Last week, the largest heist in the 20-year history of the MMORPG EVE Online took place. A player shamelessly betrayed his alliance, of which he had been a part for 10 years. He stole a fortune and destroyed valuable clones. Even the developers of EVE want to know: “Why?”
The heist in EVE Online in short: We reported on the heist on MeinMMO on November 16:
- Player Jay Amazingness returned to his alliance Goonswarm after a break and because he was friends with the leader and in private contact with him, the leader gave him back his position of power. The leader said he trusted Jay Amazingness more than anyone else in EVE Online.
- However, the player exploited the trust placed in him and betrayed his alliance: He emptied their coffers and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. Additionally, he sabotaged the station and doomed over 52,000 strategically important jump clones to death.
- Only a server downtime could prevent the worst and save 70% of the marked clones from destruction, but the player had made off with a huge fortune and joined the enemies of his alliance, the Pandemic Legion. The leader of Goonswarm, his friend, was in disbelief and did not understand why he was so betrayed. There had been no signs that the player was unhappy and planning such a betrayal.
The heist took place in direct connection with the new expansion “Havoc”:
Traitor celebrates his heist
This is known now: Meanwhile, Jay Amazingness, the thief, has released a video on YouTube of his heist, and it is clear that he made loot worth billions of ISK there, including actually stealing valuable blueprints.
The exact loot remained unknown after the heist. Because Goonswarm had an interest in downplaying the heist so as not to appear weak and vulnerable. But the video now shows that the alliance suffered a significant setback and lost many resources in one go.
It is now also clear that the theft was not the act of a “lone perpetrator”, but that the coup was actually orchestrated with the knowledge of the Pandemic Legion, the enemies of Goonswarm.
Traitor had long-time friends in the enemy alliance, wanted to join
This is what the other side says: From the Pandemic Legion, it’s said that Jay had long-time friends in the alliance and that they had been preparing the coup against the enemies of Goonswarm for months. When it became clear that Jay wanted to join the Pandemic Legion, they considered how they could make that happen. However, they did not want to reveal how involved the Pandemic Legion was in the heist.
They are also a bit cheeky at Pandemic Legion: One of their leaders says they sold a valuable ship, a titan, back to Goonswarm, as mmorpg.com reports.
Pandemic Legion even had the nerve to write a support ticket to the developers CCP, asking them to retroactively destroy all 52,000 clones, as their destruction had only been stopped by the server downtime. But CCP rejected that.
A server downtime is just a fact of life in EVE Online that one has to deal with. It has always been that way, the developers said.
This is how the developers react: Even the developers, CCP themselves, were astonished at what was happening in their MMORPG. One of the developers, Peter “CCP Swift” Ferrell, said in an interview with mmorpg.com:
“It was totally insane. So we go into downtime, and it’s just before lunchtime. We do our stand-up around that time. And then I see screenshots popping up everywhere, and I think: This can’t be real.”
The team then tried to find out what was going on and used their own tools to investigate what had happened: They quickly saw that more was at stake than just the 52,000 clones.
CCP Swift then contacted the players, the leader of the Goonswarm alliance, and also Jay Amazingness, to find out what had happened. But they didn’t even want to explain to him what the exact motivation behind the betrayal was.
So far, the motivation behind the fraud remains a mystery to the thief.
Even the leader of the Pandemic Legion says that this story must be told by Jay himself. But it looks like he played a double game. And staged his switch to the rival alliance so dramatically that everyone in the game noticed it.
This whole thing is also significant because Goonswarm is normally the alliance that cheats. But here, on the other side, was a “This is EVE” story.
More about betrayal in EVE Online:
In 1 hour, he lost everything he had built in 14 years of EVE Online
