Last week we marveled at the story of one Eva online player who used the game’s arcane corporate stock voting system to take control of in-game assets worth tens of thousands of dollars. Still, as we noted at the time, there were some key questions about how mastermind “Flam_Hill” was able to secure the voting shares needed to cast a CEO vote in the first place.
Player card for Sienna d’Orion, the original CEO of Eva online‘s EHEXP. Dave/Eve online
It turns out Flam_Hill is just one alias of Dave (last name withheld), a long time Eve player who was formerly CEO of the Event Horizon Expeditionaries Corporation (EHEXP). And Dave tells Ars that his recent “hostile takeover” began as an attempt to reclaim assets from a company he thought had lost its way.
The motive
The story of Dave’s EHEXP coup goes all the way back to 2011 when he founded EHEXP under the control of his Eva online character Nikki Shea. Dave says he quickly handed over the CEO role to his “original and first” character, Sienna d’Orion.
Sienna left the company in April 2018 and appointed Dave’s friend and longtime player Mackkenzie Hawkwood as the new CEO. Crucially, however, that transfer of control of the company did not include a transfer of those 1,000 corporate voting shares, which Dave previously moved from a corporate purse to Sienna’s persona “for safety.”
By 2020, Mackkenzie had resigned as CEO of EHEXP and named character Chi Aki as the new head of the company. That’s where things stood in November 2022 when Dave said he got back into the game to find that EHEXP had “unfortunately” become part of the massive Pandemic Horde alliance.
“Eve is a game of alliances, and we play in many different ways,” Dave told Ars. “I was never a fan of Pandemic Horde, so for me it was disappointing that EHEXP had joined them.”
Dave said Sienna officially quit EHEXP in disgust just three weeks after returning. He said that at one point he reached out to company leaders via in-game messages “to say hello and ask if [Sienna] was able to recover some of her belongings left in it [the corporation].”
When that request was “greeted with silence,” Dave said he and some friends at a new company “started a discussion…about how to get these assets back. One of our new friends suggested [corporate] stocks…so we started looking into how.”
“I toyed with the idea for a week because it’s not really how I play, but I resigned myself to the view that EHEXP had run into the ground and was a shell of its former self,” Dave told PC Gamer. “So I gave… the green light to infiltrate.”
