In November last year, after 13 years of requiring a paid subscription, EVE Online went free-to-play. Free accounts have some limitations, while players who pay $10/£7 a month get access to all of the game’s skills and spaceships. It was a big step for the long-running space MMO, and I ask executive producer Andie Nordgren about the decision and its impact on the game.“We put our trust in the community on the line to do it,” she says. “It took a lot of thought about how to design it and also how to communicate it. People who read our information first, about how the clone states work, they understood it and didn’t react badly.”There are two clone states in EVE Online: Alpha and Omega. Alpha is the base state for all players, granting access to New Eden and a limited selection of ships. But upgrade to Omega and you’ll get access to every ship and skill, as well as faster skill training. It’s basically a premium account.“But those people who only saw the headlines about EVE going free-to-play were like “Nooo!” Then they learned more about how it all works and were like, oh, okay, I get it now. And once people understood what it was, the community reception was actually really good.”“It’s still early days,” says CCP’s long-serving CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. “Making EVE free-to-play was just the first step. This will take years to master, and we went into it knowing that. There was some worry, and it was dangerous. But we said to ourselves: we can’t not do it just because we’re afraid. The world is changing, and we have to as well."

Pétursson notes that EVE is not, and never will be, finished. He describes it as a science experiment, and says CCP has to keep pushing it as far as they can. He also thinks of EVE not as a traditional game with a playerbase, but as a city that CCP runs, but doesn’t control every aspect of. “It’s not a country, but a city. It has citizens who pay tax and move in and out.”I suggest to Pétursson that it’s like China’s infamous Kowloon Walled City, a self-contained metropolis that was only loosely governed and developed its own complex infrastructure and politics. “That’s a great metaphor, actually,” he says. “There’s traffic jams, the toilets have to work. Running a city is not very glorious. We’re like the janitors of EVE.”“Shifting to free-to-play is everything we hoped for,” says Eðvald Ingi Gíslason, CCP’s data scientist, who’s responsible for overseeing the game’s economy, among other things. “It’s important to keep people playing, so adding a free tier helped with that. And it opened it up to a wider audience. There’s a huge market of people who don’t want to subscribe to play a game, and we’ve seen a massive boost since the change.”New players also means new money, and I ask Gíslason how the surge of new capsuleers in New Eden has affected the economy. “They’re definitely participating like anyone. Doing trading, manufacturing, etc. So it’s really helped the economy to have this extra boost of activity.”Gíslason explains that encouraging players not to settle into a comfortable routine is key to keep the economy going. “We want to shake things up,” he says. “When we see things settling down, we step in. If no wars going on for some time, and everything is stable, then we add some new gameplay to encourage players to leave their comfort zone.”EVE is notoriously difficult to get into, a fact CCP is fully aware of. “This is not a game you just suddenly decide to play,” says Nordgren. “It takes a while to get stuck in, which makes it more like a hobby. It’s like getting into cycling or golfing or something like that. You don’t immediately just get into it. You have a friend who brings you along and you try it, then maybe you consider getting your own equipment, and so on. It’s a slow process.”

“There’s a lot we can do to make it more accessible. There are lots of great activities in the game, but they can be obscure or difficult to find. Most games are much smaller in scope, but EVE does a lot of things at once.”CCP considers EVE to be more like a virtual word than a traditional game, and with something that complex there’s a lot to learn. “There are a lot of basic competencies to learn for many different activities,” says Nordgren. “And in that sense it’s like a hobby. You’re not expected to get into it straight away.”In EVE there are alliances devoted to helping new players get into the game, including EVE University and Brave Newbies. I ask Nordgren how important these are to helping CCP keep players in the game.“It’s like finding a sports club,” she says. “But we want to make the connection between players and those groups a lot better. We have a corp finder, but you have to learn to use that properly to even get started. So we could do a better job of integrating that into the game, especially for newbies.”“Solo players are important too,” says Nordgren. “It shouldn’t be required to be on comms with people. You shouldn’t have to join a corporation. It’ll never be a single-player game, because there are always people around you. We don’t want to focus on corp play at the expense of solo.”“We won’t be massively changing EVE,” says Pétursson. “But we do want to add new ways of playing it to suit different kinds of players. We also want to improve the new player experience, which we’ve already taken steps towards. But we want to improve it even more.”I ask Pétursson if the steps CCP is taking to add more variety to the game is an attempt to open it up to as many people as possible, almost to fight back against the sense that it’s a closed city dedicated to an elite playerbase.“EVE will never be a game for everyone,” he says. “It’s impractical, and it’s not really interesting. It’s a game for a certain type of gamer. I think it could be accessible to a larger number of people, but pleasing everyone is not one of our goals. The game will always be dangerous and seen as something of an outsider, which attracts a certain type of audience.”

But what about the people actually playing the game regularly? I ask Gíslason what he’s managed to discern from his studies of the data about how people spend their days in New Eden.“From our research, there are five key personas,” he says. “There’s the professional, who’s the most elite player, involved in almost everything in EVE. Manufacturing, PVP, mining, and social activity. Then there’s entrepreneur, who’s similar, but more focused on industry.”“Aggressors are what most people would consider pirates. They’re highly engaged with the game and more focused on PVP than the other personas. And social players spend most of their time interacting with their friends, and they aren’t really that active on top of that.”“And then there’s the biggest chunk of the playerbase, which are the traditional players. They’re not really seeking out  group activities. They just want to mind their own business, either in small groups or alone. They only play EVE for an hour at a time, without having to rely on the social side of things.”And traditional players are the kind most likely to have periods of high activity in EVE, then long periods of low activity. “It could be their personal life gets in the way, or they just get bored. And these players don’t really leave, they just go dormant for a while. Then they’ll come back a few months later.”Another stumbling block for a lot of players is EVE’s reputation as a challenging, slightly scary place to lead a virtual life. Stories of espionage, scammers, and piracy make it seem more intimidating than it perhaps is. I ask Pétursson if he thinks this makes it harder to attract new people.“EVE has become legendary,” he says. “It boggles some people’s mind that a game from 2003 is still around and still kicking ass. This reputation isn’t something we need to fight. That’s the magic of the game, that this kind of thing can happen in our universe.”

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 302. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.  

The moment the fleet of Svipul-class tactical destroyers crashed through the gates of Standing United’s home system was the greatest moment of Circo Maximo’s virtual life. Leading the charge was a man who had once tried to take everything from him. But today, EVE Online’s most notorious scammer Scooter McCabe would be his saviour. As the hundred-man fleet warped into the star system, Scooter McCabe sent a message in the local chat channel: “We are the Goonberets and we are coming to liberate the oppressed.”

Though Circo didn’t realise it, he had just become the target of EVE Online’s first humanitarian-aid mission. 

Weeks earlier, The Mittani, leader of the massive Goonswarm Federation and Scooter’s boss, asked him to settle a personal vendetta against another player. The mark was a small-time pilot who went by the name of Scottmw15 and had made a crucial mistake when he called The Mittani’s personal friend a bitch. Scooter would teach Scottmw15 a lesson about making the wrong kinds of enemies. 

In EVE Online, veteran pilots often play with multiple accounts at the same time. This allows them to specialise in several key areas, such as having a powerful combat pilot and another who oversees complicated industrial production chains. For Scooter, each of his ‘alts’ is a suit of digital skin that he wears to become someone else. This time he’d become Neerah Otomeya, a quiet, likeable pilot. In a harsh sandbox MMO where trust is everything, people like Scooter are the very reason it’s in short supply. 

“The idea was that I would infiltrate his corporation, befriend him, get a leadership role, and then rob everything,” Scooter says. Making matters easier, Scottmw15’s corporation, Standing United, recruited only brand-new players. It seemed like a simple scam.

In November 2016, EVE Online launched a limited free-to-play option that allows players to explore New Eden without the intimidating cost of a monthly subscription. As fresh pilots spawned for the first time, they were bombarded by recruitment notices from corporations looking to capitalise on the population explosion. It was EVE Online’s own career day. 

“I’d never played before and I’d been told EVE Online is really involved and complicated,” Circo Maximo tells me. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to function that well on my own.” Scottmw15 recruited him within 24 hours.

“He took them out to Russian space where the only people who spoke English were the people in the corporation and him,” Scooter tells me. “They were off and isolated, and once they were there he put them to work.” 

The tales of glory and wealth that Scottmw15 promised to recruits like Circo was a lie. Instead, he forced them to ‘rat’—kill respawning NPC pirate ships to collect their bounties—every hour they were logged in. While hunting real pirates is an adrenaline rush, killing the AI variety is a monotonous grind. 

“It was basically a ’20s mining company,” Scooter says. Scottmw15 had cranked up the corporate tax rate so that a massive portion of every bounty would go directly into his wallet. What’s more, he’d force the recruits to sell him whatever loot they found at a fraction of the price so that he could flip it on the market for double the profit. While Scottmw15 got rich, Circo and the rest barely made enough to survive. But Scottmw15’s cruelty ran deeper than exploitation.

“He would yell at people if they did anything other than ratting,” Circo says. “He’d make examples of them.” On Standing United’s Discord chat server, Scottmw15 would frequently humiliate and terrorise players. He even spammed links to weird dating sites he owned and forced them to click on advertisements to generate ad revenue. Those that resisted were cut loose and left to die penniless and alone at the hands of the Russians. Scottmw15 wasn’t running a corporation, he was running a forced labour camp. 

The moment that Neerah Otomeya—Scooter’s spy alt—exploded into flames at the hands of her corpmates in Standing United, he knew his plan was working. For days, he had launched a one-man siege against Standing United, and the cracks were beginning to form. As Neerah, Scooter worked his deception from the inside while as Scooter McCabe, he piloted a strategic cruiser more powerful than anything Standing United could match. 

“Scooter made everyone’s life a living hell,” Circo recalls. “It was awful. Nobody could do anything—he pretty much shut down the entire corporation just by himself.” The moment anyone undocked, Scooter was there to destroy them. Circo lost millions of ISK to Scooter personally, and others lost much more. The threat of death meant Scottmw15’s labour empire had ground to a halt. “He flat out told people that he was here strictly because of Scottmw15, and then Scottmw15 would tell us that he was full of it and that everything was a lie.” 

But more than physical damage, Scooter’s siege was quickly eroding the morale of the entire corporation. Cooped up inside their station and safe from his missiles, Scooter began playing mindgames with them. “As I sat there on comms as Neerah, I took details I heard and belched them back out as Scooter,” he says. It worked. 

“Scottmw15 was super paranoid,” Circo tells me. “He thought everyone was Scooter.” Players were screamed at and interrogated. But eventually suspicion fell on Neerah and Standing United ambushed her, destroying her ship in an attempt to interrogate her. But this wasn’t Scooter’s first rodeo. A carefully planned alibi in the form of a kill report that showed Neerah had killed Scooter in a past career proved they couldn’t be the same person. “There’s no possible way Neerah is Scooter because who would do that to himself?” A crafty scammer, that’s who.

However, the witch hunt was taking its toll. Many gave up EVE altogether, and those that persisted were miserable. Convinced that Neerah was his ally, Scottmw15 began to suspect everyone else and the pressure was causing him to crack. And then he crossed a very personal line. “I suffer from lung cancer,” Alexya Fisulfatia, one of the recruits, tells me. Weeks ago, Alexya had told Scottmw15 this in confidence. But then Scottmw15 used Alexya’s cancer as leverage. “He says, ‘Hey leave us alone because this guy has cancer—we must pity the cancer kid,’” Alexya says. “I was humiliated.”

“It was a really shitty thing to do,” Scooter adds—and that’s saying something for a professional scammer. “I’m talking to these guys as Neerah, and suddenly as they’re explaining the situation to me, I realise all of them are nice fucking guys.” While burning Scottmw15 was still Scooter’s plan, he needed to find a way to make sure the innocent members didn’t get caught in the crossfire. 

Returning to The Mittani, Scooter told him everything. “We’re going, this is fucked up. This guy is actively hurting the game itself. I know in the past I’ve scammed people, but shit, those people have been in the game for years and should know better,” he says. 

Together with Markonius Porkbutte, a Goonswarm spymaster, Scooter and The Mittani reached out to rival null-sec alliances to put aside differences and devise a strategy to liberate the trapped Standing United newbies. Over the next few weeks, each alliance would seed spies into Standing United and foment a mutiny and get them into proper corporations. 

And then everything collapsed.

While hunting Scottmw15, Scooter ran into a band of Australian soldiers known as the Swords of Damocles roaming into nearby regions looking for fights. As it goes in EVE, they destroyed Scooter’s ship. But their leader was curious, what was Scooter doing way out here? “I told him about Scottmw15, and it turns out he knew him from the past and knew he was an asshole,” Scooter says. Seeing an opportunity, he told them about a 100 million ISK bounty Scottmw15 placed on his head and asked if they’d do him a favour and collect it. They did one better. 

In an in-game mail, Swords of Damocles’ leader informed Scottmw15 of their recent kill and their intention to collect the 100 million ISK bounty, except with just one twist: they demanded 20 billion ISK instead or Standing United was as good as dead. Everyone panicked. 

“Now that we didn’t just have Scooter coming after us, Scottmw15 completely lost it,” Circo says. What they didn’t realise was that Swords had no intention of collecting. Scottmw15 bought their bluff all the same. 

To Circo and everyone else in Standing United, Scottmw15 had cracked. While Circo tells me there was always something “weird” about him, he was now fully unhinged. 

“He said God punished me with cancer because I deserve to die,” Alexya says. “I went beserk.”

Scooter’s idea worked too well. Within minutes, the Standing United voice server devolved into mutiny. Pushed to the edge, forced to endure verbal torture and monotonous labour in a videogame they played for fun, and now seemingly the target of powerful alliances, Circo and Alexya were done. They accused Scottmw15 of exploiting them for profit and lying about Scooter’s intentions in front of the whole corporation. 

“You bastard, you made us slaves!” Alexya screamed at him. Before anyone could respond, Alexya was gone—Scottmw15 had banned him from Discord and booted him from the corporation. Soon after, Circo suffered the same fate.

One by one, Scottmw15 began kicking recruits from Standing United. Days old, barely able to navigate through space, and locked out of all their ships, it was game over. “He kicked the entire corp and left them stranded in Russian space where they can’t speak to the Russians and essentially told them to go fuck themselves and die,” Scooter says. He watched everything in silence as Neerah and realised he couldn’t wait. 

“We got to get these guys out, we got to send a fleet in now because if we don’t it’ll be a bloodbath,” he wrote in a message to Markonius. 

“Let’s roll,” Markonius wrote back. 

While Alexya made a run for safety, Circo stayed behind. For days he had secretly ferried what few items he had out of Russian space in anticipation for a collapse. Though only days old, he knew the route well enough. “I was telling everyone, ‘Come follow me and I’m going to get you to [high-security space] and, once in Hisec, I’ll lead you guys to the Goons,’” he says. “I was going to take my ship and scout ahead and if I blew up, I blew up. I was going to get those guys to safety.”

Scooter couldn’t maintain his disguise any longer. “Sit there and don’t move,” Neerah wrote to Circo. He didn’t have time to explain because in a second window of EVE Online, he was guiding a fleet of Goons through the 62 jumps of enemy territory that sat between Goonswarm and Standing United. An hour later, Circo saw the biggest fleet of his life. 

“We crash into the system with Scottmw15 and the Russians there,” says Scooter. “The local population all of a sudden spikes, and I can see, as Neerah, the Russians going, ‘Oh shit.’ I’m telling everyone as Neerah that the Goons are coming and to relax. As Scooter, I write into chat, ‘We’re the Goonberets and we’re coming to liberate the oppressed. Russians, if you undock we will fucking kill you. Scottmw15, you had this coming.’” 

Scottmw15 would never see that message. Minutes earlier he received word of the incoming warband and logged off, presumably in terror. For all he knew, the whole galaxy was coming to kill him. Scooter tells me that, to his knowledge, he’s never logged in again (Scottmw15 couldn’t be reached for comment on this piece). 

For Alexya, Circo and the rest of the recruits, the rescue operation was akin to being liberated from a virtual labour camp. “They don’t know me, but they spent hours to come out and get me and bring me back,” Circo says, amazed. “I lost all this money, and these people just met me and they showered billions [of ISK] on us. They just threw it at us.” 

But more important than the ISK, Alexya says that it was the realisation that EVE Online wasn’t the cruel and abusive world he thought it was. “I was told by Markonius and Scooter that I was among friends right now,” he says. “People were so friendly.”

Markonius extended each member of Standing United instant admission into KarmaFleet, Goonswarm’s own new-player corporation. For Circo and Alexya, they could finally experience the real EVE Online—not the exploitation and harassment, but the sense of belonging found among friends in an unforgiving galaxy. In the end, over 25 players had been liberated. 

Both were lured to EVE Online by its stories of war, intrigue, and scandal, but neither imagined they would become the centre of it. “I always wanted to join something big and have my moment of fame, but I never could expect something like that to happen,” Alexya explains. “It’s just such a weird coincidence.” 

“It was awesome,” Circo says. “After it happened I pretty much loved the game.” 

For Scooter McCabe, it’s a reminder that even after all these years EVE Online and its players can still surprise him. Scottmw15, he says, “is an awful fucking human being. Not just in the EVE way, but I mean this guy in real life is an awful human being. I didn’t even make money off this but this was the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in this game.”

Update (March 21): CCP Games has since published a new post adding further clarity to some of the changes discussed below. Though PLEX can be divided into smaller bits, subscription time will not. The smallest portion of subscription time that can be purchased will remain 30 days. Also, CCP has said that they will now convert Aurum balances under 1000 but only three months after the changes are live and balances over 1000 are converted. This is to prevent destabilizing the market with an influx of new PLEX. No release date has been given but CCP has said their looking at "late spring or early summer." 

Original story: One of the things that keeps EVE Online's player-driven market turning is the premium item known as PLEX. Purchased for real money or in-game ISK, PLEX can be converted into 30-days of subscription time or sold on the in-game markets. With real money on the line, it's an extremely delicate economy and any tweaks to its value makes players understandably nervous. That's exactly what seems to be happening as the result of proposed changes to the system meant to simplify EVE Online's microtransactions and make PLEX less intimidating to handle for new players.

Currently players can buy PLEX from CCP for $19.99 and then add the item into a character's in-game inventory to decide what to do with it. What complicates things further is Aurum, a totally separate premium currency used to purchase cosmetic ship skins and clothing for your avatar. As executive producer Andie Nordgren says, "We want the whole ecosystem of things that you can buy from CCP to be easier to understand." 

To do this, CCP is making three major changes to EVE's microtransactions. The first is that each single item of PLEX will be broken up into 500 units. In that same vein, 30 days of subscription time or any other service that cost a single PLEX (like transferring a character between accounts) will likewise soon cost 500 PLEX. "By making PLEX more granular like this, we can give people more options because we can sell PLEX at smaller price points than now," Nordgren explains.

Along with that change, CCP will also be adding a PLEX vault in players' inventory that will help them better manage their PLEX across all characters on a single account. By dragging their PLEX from their inventory into the vault, they can spend it on services or subscription time. More importantly, they can use the vault to prevent PLEX from being destroyed entirely. It's unclear, however, whether PLEX placed in the vault can be later taken out and traded to other players. 

Up in smoke

One of the most unique aspects of PLEX is that it's an item that is carried around in your ship's hull like any other commodity. If someone destroys your ship, the PLEX is either destroyed or dropped for other players to loot. This design has created an incredible phenomenon in EVE as players are frequently destroyed with hundreds of dollars worth of PLEX in their hull. Hauling PLEX improperly is one of the stupidest and most costly mistakes you can make in EVE Online.

But new players don't always understand that moving PLEX in your ship comes with extreme risk. It makes sense that CCP wants to create a system that more clearly communicates how PLEX works and how players can keep it safe from the missiles of those who would take it from them. But to do that, CCP Is also installing a huge safety net that softens some of EVE's brutality by letting players avoid that risk entirely. This alone has stirred up some controversy in the community, which prides itself on the hardcore nature of the game.

"PLEX tanking [a disparaging term for people who try to haul PLEX in inadequately protected ships] is historically something that separates idiots from other players," writes player Sam Guivenne on the forums. "And as you get punished for being an idiot on every other part of the game, why not get punished here?"

Others are criticizing the new system for making things more complicated than before. "So, 500 PLEX works out to be [one hour, 26 minutes, 24 seconds] of game time per PLEX. Why not convert them all to 720 units, which will make every PLEX exactly 1 hour of game time?" Argues Def Monk, who goes on to suggest that trying to buy a week's worth of game time requires unnecessarily complicated math.

But it's CCP Games' third change to PLEX that has the community really riled up. With PLEX now broken up into granular units, there's no real need for Aurum, that second premium currency. Aurum will be completely phased out and replaced by PLEX. But here's where things get shady: While CCP is going to be converting Aurum balances over 1000 to its equivalent value in PLEX, every Aurum balance under 1000 will be erased. 

Right now, players can purchase 900 Aurum for $4.99 directly through EVE's store. But if they don't spend that Aurum by the time the update goes live later this spring, it'll disappear forever. The community is obviously pissed. "In what world is it acceptable to straight up remove the balance of a customer? If a bank did this when converting from [pounds] to [euros] for all balances under £5 there would have been fucking uproar," writes 'cap__qu' on Reddit.

Adding salt to the wound, CCP gifted players 300 Aurum for Christmas. It's a small enough amount that many were holding onto it for a rainy day. Now, a mere four months later, players learn that this gift will essentially be revoked. The only way to not lose your Aurum (whether purchased or gifted) is to purchase more to get the balance over 1000. That's not exactly a consumer-friendly solution.

There is hope that these points will be addressed, however. CCP Games is pretty good at soliciting feedback from its players and adapting to their opinions. As part of the announcement, a forum thread was created where anyone can leave their feedback on the proposal. Already players have found much more reasonable solutions like converting Aurum balances under 1000 into the equivalent value of subscription time.

The proposed changes haven't yet had a dramatic impact on the market, but the player response seems to be largely negative—especially in response to the plans for the PLEX vault and Aurum. Hopefully further updates clarifying the proposal and addressing some of the bigger concerns will arrive in the following weeks. For now, EVE Online's market tycoons are waiting with bated breath. 

As you might've spotted in mainstream news today, astronomers recently discovered seven worlds similar in size to Earth revolving around a star within the Aquarius constellation. In light of the exoplanet find, EVE Online plans to launch its second variation of its crowdsourced Project Discovery with the aim of tracking real-life exoplanets in-game. 

Similar to its first Project Discovery campaign—whereby players submitted over 25 million classifications of human cells to the Human Protein Atlas—the latest venture marks a collaboration between the game's developer CCP Games, Massively Multiplayer Online Science, the University of Reykjavik, and the University of Geneva—including the latter's 2017 Wolf Prize for Physics, and discoverer of the first exoplanet, Professor Michel Mayor. 

"We were thrilled to see the successes of our first foray into citizen science, in which EVE players have been voracious contributors to the database of the Human Protein Atlas," says EVE’s executive producer Andie Nordgren. "In searching for the next dataset for our massive player community to tackle, the stars aligned for players to have the opportunity to directly contribute to the search for new planets with a world-renowned scientific team. 

"Real people around the world collaborating in a virtual universe to explore the real universe is the stuff science fiction, and soon science fact, is made of."

More information on how this Project Discovery mini-game will unfold will be announced via a Michel Mayor-hosted presentation at this year's EVE Fanfest, April 6-8 in Iceland. Until then, check out Andy's overview of last year's campaign.

For MMOs, going free-to-play has long been seen as an admission of failure a last ditch effort when a game can't justify the monthly cost just to play it. But for every MMO that turns free-to-play out of desperation, another finds a new life free from subscription fees. Yesterday EVE Online became one of the many MMOs to make the switch with its Ascension update, letting players participate in its unique spaceship sandbox without the monthly cost. As I sit down with CCP Games executive producer Andie Nordgren, I have one question: Is the addition of a free-to-play option a bid to save EVE Online from dying?

"Yes," she says and then quickly adds, "but not because it's a last-ditch effort." Instead, Nordgren explains that the decision to include free-to-play options was a reaction to the way the MMO genre has all but abandoned the notion of subscription fees. "The combined equation of EVE being intimidating to a lot of people and also carrying an inescapable financial commitment I think it's just become too big of an ask. It's not anything that has to do with EVE really, just what people expect from games these days." While Nordgren maintains EVE Online is doing just fine as is, she says CCP Games saw the writing on the wall.

A change of perspective 

With Ascension, EVE Online has joined the growing number of MMOs that are ditching the subscription fee in favor of attracting a wider audience, leaving only a few like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and amazingly Final Fantasy XI behind. EVE's interpretation of free-to-play is different that any other MMO, however. Most use a model similar to Tera, which went free-to-play in 2013: You can level and experience the entirety of the game for free, but an optional subscription gives you more experience points, better fast travel, and more generous loot. Simply put, cough up the dough and they'll make the grind a little less of a chore.

EVE Online's free-to-play system, called 'alpha clones,' is quite different. Because EVE is a sandbox, it doesn't have the linear leveling system seen in most RPGs. Instead, players train skills passively, allowing them to pilot new ships, use certain equipment, or access new ways of earning its in-game currency, ISK. As an alpha clone, you're free to do all of that. The only restriction is that you can only train a set of basic skills that prevent you from sitting behind the captain's chair of EVE's more specialized ships. If you have dreams of one day flying a 14-kilometer-long Titan, you're going to need to pay up.

On paper, it sounds a little like World of Warcraft's "unlimited free trial," which lets players level up to 20 and enforces a handful of restrictions on how they can interact with others. But Nordgren stresses that alpha clones aren't just a way to have a nibble before CCP charges for the full meal. "We really want it to be viable to play for free in EVE," she says. "We want it to be a choice of how far you want to get into EVE and whether the subscription is interesting to you or not. The game is just better or cooler with more people."

While not flying the most powerful ships will be limiting to some, it doesn't stop anyone from participating in EVE's unique social ecosystem. Unlike most MMOs, your value as a player is defined by more than the armor you wear or in this case the ship you fly. Alpha clones have no restrictions on how you communicate with other players, so you're free to join EVE's massive null-sec alliances and fight, trade, scam, or whatever else you can imagine. "We want to be generous with just giving away the genuine EVE experience and trust that if people really get into it and love it that enough people are going to want to buy subscriptions or ship skins and that will be enough, that we'll be fine," Nordgren says.

Much of that has to do with understanding that EVE Online isn't your typical MMO. While character progression is important, the sandbox nature of EVE doesn't mean that bigger is always better. Even the most powerful ships are useless in the hands of an idiot, and likewise, an experienced pilot can turn a cheap frigate into a deadly machine of war. During a talk at EVE Vegas 2016 in October, game designer Steve Clark broke down the fleet compositions of two of EVE Online's biggest battles, showing that 17 percent were ships that alpha clones could fly. Free-to-play pilots might not win the war, but their presence on the field of battle is sure to have an effect.

With the skill restrictions placed on alpha clones, players can still experience the basics of what EVE has to offer. They can fight, mine, do basic production, trade, and explore dangerous parts of space for expensive loot all with just a few days of skill training for each profession. There's also ways of playing that aren't clearly defined by the game, like spying, scamming, and any other nefarious activity you can dream up.

New blood for the blood god

At EVE Vegas, I made a point of asking players I met what they thought was EVE's biggest hurdle. Without a doubt, the most common answer was attracting new players. It might not surprise you, but an incredibly complex 13-year-old MMO where death means the permanent loss of your ship isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea. That's without mentioning EVE Online's reputation for crippling betrayals and general brutality.

Making matters worse, EVE Online's population has been in decline since around 2013. Attracting new players has felt like Mission: Impossible for CCP. Earlier this year at EVE Fanfest, its developers candidly revealed that a whopping 1.5 million players had tried EVE Online in 2015 and an equally whopping 51% of them had quit within two hours.

"So much of the gameplay is defined by what other players are doing as opposed to being defined by the game itself, having more people to interact and play against [is crucial]," Nordgren says. EVE pilots seemed to recognize this a few years ago, as the community's perception of new players has shifted considerably.

In 2013, the rise of alliances like Brave Newbies marked an era where new players weren't seen as a liability, but a potential threat to EVE's delicate political ecosystem. More recently, major alliances have started weaponized newbie organizations like Karmafleet and Pandemic Horde designed to bathe green pilots in the blood of their enemies. With the announcement of alpha clones and free-to-play, the reception from the community has been almost universally positive.

"I'm a big fan of free to play," says Karmafleet's leader, Merkelchen. "Anything that puts more ships on the field, whether friend or foe, is a great thing for EVE."

"Recruitment is probably one of the most important initiatives of any alliance," says Markonius Porkbutte, a spymaster in Goonswarm and previous leader of Karmafleet. It's simple: the bigger an alliance is, the more soldiers it can enlist, and the more resources it can capture. But Porkbutte says that before the Ascension update, recruitment often felt more focused on convincing others to abandon their own alliances than enlisting newbies something that alpha clones should hopefully solve.

Talking with Drelnar, a recruitment officer in Brave Newbies, that seems to be the case. He tells me his department has been swamped with applications to join since yesterday and that sorting through them feels like "running on a treadmill." Make no mistake though, he's not complaining: "If [free-to-play] gets more people playing the game that means more people to fly with and shoot at that's a good thing."

And that's only the beginning. "I was talking to people in Mercenary Coalition who have never really recruited noobs much," Nordgren says. "They're setting up a whole new operation and newbie recruiting infrastructure in the starter systems and they're really trying to bring people to them."

Like Karmafleet and others, Brave has created resources to help new players get into the game including guides on what skills to train and creating new fleet doctrines that make the most of ships alpha clones can fly.

"We have tasked our recruitment and engagement teams to get out there and roll out the red carpet for the influx of new pilots," Merkelchen says. "Making connections to other people has a direct correlation to pilots who have a positive new player experience in EVE Online so we are getting out there and talking to people. I would hate to think even one person is sitting out there alone in a high-sec grinding and thinking to themselves, 'this is it?'"

Learn to fly 

While a lack of new players is a problem, it's more of a symptom that the source. Anyone who has played EVE for all of an hour can tell you that it's not exactly the easiest game to understand. Simply learning how to fly your ship can be confusing let alone knowing which modules to equip to it. Even if you manage to figure all that out, it only takes one wrong turn to wind up in pirate-infested space where your soon-to-be corpse will be scooped up and added to an ever-growing collection. EVE Online's first impression is more akin to a sucker-punch than a hug.

"There's no real way around EVE's brutality," Nordgren says. "But what I don't like is when things happen to people and they don't understand why. I think of it in terms of how can we make more people successful according to their own definition at playing EVE Online and that includes understanding what's happening to you and why and helping you make informed decisions."

To address this, Ascension is also unveiling a top-to-bottom redesign of EVE Online's tutorial system. CCP has always experimented with different methods of instructing new pilots on how to play, but the results were always underwhelming. Ascension tries something new by using a linear story-centric campaign to teach new pilots the ropes. Designed by producer Tryggvi Hjaltason, the goal is to use compelling characters to create an emotional bond and provide newbies with a purpose until they are comfortable enough to find their own.

"In the past we have tried all kinds of methods for teaching you the mechanics of the game but every time we have assumed you have your own motivation for learning it," Nordgren explains. "The approach we're taking now is saying hey, before you can even pick your own motivation, you need to get your bearings. You need to understand 'how does one EVE?' and then you're ready to start picking your own path. It's on us to show you around and we think this story-driven approach is a fantastic way to do that." It remains to be seen whether Hjaltason's philosophy can convince those 51% of players to stick around a little longer, but the initial reception from the community is hopeful.

Already the EVE subreddit is filling with posts from old and new players alike sharing stories about the influx of alpha clones and the starter systems are brimming with hundreds of new pilots. "I made a point of visiting my starter station, and teared up upon seeing the station bay full of undocked ships again," writes one player. "I missed you, EVE."

For CCP, Ascension is a chance to throw open the stargates and give potential players a chance to see what's so special about this MMO. But more importantly, it's going to hopefully solve EVE Online's new player woes, ushering in a new generation of pilots. Over the next few weeks, thousands of people will be trying EVE for the first time and Nordgren knows the stakes. "This is a huge deal for us and a huge launch. Overall, this is something that is going to take up to six months or so to really stick in terms of seeing the deeper ecosystem impact. It takes a while for people to really learn that it's now possible to play EVE for free. We're all a little bit scared and excited for the potential of it."

Last week, I spoke of our resident EVE Online raconteur Steven Messner's proclivity for consistently uncovering fascinating tales within the game's space world, and he's since produced yet another. It's these very stories which make me consider taking the plunge with CCP's ambitious MMO, and, if you happen to be on a similar boat/vessel yourself, next week might be a good time to do so.

It's adding free-to-play elements alongside its current subscription model, you see, which will introduce a host of new features some of which are teased in the trailer featured below.

"The November 15th 2016 Ascension expansion is a free addition to EVE that brings a whole host of new features and some of the biggest changes ever to New Eden," reads the video's description. "It introduces Clone States, allowing you to play for free as an Alpha clone for as long as you want. The improved New Player Experience makes it easier than ever for your or your friends to learn how to play."

Next week's update will add three engineering complexes, new ships, command bursts, new explosion effects, among other things. The new Fitting Simulator shown around the 43 second mark below also looks interesting.

Again, EVE Online is a game I've always fancied investing more time in, but have always managed to find distractions. You might be the same, which is why you might like to check out Steven's helpful beginner's guide.

EVE Online's Ascension expansion is due next Tuesday, November 15. More information can be found this way.

Of all the adjectives you might use to describe EVE Online's most notorious scammer, humble probably wouldn't be one of them. But that's exactly my impression of Scooter McCabe. Scooter McCabe (a pilot name) has taken more than just ISK, EVE's virtual currency. He's stolen ships, space stations, and even scammed his way into the captain's chair of an entire alliance.

I meet the man who turned space deception into a fine art in the Planet Hollywood casino, surrounded by the chirps of slot machines as hunched patrons feed them tokens. When I ask him if he's the biggest hustler in EVE, he shifts uncomfortably and says, "I don't like to get a big head about these things."

On the surface, EVE Vegas is a community event where developer CCP Games gets together with their fans to party, gamble, and celebrate life in the virtual galaxy of EVE Online. For Scooter, it's a chance to shed his avatar's skin and reveal he's not just the silver-tongued devil you'd make him out to be. In real life, he's an average looking guy in his mid-thirties with slightly greying hair and glasses. He might rob you for everything you're worth in EVE, but in person he's genuine and affable.

Look into any comment section of an article written about EVE Online, and you're likely to find the same recycled comments about sociopaths, liars, and cheats. While hyperbolic, people like Scooter make that reputation somewhat deserved. Fly into Jita, EVE Online's biggest trade hub, and your chat window instantly floods with players offering to "double your ISK" or sell what appears to be amazing deals on expensive items, hoping you don't realize they're conveniently located in pirate-infested territory. But Scooter doesn't waste his time with these low-effort scams that try to catch any player like a mosquito lamp.

His are elaborately staged heists that, over the years, have pulled in well over 3.5 trillion ISK at least, that's when he stopped counting. Consider that EVE Online's greatest battle, the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, cumulatively cost more than 11 trillion ISK and you begin to appreciate how destructive Scooter is to EVE's fragile ecosystem.

The man who scammed the world 

You might think the most valuable resource in EVE would be ISK, but any alliance leader worth their salt would tell you otherwise. In EVE, the most valuable thing is trust. Trust holds EVE's massive player-made alliances together. Leaders must trust that their officers aren't secretly feeding intel to the enemy or won't suddenly make off with everything in the corporate bank account in exchange for a position of power in a rival alliance. But unlike other MMO developers, CCP Games doesn't punish treachery with bans or suspensions it outright encourages it as long as it remains within the boundaries of the game.

"People from other games have no idea what they're getting into when they start playing EVE and that makes my job so much easier," Scooter laughs. It's that freely given trust that players seem to offer internet strangers that Scooter preys upon. It sounds simple, and for your average Jita scammer, it kind of is. But where a Jita scammer might make a few hundred million ISK a week, Scooter tells me that unless the payout is above 500 million ISK, he's not interested. That's because his scams are carefully concocted ruses tailored to each 'mark' the intended victim. "We identify your flaws, we find out what you're looking for, what you need to hear, and what we can take from you," he says.

Each scam is different depending on who the mark is, but the common formula remains the same. Gain trust, promise everything, take everything. During a talk at EVE Vegas, Scooter recounts one scam that ended with him owning an entire alliance and renaming their home station "Scooter McCabe's Personal Toilet."

The heist started with a simple proposition: An enemy alliance was looking to join The Goonswarm Federation and betray their overseers, Pandemic Legion, after a period of cruel subjugation. The Mittani, Goonswarm's leader, laughed the offer off, but Scooter saw an opportunity. He approached the enemy alliance's leader, a player named Brante Sletkia, pretending to be a secret agent for a 'shadow cartel' that was interested in his offer. Scooter lied and said he needed to verify that Brante's proposal wasn't a "false-flag operation to break up diplomatic agreements" as Goonswarm and Pandemic Legion had a truce at the time.

Through in-game conversations, Scooter convinced Brante that Goonswarm was willing to give asylum to his alliance but wanted to use their territory as a staging system to attack Pandemic Legion. If Brante was serious about crossing sides, he'd need to let one of Scooter's alternate characters into the alliance and give him unlimited access to everything so he could verify it wasn't a trap. Now in a position of absolute power, Scooter then had the alliance store all of their ships in one station to prepare to evacuate their space and cross over to Goonswarm territory.

Just as the last of the alliance's valuable assets were stored inside the station, Scooter unleashed his plan. He used his unrestricted access to declare himself CEO. His first order of business as king? Kicking every single member, including Brante, out of the alliance. Within minutes, the hundreds of ships they had placed inside of their station were no longer accessible to anyone but Scooter. It was like buying a house and then changing the locks before the old tenants had a chance to move out except Scooter never paid a dime.

But Scooter has a dark sense of humor, so he changed the name of the station to "Scooter McCabe's Personal Toilet" and told them that if they wanted their ships back, they'd need to pay him 30 billion ISK. What's more, Pandemic Legion was tipped off about Scooter's treachery but instead of being angry, they offered him another 4 billion ISK to peacefully transfer his newly acquired territory to them. Within hours, an entire alliance had evaporated, its members penniless and without ships. Even their own identity as an alliance was no longer theirs.

When they eventually kicked Scooter from their Teamspeak channel, Brante had one message: "Thanks for killing my EVE."

I ask Scooter if he ever feels bad after pulling such devastating scams. With a blank expression he says "nope."

All rise for the honorable Judge Scooter 

Dismantling an entire alliance that's seeking asylum might seem pretty cruel, but that's nothing compared to Scooter's magnum opus, Space Court a spin on Night Court, an American sitcom. Scooter tells me he conceived the idea while reading the forums and finding countless posts from scam victims begging for retribution. He had a twisted idea: "If they want a law enforcement system, why not give it to them?"

But Space Court isn't a well-intentioned attempt at justice, it's just another way for Scooter and his cohorts in Goonswarm to scam even more money from their enemies. Scooter's most vocal victims are given an opportunity to present their case through Space Court's voice communication servers, not realizing that the whole thing is an elaborate ruse to waste their time like a kind of pseudo-reality gag show. Just like a real court, there's a jury, a judge, defendants, witnesses and even a mock lawyer is given to represent the plaintiff. The only problem is that every single one of them except the victim is in on the gag.

"It's like a giant Saturday Night Live routine," Scooter laughs. The court proceedings start out incredibly dry, filled with rambling sentences crammed with phoney court-speak, made up laws, and fake government bodies. The longer the ruse goes on the more they begin to turn up the ridiculousness in hopes that the victim finally catches on. Some of the more ridiculous moments include playing "Who Let the Dogs Out" by Baha Men while a lawyer looks for his escaped dog and not so subtly reenacting scenes from the movie "A Few Good Men" (click below around 38:25 for one such moment).

"Everyone else comes in and they just start improvising," Scooter says. "We don't have a script, but they say all this crazy crap. And it's this guy who's already been scammed once, and he's willing to sit there and believe this whole kangaroo court."

Unlike a real court, however, Space Court doesn't have any actual legal jurisdiction and its verdicts are meaningless. That doesn't stop them from finding the scammer not guilty in every circumstance before leveling charges of "defamation" against the actual victim. When I ask Scooter if they actually pay up, he shakes his head not because they don't, but because he's so ashamed that they do. "It's just amazing seeing how people turn off critical thinking skills."

You can't scam an honest man 

You wouldn't be alone if you felt Scooter's exploits were a bit controversial. "For somebody to have lost their morale [sic] compass and clearly take delight in causing misery to others and then to proudly boast of his 'achievement', truly speaks volumes for that person," wrote one commenter in 2014, when Scooter's alliance heist was first publicized.

"I've scammed before and stole stuff in EVE. I can tell u [sic] that I would not do what this guy did. Maybe take a few ships, but to ruin the game entirely for so many players..." wrote another.

Scooter, however, sees it differently: "People don't like having their flaws exposed... No one likes being blamed and having to take responsibility. So that's where a lot of the demonization comes because it shifts blame and self-introspection off of you."

He didn't go into details, but during the 2008 stock market crash, Scooter lost everything. With the bank ready to seize his car and with only a hundred dollars to his name, he drove to Atlantic City. For three days straight he played poker, feeling like it was his only option to stay afloat as his world sunk around him. "One guy I took down grabbed me by the arm and said 'that's my kid's college fund you just took.' But the thing is, if you get involved in a game where you have the potential to lose everything you brought into the game, you have to take responsibility for that. It's not the other person's fault that they played a better game than you did. For me, he was trying to make me feel bad, but here I am in a survival situation. I can't give back this money or I'm a dead man."

"Nobody has a problem if you screw over your friend in Monopoly because it's a board game and it's fun. But all of a sudden you turn it into a computer game where you have billions and billions of space money changing hands and people lose their minds. There's so many warning signs in EVE to be careful of scams and it still happens. Why be angry at me when they should know better? Their parents told them not to trust strangers, but all of a sudden they're playing a computer game and all that goes out the window. You should never stop exercising your own self-judgment and never stop making good decisions."

Whether or not that's what Scooter actually believes or, as he accuses of his victims, an attempt to deflect responsibility and self-introspection, I'm honestly not sure. Unlike Monopoly, EVE Online doesn't take up an evening or two players invest years into their virtual lives and alliances. And even though I like the man behind the monitor, I'd probably think twice before ever accepting a deal with him in-game. If trust is the most valuable resource in EVE Online, players like Scooter are a great reminder to always be careful who you give it to.

As our time together winds to a close, Scooter and I walk towards the casino bar. I notice him eying up passing poker tables and a moment later we say our goodbyes and he wanders over to one. I watch him go, pitying whatever poor sap ends up sitting next to him.

Our man Steven Messner has a knack for uncovering interesting stories from CCP's space-flung MMO EVE: Online, with recent tales exploring everything from a pilot who placed a $75,000 bounty on a rival alliance; a DEA wannabe who aimed to get players off drugs; and a player who faked a suicide attempt in a bid for personal gain.

When the sci-fi-inspired persistent world adds free-to-play alongside its current subscription model on November 15, more dramas, fictions and fables are certain to surface and the developer has now released an informative trailer to best explain what EVE is all about for those on the sidelines.

"Everybody is on this journey and writing their own stories," explains one commentator in the video above. "That is probably the simplest way I can describe EVE."

Any one of these stories will help the uninitiated gain a better understanding, yet that's barely scratching the surface. Know that we consider it one of the best MMOs to date, and one of the most ambitious games out there. The rest is up to you to discover for yourself.

EVE Online has a reputation for malicious schemes, but one player has taken that to troubling new lows. Earlier this month, the EVE community was rocked by news that a player had attempted to take her own life after being harassed by multiple players. EVE Online's reputation as a brutal sandbox MMO seemed to have bled into real life with tragic results. In response, donation drives were set up for her benefit and a campaign to raise awareness for mental illness took root in the community. But thanks to an investigation by Imperium News, an EVE news site, things took an even darker turn when it was discovered that the whole incident was an elaborate scam by one player.

Her name is Olivia, and she is a member of the Storm Tribe corporation in EVE. As the story goes, Olivia had been approached by members of a rival alliance known as 'Manifesto.' and harassed about recent posts made to EVE's Broadcast 4 Reps group. Broadcast 4 Reps (B4R) is player-driven support group in EVE with the purpose of helping those struggling with mental illnesses regardless of who they might be in-game.

A troubling tale 

On October 4th, a Facebook user claiming to be a personal friend of Olivia's posted to an unofficial EVE Online Facebook page, detailing how the harassment Olivia suffered from reaching out on B4R drove her to attempt suicide. At the time of that post, she had been in the hospital for a number of days. "She needed fucking help," he wrote. "And the shittiest fuckers in EVE decided to give her the opposite." That story was later verified by another woman on Facebook claiming to be Olivia's sister.

As news of Olivia began to spread throughout the community, players were horrified.

"As someone who's lost friends both in EVE and in real life due to suicide fuck whoever would encourage someone to take their own life," wrote one player.

"I've never been more ashamed of calling myself an Eve player than I have this week," wrote another. "This is just... disgusting."

EVE Online has a reputation as a brutal virtual world where players are free to scam, cheat, and destroy one another without consequence. It's given rise to incredible stories, like a group of assassins hired to infiltrate a corporation and murder its CEO a mission that took almost a year to complete. Despite all that skulduggery, even EVE's coldest killers believed Olivia's story and wanted to help.

Charles White, a prominent member of the EVE community, put it perfectly in his video responding to Olivia's story: "We will scam you, we will hunt you down, we will destroy you. We will do everything we can to make your in-game experience miserable. But we have a poker face we will go out and have a drink with our enemies. We will laugh with all of our friends that are trying to kill each other in-game." In EVE, players will be merciless to one another, but that comes with the understanding that it's all in good fun. White wanted it clearly understood that, despite all the backstabbing in-game, players were respected in real life.

Disturbed by her story, the community banded together in support of Olivia. A movement called "Her Name is Olivia" grew out of a post by another popular EVE news website, The Neocom, and began spreading as players stood up against online harassment. Though a GoFundMe campaign was quickly shut down, I'm told players donated everything from in-game money to gift cards to Olivia. One of those drives accrued over 15 billion ISK, EVE's virtual currency, valued at roughly $300. That's not to mention that plans were also being made to donate a Keepstar citadel EVE Online's gargantuan space station to Olivia, which alone would've amounted to a whopping 300 billion ISK.

Pulling the thread 

During the weeks since Olivia's story went public, members of B4R, Manifesto., and Imperium News began investigating what happened to Olivia. Their goal wasn't to disprove Olivia's claims but to find those responsible and make sure that they were banned. EVE community manager Paul Elsy also confirmed that CCP Games was investigating the alleged abuse. "This is something we have zero tolerance for, and frankly this kind of behaviour disgusts me," he wrote in a Reddit thread. CCP has yet to officially address the issue.

During those investigations by the community, however, things took a troubling twist. Imperium News discovered that the pictures used in Olivia and her sister's Facebook profiles were stolen from different Twitter and Instagram accounts owned by people who had no connection to EVE Online. Upon reaching out to the alliance that Olivia's corporation belonged to, no one could confirm who her character was or if she even existed.

Those findings were substantiated by the leader of the alliance that Storm Tribe belongs to. In a lengthy post to Facebook, Christopher Adams details his own investigation into the matter. Jackson Thrane, Storm Tribe's leader, supposedly had chatlogs between Olivia and her alleged harassers but refused to reveal them to anyone. After Adams spoke with the players Thrane accused of bullying her, both claimed they had never spoken with Olivia. What's more, chatlogs in EVE are automatically saved as text files to players' computers, but members of B4R weren't able to find evidence that anything had happened on their official channels.

The voices who had spoken on Olivia's behalf were fake too. Suspicions began falling on Jackson Thrane, the leader of Olivia's corporation. As mentioned in his Facebook post, Adams already suspected Thrane of creating fake personas, and there was suspicious evidence that he and Olivia were the same person. For example, a generous donation to Olivia was meant to help her purchase an expensive new ship she had been trying to save for. The money and then the ship somehow ended up in Thrane's pocket.

In EVE, players are free to create multiple accounts and there's no real way of discerning how many characters one might own. This tactic is famously used by spies, who implant alternate characters into rival alliances to gather intelligence or sow discord.

I spoke with the writer and editor of the Imperium News story, and both believe that the character of Jackson Thrane and the multiple fake Facebook profiles are used for 'catfishing' the act of creating a false online identity in order to manipulate or mislead someone. After testimony from those accused of harassing her, the popular belief is that Thrane used his catfishing network to settle a personal vendetta against specific 'Manifesto.' members. Posts to Olivia's fake Facebook account also say she was looking to meet single people and was "taking applications" for a romantic partner, which many see as evidence of ongoing catfishing.

Since Imperium News and other groups revealed their findings, Jackson Thrane seems to have voluntarily deleted his account and disbanded his corporation. While direct donations can't be recovered, the 15 billion ISK was returned by the non-affiliated player who had collected it and plans to build the Keepstar citadel were cancelled. I was also shown correspondence between a member of the Imperium and the owner of the profile picture used to create the fake Olivia persona. The real owner of the picture filed a report on Facebook which has led to the removal of the fake account. "Thank you for stopping this!" She wrote. "I don't understand how people can be so wrong and try to scam others. I appreciate you letting me know!"

As a longtime player of EVE Online, stories of deception aren't just common, they're part of what makes EVE such an exciting game to play but only when they remain confined to the virtual universe of New Eden. This story has struck a nerve in a community that already struggles with issues of doxxing and what happens when the line between fiction and reality is blurred. While you have to give someone credit for daring to imagine such an elaborate hoax, it's also not hard to question what kind of person would sink low enough to cry wolf about a such a serious issue.

"If it was real, and she was harassed, or if it wasn't real, and someone made it all up, the question remains. What the fuck is wrong with some people?" Wrote one player in a Reddit thread.

Still, despite the despicable attempts to apparently exploit serious issues like suicide for personal gain, communities like B4R are refusing to let the Olivia scandal get in the way of its mission to provide support and help when someone might need it most. In a video responding to the exposed scam, White admitted he had, like many, been manipulated by Olivia's story, but urged the community not to let it color their response when dealing with those seeking help. "This Olivia might be fake, but there are other Olivia's out there and Broadcast4Reps is always out there too," he says. "It is better to have a coast guard that answers false calls for help than [to have] someone lost at sea and there's no help coming."

It's hard to fully comprehend the drug problem that's infesting EVE Online's galaxy of New Eden. With players tucked comfortably inside their spaceships, you never really get a chance to see their bloodshot, drug-addled eyes. But rest assured, drug use in EVE is rampant, and one player is trying to do something about it.

His mission is so important he doesn't even have a proper name. Instead, he's simply called 'CONCORD Drug-Enforcement Officer' (let's call him Deo for short). He's a character created by Reddit user 'JadekMenaheim' to roleplay a rookie DEA agent modelled after Javier Pena, a real-life agent whose efforts helped bring down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar as shown in the hit Netflix series Narcos. And like Pena, Deo means business.

"Narco containment protocols require that I conduct checkpoint scans for your protection," his character biography reads. "Please forfeit any drugs or illegal boosters aboard your ship/capsule to this authorized drug enforcement agent."

Fitted with a cargo scanner, Deo is willing to violate any pilot's right to privacy to win his personal war against drugs. But like any good official, he's dutifully recorded his exploits and shared his first outing in an Imgur album. His mission started in EVE Online's "newbie" systems, where concerns arose that new players might have "inadvertently become mules for the NPC narcos."

Deo's mandate is obviously just a funny gag played for laughs, but EVE Online does have a problem with performance enhancing drugs. Called boosters, these illicit substances can dramatically improve a pilot's various skills, like providing an increase to their reflexes, allowing their guns to track enemies quicker. There are dozens of different boosters, everything from Crash to Blue Pill to Mindflood. And like real drugs, they can have some serious side effects.

Each time you get high, you run the risk of the effects backfiring. Instead of being super accurate behind the guns, you might find yourself unable to fully engage your thrusters, leaving you a sitting duck for enemy pilots. EVE Online's NPC police force, known as CONCORD, has strict rules against possession of boosters, and AI-controlled customs officers will persecute any player caught with them in their cargo. Weaker versions are legal, but their enhancing effects are greatly reduced, making them less appealing.

As a result, the lower security regions of New Eden, where pirate cartels are found, sometimes contain black markets where these substances can be acquired by any player looking for a good time. Booster kingpins manufacture the drugs from clouds of gas that can be harvested out in space and transport them using blockade runners ships that fit expensive covert ops cloaking devices that allow them to slip by the authorities undetected. Though the market isn't nearly lucrative enough to turn a player into a space-faring Pablo Escobar, that's not stopping Deo from doing his due diligence.

Unfortunately, fighting digital narcos isn't easy when you're flying a Velator, EVE's newbie ship that's about as threatening as a Nerf gun. But the community reception to Deo's efforts has been so positive, one player donated a sexy police-issue Federation Navy Comet worth about 16 million ISK. This high speed frigate, flown by CONCORD's own pilots, is the perfect ship to help Deo clean up the space streets. He's even started a community outreach program called "Crash-for-Cars" that encourages pilots to trade in their illicit substances in exchange for Gallentean Planetary Vehicles. These are just a commodity for traders to sell, so you can't actually drive these vehicles, making them functionally useless. But it's the thought that counts, right?

Deo might also be making some powerful enemies. In a comment, he reveals that a player named 'ShadowMaster' sent him a severed head, which he interprets as a pretty clear warning. I logged into EVE Online to reach out to Deo, but could find no trace of him. Honestly, I fear the worst has already happened. It's only a matter of time before someone finds his mutilated corpse in a dumpster somewhere. Will New Eden's war on drugs ever end?