There is a jagged fissure of insanity which runs through the heart of

the EVE playerbase, a kind of feverish bad crazy that you simply don't

find in other online games. Oh, sure, everyone knows a tale or two

about the Starcraft player who stayed awake for 50 hours and href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4137782.stm"

target="_blank">died from exhaustion because he

wouldn't stop gaming, or the legions of relatively mundane overweight

basement-dwelling nerds that populate the other MMOs that have a lack

of perspective that comes from playing in virtual worlds too much. Some

people like to point to South Korea's Starcraft tournaments as a sign

of abnormality, but sporting leagues are a 'healthy' expression of

hobby activity by most standards. No, if you want utter madness, you

have to look to EVE.

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Humans, for all our pretensions, are monkeys, and monkeys are funny

creatures. One or two of them might seem normal enough, but in

isolation or small groups social animals aren't really their true

selves. With their overdeveloped adrenal glands, numerous href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases"

target="_blank">cognitive biases and a supreme

faith in the rightness of that same flawed cognition, when you get them

in groupings over a certain number hilarious things occur. What

differentiates EVE from the other MMOs - and what creates the level of

frothing madness - is the number of monkeys it manages to pack into one

barrel.

In World of Warcraft, while there may be an obscene 11.5

million people running about as elves and orcs hitting monsters with

swords and spells, those people are broken up into small groups of ten

to twenty thousand per server. If you don't like your server, you can

leave to another server, start anew, find a different social milieu.

The game is also infamously newbie friendly, which is partly why it has

gained such mainstream success; almost anyone can pick it up and play.

The basic group unit in WoW is a guild between 20 and 100 people; the

odd megaguild nonwithstanding, it's a grouping intimate enough that

every monkey can get to know every other monkey, and the primary social

activity involves groups of between five and 25. Even at this level,

though, there's a blurring of perspective in the minds of people; sick

days are called in from work to raid, personal hygiene is neglected,

obsession with purple loot and intensely personal dramas around said

loot occur.

By contrast, EVE takes a much smaller player base - perhaps 450,000 -

but jams all these monkeys into one barrel, a barrel from which there

is no escape - no 'other server' to flee to and begin anew. The

learning curve in EVE might as well be vertical, despite all the

efforts to make the game more newbie-friendly over the years; any sort

of mistake usually results in you dying horribly and losing substantial

assets, which are very limited when first playing the game.

Additionally, more than any other MMO, EVE relies heavily on

mathematics and spreadsheets in the player-run logistics and production

aspects of the game. Given the violence, loss, and (horror of horrors)

math, it is only a certain sort of of monkey who not only ascends the

nightmarish and Darwinian learning curve, but finds the process

entertaining enough to stick around and play for more than a week. So

this is EVE, a galaxy filled with socially inept spreadsheet nerds on

the one hand and obsessive, ambitious griefers on the other. Resources

are limited and must be fought over, and the only way out is to quit

entirely.

Unique in EVE, the number of people on one server puts the players far

beyond the threshold of intimate friendship; your average social unit,

the corporation, involves hundreds of people, while alliances made up

of these corporations include thousands of people. Thus, instead of

micro-level 'guild drama' over who gets what epic item, EVE suffers

from 'alliance politics' which in many ways have come to mirror real

world politics; the threshold of 'enough monkeys in one place' is

crossed, and you find yourself contending with alliances based on

ethnic and nationalistic identities, many of which carry their cultural

quirks and baggage into the realm of internet spaceships. EVE has

French alliances, Russian alliances, Polish alliances, German

alliances, you name it.

If the idea of social units comprising of

thousands of people allied by

nationality or shared culture doesn't add enough monkey madness for

you, consider that the game has both legal and illegal channels for

real world income to bleed into the game. You can spend your

hard-earned money on an in-game item called a 'PLEX' which can be used

to add two months of in-game subscription time to a character, and then

sell these PLEXes on the in-game market for in-game currency (isk). If

you're rich in-game and poor in reality, you can play EVE for free by

simply purchasing PLEXes; if you're rich in reality and don't have time

to make spaceship money, you can sell some PLEXes and buy as many

spaceships as you feel like. Of course, many players go outside of the

established CCP-sanctioned system and buy and sell both currency and

characters on the black market of eBay; a substantial sum of hard

currency can be earned by a diligent eBayer, and it is an accepted

belief among many EVE players that some people are making a day-to-day

living off selling isk.

One galaxy, limited resources, 450,000 players who are all a little odd

to begin with, nationalistic alliances, and a porous system of currency

trading. Welcome to the asylum, let's take a tour!

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Our first patient is href="http://images.tentonhammer.com/eve/lordex1.jpg"

target="_blank">SirLordex, an aluminium magnate of

Russian extraction. His existence was only a rumor among the

English-speaking population of EVE for many months; he was alleged to

have bankrolled his own alliance, RED.OVERLORD, in a quest to seize the

region of Feythabolis from its previous owner Goonswarm; it was hinted

that he was spending thousands of dollars to purchase isk in bulk from

eBay, and that with this money he had purchased five Titans, a number

of motherships, and innumerable control towers. The money was

eventually traced by CCP those Titans and characters vanished in a mass

banning, but evidence of the true extent of SirLordex's habit of

spending money on EVE only recently came to light- apparently he's

started pumping money into the PLEX system and has singlehandedly

crashed the market, driving the in-game price down steeply. You too can

watch the madness href="http://eve-search.com/search/author/lTOPl" target="_blank">here,

keeping in mind that one PLEX is worth $34.99. How many games do you know of

where someone spends over $100,000 on spaceships and brags about it? In

SerLordex's own words:

"Listen, calm down. Everyone here understands that

ROL didn't sell a

single isk on Ebay. Originally, I put in about 50K cash (buying isk,

chars and 5 titans + a ton of motherships) from your ratting me out to

the GM's (RA's directors = rats, admit it). All of this got banned

under the pretext of an exploit that we never used (GM's couldn't prove

that I bought isk for RL cash, but I couldn't prove that the isk was

legal, either). After that, I bought a ton of timecards from legitimate

dealers and, at the moment, have sold more than 1 trillion isk's worth

(GM's have confirmed that they know about this and decided that I'm not

breaking any rules), bought another five titans, two [more? this is

unclear] are still building, and I'm also financing new corps that are

coming in. I'll have no problems with [continuing to fund] any of this.

So let's not have any dirt thrown around, because if anyone is selling

isk here, it's you, and since I know all the gray market dealers I'm

going to sell you to CCP at the first opportunity - the next ban is on

you."

Perhaps he should consider a career in href="http://images.tentonhammer.com/eve/lordex2.gif"

target="_blank">rap.

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 href="http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=527"

target="_blank">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.

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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 href="http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=424"

target="_blank">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 href="https://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?t=363"

target="_blank">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 href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/65110" target="_blank">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.