In the vast simulated galaxy of Elite: Dangerous, a years-old mystery concerning an unknown region of space called the Formidine Rift was poised to take a dramatic leap forward on Saturday. An NPC going by the name of Salomé was preparing for a frantic, fast return to the main inhabited core worlds with information that would advance the mystery’s plot. Elite players could choose to try to escort Salomé to safety, or could try to gun her down.

The event was organized in part by science fiction author Drew Wagar, who has written one of the official Elite: Dangerous tie-in novels. Wagar—with some assistance from Frontier Developments to make the magic happen—would be controlling Salomé's ship as she made her mad dash back to the core worlds; the result of the run would be featured in Wagar’s upcoming Elite novel. If Salomé lived and delivered her message, that’s what he’d write in the book. If she died, the book would be written to reflect that, immortalizing the player character who did the killing.

The stage seemed set for an exciting afternoon of hunting Salomé online, tracking her whereabouts, and participating in some fun player vs. player combat. There were some other “VIPs” flying with Salomé with their own messages to deliver, but Salomé herself was where all the player interest lay.

And then things started to get…odd.

Better custodiet those custodes…

Although the game lacks a formal system for clans or guilds, there are still a lot of player groups in Elite: Dangerous. Some are tiny. Some are enormous. Some are small but incredibly vocal. Most of them wanted a piece of the Salomé event pie, and so through discussions in the weeks leading up to the event, a sort of enormous meta-group was formed. Made up of members of lots of different player groups, the “Premonition Allied Coalition”—PAC for short—emerged from the discussions as the “official” entity in charge of finding and guarding Salomé (or, at least, PAC was the group most prominently promoted by Wagar and others as the group for would-be Salomé defenders to join). Not all defenders joined PAC, but PAC was definitely the largest group in play, with more than 3,000 players in its ranks. (The situation was actually a lot more complex than that—there are lots of reddit posts with more info, but this one is a good and concise description of how things were arrayed. The Children of Raxxla were actually tasked with personally defending Salomé, with PAC taking more of a backup role. However, the public promotion given to PAC and PAC's increasingly crazy behavior meant that PAC got the lion's share of public attention.)

As the multi-hour event began to get underway, weird things started happening. Rather than making the event one where all comers were welcome, PAC began issuing threatening edicts: if you weren’t a PAC member, don’t show up to any of the active event systems with guns on your ship. Anyone in-system who was armed and wasn’t a PAC member would be considered hostile and would be “KOS”—that is, would be subject to a blanket “kill on sight” order.

The Elite: Dangerous matchmaking service began to falter as many thousands of players focused on a region of space starting near the Eridani systems. PAC's behavior reportedly got even weirder: the group didn't just demand all non-members be killed, but it also allegedly started ejecting Russian players from its Discord server and barring them from group membership, on the basis of the Russian players being “spies” for the anti-Salomé faction. Friction with other player groups grew, with PAC starting fights and throwing its weight around by laying claim to entire systems, ostensibly to "protect" them.

Complaints about PAC’s behavior began filling the main Elite subreddit as more and more players who just wanted to enjoy a community event were either blown up by zealous PAC members or otherwise refused participation in the event by PAC’s actions. When Salomé’s ship was sighted, escorts from PAC and other groups flocked to it, attempting to ensure no one else could get close to it—not even other players who legitimately wanted to assist.

Salomé—played in-game by Wagar—was beset by constant attacks from the moment the event started. Her ship eventually suffered massive, crippling damage in spite of the defenders' best efforts. Waves of combat flowed across multiple systems—much of it having very little to do with Salomé directly, as PAC aggressively swept route systems clear and attempted to keep guardians on Salomé.

But it wasn’t enough, and reports began emerging that the author-controlled NPC had been killed. Worse, Salomé appeared to have been killed not by one of the player groups that had pledged to take her down, but instead by a member of PAC who was supposed to have been protecting her. The community exploded with speculation about what had happened, even as Wagar confirmed via Twitter that Salomé was indeed dead.

Videos were quickly posted of the attack on Salomé. Was it an alpha strike by a fleet of dedicated combatants? A stealthy sneak attack? Aliens, perhaps?

Turns out it was an inside job—and a wizard did it. A very bad space wizard named Cmdr Harry Potter.

Smile when you say that

It appears that PAC was “infiltrated” by an infamous player group called the Smiling Dog Crew. SDC’s mission, broadly, is to break as many of the game’s systems as possible in the most creative and public ways possible. Their participation in events usually involves killing vast numbers of other players; they’ve been called griefers, trolls, “murder-hobos,” and everything else one can be called in the game.

By loudly exploiting game mechanism faults and oversights, the group has arguably done as much good as they have bad—though you might be hard-pressed to agree if you’re one of the thousands of players they’ve murdered to make a point (or one of the other thousands of players they’ve murdered just because).

By all accounts, unscrupulous SDC members appear to have talked their way into the PAC meta-group by employing the age-old tactic of “promising to be good this time, we pinky swear for reals.” Among the SDC members allowed into PAC was the aforementioned Harry Potter, who can properly be called the most reviled player in the Elite: Dangerous galaxy. Potter—UK-native Josh Chamberlain in real life—has blown up traders on the last leg of a 20,000 light year string of jumps out to a new colony location; he’s killed people in the middle of charity Twitch streams; he’s murdered new players and old players alike in paroxysms of violence intended to disrupt the game for no other reason than that he could.

And he killed Salomé—because at some point in the past, either Potter or other SDC members got themselves added to Salomé's in-game friends list, and this proved to be the trick that led directly to Salomé's death. The Salomé "NPC" is actually controlled by someone (usually Wagar) and is actually just a regular player account. And regular accounts that are on each others' friends list can see each others' in-game locations. Between that and PAC's declaration that it would kill any armed non-PAC members in PAC-controlled areas, Smiling Dog Crew had both a "safe" area to play in and also a direct bead on Salomé's location as she began her run to the core worlds. It was only a matter of time before Smiling Dog Crew found Salome, turned coat, and attacked.

The wolf wasn’t just given the keys to the henhouse—the wolf was escorted inside, seated at a table, and asked to personally select the chicken he wanted to eat.

Maskirovka

The event quickly collapsed. Three of the other VIPs had made it in safely, but Salomé herself was dead at the hands of her protectors, and Wagar had to contend with the fact that a player named “Harry Potter” had killed her and his next book would have to somehow convey that (though Wagar had noted that he had contingency plans if Salomé was killed by a player with an unusable name).

As the event was unfolding, the community was replete with posts from angry players who couldn’t participate due to PAC’s ultra-paranoid kill-on-sight policy. Immediately after it was confirmed that Salomé had been killed by Harry Potter and the Smiling Dog Crew—who had inexplicably been welcomed into PAC while other less-infamous players had been turned away—the community fairly exploded.

How had this happened? How had a notorious PvP ganker/griefer group infiltrated a huge player organization and been allowed to destroy the NPC the organization was trying to protect?

At least according to the subreddit’s unscientific poll, a large percentage of players believe this wasn’t by chance and the event organizers somehow planned it this way for maximum drama (though Wagar denied this in a Sunday blog post on the event’s aftermath). Another chunk of the playerbase believes that Smiling Dog Crew actually played a long con, starting back in January with a series of videos called “The Git Gud Guide” (“git gud” means “get good,” and is the prototypical response by veteran players to new players who ask what they can do to stop dying so often). SDC, the theory goes, spent time and effort to appear as if they’d at least partially reformed their murdering ways.

Besides—who better to protect Salomé from an army of attacking players than a player group that specializes in radically unfair, mechanic-exploiting PvP combat? From that point of view, SDC made the perfect guardians, and that's one of the reasons PAC allowed them in. Except, of course, SDC wasn’t there to do anything other than grief and troll—and they executed a masterstroke, in full view of the entire Elite: Dangerous community, at the climax of a plot-related event.

If I were writing this as fiction, I couldn’t have done it any better.

"What we do in life echoes in eternity"

“Yes, I had anticipated her death,” wrote Wagar of Salomé in his blog. “Clearly that was a highly probable outcome. Personally I was hoping she would make it. She had a speech all ready to go—she liked speeches. That will never see the light of day now because you changed the story. But this wasn’t scripted, there was only preparation for as many eventualities as we could foresee.”

Ars has reached out to both Wagar and some of the Smiling Dog Crew principals, but as of press time no one has responded.

It’s too soon after Saturday’s events to be able to properly place them in context, or to see their effects on the game’s fiction in general and the Formidine Rift mystery in particular. The fact that the other VIPs arrived and communicated their messages indicates that the plot will continue to unfold, but perhaps not in the same way as it otherwise would have. It seems clear that Salomé is tied somehow into the eventual appearance of the Thargoids, the game’s long-absent alien menace ; we don’t yet know if killing off Salomé will cripple humanity in some way when the Thargoids do eventually show up.

We do know that we’ve all been trolled, expertly and well, by masters of the craft. Smiling Dog Crew, we salute you, because this has been one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever seen happen in Elite: Dangerous.