Scorpius Scar
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Posted - 2008.03.06 18:54:00 -
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Edited by: Scorpius Scar on 06/03/2008 18:55:23
Edited by: Scorpius Scar on 06/03/2008 18:54:53
CCP = BOB = GOONS = GRIEFERS
Consider the case of the Avatar class Titan, flown by the Band of Brothers Guild in the massively multiplayer deep-space EVE Online. The vessel was far bigger and far deadlier than any other in the game. Kilometers in length and well over a million metric tons unloaded, it had never once been destroyed in combat. Only a handful of player alliances had ever acquired a Titan, and this one, in particular, had cost the players who bankrolled it in-game resources worth more than $10,000.
So, naturally, Commander Sesfan Qu'lah, chief executive of the GoonFleet Corporation and leader of the greater GoonSwarm Alliance ù better known outside EVE as Isaiah Houston, senior and medieval-history major at Penn State University ù led a Something Awful invasion force to attack and destroy it.
"EVE was designed to be a cold, hard, unforgiving world," explains EVE producer Sfgurlina Ingvarsd=ttir. It's this attitude that has made EVE uniquely congenial for Goons.
"The ability to inflict that huge amount of actual, real-life damage on someone is amazingly satisfying" says Houston. "The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don't come back."
And the only way to make someone that miserable is to destroy whatever virtual thing they've sunk the most real time, real money, and, above all, real emotion into. Find the player who's flying the biggest, baddest spaceship and paid for it with the proceeds of hundreds of hours mining asteroids, then blow that spaceship up. "That's his life investment right there," Houston says.
The Goons, on the other hand, fly cheap little frigates into battle, get blown up, go grab another ship, and jump back into the fight. Their motto: "We choke the guns of our enemies with our corpses." Some other players consider the tactic a less-than-sporting end run around a fair fight, still others call it an outright technical exploit, designed to lag the server so the enemy can't move in reinforcements.
Either way, it works, and the success just adds force to GoonFleet's true secret weapon: morale. "EVE is the only game I can think of in which morale is an actual quantifiable source of success," Houston says. "It's impossible to make another person stop playing or quit the game unless their spirit is, you know, crushed." And what makes the Goons' spirit ultimately uncrushable is knowing, in the end, that they're actually playing a different game altogether. As one GoonFleet member's online profile declared, "You may be playing EVE Online, but be warned: We are playing Something Awful."
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-02/mf_goons?currentPage=all
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