Did BoB Really Get Griefed?

Posted by Stropp on February 7, 2009

I've seen a few posts on blogs and forums, including this one by Tobold, suggesting that what happened to BoB was a case of griefing.

First, lets just briefly recap what happened.

1. A senior level Band of Brothers director got bored and sick of all the nonsense that was occurring in the alliance. That director approached a member of GoonSwarm and offered to sell out BoB.
2. The GoonSwarm member was understandably suspicious considering the enmity between the Goons and BoB, and got the senior players involved.
3. The BoB director conspired with the Goons to take down BoBs alliance and did so making them vulnerable to a surprise attack.
4. The GoonSwarm and other unrelated corps and alliances moved in to BoBs former territories in a frenzy of looting.

Now back to wether this incident is a case of griefing or not, Tobold makes the following comment:

Now some people will find this way cool, big drama is one of the features of EVE. But somehow I doubt that the thousands of players who got robbed by a turncoat will feel the same way. Griefing is only funny if it happens to other people, and many people react to being griefed by simply quitting the game (which is for example why I quit EVE, I got podded in the early era of EVE, before they introduced insurance and cloning).

I'm sure a lot of BoB players are feeling the effects of this betrayal right now, and some of them will quit the game. And, I'll freely admit that I'd be pretty shattered, and might decide to leave the game if the same thing happened to me. There was an awful lot of time and effort that was destroyed in that single action. It's not nice to lose what you have worked hard for.

However, it should be said that there are a lot of other players who have been on the receiving end of a lot of BoB shenanigans in the past, and some of those see what has happened as just desserts.

Eve is a PvP game. It is designed as a very harsh universe where a single mistake can cost everything, and the players at the level of Band of Brothers know that.

The Band of Brothers mostly live in 0.0 space, and 0.0 is not newbie friendly. The players who head out that way know what they are getting themselves in to, and if they don't, they soon find out. They either then make it work, or head back to the security of hi-sec space.

I suspect that given a bit of time, at least some of the Band of Brothers will look back and think to themselves that, yeah, it hurt, but it was way cool that that sort of thing could happen in the game.

In a game like WoW / LotRO / WAR / AoC your power as a player only ever goes up. In a game like EVE or Darkfall, your power can go up or down, which is not to everyone's liking.

That's true. The Eve Online game dynamics aren't to everyone's liking. It's obvious that they don't appeal to Tobold. But that's okay, they do appeal to a lot of players -- from what I've heard, Eve has nearly half a million subscribers -- and that's what is important. And these days Eve Online is a known quantity. Players are generally aware of what the game is about when they subscribe to it -- though that might change once it hits game store shelves.

So even though BoB reached the pinnacle of power and lost it, they are starting to reclaim some of that lost territory and power. It might take months to get back what they lost. It will be a struggle. And do you know what? If they can achieve that, it will be way cool.

So yeah, maybe one guy caused a whole lot of other players a lot of grief, but that is life in New Eden low-sec.