EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

The bad crazy goes beyond dropping 100 large on internet spaceships, though. About two years ago, Goonswarm was aiding our allies, Red Alliance (RA, the aforementioned 'rats' with whom SirLordex is cross) in the invasion of the Scalding Pass region against Lotka Volterra and their coalition. Lotka Volterra 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 RA director didn't want in-game information from me; he wanted us to use the forensic resources of our intelligence agency to trace down The Enslaver's home address. At a coordinated time, armed with this information, a RA member would apparently cut the power to The Enslaver's house in the real world, and in EVE a RA capital fleet would assault the abruptly pilotless Titan. Yikes.

As one can imagine, I demurred, but the RA 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 - Kugutsumen got involved.

Kugutsumen is a French national living in Jakarta, Indonesia who was convicted as a teenager in the early 1990s of phreaking the FBI's conference call system and running up $250,000 in international calls. He now runs an extremely successful computer security business, when he's not setting up nightclubs in Jakarta or messing about in the EVE universe. He copped 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. One might suggest that he is also a little off when it comes to the sanity scale, though I personally adore him.

Why didn't I have to deal with RA trying to cut the power to The Enslaver's house to kill his Titan? Because Kugutsumen, out of either idle curiosity or malice aforethought, traced The Enslaver's ip addresses back to Iceland, confronted him on Lotka Volterra's teamspeak while under an assumed name, recorded the conversation, and then outed him as a GM and CCP employee. This resulted in the immediate removal of the Enslaver character, as GMs cannot have their identity known - since this era of gameplay, CCP has radically revised and tightened the restrictions of where and how their employees can play, but this was the Bad Old Days. While the Titan was eventually given to another pilot - and that pilot was much more cautious with it than The Enslaver - by that point Lotka Volterra had already lost the war.

More recently, 'space madness' came to grip a huge section of EVE itself, particularly those involved in the invasion and conquest of Delve. Because of the time-limited nature of that war, a tremendous effort had to be put forth within 28 days, not merely due to the actual conquest of Delve but also the logistical nightmare that comes from moving an established alliance of 6000 people from one end of the galaxy to the other. Sleep was sacrificed, work was skipped, and as each day passed a greater edge of delirium inserted itself into the normal operations of the alliance. One of our logisticians woke his wife up in the middle of the night shouting that "We've got to pack up everything and move the babies to Delve!" Another Goonswarm director told his wife that she should only use half the detergent in the dishwasher, because the "salad bowls are in reinforced mode." And yours truly (so I am told) once sat bolt-upright in bed and warned his spouse: "Don't touch that! Don't open the refrigerator! The spy is in the refrigerator!" before abruptly passing back out.

CCP often touts this sort of thing with the bland marketing lingo of 'player generated content.' What that actually means is that you get to share a galaxy with Russian aluminum magnates, French-Indonesian nightclub-owning hackers, self-aggranziding 'spymasters,' and people who will cut the power lines to your house to destroy your internet spaceship. There's something deliciously addictive about the sweeping, endemic insanity, one of the ever-present yet rarely remarked upon facets of this most unhinged of MMOs.