There’s a constant thread throughout the EVE Online community that contributions, no matter how small, should be met with some measure of praise. But there’s a catch, see, EVE Online is built quite heavily on the idea of making your own fun. And if you’re not having fun where you currently are in EVE, then something has to change. And even if that change is screwing over your now-former friends and destroying Trillions of ISK, it’s still encouraged. This mentality of valuing your teammates because they might stab you in the back is so common that CCP even made multiple trailers built upon an idea that essentially boils down to the twisted intersection between Self-Determination Theory and The Butterfly Effect. Here’s a few of those trailers to demonstrate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq2oxt7Nrxo
So why does this kind of mentality matter in this case? Because the player who stole the assets did so not because he intended to flip sides, but simply because his corporation CEO demanded compliance from the member in question and ended up causing a cascade effect of bad consequences.
According to the player, Me of Course, Sniggerdly CEO Hedliner had been overly antagonistic about the loss of a Rorqual mining ship on the part of Me of Course. Now unbeknownst to Hedliner, the player was planning to leave PL anyway due to other circumstances, but this harsh response pushed him too far. Me of Course decided to make his departure a lot more personal, and damaging, as a result.
In the ensuing chaos, Me of Course offlined crucial infrastructure for the alliance such as Citadels and associated structures, as well as cancelling build orders on multiple Super-Capital class ships. A significant number of jump clones, some 1900 or more, were deleted from the game when cloning services were taken offline in one of the staging Citadels belonging to Pandemic Legion. This means that the ability of PL players to jump into their clones to quickly respond to a military threat has been temporarily hampered.
And before you ask, yes, Me of Course stole anything not nailed down. The final tally for stolen and destroyed assets is incalculable, but easily into the trillions of ISK in materials and industrial assets alone.
As is the case with any interpersonal drama in EVE, Reddit threads were awash in celebration, cynicism and speculation. Although intending to set the record straight, the player that pulled off the heist spoke to EVE Online news outlets and had the following to say.
“Well, what Asher posted was rather accurate as to what happened. Basically, Hedliner took it further by deciding to go back into my history and pull up every single loss that I happened to have while krabbing to try and maintain some ISK in my account, for both PLEX, ships, etc, etc.
Honestly, I was planning on quitting quietly at the end of this month (the moon I was mining was pretty much gonna be my last pull before I got dropped by Bomber’s Bar and this kicked off) because of RL obligations.
Rageliner’s go at me basically just threw me over the edge. I pretty much just said enough was enough. I had roles to steal a bunch of stuff and incidentally do a bunch of damage, so just went with it
In the end, as I only had two characters to steal things with (both my mains), I split them up between the north and south. Me of Course was in 9uy, and honestly the only thing i took was from the corp hangar there, figured it would’ve given up the gig too fast if i was sitting in the gunner seat of the fort with Hedliner in system, while Me of course was up north in a JF sitting in TRKN and a cyno char in M-O. And well…the rest is now history. TRKN jobs got cancelled—unknown how much was in there—and M-O clones got destroyed
My only regret about all of this now is that it seems that PL leadership is deciding to hold everything that I did onto one other person and basically forcing ‘em to reimburse what was destroyed (said person at this point in time is liquidating everything they have, but is extremely short) also pretty much made a deal with Hedliner, who I do hope holds up his end of the bargain to let previously mentioned person off the hook in return for everything taken.”
So let this all be a lesson to EVE Online players out there. Player autonomy and choice matters. And in a game as cut-throat as EVE, someone else will have fun at your expense if you push them too far. So instead of lashing out at a player who makes a mistake, help them to learn from that mistake, let them make their own decisions in terms of how to play the game. Not only will this make the players more engaged with the tasks in front of them, but they’re also more likely to stick around longer if they feel like their choices matter and that they’re having fun of their own volition.
