Remember that early Simpsons episode where Martin wins the student council presidency over Bart because only two students bothered to vote? Eva online recently played host to a similar situation when players took advantage of the game’s mysterious voting system to give themselves full control of an in-game company and an estimated $22,000 in in-game assets, all under the nose of absentee company executives.
How did no one notice?
User Flam_Hill explained the mechanics of the election-based heist on Reddit. The start, Flam_Hill said, was simply an outside observation of the staging area for Event Horizon Expeditionaires (EHE), a 299-member in-game venture dating back to 2011. That observation phase revealed the encouraging and crucial sign that the CEO and executives responsible resources for the maintenance of the company were “minimally active,” as Flam_Hill put it.
With that information in hand, Flam_Hill used a “very clean account with a character with a bit of history” to apply for a new membership in EHE. After weeks of waiting, company management finally logged in to run some basic social security and safety checks and approve the applications for Flam_Hill and an ally.
After their membership was approved, Flam_Hill and partner used some ownership shares in the company to vote for a new CEO. That was the start of a 72-hour voting period that publisher CCP Games says has been set “to provide the company’s directors with a response window regarding the company’s assets, in case the takeover was made with malicious intent.”
During that mandatory voting time, Flam_Hill writes that they “checked almost every waking hour to see if our plan would be discovered, but it kept moving slowly toward the final outcome.” But in all that time, apparently none of the company’s absent leadership bothered to check in and notice that a CEO vote was taking place. After three days, and with only two votes cast in the election, “we had control over the whole company,” writes Flam_Hill.
CCP games
With control established, Flam_Hill says the duo were able to drain the company’s ISK130 billion portfolio and gain control of ships and other in-game assets worth more than ISK2 trillion. While there is no official way to convert that in-game money into cash, that ISK can be sold on gray market sites or converted into tradable PLEX that players can use to avoid paying their monthly “Omega” – have to pay subscription in game.
All told, Flam_Hill estimates the true value of all those in-game assets at $22,309. Eva online Publisher CCP Games confirmed the transfer of control of the company in a statement to PC Gamer, but did not comment further on the value of the assets involved.
Shady origin
Before you sign up Eva online to explore other companies with absent leadership to exploit, note that Flam_Hill’s heist relied heavily on a previous acquisition of 1,000 EHE ownership shares, which allowed Flam_Hill to pass the 5 percent threshold to trigger the vote in the first place . Those shares are usually not easy to come by, as they represent an important vector for control and/or ownership of a company’s in-game assets.
Flam_Hill seems to be deliberately vague about how they initially acquired their shares in EHE. But the fact that Flam_Hill had 1,000 such shares may be significant since that is the number of shares created when a Eve corporation is founded for the first time. That coincidence has led to some speculation that Flam_Hill was involved in the formation of the company and sat quietly on those first shares for years (Flam_Hill has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica, but has emphatically not directly denied this in response to a Reddit comment raising the possibility).
Many companies vote over time to create new ownership shares, which could effectively dilute the value of 1,000 “founder” shares to the point where they are functionally useless. But the EHE leadership apparently hadn’t been observant enough to keep track of the voting value of these free-floating ownership shares that Flam_Hill acquired, regardless of how they were acquired.
In any case, Flam_Hill deserves credit for using an arcane corner of it Eva onlinegovernance rules to take advantage of a company with lax security and absent leadership. This robbery has certainly earned its place in the annals of Eve Online’s many spectacular crimes. Plus, it’s the kind of heist that seems to live up to the game’s reputation as “spreadsheets in space.”
