This is for all you 'hardcore' WoWers out there, who think their T6 gear makes them good MMO players. Let's examine...

WoW: Hyjal/Black Temple/SSC- Meet at the Meeting Stone with two people, start summoning. Have 23 other people at the entrance of the instance in less then 5 minutes. Bring about 50 gold in items. End instance in maybe 4 hours. Assured you will get 3 or 4 pieces of loot, everyone gets some money, greens and maybe a blue and purple trash drop might drop. A token shall drop that allows the person to obtain it to pick and choose which piece of armor they want from a NPC.

FFXI: Dynamis/Einhajar/Salvage- 6 to 18 to 48 people must be on time at one location they have to travel on foot to, or via teleportation nodes that require XP and/or money to purchase. There is no summoning. Buy your Reraise items for 100,000 gil, Shihei for 30,000 for a night, assorted medicines for another 30,000-50,000 for entry fee, or spend a hour's worth of Assault points taken away from using towards your Assault gear, and still have to do Assault to enter, which is more money spent, then you can experience a 'instance' when everyone arrives, where you have no assured chance of anything dropping. At least one person has to die repeatedly for sacrifice pulls that cost them to lose XP, any 'token' you get lucky enough to receive, you have to random against 6-48 other people that might want them as well, with one to three tokens dropping a night, if any for that month, and you still need 10 of these plus another 2 million gil just to purchase one piece from a NPC, if you don't need a abjuration from a 18-man God first.

WoW: PVP- PVP is integral to WoW. It's a conflict game. You can fight in the field if you want, and you suffer no XP or gear loss to die to another player. You can also duel if you wish at any place outside a major city. Battlegrounds are just a queue away, with the ability to teleport you to the BG as soon as it's ready, with objective-based battles, Honor, and mark rewards for participating that...

family and everything, I know you wouldn't do something like that. So what's up? Why does it say "Character Doesn't Exist" when I try to send you messages in Eve?

Nightfreeze: Hello friend! I'm gonna write something, so tell me, are you reading closely?

HardHead: Yeah. What is it?

Nightfreeze: I just scammed the ~censored~ out of you.

Hardhead: ......

HardHead: But why? Why would you do something like this? I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS.

HardHead: Hell man, I LOANED YOU MONEY. I just don't understand, how could you DO THIS TO ME?

HardHead: Jesus Christ... I don't even know how to respond... I hate to say it, but man, I'm almost crying right now.

HardHead: I don't think I'll ever be able to trust another person again. Thanks man. Thanks.

*HardHead Logs Off*

There was nothing left for me in the barren wasteland of online chatting. I followed HardHead's example, and dismissed myself for the night.

My eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. Sunshine streamed through the window, and the shackles of duty slowly began to fall with each gradual upward movement of my torso. I leapt out of bed and stood straight, high, free! Eve was nothing more than a faded memory to me now; the world was calling me, and my soul was leaping at the call, to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

"ENOUGH OF THIS DAMNED GAME!!" I shouted, my booming voice causing a freshly awoken dog to begin howling at the day. I jogged to my computer and started Eve Online. I flew my starter ship out to the closest asteroid field and struck up a conversation with a player named Frosttt.

Me: Hi. What would you say if I were to offer you 300 million isk?

Frosttt: id say it was pretty kool lol

I wired the credits to him and logged off.

I never logged back in again.

By Nightfreeze

it to find out who was browsing for erotica. If somebody was ballsy enough to pick up, I would direct them towards the S&M book. The one where the first page describes, in detail, a man having his penis torn off. That book was later removed or stolen, I shall never know which, but I never thought back then that my childhood antics would serve me in the future. I knew exactly what I was going to do.

11:45 AM rolled around, and I put on my running shoes and shorts. I stretched my feeble joints for 10 minutes, hoping that my limbs would remember their glory days of running cross country and revitalize themselves. It was time.

I logged onto AIM, and Thoggins messaged me immediately.

Thoggins: You're a minute late. Now, what's your phone number? I need to have it before I go through with this.

Nightfreeze: I can totally understand that . Can you wait 5 minutes before calling though? The only phone in our house is in the kitchen, and I figure that as long as I'm in the ol' Food Kingdom, I would fix myself up a snack.

Thoggins: Uh... Okay, whatever, I'll call in 5 minutes. What's the number?

Nightfreeze: [Library Number]. Remember, 5 minutes, I might not pick up if you call before then because I'll be too busy making my food. Talk to ya then

I logged off AIM and ran like a starving coyote chasing down his dinner. I ran like Steve Prefontaine if he had had a second chance with the grim reaper to run home drunk instead of drive, the only condition being that he would have to make it back before the car did. I ran like a brotha running from the police.

I arrived in front of the building with 3 minutes to spare, vigorously gasping for air. But I wasn't done yet. I would have to make my way through the complex armed only with my wits and my deadly kung-fu grip, avoiding librarians through deception and misdirection, lest they foil the scheme I had worked on for so many hours. I walked through the double doors, with 1 minute and 57 seconds on the clock.

The female receptionist spotted me the moment I...

I pondered this query for more than a few seconds. It was the $64000 question, and the wrong answer would lead to heartache and waste. Finally, I responded.

"I remember reading a story once about this guy who worked as an attorney during the summer, right after he graduated from law school. He was working in the California area, and all the law firms there had reached an agreement to pay the law students $500 less per week than they normally would have. This guy somehow found out about the dastardly pay he would be receiving, and created a bunch of accounts on AOL. He posted in the California lawyer forums and started a huge flame war with himself; he used the various accounts to argue both sides of the issue, and changed up his writing style for each account name. He dragged other, real people into this flame war, and the controversy became so great that the law firms eventually gave in and raised the pay back to its normal level."

"Interesting... Very interesting. So what do you think we should do?"

"We're gonna go undercover, man, like the ~censored~ CIA. And we're gonna hype the hell out of this investment deal on every Eve forum that was ever made. And we're gonna do it using hotmail accounts for our registration email addresses, so I suggest that you get out a legal pad and start coming up with hotmail account names and passwords. I'm personally gonna register 25 hotmail accounts tonight, and I hope you do the same. I'll call you back tomorrow, and we'll start posting like a couple crack whores on crack."

"Crack whores on crack? What the ~censored~ does that mean?"

"Never mind. Go and start registering dude," I responded. I hung up the phone and got to work.


Part 8


And so we worked, like a couple of crack whores on crack. We hit just about every message board related to Eve, and we hit them hard, using the newly created accounts to question our main accounts about just why somebody should invest in our little scam. Our two main accounts would...

"WHAT THE ~censored~?" I slammed my finger into the MWD hotkey again; this must be some sort of joke, some temporary bug in the game.

"Your ship does not have a sufficient amount of energy to use that."

The bullets from his machinegun pinged off my shields, doing considerably damage, and I knew it was only a matter of time. I watched in terror and heartache as my ship slowly cruised towards the warp gate; each bullet into its side was like a cut into my heart. I was carrying 30 million credits worth of goods, and I was NOT going to let those goods be destroyed. My only hope was to try and enter hyperspace, try and get away, try ANYTHING to recover my money. But alas, a moment before my finger stroked the hyper-drive hotkey, his ECM ray drained my ship of its energy. I messaged Lando, desperate for survival.

"I'll give you 5 million credits if you let me go. PLEASE MAN."

He responded with a dual-volley of Phalanx Rockets. My formidably armored industrial ship was now on fire, each lick graphical lick of flame consuming the last vestiges of my morning optimism. I was dead now, and I knew it. I force-ejected from my ship, hoping that he wouldn't destroy it if it was unoccupied. My pod hovered in space, like a small child seperated from its parent. I jammed my finger into the hyperspace key, and moments later, I blasted off into the stars. By the time I was tens of kilometers away, I saw a small speck of light in the galactic horizon. The ~censored~ had destroyed my ship.

I wasted no time in calling Trazir on the phone. A few days earlier, he had purchased a cruiser of his own, one that I knew was just as powerful or even more powerful than my own. It was an Amarr Maller, a ship with more combat slots on it than a ~censored~ space station. He told me that the purchasing price was 40 million, so I knew that unless he got ripped the ~censored~ off, which was quite possible for him, each of those slots possessed a piece of ordnance capable of ending a star system. I flew back to...

I drove home like a maniac that day, darting in and out of traffic and speeding through crowded city intersections. I sprinted to my computer and started Eve, my heart warming at the gentle glow of the galaxy sun. I netted about 1.5 million more credits by 7 PM, when HardHead logged on. He wasted no time in messaging me.

HH: "Hey dood, how's it going? How's the financial situation?"

Me: "Pretty ~censored~ awesome, I've made 5 million credits so far."

HH: "Are you kidding me? Jesus Christ that's a lot, can I have my money

back?"

Me: "Sure. I'll give you a million extra too, just as promised."

HardHead logged in, and I wired him 4 million credits. His trust in me was now firmly established, and I got back to work, doing what I did best, running trade routes. During this time, Trazir ~censored~ and moaned, asking me to wire him money so that he too could start doing trade routes. He even called me up a few times, asking for virtual money. I eventually gave in and sent him a million just to shut him up. By the time I went to sleep that night, having made an additional 500k by whoring large amounts of cheap items through safe areas, I knew that my virtual life had changed forever.

Over the next two weeks, I traded harder than a Chinaman in a flea market. Trazir even joined in, but since he was too lazy to wake up early in the morning, he would be lucky on his best days to make half what I made on my worst days. During this time, HardHead told me about how he had moved on to actually writing scripts for the game so that he could find and mine the very rarest of asteroids with ease. I also became a master of blasting off with my MWDs the second any hostiles showed up near a warp gate, and while there were a few close calls, nothing ever rivalled my experience with Dethbringer. By the end of this period, I was worth close to 85 million credits, and Trazir was near 30 million. I felt like a ~censored~ space tycoon, a financial juggernaut, ready to expand my realm of...

Part 1


This is a story of deception, intrigue, and doublecrossing. It is a story of liars, bandits, and greed. It is a story of the worst of the human condition, and how the motive for profit will drive a normally nice guy to the deepest depths of evil and betrayal.

This is the story of my life in Eve Online.

Eve Online is a space-based MMORPG with a level of depth and breadth that blows games like Shadowbane and City of Heroes out of the water. It is also a beautiful game, with glaring suns, shining stars, and exorbitant ship detail. Beneath its gilded beauty, though, there lies a poorly designed game which rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking and honest; and if you think about it, that's a good representation of capitalism. I first started playing Eve a few weeks before it came out, in April 2003, and quickly picked up the essentials of the game. This would prove invaluable later on, since Eve was released with a money-making loophole that gave me the opportunity to make the starting capital I would need to successfully pull off what was probably the biggest scam in the game.

Unfortunately, in order to reach the point where you can revel in a deep and absorbing level of gampelay, you need to have credits. Lots and lots of credits. And you couldn't easily get credits by killing NPC enemies, or "pirates" as the game designers labeled them, because these pirates would either spawn in huge overpowered groups capable of ganking even the best equipped mid-level ships in under a second, or they would spawn so far apart and drop such ~love~ loot that the idea of killing them for profit was ridiculous.

Since crafting was never really my style, building ships and then selling them was out of the question. This left me with two options: I could run trade routes, or I could mine asteroids.

The entire concept of mining in Eve consists of pressing Ctrl + F, finding an asteroid, then auto piloting your ship over to it and watching little pebbles of rock float into your ship from...