They say revenge is a dish best served cold. In EVE Online player Darvo Thellere’s case, it was cold as the uncaring vacuum of space.




Darvo’s story, which I verified via EVE war records as well as lengthy chat logs Darvo provided me, began back in 2013. He was just taking his first steps in the game’s massive galaxy—banding together with other overwhelmed newbies—when a player named Kackpappe decided to give him shit. And by “give him shit,” I mean he declared war.

“His goal was—this is what he stated to us—to ruin our game experience and harass us until we stop playing,” wrote Darvo on the EVE subreddit. “We fought back—in kestrels, as the noobs we were. In the end, after a few months of daily harassment, he dropped the war. And I made a promise to him: ‘I don’t know how or when, but the day will come that I will find you and I will take all your stuff.’”


Time passed. Darvo began to find his footing as a player, with PVP as his main jam. “I trained multiple PVP toons and started multiboxing in PVP, and even founded Ish-Stars together with three other friends, a merc alliance in [high security space] that operated with and against the large merc alliances in EVE,” he said.

Flash forward to recent times. Out of the blue, Darvo saw that Kackpeppe was looking for a new corporation to join. In that moment, he hatched a plan.

“I explained the story to my [corporation] members and that I wanted to take all his stuff,” said Darvo. “We had a long meeting about this because being that kind of asshats is usually not what we do. But in the end they backed me up. So I changed my name on teamspeak (just in case he remember[ed]) and had a day full of chattering with him. Finally he joined us.”

Then came the devious part. Darvo and co faked a bunch of “political drama” to convince Kackpeppe that he should teleport to a specific location with all of his stuff. Upon arriving, Kackpeppe found himself surrounded by Darvo and a whole fleet of ships. I’m gonna let you guess who won that encounter. Hint: it wasn’t Kackpeppe.


“He had no clue what was happening until I changed my name back,” said Darvo. “‘Argh fuck, Darvo Thellere,’ [he said], and then he died in silence. We thanked him for the loot, podded him back and kicked him out of corp.”

So there you go. Justice is served. All’s well that ends well, right? Well, perhaps not entirely. After it all went down, Kackpeppe left some comments of his own on the record of the kill. He claimed that Darvo, too, was responsible for their war back in the day, and he called Darvo’s revenge ruse cowardly.


Regardless of who’s telling the truth about motivations here, it gets to the heart of an unavoidable truth about EVE (and I guess also life): if you stay down in the mud for too long, everyone gets dirty.