The EVE Online Bank Job

I have to agree with most people here, this shit is what EVE is about. From what ive seen, no other MMO comes close in terms of what EVE achieves.

"

"Holy Crap!
I just checked a ISK selling website and, 300 million ISK cost 900.
And this dude took 80 Billion..."

No, you are all doing the math wrong, like really wrong, and getting your isk buying info from a bad source.  EVE allows you to purchase game time cards for real money, and sell them for ISK in game.  Doing this you can turn 35.00 USD into about 650M isk.  To make the math easier we'll just round it to about 50 bucks for 1B isk, or about $4,200.00 stolen.  Depends on the day and the current market for time codes, but its nowhere near the figures some have come up with.

This is one of the reasons I really like EVE.  :)

"

EVE is just amazing

.

For any of those thinking of taking up EVE Online. Please dear god, do not sit in the newbie corporation and run missions. EVE is not a PVE game like WoW and the vast majority of other MMOs out there, it is a PVP game and the PVE portion is there to give combat pilots a way to make money off of something that isn't piracy or mercenary contracts and is incredibly dull. Get out there and join a player corporation, there are many that take in new people and are there specifically for training new people the  game and will often supply you with your first few ships. And even the most powerful alliances in the game are in constant need of new pilots.

For those that are saying that the game is slow and requires a large time investment before you can do anything. It is true that you will not be able to be an excellent battleship pilot or capital ship pilot for close to a year, but you are useful from day 1, in specific roles. You can hold people in place so the rest of your fleet can destroy them from day one and that is a vital role in fleets that is most often fulfilled by new pilots. From there you can get in larger or more specialized ships, but all ship types are useful in fights and some of the most fun I have had in the game is getting my corp together in small frigate type ships, the kind you can fly when you start the game, and roaming around killing things with them.

There are many many many ways to play EVE online, mining, research, exploration, piracy, manufacture, trade mercenary and you can have a very good experiance doing any of the them but find the one you like the most and specialize. It will get you on an even standing with the older members of the community rather quickly because there is a cap on how well you can do secific things. You will get to a point you will be able to fly a ship as well as a pilot that has been around for 3 years, he may be able to mine better then you as well but in that fight you will be even.

So my advice for anyone looking to play the game:

1) Quit the starter corporation and find a new one.
2) Find something you like to do in the game specialize for it and enjoy it.
3)  Even is a harsh game, you will be blown up, stolen from, trapped, hunted and destroyed. Take a deep breath, get a drink, find a new ship, grab a friend and get back there and crucify him.

.

.

barf, mmo subscriptions

Holy Crap!
I just checked a ISK selling website and, 300 million ISK cost US $900.
And this dude took 80 Billion...
BILLION.

That's actually pretty awesome.

Xabier is the Bernie Madoff of the EVE online world.

I remember this happening atleast once before.

If i had the stomach to spend $15 a month to play EVE i would, as i enjoyed everything about it when i played the trial.

Maybe the kid was mad cus his parents stopped giving him an allowance so he stole a bunch of in game money. The perfect crime..

I need to play this game.... o.o That is fucking incredibly cool. This article pretty much perfectly sums up how I feel about this xD

There is a fiction book I would like to recommend that goes together fine with this robbery. It is called Halting State by Charles Stross. It's one of the best near-future sci-fi books I've read. Look up the storyline on Amazon or something - I guarantee that you'll like it if you into near-future sci-fi and MMO's.

The great thing about EVE is that people can "roleplay" without giving up their real life persona and pretending to be an elven lord or something dumb.

That said, the time investment is just waaay to much for a lot of people. It just takes so long to get to the position where your existence in the game even matters to the same minuscule percentage that your real life existence matters.

At this point it's been going for so long that you'd be mad to start out playing alone. If you were to start playing with a group who would stick with it for literally years, it might end up being worth it. Either that, or you'd need to know people playing already. That was my experience trying it fairly late into the game anyway -- even with a fair sized group of people starting out together -- it just wasn't worth the time it seemed like it would take to get the most from it. For that reason, I eagerly await their next MMO, WoD: Online. Seems like getting in relatively early, in the first few years at least, would be the key to getting the most from a CCP style, emmergent gameplay, MMO.

My friend and I started playing EVE because of this article. Thanks Jeff.

Haha, that's awesome. I hope they deal with him solely through EVE Online; crimes committed in an MMO should be dealt with in an MMO.

I always found the auction house and trading in MMOs far more fascinating and engaging than the fighting. If Too Human had an auction house it would've been a far better game.

Intrigue.  It's not just for NPCs anymore.

@MB

Yea, whoops, lol.  I wrote that right before I passed out, so yea, maybe added a couple 0's here and there, lol.


And to all of you people that call the game boring, all there is is mining, etc, you don't understand the point of the game.  It's meant to be a niche game, otherwise it'd be a WoW clone.  Yes, you sometimes have to mine.  Yes the menu's are confusing at first.  I've been playing for 1+ years and I'm still earning new stuff every day.  The whole point is this is a SOCIAL game.  If you come in, run missions, and mine solo, it's going to be boring, hands down.  I'm in an active corp where we mission when we need our sec standing back up, then go plundering throughout the low/nullsec universe.  After the 2 week trial, you either get it or you don't.

Speaking of which, if anyone wants a 21 day trial (not the standard 14 day) pop me a private message and I'll send you a referral email for the buddy program.  An extra week is always nice and if you end up subscribing before the trial is up, the time is added to your account.  Just lemme know!

EVE is really like the sci-fi movies where corperations have taken over. The nations in EVE don't have much power and the police doesn't do anything unless they see someone attackingg someone else (in high security space) or if you have contraband cargo. Unlike other games in EVE pretty much anything is legal, except for using exploits or buying ISK on ebay everything is possible. Life in EVE is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short as Hobbes would have put it.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up the going price for ISK on these shady MMO gold-selling sites.

This dude made off with like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If I were him I would start making sure that his Eve username isn't in any way linked to his real name or address.

That's so cool, he's robbed it up and booked it. I'd instantly start selling the gold on Ebay or something, you'd get pretty loaded I'm guessing.

Stories like this are always so fun to read. EVE Online player politics are way more interesting then real life. lol

I love EVE Online. It's the best MMO ever. Simple to play, hard to understand.

That is freaking awesome! That almost wants me to play EVE online! "this could be the end of the world.....of warcraft...."

Haha thats awesome.

That is just awesome!

must be nice to see all that real world stuff happen in Eve. i tried the trial and ended up mining all day. shortly after i said "booooooooring" out loud i uninstalled it.

So when does the crazy kid who spent weeks-on-end hunched over a terminal in some South Korean internet coffee hut show up on the doorstep of this player with a machete and a slippery grip on reality?

When they say virtual "world" they mean it.

One of the reasons why Eve is pretty amazing and scary at the same time.

this little story sold me! im downloading the 14 day free trail and giving the game a shot!

This is so goddamn awesome.

There are no real world repercussions?  Maybe if people didn't already buy and sell ISK in side accounts in exchange for real money, or spend a monthly fee in order to accrue this fake cash, only to have it stolen.  That seems fairly real to me, even if the solution is something like "stop playing EVE"

What struck me as surreal is you don't tend to get open interviews with real-life crooks about how much money they stole before they've been acquitted or sentenced to prison, and even then they're often cagey about it.  This dude actually said he had MORE than was believed, and he made a point to say he'd payed back some investors, as though that excused it! 

I find the whole thing amusing, but games like this, despite their saying they're player run sims, tend to push what we consider to be crime to the extreme simply because there's little in the way of enforcement of the law, there.  Punishment isn't always a deterrent, but it sure as hell would be for many of these people.

Whilst its a crappy thing to do it speaks volumes for the free player run narrative in Eve-Online. I play in a mmo with similar freedom though its a lot more fast paced and massive. Beyond Protocol is a Scifi MMORTS and you can find info elsewhere so I wont bore you, but the game has been live near 3 months and blood feuds over folk stealing all th emoney from the guild bank have already happened and are very much affecting the overall narrative. The devs are active and encourage folks to stretch the boundaries, and have tried to supply us with enough tools to pretty much design/customise everything - so many ideas have sprung up the devs never even considered but love and endorsed such actions.
I am finding that with this freedom comes some very good role play - so much so id declare scripted  and dev made narrative games like WoW to be 3d platform games not mmorpg's. Player defined narrative games like Eve and Beyond Protocol are awesome and truly blend hard core and casual gamers well.

aaahhh, love the 'butterfly' touch there Jeff;) CXT baby!

Argh! Damn you, Cubical. I was just about to post the link to that story myself. I absolutely adore it, and everytime I see it it makes me want to get into EVE.

In EVE you can  higher players to kill the dude who stole your cash.  Happens all the time in this game  there was another large job done before i played the game free for like 4 months found it more fun to watch the crazyness of people backstabbing mostly since i was to weak to do anything cool like get money for killing people.

The other jobs story is Slightly more entertaing since it invloles revenge undercover spys  with secret codewords ,and people left floating in space before being murdered on request of the "client", and people stealing rare large battleships  besides money stealing.

more heist/assasin/murder stories here.


I
http://eve.klaki.net/heist/


http://eve.klaki.net/heist/page-1.jpg


http://eve.klaki.net/heist/page-2.jpg



http://eve.klaki.net/heist/page-3.jpg


http://eve.klaki.net/heist/page-4.jpg

"Well for you people that have never played the game.  If you converted the amount of ISK stolen to actual cash value (you can by a Game Time Card and sell it for ISK for $34.99 for around 670 million ISK atm):

3.1 million US dollars.

Oh, crap, Jeff. You mentioned Trade Wars 2002. Then there was P.L.A.N.E.T.S.... then L.O.R.D.... man, I miss those days.

That's crazy business, literally.

I wanted to try out EVE cause there really is a lack of future/space rpgs out there but it doesn't look like the type to start off with this late in the game.

That is crazy in a cool sorta way.

He could be the CEO of a real company! He's apparently really good as what they do best; embezzeling!

EveZZzzzZZzzzzZZzzz...

Wake me up when Ultima Online comes back and does space faster than Eve does.

I tried to get into EVE but I found the whole setup of the menus and everything extremely confusing.

Eve online would be awesome if it weren't so mind numbingly boring. But if your into it's really lazy ass pace it's great for this kind of stuff.