How Eve Players Pulled Off the Biggest Betrayal in Its History

Eve is a space based MMORPG. Players are pilots of single player space-ships, though it's more point and click than flight sim. There are multiple categories of ships, from small and fast, right on up to capital ships (think aircraft carrier or bigger.) Ship prices range from peanuts through to "more than you could earn solo in your lifetime".

Players typically earn in-game money (ISK) through mining asteroid belts, manufacturing, trading, "ratting" (shooting NPC pirate ships), running missions, and wormholeing (that one is more complicated to describe)

There's a whole complicated economy built up in game (at one point the developers had a full time economics professor working for them, not sure if he's still there). Raw materials from mining get manufactured by players in game from blueprints into ships, weapons, modules etc that the players need to fight or mine or whatever. The regular destruction of personal property helps drive the economy.

Eve is set in a great big galaxy, made up of thousands of solar systems.

These solar systems are have different security ratings, stretching from 1.0 to 0.0. The higher the security rating, the stronger the presence of the in-game NPC police force (CONCORD).

If you shoot another player character in anywhere but 0.0 space, you'll earn fines at the very least and in the worst case be blasted out of the sky by CONCORD ships. As such 1.0 is pretty safe space. You can largely do what you want, as long as you're not outright violent to other players. It's mostly safe to fly solo in your trade ship without having someone around as a wingman.

The safe space makes up the central core of the galaxy. Generally speaking, as you move away from the core the security rating drops.

The larger majority of space is 0.0. This is where basically anything goes. No rules, but what you make and enforce yourself. It depends on who you speak to, but almost everyone who has ever spent time playing in 0.0 space will tell you that it's there that the real game takes place. It's almost impossible to survive in 0.0 space flying solo.

Players form corporations (guilds in typical MMORPG parlance) together, to co-ordinate and organise themselves. Then, above those, groups of corporations can form Alliances. Working together, they can hold territory in 0.0 space. Out in 0.0 space you'll still find space stations and the like, with hangers you store your equipment in, refit ships etc. Both alliances and corporations have their own hangers, and wallets, access to which is controlled.

Originally alliance territory used to be an informal notion. Wherever an alliance had ships and could fight off other alliances, that was their territory. Then CCP (the developers) introduced the sovereignty mechanism, which more formalises that concept. Alliances can actually own space, and now fights between alliances also include stripping sovereignty of space from them. Alliances can also choose to make space stations for their players to use.

Different alliances take different organisation structures, but the benevolent dictator / military dictator / corporation approach tends to be the most effective. Democracies don't tend to be able to react fast enough to survive. Within those structures players can be given authorities.

Hopefully that's a fair overview of the game. There's safe space (1.0) and dangerous space (0.0). The game is largely a sandbox, in which you can do what you like. The number of actual rules is pretty small. It's up to players to build what they want in that sandbox.

Wherever you get two or more people, politics comes in to play. The game is in constant flux for players in 0.0 space as alliances wax and wane, agreements between them change for various reasons and so on and so forth.

The Judge was the senior diplomat for one alliance, CO2. After constantly having his hard work destroyed and crapped on over and over again, under what he sees as an increasingly erratic or volatile leader, got tired of it and decided to defect in spectacular fashion.

The game, despite having few rules, is quite complicated. CCP decided that it would help to have an elected set of players act as representatives for the player base in general, called the CSM. Future changes to the game are discussed and debated with people in the CSM, all covered under an NDA. They meet a few times a year in Iceland (where CCP is based).

While players were there, stuff started happening in game. Fights broke out, mutual defence pacts between alliances and corporations started getting invoked. From The Judge's perspective, the leader of his alliance continued to be erratic and destroy his hard work and he'd about had enough. People present at the CSM persuaded him to defect, and he agreed.

As a senior person within the alliance, he had high level access to all assets, space stations etc. When he defected he transferred basically everything the alliance had over to another alliance. That would include all docked capital ships, all money etc. Players own personal hangers would be safe, as would the assets contained in them.

This is where a third alliance comes in to play. They saw what was going down, and despite not really liking either of the alliances involved, they particularly disliked CO2, and wanted to see them destroyed. They arranged a temporary truce with the alliance that Judge defected to, to allow them to travel through their space without interference so that a blockade could be set up on the space station they'd just been given by Judge.

The erratic player that had been the leader made threats to the out-of-game safety of the player of Judge, and CCP permabanned him from the game.

That basically leaves CO2 as an alliance without a leader, without assets, and likely the majority of the assets of the players stuck in a space station they can no longer get to or fly safely out of. It's arguably a dead man walking. It's possible it could come back from the dead, but the road is long and hard.