Imaginary Worlds - World War EVE

Episode Date: June 29, 2017

EVE Online is a massive multi-player online role playing game, which means it's a game where there are no rules -- just a galaxy where you build space ships, form alliances and go to war. The Icelandic company CCP that created the game even attracted players with the motto: "Build Your Dreams. Wreck Theirs." And the war stories of EVE players are remarkable, like the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, where over $350,000 worth of digital spaceships were destroyed in a single day. So why do half a million people invest so much time and money into EVE, to the point where they're living a double life in a virtual galaxy?Also highly recommended reading -- Andrew Groen's book "Empires of Eve" -- which was about how the early wars in EVE were just as much a battle over what kind of game it's supposed to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Flash Forward is a show about the future that overthinks what those possible tomorrows could be like. Things like, what would the warranty be like on a sex robot? Could an evil megacorporation build so many wind turbines that it actually alters the climate? And what would it take for us to abandon the Internet? that it actually alters the climate? And what would it take for us to abandon the internet? The host, Rose Eveleth, interviews scientists, engineers, authors, doctors, artists, farmers,

anyone who can help her figure out what each future would be like and how likely it would be. You can listen to Flash Forward on any podcasting app or go to flashforwardpod.com to learn more. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. There is a vast imaginary world going on that most people don't know about. At any given time, 500,000 people around the world could be playing a video game called Eve Online. Now this isn't the kind of game where you go around shooting monsters or try to move a character through a maze.

Eve takes place in a virtual galaxy where you can be anything you want. You can live in a space station. You can fly around the universe with a crew of pilots. You can mine raw materials off these digital planets. But none of that stuff, except the planets, was built by CCP, the company in Iceland that created the game, which means that every ship, every space station, was built from scratch by the players, from raw materials that they mine off the planets. And there's an in-game space currency called ISK, but you need real money to have it. And some people in EVE don't do anything else but build things and sell them to other players

like it's an intergalactic eBay. Now, I don't play EVE because I basically suck at it. I mean, I usually play video games where I get to be Batman, and that's about it. I mean, I'm Batman, swinging around the city, fighting bad guys. But in EVE, when you create a character, you just have a fake name and a picture of your avatar. Otherwise, it's mostly your point of view as you interact in this universe. Otherwise, it's mostly your point of view as you interact in this universe. And since you play EVE through your internet browser, you can interact with any player in the world in real time.

Is there another dictator that can put a bubble down on their gate to make sure they don't warp off? You aren't a safe, not a safe. Now to thrive in EVE, you need to be very patient, highly technical, and have a taste for Machiavellian politics. Yeah, this is not some utopian future where everyone's flying around space waving at each other. There is a fierce competition to control as much space as possible. To survive, you need to form coalitions with other players. And as the game has evolved over the last 14 years, the alliances between these coalitions have gotten so big,

the balance of power in the game is like pre-World War I Europe. Now most of the time, these gigantic alliances are at a standstill. Everybody's flying around in packs, talking to each other on secure channels, protecting their space until war breaks out. And that's what happened on January 27th, 2014. So this story starts with a player called Manfred Sidious, or Manny for short. By the way, some of them gave me their real names, some didn't, so I'm going by everybody's in-game player names. The day started at around 2 a.m. for me when I believe I got a text message that the Sov had dropped. The Sov bill that he's talking about is an auto-pay box on the website,

which allows his coalition, Pandemic Legion, to hold claim on an area of space that they conquered called BTEC-R. Now, Manny swears he paid the bill. The problem was with the company that runs the game, CCP. There was a bug that CCP later fixed, and they alluded to in the patch notes, that caused, in rare instances, for the sob to not be paid, even though the box was checked. He claims to this day that he had everything checked and there was money in there. This is Elise Randolph, who's in Manny's coalition. Now, most of the players are men, but a lot of them actually choose female avatars, as did Elise.

Anyway, he's very close with Manny. But on this issue, he just doesn't believe him. Everyone else, including CCP, who investigated it, they were saying, no, no, just the bill wasn't paid. So if the bill's not paid, like the soft turns off and your station goes from being invulnerable to vulnerable. That's actually pretty common in EVE. You'll hear two sides of a story where they can't both be right, but it seems like every player in the game has a strong opinion about it. So all Manny has to do right now is recheck that autoay box, right? But the problem is, it takes a day to process and reclaim this area of space where they have their biggest space station.

Meanwhile. All of our stuff was in this station. Like everything that the Alliance pretty much owned at that point in time, all the memberships, everything that they owned at the time was in the station. Graf Telken is part of Manny's coalition. At the time, they had been battling another alliance called the Clusterfuck Coalition, or CFC, which was huge. It had 37,000 members, and it was aligned with other coalitions in Australia and Russia. Now, EVE is very time zone based. Russians and Australians control the nighttime.

That's the way it is. It's the way it's always been. And there's nothing we can really do about to contest their numbers in those times. There's just not enough people awake when it's five o'clock in the afternoon in Moscow for us to actively defend against the Russian attack. So we generally try not to attack Russian space in Russian primetime. We try and attack it outside of their primetime when it's harder for them to defend. Well, this is five o'clock in the morning and Manny just didn't care. He just called for everything. Meaning all hands on deck, they are coming to get us. In order to fight the odds that we represented, we had to put an incredible amount of assets on

the field in order to be competitive. But it's early morning in the East Coast of the United States, even earlier on the West Coast. Meanwhile, players around the world are noticing this area of space is up for grabs. We saw that it was happening and we decided to take a swing for the fight. Sort Dragon is part of an Australian coalition that's hostile to Manny's coalition, Pandemic Legion. Well, generally before a fight goes down like that, both sides would calculate how many capital ships they had and how many capital ships they thought they would get over time. We looked at the hostile numbers and we looked at what we had and we realized that

as it stood, we had more ready to go. These ships have great names, by the way, like dreadnoughts and supercarriers. When EVE went online in 2003, the people that made the game thought there was a limit to how big these ships could get. But the players surprised them by building enormous ships called Titans. I don't know what that cost in terms of the in-game currency, but in terms of real money, they cost about $2,000 to create. And they take thousands of hours to build. They are something in the region of 70 kilometers long.

They're these gigantic, just death machines. They have a doomsday that can kill almost any other ship in the game with one shot. That is Jin Tan. He was a neutral player in this fight, but he also sees himself as a war correspondent because there is an entire media landscape of blogs and podcasts that just cover Eve. And this was a big story unfolding in real time. So there was Jin Tan in England watching with fascination as hundreds of titans were converging around the same area of space.

They brought everything. They threw every dread, every titan, every super they had at their disposal, just pounding meat into that grinder. Elise Randolph says if you were to watch the game at this point, what you would see is hundreds of ships firing at each other and blowing up in slow motion. You know, EVE has a mechanic where when there are a lot of people in the system, time in that system slows down,

just so the server can handle all the things that are going on. So time slows down to 10% normal time. I've seen the footage on YouTube. It's actually beautiful to watch. Now the tide of this battle turned when the decision was made by Manny and his allies to target the Flight Commander, or FC, from the enemy coalition in Australia. In other words, they decided to go

after the head honcho on the other side who was calling all the shots. Because if they could get him out of the way and stop him from coming back, they were going to be dealing with, you know, a decapitated enemy force, and they were going to be able to move in for the kill. It took two and a half hours for them to kill me. The guy inside that Titan that everyone was trying to blow up was SortDragon. And going after him was bad for two reasons. First of all, SortDragon's Titan was really, really big. It took them a long time to blow it up. Meanwhile, with all of their firepower aimed at him...

We killed six of their equivalent ships. And it just came down to the calls. The calls were made on their side and it was made incorrectly and it cost them the fight and it cost them the biggest number of Titans at the time. And then once you blew up, what happens to you? Where do you regenerate somewhere else, right? Yes, but I had another ship on the field anyway. I had another account logged in on the field. So in reality, when they did kill my Titan, it didn't really matter. I just alt-tabbed to another account and kept calling targets with that account. From that point, the fight was never the same again, and we were never able to trade blows like we were when it first kicked off.

Grath Telkan knew from the start this was a really bad idea to focus all their firepower on Sort Dragon. So watching this mistake play out in slow motion was heartbreaking for him. And the only thing I could actually do at that point in time was kind of hold people's hand as they died over 19 hours. Some of the guys that died in that fight, their titans were from the beginning, like from the earliest titans in the game. Maybe not one of the first two or three, but there were definitely some that were in the first 20 Titans ever built in EVE that died in that fight. So the amount of money we lost as far as cash value goes, if you were to convert it into real life, that's more money than some people make in a lifetime. And I just got to sit and watch it all die. It was a

really morbid day. So there wasn't a lot of angry in me at that day. It was just kind of making sure everybody knew that they died, that we'd spend every dime we had to replace it as soon as we were free and safe from the fight. Grath also ended up being the guy who negotiated the surrender. He agreed to hand over the space station if they could take all their stuff with them, which turned out to be a good deal. Like, my alliance actually loved me to death because we went from everybody losing everything they owned to within 24 hours all of our stuff free, and the only thing we really lost in that fight was a bunch of titans. Also, Graff needed to take a break. This fight was the culmination of a series of battles that had been going on for three months.

Three months in a war? It sucks. Like, it's a video game. Like, I've been fighting the same war for three months. It's not NOM. In the end, the bloodbath of BTAC R5B, which is the official name of the battle, was the largest in the history of the game. Over $350,000 worth of ships were destroyed in a single day. And that's real money, not in-game currency. And it made the real news. Like, this is the BBC. An intergalactic brawl between more than 4,000 players of the massively multiplayer space game EVE Online

saw the CFC faction triumph over the Test Alliance. Everybody's like, oh, did you see this fight in EVE? I was like, yeah, I was in it. And they're like, oh, what side were you on? I'm like, the one that lost. It was especially weird for Manny, who a lot of people blamed for the battle because of that unchecked auto-pay box.

I was especially surprised when I started getting interview requests from, like, mainstream media, like, you know, Washington Post and New York Times, and it kind of floored me. The game company, CCP, actually built an in-game monument to commemorate the battle, and Manny has flown his ship out to see it. It's a little bittersweet for me, but in the same vein, it was cool to be part of it. If he doesn't sound too choked up about this, it's because, well, they lost this battle.

They actually won the larger war and eventually retook the station. And it wasn't just good strategizing on their part. Something happened in real life that weakened their enemies. Now, all the English-speaking players in Eve refer to the Russian coalition as the Russians. But they're not all Russian. They're just players in that time zone,

which includes Ukrainians. It was around the time stuff happened in Ukraine. The Russian alliance at the time, there was a lot of infighting in between people in the Russian alliance from Ukraine and from Russia. One of them used it as a reasoning to tear apart an alliance that they built together over the years. And that in itself was enough of a big hit, not financially, but morale-wise, that the alliance or the group that we'd defeated got a morale boost themselves and then pushed back and took back all of the space that they just lost, and then some. And that is just one example, the story of one particular battle. There have been so many more over the last 14 years. But what really fascinates me about EVE is that while it feels real to the players,

it has to exist within the confines of their daily lives. Which made me wonder, who are these guys? And what drives them to live a double life in a virtual galaxy? That's where things get really interesting. Just after the break. So as I talked with these guys about Eve, I kept wondering the

same thing. Where do they find the time to play? It's 1.22am right now, and the only reason I'm awake is because I have to lead a fleet in an hour and a half. And it's about dedication. I mean, it breeds

a certain kind of dedication to the, I guess you could say, to the flag or to the group that you're following. And so if I want my people to take time off work or do something that's important, then I expect to lead

from the front. A sword dragon strives to have a work-life balance, or in this case, it's a game-life balance. When there's no wars happening in real life, I'm sorry, in EVE, I will spend more time with my wife, I'll spend more time with my newborn son, I'll do the jobs that I need to do,

I'll do the stuff that I need to do. And I consider it accumulating brownie points. So if something does come along that needs to be done, I can be like, OK, I need this time for my game. And my wife is very understanding. I'm very happy of that. I heard that a lot. Very understanding wives. And some of the wives are gamers.

In fact, there's a lot of themes running through the stories about why people played. Some of the guys I talked with said they started playing in college when they had a lot of time to kill, and now they're in jobs that feel monotonous, and Eve makes them feel truly alive. Well, just as many told me that they have very challenging technical jobs, like Jin Tan is an aerospace engineer, and playing Eve is a way to use those skills in a really creative way. engineer. And playing Eve is a way to use those skills in a really creative way. But Graf Telken had a reason for playing that was not like any of the others.

I learned a long time ago, they can't put me in jail if I stay in the house and play video games. Wait, did you really have that moment where you're like, oh, wait, this will keep me out of jail? Oh, yeah, for sure. Actually, like 100%. So I spent 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, and 27 incarcerated those birthdays. Uh, the number of my friends from Baltimore that have died from a heroin overdose is astounding. Uh, I lose something like six or seven a year, drunk driving accidents. I've lost a son, you know, like the number of people that die violently in that area is pretty high. And I feel like I probably made it out of that trap because of my growing interest in computer games. Now, a lot of the video games he was playing, he just needed good aim to blow stuff up. But what sucked him into EVE was that he needed real leadership skills. And he had them.

He eventually rose to be a fleet commander, or an FC. You know, I'm a construction foreman in real life, so it's kind of second nature to me to bark orders in a certain way, and it probably led to me excelling in the game in that regard, as far as sheep herding is what we like to call it. I used to be a fleet commander, now not so much. Now I'm more of a HR guy, really. I manage people instead now, instead of whole fleets.

Graff talcon vets his crew very seriously, and for good reason. The game is rife with double agents, people who pretend to join one coalition when they're spying for another. And while he's vetting these guys, Graff gets a kick out of knowing that many of them have higher-profile, higher-paying jobs in real life than he does. And a lot of the players who take orders from him are in the military. I've had, you know, I've got Army Rangers,

I've got a submarine commander in my corp, I've got, like, there's the CEO of the cell tech company. Now, some of the FCs, like Elise Randolph, care a lot about the feelings of his crew. I mean, it's one thing when he's managing people at the law firm where he works. But the guys who follow him in the game aren't paid to spend time with him. They're actually paying to be part of EVE Online. If everyone dies because you make a bad call, that's one thing. But if like people spend hours and then

nothing happens, that's where you feel the worst. Like you're like, oh my goodness, I just made all these people like cancel their dinner plans or whatever. And we didn't even have any fun. We just sat together waiting for something to possibly happen. But more often you get leaders with a hardcore attitude like SortDragon. There's no such thing as democracy in EVE. Most alliances or successful alliances in the game are run by dictators. Because you find that in EVE, a lot of people like to follow. They may have a high-paying job in real life. They may be a boss.

They may be a high person in real life. But all they want to do is come in EVE and just follow. Jin Tan says there's another aspect which draws people to Eve. You can act out your darkest impulses. I think that's kind of at its core what Eve is about. It is like this kind of, you know, be a tribal asshole simulator. You know, you get to live like there are no consequences. You get to just brutally destroy

other people's tribes because you think your tribe is superior i mean do you need that to succeed in the game i mean can you win by being a nice guy yeah but you can you can definitely succeed by being a nice guy but you can't succeed by being dumb i mean there's a sort of the all is fair in love and war or in this case maybe it's friendship and war but are there moments in the game where people just say that's you've gone too far you know when people start to bring in real life stuff into the game that's when the line is basically drawn you know there is that kind of implicit understanding that EVE Online is a game. You can't be a massive asshole. Be an asshole in the game. That's what it's there for. Don't be an asshole outside of it.

That's actually why most of the players didn't want to give their real names. SortDragon had to go public when he joined a council of players that advises CCP on how to run the game. And while he was serving on the council, CCP changed the game in a way that a lot of players didn't like, and they blamed SortDragon. But now they knew his real name. I had people telling me to go kill myself,

ringing my house. I had to disconnect my house phone because of it at the time. Generally, the EVE public itself will deal with that. It's very much shunned upon, but that doesn't really stop people. I heard a few different variations of the story. People were shocked to find their enemies in Eve were trying to mess with them in real life because they have a strict code of honor that's supposed to prevent that. My favorite story is one that Graf Telken told me. There's a guy and his crew who goes by the name Sith Rex.

In real life, Sith Rex is a Louisiana state trooper. And by the way, the fact that Graf Telken is friends with a cop, it's a big deal. You know, Graf did not spend that much time in jail by being nice to cops. Anyway, this guy who was in Graf's coalition, Sith Rex. One day, he invited another cop over to his house, and he discovered this guy was taking screenshots of Sith Rex's computer because the browser was open to Eve.

And that's when Sith Rex discovered his friend, a fellow officer on the force who was actually part of a rival coalition in Eve, and he was spying on him in real life. And what's even crazier, Sith Rex had just asked this guy to write a recommendation for him because he was applying to the FBI. It was the weirdest shit I've ever seen in my entire life. And Sith Rex is like, I got this guy to vouch for, like, got a guy to be a reference on

my application to the FBI. Yeah, that's just so, that's some wild Eve, only in Eve shit. Like, nobody's going to come over to your World of Warcraft raid and look over your shoulder and report what's going on ever. But storytelling is one of the prime ways that you can motivate your followers

to understand who your enemies are and why they need to be stopped. You know, to a degree of people saying, you know, they're bad for the game. They, you know, oh, they stifle all of these new players or, oh, you know, they a degree of people saying, you know, they're bad for the game. They, you know, oh, they stifle all of these new players. Or, oh, you know, they take all of this resources away from people who could use it. But I think that's why EVE is all-consuming.

It's a grand narrative. And you can be a legend in the game. You can quit. And years afterwards, everybody will still know about the part you played. EVE Online is a space opera. You get to be. There's nothing else where you get to feel, you know, you get to say that I was there, you know, I saw VTAC R5.

You don't read about these lore events. You make them. You make the history of the game. So you play a World of Warcraft, for example, you don't really affect the game. You don't really have anything other than your account where you go and you shoot this or shoot that right but in eve even the smallest person can affect the game even the smallest person can affect someone like my game the the people who think that they aren't they aren't special in another game you can be truly special in eve i like i know the mechanics of the game like the other side of my hand.

And whenever I talk to a new player, I'm like, do you have any mechanics questions? They're like, no, no, no, I don't care about that. Tell me what happened in this war like a few years ago because you were there and I want to hear about it. Yeah, it's totally like a grandpa, what did you do during the war kind of question. There's something that you literally couldn't make it up even if you tried just because it's real life.

Sort of. I mean, the sense of loss feels real. When you lose something in Eve alongside someone else, they know, because they play the game with you, they know what it would be like for them to lose it. And so they understand the sacrifices that you make in Eve and what you lose in Eve. The friendships are very real. The friends I have in Eve, I would say that some of them are even closer than my family. I have forged some of the greatest friendships

in my life from Eve Online. And the adrenaline rush is real. The first time you get into a fight and you're done, and for 20 minutes after you're done, your hands are still shaking from the adrenaline rush that you got from that fight, you'll know what I'm 20 minutes after you're done, your hands are still shaking from the adrenaline rush that you got from that fight,

you'll know what I'm talking about. In the end, I think that Eve allows players to experience something people have fantasized about since the beginning of civilization. The glory of war. But a very particular kind of war. Where you can be the victor in a grand conflict. Which is interesting, because there's a much more popular video game out there, Call of Duty, where you experience the

gritty, gory reality of war. You don't know what's going on. All you know is you have to kill the people trying to shoot you. Now in EVE, you do get to experience the pain and gain of serving in combat. But it's a war that feels like it matters, where you understand the politics very clearly, Now, in Eve, you do get to experience the pain and gain of serving in combat. But it's a war that feels like it matters, where you understand the politics very clearly and why you're fighting. And at the end of the day, or when the sun comes up, you can turn off your computer and go back to real life, mostly unscarred. in this episode, but I loved hearing your war stories. And if you'd like to learn more about Eve,

there's a lot of really interesting videos on YouTube of speakers at their fan fests in Iceland or Las Vegas, and that includes economists and sociologists who study Eve because it is the perfect test subject group. Imaginary Worlds is part of the PandaPlay Network. You can like the show on Facebook, and I tweeted E. Malinsky. If you really like the show, please put a good word in in iTunes.

It helps people find it. And you can also support the show by clicking the donate button on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you.