughout the years but as newbie-friendly groups popped up it was harder and harder to find fights that weren’t just blobs of T1 frigates rushing you.

At some point I made a bunch of outrageously blingy ships and when they ran out I sold the accounts on eBay.

I had a great time while it lasted and hope something like Star Citizen can bring back some of that fun with more immersive gameplay…eventually.

nirui• 3 years ago

what a boring game day-to-day

Got to do something while autopilot is running... how about conspire a heist?

(Seriously through, I almost never used autopilot even when in highsec systems. There are some mad people out there and you don't want to know them)

Cthulhu_9• 3 years ago

I've played it for a good while and... pretty much, yeah. The bit that made it fun was the community I was in (Eve University at the time, fairly low stakes), weekly events with lots of banter, e.g. going out for fights - but you go into them knowing you'll probably lose your ship (and if not, it's probably faster to just self-destruct to get back to where you came from).

There was a period I did what's called incursions, high-level PvE content that has been min/maxed to optimize how fast you can make money. Other times I did exploration, especially after they rehashed it and added hacking minigames and the like, but the competition there was quite firm.

Last times I played it I was careless; I lost a Loki (a half a billion advanced ship) from going into low-sec to kill things, running out of ammo, going out, and making the mistake of coming back. And I lost a Stratios (another half a billion ship with equipment) by going into new content where you need to clear it before the time expires, but I couldn't because I was harassed by tiny enemies that my ship couldn't hit.

Maybe one day I'll come back to it, but I just don't have the spare time for it anymore.

remram3• 3 years ago

That was my experience as well. The power difference between players is too great. I would get killed by randos in cloaked ships using missiles worth several time my ship and its entire loadout. What's the fun in that?

At some point I realized that this is an financial game with a space setting, not a space game with a rich economy, and I never played again.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

Flam_Hill estimated the total value of the heist at 2.23 trillion ISK, which works out to more than $22,300 in real money. ISK can't be legally cashed out of EVE Online, but it can be used to buy Plex(opens in new tab), an in-game currency used to upgrade accounts, purchase virtual goods, and activate other services.

Wait, if it can't be converted to money then what are they using to generate the $22,300 figure?

Or is it the "legally" part, where there's an illegal way to cash out?

Also, what would even make it illegal? There are actual laws against it or something? Or is it a TOS thing the company tries to enforce, which wouldn't make it illegal but just against policy?

vinyl7• 3 years ago

You'd have to buy $22.3k worth of Plex, which can then be traded to ISK, to be able to buy those assets in game. Because you can buy plex with cash which can be used to obtain in-game-currency, it gives the in-game currency to a real world dollar value.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

Oh that makes sense. Got it, thanks!

scrame• 3 years ago

So, does anyone ever cash out with these big heists? Like is there money leaving the ISK ecosystem in cash? I get that you can measure ISK since it is pegged to subscription costs that are solid objects that can be traded or destroyed, but does anyone heisting 22k of eve online ships actually ever turn that into money at that rate? Who's the buyer, vs WoW goldfarmers?

singron• 3 years ago

Trading ISK for real money isn't allowed by CCP. You are exactly right that describing an amount of ISK as if it was worth some amount of USD doesn't tell the whole story. It's likely that if the market were truly bidirectional, ISK would be worth less USD than it seems now.

xapata3• 3 years ago

Wasn't there an exchange rate in the past? If so, why'd they end it?

nubinetwork• 3 years ago

$22k worth of plex would last you the rest of your life in free game time.

sundvor• 3 years ago

Equates to roughly 150 annual payments, so that's enough for your main and two alts for 50 years. :)

Side note, the AUD monthly of $30 - wtaf? I've been away for a while, they seem intent on keeping it that way.

Cthulhu_9• 3 years ago

For one character, but they don't mind (if not actively encourage) people paying for multiple characters. Although I'm not sure if they decided to crack down on multiboxers or not.

Mashimo• 3 years ago

Yes, you can sell your ISK on the "black market" so to speak.

Your account might get banned, but if you cash out to leave the game you probably don't care anyway.

Cthulhu_9• 3 years ago

The only way to do so is if you find a buyer IRL, but you're probably looking at taking a big hit on your profit. People can buy an item called PLEX for real money, which they can use in-game for a month of subscription OR they can sell it for the in-game currency, so you're already competing with those that are willing to spend real money on in-game currency.

But it's a frequent issue in other MMOs, where these companies will set up bot farms (or even pay people to play) to earn tons of the in-game currency, then sell it online. Officially it's not allowed by most games, but it's only illegal if you get caught.

Lazare3• 3 years ago

This is a bit less interesting than it sounds.

When you create a corporation (aka guild, free company, etc.) in EVE 1k shares are created by default (you can create more, not everyone does). And this corproration hadn't, so if you have 1k share you own every share in the company (and thus have complete control over the company, if you choose to excercise it).

Now, nany corporations don't really care for the share mechanic, and just leave the shares in the posession of the founder, or place it in a locked down corporate wallet. But somehow "Flam Hill" got all 1k shares in this company. They refuse to say how. Some people suspect the original founder of the company quit EVE while still holding the initial 1k shares, in which case Flam Hill is likely the founder, or someone who obtained the account from them. Or perhaps they were a company officer who got access to the wallet and took the shares, etc.

Which means all the writing about how the directors were AFK or whatever is just window dressing. Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company. In other words, there isn't really any obscure rule here or clever tricks. Or rather it is, but it all happened off screen, because the only thing that matters is how Flam Hill obtained control of the shares; once he had it, everything else followed.

It's as if Elon Musk wrote something about how he obtained control of Twitter by the clever gambit of walking up to the HQ carrying a sink. Actually, he obtained control of twitter by buying all of its shares, at which point he could do whatever visual puns he liked because he owns the company.

How come Flam Hill owned every share in the EHEXP? There might well be a fascinating story there of intrigue and theft and betryal there. But this story is just about the boring stuff that followed.

bscphil2• 3 years ago

Some (purported) details here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde...

Flam Hill owned 100% of the shares, and thus could do whatever they liked with the company.

I think this is not quite right. Their 1000 shares were more than 5% of the total shares in the company, not (necessarily) 100% of the shares. 5% of shares can trigger a CEO vote at any time, and a majority of voting shares can elect a new CEO. They won the CEO election by being the only people online and voting at the time, and by having the corporation directors not notice the CEO change in the UI for 3 days until the vote took effect.

The failure of the corp was in not diluting the shares of the founder below 5% after they left the corporation a decade ago, so now they come back (with alt accounts) and rob them blind.

Lazare3• 3 years ago

See here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/12a6szd/pandemic_horde...

I haven't personally confirmed it, but it seems that there were only 1k shares outstanding, meaning that Flam Hill somehow had the original 1k created when the company was founded.

This would be a slightly more interesting story if someone found a company where, say, 90% of the outstanding shares were owned by inactive accounts, sneakily acquired 6% on the cheap, and then started and won a vote to become CEO, but it doesn't seem like that happened here. (Assuming that pseudononymous Reddit claim was correct, of course.)

tech_times_• 3 years ago

In the US outside of the game you couldn't do this even if you owned 100% of the corporation because it would be a violation of corporate law. You have to remember that a corporation is legally a person. Good recent note from the Harvard Law review here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus...

If you can find out who the accounts are can you sue in real life?

nl• 3 years ago

In the US outside of the game you couldn't do this even if you owned 100% of the corporation because it would be a violation of corporate law.

Yes you can

You have to remember that a corporation is legally a person.

It has nothing to do with this whatsoever.

Good recent note from the Harvard Law review here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus...

This is a good note. As they point out: directors owe a duty of loyalty to the corporation and its stockholders, which requires that a director act in good faith and in the best interest of the corporation and stockholders, rather than in the director’s own interests or the interests of someone who the director is beholden to, controlled by, or otherwise dependent on.

Provided you can do this there is no legal problem.

There is no direct analogy for something an in-game thing like switching alliances, but in general courts give a large latitude to CEOs and boards to decide what is best for a company provided there is no conflict of interest.

So you wouldn't be able to sell all the assets and distribute the earnings to the CEO - but selling all the assets and distributing the earnings to all shareholders would probably be fine.

flandish2• 3 years ago

Played back in 2011. I miss the “Suddenly Ninjas” days - glad to hear stories like this are still happening. We used to roll new accounts, prep a small history, sometimes even a social media presence.

Join a corporation. Role play as a newbie. Learn their schedule. A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members.

Taking selling and scrapping all we could.

Truly Eve is one of the best implementations of “community goal/quest” games, in my opinion.

I wonder if it still works to contract for PLEX with a unit of measure missing. (Getting one for 10000000 instead of 100000000)

ThrustVectoring• 3 years ago

I wonder if it still works to contract for PLEX with a unit of measure missing. (Getting one for 10000000 instead of 100000000)

Still extremely common to get attempted, although due to the current UI it's usually listing something for billions when it should be millions. Also common is describing the contract as "500 plex" but the actual contract content is "1 plex".

A long while later, rank up in the “inventory” management roles and fly or bump ships out of the bubble to waiting “real” corp members.

Player-owned Upwell structures have largely replaced POSes so that basically isn't a thing anymore. What is a thing is using a Black Ops battleship to conduit jump expensive ships off of tether into a waiting gank. It's honestly a UI/design oversight, if your ship can fit a covert ops cloak and you're close enough to a blops in your fleet, you can get involuntarily yeeted to any system within jump range.

jakkos• 3 years ago

Bookmark

fastball• 3 years ago

Surprised EVE Online has a corporate structure system with shares and boards of directors and voting but left out the concept of quorums.

wudangmonk• 3 years ago

I remember liking read the drama about alliances and betrayals in EVE and even though I never played the game I always enjoyed reading about it. That is with the condition that everything is done in game, I'm not a fan of the whole social engineering outside the game to rip people off angle.

Now to me in mmo games EVE players are a BIG red flag as the vast majority of them from my experience will bring their EVE mindset to other games and try the same tactics. Before if someone wasn't happy with the guild they would just leave or form a competing guild but these people might engage with people more, even pretend to be real life friends in order to rise in the ranks and to ultimately steal everything or will try to cause people to turn on each other so that the guild breaks apart. Who wants to deal with that? its crazy.

einpoklum• 3 years ago

The story reminds me of that old maxim: The best way to rob a bank is to own it.

There's a widely-held feeling that the whole shares system is, if not broken, then at least too easy to exploit

Another case of art imitating life, I suppose.

dschuetz• 3 years ago

The main reason that this was possible is inattentiveness of other players. That is a usual thing when people are playing a game and then turn to other more important things in life. What grinds me most about this is the waste of money and time. Whoever puts thousands of dollars into a game and then leave it seem to have no sense of responsibility or value of money. And then cry out it was stolen. Well, it wasn't. It was taken.

This dynamic reminds me of unpopular or shady laws being passed in some parliaments in the middle of the night or during major sports events where the representative attendance and public attention is at its minimum to get enough majority votes. This "biggest heist in game history" follows the exact same dynamic.

hnarn• 3 years ago

I agree, but from a game perspective I’d say it’s pretty odd that these types of events does not at least result in more alerting to the people concerned. I don’t know if emails are already sent out in this situation, but even if they are it would make sense to have push notifications via an app, or SMS notifications, or anything in addition.

Not because it’s the game designers “fault” but in cases of anything that can have a permanent impact on someone’s experience of a game without their knowledge it’s probably better to err on the side of caution.

Cthulhu_9• 3 years ago

Whoever puts thousands of dollars into a game and then leave it seem to have no sense of responsibility or value of money.

The monetary value associated with Eve Online things is a bit arbitrary, as it's usually the accumulated value of people's efforts in game; we can't be sure if real money was invested in this heist.

That said, it's easy to underestimate the value of assets and property in-game in eve, as it builds up over the years and for a lot of people it's just a video game.

AndyMcConachie• 3 years ago

This is why quorum exists.

b3lvedere• 3 years ago

Amazing what impact EVE Online has in the real world. The hardcore dedication of its players is very impressive. This article also reminded me of the sad sad story of Vile Rat ( http://www.davidkushner.com/article/vile-rat/ ) years ago.

MagicMoonlight2• 3 years ago

That’s a really stupid mechanic. Why would it not require a minimum number of votes to pass? So you could go on holiday with 90% of the shares and they can just vote to take your shares and win with 10%?

Absolute moron devs.

eimrine• 3 years ago

Suppose devs use to fix it and now the minimum is 10 votes or any other number you like. Then somebody gets banned, someone gets mobilized to army and someone is hit by the bus. Guess what? Lots of wanna-be-wit comments about "absolute moron devs". 2 votes is decent to be honest, but in my opinion 3 days is too little.

jefftk• 3 years ago

One way to handle this is combine those two mechanics: the quorum gets lower the more time has passed. When I was playing GitHub Nomic [1] we decided you needed one fewer player to vote for each day that had passed since the proposal was initiated.

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/news/nomic

ChoGGi• 3 years ago

Flan_Hill or Flam_Hill

You decide...

remram3• 3 years ago

I'm sick of those "real money" conversions every time something happens in EVE Online. Probably, those in-game assets were acquired by playing the game, not by paying dollars for them. Additionally no one would buy them for that amount. Why show a dollar value if that is not what it's bought or sold for?

This conversion rate is based on the price of subscriptions, which can be bought either with dollars or real money. But why should that establish a conversion rate for every other asset? No one is trying to buy $22,300 of EVE subscription.

itake• 3 years ago

I don’t see why “playing a game” can’t earn you money. There are many “play to earn” crypto games where 3rd world country gamers grind coins for people who don’t want to grind for money. Before crypto, world of Warcraft had gold mining groups.

I assume there is a market place that offers a currency exchange.

The dollar value is for everyone that doesn’t play the game and doesn’t know if that is a lot or a little of monies.

remram3• 3 years ago

I assume there is a market place that offers a currency exchange.

There is not. There might be a black market for this, but not with anything close to this made-up rate.

I'm not saying you can't make money from in-game assets, but you would make a completely different amount of money. Those assets have never been bought or sold at $22,300, so why do we pretend that's their value?

Because different assets can be bought using both dollars and ISK (and cannot be sold for dollars at all!), we decide that's a conversion rate? And apply it to everything else?

throwaway_65432• 3 years ago

I haven't played for a while but Corp creation and access mechanics were always incredibly frustrating and buggy and these "heists" are almost always people exploiting mundane software bugs in the platform rather than being clever and/or sneaky in carrying off anything daring. This makes for really boring and unpleasant consequences for the victims of these actions which basically just drive people from the game.

Example: My alliance leader basically stole a huge amount of my personal money and several months of work from me.

Background: For anyone who doesn't know eve, wormholes in eve are habitable spaces but they connect in ways that are governed by rules but are fundamentally random in nature. So your wormhole might always have 2 guaranteed connections to particular types of space but specifically what systems it connects to is random and will change every now and then. And also other new connections will spawn and disappear at random all the time. It is also entirely lawless space full of people trying to jump you at every turn, (sometimes) powerful NPCs and (usually) very powerful corporations who will every now and again mount operations to jump into a wormhole and evict the occupants if they are not very careful about defending themselves. All of this makes wormhole space very dangerous and inconvenient in lots of ways, but if you persevere, the game rewards you with very interesting gameplay and valuable rewards. I had a lot of experience with wormholes and was teaching people in my corp the ropes.

I had bought a new higher-class wormhole for my corporation, set up several new stations and a bunch of infrastructure. Because of the randomness above, this kind of logistic stuff is very slow and tedious work and I had spent a month or so of my time and a bunch of ISK (in-game currency) buying the hole, the stations and all the ships and stuff so my guys had stuff to do and didn't have to sweat the logistical stuff.

My alliance leader created a new corporation, transferred all the stations in the wormhole (including all my stuff and all the things I had put in shared hangars etc) into that corp and made the other people in the hole in charge of that corp. I was locked out in the middle of nowhere with no recourse.

He said he had misunderstood a message I had sent about taking a break (for the rest of the day) as quitting the game completely but anyway it fitted his objectives for the alliance so I could just basically stfu and accept it.

I tried playing a bit after that but it really was never the same. I left the corp and tried to restart but never got back to where I was or recouped what I had lost.

EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off biggest heist in game history

Related Stories