“I am thus optimistic that historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs—and with profit to our own society today, by teaching us what shaped the modern world, and what might shape our future.”
–Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
THE STORY OF EVE Online is the story of hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, lived digitally within one of the most complex and dynamic virtual social spaces ever built.
EVE represents the extreme of what you can experience in an online game. It’s the edge of online exploration; a social space where many gamers are legitimately afraid to go because it has been largely unmoderated for most of its history. Step through EVE’s login portal, and you’ll find unfiltered humanity, in all its splendor and unexpected brilliance, but also its ugliness and sinister genius.
“It’s like real life, but without rules,” said Sort Dragon. “For the last 12 or 13 years I’ve been a leader in 0.0, and it’s a very interesting insight into people’s psyche, and how they are as people and what they believe in. You meet some very interesting people. When you take away the need to conform to rules they enjoy themselves a lot more, and you get to see into the deep dark soul of them.”
By refusing to put limits on what players can do to seek advantage over other players, EVE allows its players to use their ingenuity to build human networks, solve problems, and create systems. These are some of humanity’s greatest tools, and EVE engages with them at scales no other video game ever has. However, those same tools can be turned for evil purposes.
The boundless room for human ingenuity results in a unique darkness balanced by a profound bonding among those trying to save a light from that darkness.
But the darkness remains. Complete freedom on the internet is a wish upon a monkey’s paw, and it inevitably comes with devastating drawbacks. Humanity is all its own worst horrors. In any given virtual population, some people’s goal will be to hurt other players. Their goal might even be to hurt a specific player.
EVOLUTION
Death and loss are at the center of EVE’s gameplay design. This is true in some other games as well, but because of the way EVE is structured this also applies to player organizations.
Human social networks have always been the most successful tool in EVE, and that also means they are the number one threat to other player groups and the first thing to be targeted in a conflict. It didn’t take long for EVE’s players to begin looking into the human history of espionage to learn how to use spies and propaganda tactics that might help break a rival group’s morale and social bond. Unfortunately, that impulse has also led to some players taking things too far and either threatening others in real life or revealing their personal information to the online masses.
The true game of EVE is a meta-game that exists outside the virtual realm, largely on chat servers and community platforms, and that is a wild, occasionally dangerous space that CCP has never figured out how to police.
“There are things that did cross the line,” said ProGodLegend about the espionage underbelly of the game. “EVE is weird in that there’s a grey area when it comes to spying and counter-intelligence. There’s a lot of IP tracking, a lot of cookie tracking. There’s some stuff that a lot of people would frown upon in just about any other situation but EVE Online. […] I am slightly worried. I have a well known name in EVE, and there’s a tiny tiny little portion of people in the EVE community who will take things too far. There’s some crazy people out there, and it does worry me. But it’s a minor worry. Not enough to keep me from [the game.]”
While there are beautiful sides of EVE that I’ve had to leave unexplored in this book, there are also ugly ones. For example, I’ve tried when possible to highlight women’s stories within EVE, but the truth is that they are devastatingly few, especially in nullsec. The total player population is not even 5% women, and the reason isn’t hard to figure out if you speak to enough players. Every woman I spoke to for this book told me stories of being harrassed and targeted by other players, and sometimes horrifically so. Even for the internet. The vast majority of them choose to leave EVE, and the community is incalculably poorer for it. The women who encounter this treatment and stay a part of the EVE community tend to be utterly unique people who manage to fight past harassment by sheer force of personality. One of the women mentioned in this book was a miniature donkey rancher in the real world who hunted the hilly forests of Virginia from the back of her mule. Another was a scientist who operated a nuclear reactor during the day and led fleets by night.
“I love me some EVE players,” the miniature donkey rancher/infamous low-sec pirate lord told me. “But there are some assholes in this game.” (Emphasis hers.)
They all told me some version of the same story: one day some jerks started harassing them, and they decided they wouldn’t be pushed around anymore. They told me stories of crushing their enemies, and coming to love that feeling.
Sometimes they have to go to extreme lengths to do it, but the results can be spectacular. To my knowledge, in the history of online gaming nobody has ever gotten owned harder than the turds who doxxed Greygal, a fleet commander, newbie mentor, and community leader in high-sec. In the real world, she’s a 55-year-old woman from the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, and she wasn’t about to get pushed around by some internet shitlords. So she tracked their IP numbers, found out where they lived, called their local sheriff, and as part of the plea agreement demanded that they write her a handwritten note of apology. Which they did. She still has the letters. Not every story has justice at its conclusion though. In fact, most didn’t, and it has been a powerful force in shaping the structure of the game and its community over the years.
POWER
Because EVE provides mechanics for exercising power over other players and other groups there exists a sort of social evolution that sculpts the community through time in all sorts of ways. The fight to collect power and stave off that evolution creates ever more complicated and capable organizations out of those who remain in the game. Organizations that provide more fun, more gain for their members, and more cultural connectedness tend to prosper and will often destroy or subdue less organized groups that they perceive threaten their goals.
That also creates a sense of urgency to avoid defeat because the punishment is the destruction of your community, and so some players will go to extreme lengths to win.
On the broad scale, the study of EVE is the study of a human social ecosystem in which social groups are planted, grow up, compete in their environment, and fertilize the soil for the next generation of social groups. Player groups amass a great deal of institutional knowledge through their successes and failures. When a group falls apart, its former members emerge as more confident and skilled leaders. They often take up leadership roles again in the future, and apply the lessons learned from the death of their previous organization to strengthening the new one. All toward the purpose of staving off that simple truth: Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.
When the game first launched in 2003 the largest groups numbered in the dozens and low hundreds. Today their ranks are literally legion, with numerous groups surpassing a thousand members, and the very largest numbering in the tens of thousands. Each of them are the most recent link in a chain of failed predecessors stretching back to 2003.
The big question that has hung over EVE for its entire existence is whether the social system of the game is an infinite conflict continuum or if it will eventually produce a winner whose control over EVE will be so absolute that the game breaks and the social community suffocates.
SERENITY
The only corollary to the history of the EVE Online Tranquility server cluster is that of its sister server, Serenity, home to the Chinese community. However, that story is a cautionary tale. I’ve never done a report into the events of the Serenity server, but official reports from CCP Games say it has been ruled by an overwhelmingly powerful alliance known as the Pan-Intergalactic Business Community and its ally “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (3V) since 2009. The leaders of the two coalitions are known to be close real life friends from the city of Chengdu.
There were other large alliances on the server but none that could meaningfully challenge its dominance, including “City of Angels,” an alliance run by a woman who had named her character the phrase “Everyone Log Off Now” in Mandarin so that enemy fleet commanders who targeted her would have to say to their fleet “Target Everyone Log Off Now!” In 2013–roughly parallel to the events of the Halloween War but in the opposite time zone—the alliances RAC, City of Angels, and the Fadeklein Alliance tried to negotiate with the dominant PIBC for access to some backwater territory, but PIBC refused. Later, an audiolog was leaked to the community in which one of the leaders of the PIBC admitted that the purpose of the refusal was to choke off the last of the resistance to the PIBC/3V coalition.
The opposing alliances—the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th largest groups on Serenity—came together with a splinter organization of defected PIBC pilots and tried to take on the behemoth of Serenity. The assault failed, and culminated in what became known as the Slaughterhouse at 49-U6U. On March 25, 2014, the two coalitions fought a 21-hour battle eerily reminiscent of the one at B-R5RB. Though it was interrupted by two server crashes, the PIBC/3V coalition emerged even more dominant than the ClusterFuck Coalition had. The toll of the battle eclipsed even that of B-R5RB as 84 Titans were destroyed—69 of them by PIBC/3V.
“Someone tried to defect, it didn’t go well, and PIBC crushed them,” said Duo Ye, who was a producer at EVE Online’s Chinese operator at the time, an online gaming company called Tiancity, speaking to the gaming website RockPaperShotgun.com. “Everyone is wondering now whether PIBC is so big that it’s just mopping up the rest of the map and becoming the only viable alliance, but I would say not from what I see. Yes there are consequences, for example one of the losing alliances paid a heavy amount of ISK to regain friendship with PIBC.”
On Serenity, a similar monument to the one that was created to honor B-R5RB instead stands in 49-U6U. In subsequent years, the PIBC’s grip on power only strengthened. It’s one of the reasons why in late 2013, an alliance called “Fraternity.” was created on the Tranquility server. Fraternity was a home on Tranquility for Chinese players who no longer wanted to play on the Serenity server, crushed as it was by hyper-inflation of the currency and the dominance of a super coalition. During the battle at B-R5RB there were already 1500 Chinese players using VPNs to play on Tranquility as part of Fraternity. Though it was a niche alliance for several years, Fraternity’s membership skyrocketed in 2018 and early 2019 reaching 12,000 players, one of the largest alliances on the modern Tranquility server. Events on the Serenity server may one day be seen as crucial forces that affected the history of Tranquility. Meanwhile, the situation on Serenity rapidly degraded. Throughout 2018 and 2019 the server was on something akin to life support often seeing fewer than 700 players online even at peak hours.
The EVE community is once again faced with the opportunity and the challenge of cultural fusion. In the past it’s collision with the Russian community was fraught with stereotyping and name-calling. Today, with the benefit of history, it’s clear that the EVE Online community has been greatly strengthened by the contributions of its Russian and Ukrainian players throughout the decades. It remains to be seen whether modern generations of players will be able to learn from history and avoid the mistakes of their predecessors. It’s worth noting that the core of the ClusterFuck Coalition never would have achieved its station at the top of EVE and become The Imperium had it not been through frequent collaboration and integration with the Russian community. The future of EVE will belong to those who understand its past, while successfully collaborating with new and emerging cultures on Tranquility.
However, at times the reaction of established players on Tranquility has been a mirror of ignorance in the real world with a loud minority of players sneering that Chinese players on Tranquility should go back and fix their own server before they ruin Tranquility too. With cultures colliding in the real world as well, I would urge those people to consider how precious and rare an opportunity a game such as EVE is to engage in acts of civility en masse with members of other cultures. Never before have human beings had a communication tool—a meeting ground for common people—such as EVE and other modern video games and virtual worlds. Even now, history is marking how we use them.
THE MODERN ERA
The modern era of EVE has proved no less fascinating than the eras of Empires of EVE: Volume 1 & 2. Though our story ends here—for the moment—the era that follows is perhaps EVE’s most fascinating epoch yet, and tells the story of a secret plot to destroy The Imperium which sparked a mass community rebellion. The legacy of this famed event is still playing out, and the fight to control how it is viewed continues.
The story of Tranquility is continuing to develop even after CCP Games was purchased by South Korean gaming company Pearl Abyss in September 2018 for $425 million. Though proclamations of EVE’s imminent demise have resounded since the earliest days, EVE ultimately shows no true sign of stopping any time soon. During the writing of this book EVE celebrated its 17th anniversary and seems poised to soon leave its teenage years behind.
The story of EVE may go on for quite some time. And if it does then we’ll get new perspective into the game, identifying larger epochs and gaining a higher understanding of how digital human social systems evolve throughout time. Whatever happens, we’ll learn something about what awaits humanity in its digital future.
Whether that future is a “Pan-Intergalactic Business Community” of Tranquility’s own, or if the many wars described in these books will continue on forever, either would be equally fitting for a cold, dark, and harsh world.