When a plan comes to fruition: Inside a massive Eve Online corporate heist
When a plan comes to fruition: Inside a massive Eve Online corporate heist
Enlarge / An image of the "Player webpage Corporations" by CCP Games, or a potential movie posted for an Eve themed heist movie? Who can say, really?
CCP games
Last week, we were amazed by the story of an Eve Online player who used the game's mysterious corporate stock voting system to take control of assets from the game worth tens of thousands of dollars. Still, as we noted at the time, there remained significant questions about how the "Flam_Hill" mastermind was able to obtain the voting shares needed to call a CEO vote in the first place.
Player card for Sienna of Orion, the original CEO of Eve Online's EHEXP.
Dave/Eve online
Turns out Flam_Hill is just an alias for Dave (last name omitted), a long-time Eve gamer who was formerly CEO of Event Horizon Expeditionairies (EHEXP). And Dave tells Ars that his recent "hostile takeover" began as an attempt to recover the assets of a company he believed had gone astray.
The reason
Dave's EHEXP coup story dates back to 2011, when he founded EHEXP under the control of his Eve Online character Nikki Shea. Dave says he quickly transferred the role of CEO to his "original and first" character, Sienna from Orion.
Sienna left the company in April 2018, naming Dave's friend and longtime gamer Mackkenzie Hawkwood as its new CEO. Importantly, this transfer of corporate control not included a transfer of those 1,000 corporate voting shares, which Dave had previously transferred from a corporate portfolio to the character of Sienna "for safety".
In 2020, Mackkenzie had resigned as CEO of EHEXP, appointing character Chi Aki to lead the company. That's where things were back in November 2022 when Dave said he returned to 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 different ways," Dave told Ars. "I've never been a fan of Pandemic Horde, so for me it was disappointing that EHEXP joined them."
Dave said Sienna officially left EHEXP in disgust just three weeks after her return. He said he at some point reached out to company management via in-game messaging "to say hello and ask if [Sienna] could get back some of her remaining assets in [the company]." /p>
When that request was "meeted with silence," Dave said he and some friends at a new company started "a discussion…about how to get those assets back. A new friend of ours suggested some [corporate] actions…so we started to study how."
"I toyed with the idea for a week because that's not really how I play, but I resigned myself to the idea that EHEXP had been overwritten and it wasn't more than a shell of himself," Dave told PC Gamer. "So I gave... the green light to infiltrate."
A plan develops
If Sienna had remained in EHEXP, the character's control over the original shares of the company would have made trying to take over Dave relatively simple. But after Sienna left the company late last year, those shares were "virtually worthless," Dave said. And if Sienna had tried to join, "the CEO wouldn't have allowed it," in part because of the bad blood surrounding the previous departure.
Enlarge / An image of the "Player webpage Corporations" by CCP Games, or a potential movie posted for an Eve themed heist movie? Who can say, really?
CCP games
Last week, we were amazed by the story of an Eve Online player who used the game's mysterious corporate stock voting system to take control of assets from the game worth tens of thousands of dollars. Still, as we noted at the time, there remained significant questions about how the "Flam_Hill" mastermind was able to obtain the voting shares needed to call a CEO vote in the first place.
Player card for Sienna of Orion, the original CEO of Eve Online's EHEXP.
Dave/Eve online
Turns out Flam_Hill is just an alias for Dave (last name omitted), a long-time Eve gamer who was formerly CEO of Event Horizon Expeditionairies (EHEXP). And Dave tells Ars that his recent "hostile takeover" began as an attempt to recover the assets of a company he believed had gone astray.
The reason
Dave's EHEXP coup story dates back to 2011, when he founded EHEXP under the control of his Eve Online character Nikki Shea. Dave says he quickly transferred the role of CEO to his "original and first" character, Sienna from Orion.
Sienna left the company in April 2018, naming Dave's friend and longtime gamer Mackkenzie Hawkwood as its new CEO. Importantly, this transfer of corporate control not included a transfer of those 1,000 corporate voting shares, which Dave had previously transferred from a corporate portfolio to the character of Sienna "for safety".
In 2020, Mackkenzie had resigned as CEO of EHEXP, appointing character Chi Aki to lead the company. That's where things were back in November 2022 when Dave said he returned to 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 different ways," Dave told Ars. "I've never been a fan of Pandemic Horde, so for me it was disappointing that EHEXP joined them."
Dave said Sienna officially left EHEXP in disgust just three weeks after her return. He said he at some point reached out to company management via in-game messaging "to say hello and ask if [Sienna] could get back some of her remaining assets in [the company]." /p>
When that request was "meeted with silence," Dave said he and some friends at a new company started "a discussion…about how to get those assets back. A new friend of ours suggested some [corporate] actions…so we started to study how."
"I toyed with the idea for a week because that's not really how I play, but I resigned myself to the idea that EHEXP had been overwritten and it wasn't more than a shell of himself," Dave told PC Gamer. "So I gave... the green light to infiltrate."
A plan develops
If Sienna had remained in EHEXP, the character's control over the original shares of the company would have made trying to take over Dave relatively simple. But after Sienna left the company late last year, those shares were "virtually worthless," Dave said. And if Sienna had tried to join, "the CEO wouldn't have allowed it," in part because of the bad blood surrounding the previous departure.
Enlarge / An image of the "Player webpage Corporations" by CCP Games, or a potential movie posted for an Eve themed heist movie? Who can say, really?
CCP games
Last week, we were amazed by the story of an Eve Online player who used the game's mysterious corporate stock voting system to take control of assets from the game worth tens of thousands of dollars. Still, as we noted at the time, there remained significant questions about how the "Flam_Hill" mastermind was able to obtain the voting shares needed to call a CEO vote in the first place.
Player card for Sienna of Orion, the original CEO of Eve Online's EHEXP.
Dave/Eve online
Turns out Flam_Hill is just an alias for Dave (last name omitted), a long-time Eve gamer who was formerly CEO of Event Horizon Expeditionairies (EHEXP). And Dave tells Ars that his recent "hostile takeover" began as an attempt to recover the assets of a company he believed had gone astray.
The reason
