As most longtime MMO players know, leaders going AFK for extended periods can result in all kinds of shenanigans in player organizations behind their backs. I’ve seen whole cities and guilds – and their vaults of valuables – snatched away by sneaky members through stealthy votes, putting whole communities in uproar when it happens, to the point that some MMOs forbid it outright.
But all of that is exactly what happened in yet another EVE Online heist, as chronicled by Ars Technica this week. A player who goes by the name Flam_Hill says he and a friend on clean accounts purchased shares in a corporation with semi-dormant leadership and then joined it, after which they simply used the game mechanics to start an open vote for a new CEO. Nobody noticed, and three days later, they were the captain now. The duo wound up stealing 130B ISK and assets worth another 2T more; supposedly, the value of all of this is over $22,000 US, though selling it for actual cash is tricky.
As Ars speculates, the number of shares Flam needed to pull off this heist strongly hints that he didn’t pick this corporation at random and in fact might have been one of its original founders who was “silently sitting on those initial shares for years.” The player apparently hasn’t denied it. Whether that changes your opinion of the quality of the heist probably depends on whether you agree this one ought to be binned under “this is why we can’t have nice things.”
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