All Is Fair In Eve and War

Posted by Stropp on February 6, 2009

Goodness me!

I just start playing Eve again and this happens.

I’m not sure how I feel about this whole incident; I’m definitely in two minds about it.

My first reaction to GoonSwarm taking down of Band of Brothers was that they were a bunch of mongrels. I’m not a big fan of the Goons. Their stated philosophy that the way to win a MMORPG is to make the other guy so miserable that he quits is quite frankly nasty, and comes from someone with a nasty mind. Whenever I hear about the Goons, I get the impression that the Goons and, by association, the Something-Awful people are the types that get their kicks by torturing puppies and other small furry woodland animals.

When Casualties of WAR were just forming the guild for Warhammer Online we all decided that we didn’t even want to be on the same server as GoonSwarm. When we found out that they were forming on the server we had chosen, we jumped servers.

But after reading the articles, and some of the comments on the Eve forums I asked myself the question:

What if it wasn’t GoonSwarm who did this, but some other alliance?

We’d probably be applauding the style of gameplay that can allow for such wonderfully unscripted scenarios to occur. We’d be ecstatic that in Eve, the players can affect the world in a permanent manner.

One of the goals the developers have for Eve Online is that it can be a place where anything goes, except for exploiting the rules. While other games have a long list of activities that they consider exploits, even if the game allows the activity, Eve only has a couple as far as I know. One of those is that players are not allowed to attempt to evade the Concord police when they move in after an aggressive act. It’s possible to do from what I understand, but not allowed.

What the Goons did to BoB isn’t against the rules. In fact, from what I understand, CCP likes it when players engage in in-game naughtiness, and from what I’ve read today, Band of Brothers has previously engaged in similar behavior. I’ve seen a number of comments around the traps referring to them as the playground bullies of Eve. It doesn’t look like BoB was squeaky clean.

It’s something that I am beginning to appreciate about Eve Online more and more. It’s a sandbox. Anything goes. It adds drama to the game if an unnamed executive in your corporation can turn out to be a double-agent and tear down everything you’ve built up. If some average player can pull off a scam and rip off billions in Isk, it becomes much more important to know who you are letting into your corporation. It’s not like a WoW guild getting ripped off. BoB lost everything, including their alliance name. It’s not just war, it’s politics.

It adds an element of, if not realism, immersiveness to the gaming experience, and I think it’s one of the reasons that Eve has been so successful. The players are not competing against the environment so much as they are competing against each other.

After all Eve Online is a PvP game.

I think we have been conditioned to think that PvP is all about hitting someone else with a stick, or bullet, or missile. PvP is more than that. PvP is competition. PvP is out-bidding, out-trading, out-maneuvering, and yes out-fighting the other guy – but that’s a topic for another post.

So BoB is no more. Now the interesting thing to watch will be how the ex-BoB players respond to their change in circumstances.

I just hope they don’t quit. The GoonSwarm doesn’t win until they do.

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