‘Eve Online’ Economy Attacked by Massive Alliance of Players
29th April 2012
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EVE Online’s largest economic hub is currently under attack by a massive alliance of the game’s most ruthless players, infamously known as “Goonswarm,” and they may succeed in damaging it. For those who haven’t heard of it, EVE is a gargantuan space-based MMO from developer CCP Games that’s been home to several rich tales of high-stakes drama since it launched in 2003. The open-ended game is like a Lockean dreamworld in its no-security (“null-sec”) areas, that are open to scamming, murder, corporate espionage, economic manipulation, ruthless warmongering, and mind-boggling heists. But many of EVE’s law abiding players stay within safe high-security (“hi-sec”) areas that have mostly protected them from null-sec raiders, much to the chagrin of Goonswarm and its allies. According to some players, many of those in null-sec, including Goonswarm and its leader, resent hi-sec’s existence and aim to force their vision of the game on hi-sec players (who they insultingly refer to as “empire dwellers”). To accomplish that, they’re waging economic warfare and aiming to strike fear into all those who play in hi-sec space.
Following a 30-day ban that resulted from his efforts to mock a suicidal player, Goonswarm leader Alexander “The Mittani” Gianturco is leading “Burn Jita:” an attack on hi-sec space that’s intended to crash the game’s market for an important resource and cut off trillions of player-made assets through blockades. Eurogamer reports that The Mittani and his team of over 1,500 players have spent months planning the Jita attack, and have built an army of 15,000 small, single-purpose suicide ships that render the protection of Hi-sec’s AI police useless. So far, they’ve destroyed thousands of ships, and continue to attack vessels in hi-sec space — but it’s not clear if the attack has succeeded in crashing the market, as conflicting reports about its stability have surfaced on the web.
One of the most glaring defects of the ‘progressive’ worldview, to which ‘progressives’ are functionally blind but which appears to Real World People™ as a great gaping hole, is the inability to accept that there are evil people in the world, and that these evil people not only act to work evil on everybody else but also combine in groups whose major reason for existing is to make those evil works more effective. This is a fairly blatant example of such a dynamic, which has the virtue of all simulations in that it leaves behind the clutter of daily details and thus makes more stark the operation of underlying principles.
As in real life, those who work to create dystopias for their own benefit nevertheless realize (whether consciously or unconsciously) that a well-ordered and peaceful society is superior to the world that they strive to make (and far too often succeed), and so are eaten up with envy and hatred that just reinforces their evil tendencies. One of the most attractive features of The Lord of the Rings is that the struggle between these monsters and the rest of creation is perennial and ongoing, and that those who try to ignore it only make the triumph of evil more certain.
The resemblance between this operation against the hi-sec space Jita and the ongoing jihad against Western civilization ought to be sufficiently obvious as to require no comment.
While other MMO developers would likely prevent such a scenario from occurring, CCP welcomes Goonswarm’s efforts. EVE Online senior producer Jon Lander tells Eurogamer that Goonswarm “is going to do exactly what you’re able to do in the game, and people will have to roll with it” — he says the attack on Jita is “absolutely brilliant.” And lead game designer Kistoffer Touborg tells Eurogamer that “we want people to be able to do this. If Goonswarm want to do it, we want them to do it and we want them to have a great time doing it.” Touborg adds that “the worst thing we could do is to stop it happening… it would be against everything we stand for.”
In other words, just as with real life, there is no grown-up who is going to step in at the last minute and make sure of a happy ending.