The extremely aggressive Drifters have hatched a new, nasty plan in EVE Online. This time it targets player communication – and that could really have bad consequences.
What are the Drifters up to now? Recently, the aggressive Drifters from EVE Online are also attacking communication channels. CCP announced this in a short clip in the form of a news broadcast in EVE Online itself.
This announcement is not just fluff. It has real consequences. The latest devilry from the marauding NPCs will disrupt all chat channels in Null Sector, that is, in player-controlled spaces.
This means that at some point within the next week, they will no longer be able to use chat. And this will cause more chaos than it sounds at first.
This is how EVE plunges into chaos
Why chat is important: Until now, chat in EVE Online mainly served as the anchor for social interaction between players, on which the entire game is built. Players used chat for:
- Communication for huge wars
- Reconnaissance
- Exchange
- and social purposes such as trading
Additionally, especially large alliances have used chat as a kind of alarm system. New players automatically appear in chat, which means their intrusion into a sector can be sent as a warning to all alliance members through bots.
If chat goes down now, this alarm is also absent and both players and Drifters can invade foreign territories unnoticed and start sowing destruction before they are even discovered.
What else are the Drifters up to? Since they appeared, the Drifters have been a plague for players. Originally, they were a largely neutral NPC race that was occasionally teased but never really fought back.
Since their first attack, they have become increasingly aggressive. They destroyed structures and even killed pilots in their escape pods. They have been troubling even the largest alliances since they have attacked unpredictably and suddenly.
After players tried to fight back with a trade embargo against the developers who brought them the NPCs, the Drifters reacted even more aggressively. Their lethality has reportedly increased more than a hundredfold. And now they seem to be getting even more dangerous.
The Drifters’ goal is apparently total control over the sector. Their development so far has become increasingly grandiose. Where will it possibly end?
