It’s all very hush-hush at the moment but I can tell you that it involves a delightful alt temptress named Nola Stewart who will convince CEO Phil Linden to meet her for a quick cyber in a Cubey Terra Dropship in the unpatrolled outer regions of Deep Space.

I fear I have already said too much.

– Neal

Can’t really afford any luxury purcheses just now, however ;p

Hey, Neal, let’s take some big corporation down in Eve. You in? I joined. But I didn’t get past the space pod thingie and I don’t see any mentors, greeters, Live Helpers, or Evens — or whatever they call them over there. I have the feeling this isn’t going to be the game for me LOL.

P.S. No, I’m not going to give you my RL telephone number you scumbag and if I ever find you in RL I will wring your scrawny…oh wait…let’s take down the corp in Eve first lol.

I didn’t realize there were so many opportunities in Eve for legitimate social-engineering and psyops antics. That’s something that I find intellectually far more appealing than getting anal with combat-tree strategies, click-click XP-farming and the dice-grind monotony of most MMORPGs (*cough* W.O.W *cough*). I’d probably sign up for Eve if I wasn’t still having so much fun fooling around in SL.

What’s interesting to me is the overlap between the in-character clan infiltration and the out-of-character relationship betrayal. I assume that many of the Eve online guilds are also based heavily on RL-name social networks. Players sometimes trade real life personal details and communicate with instant messenger programs, webcams, voice-over-IP, phone-calls, RL meetings etc. This certainly happened in the last infamous Eve Online saga, ‘The Big Scam’, where the scammer won his victims’ confidence using IRC, message forums, AIM, and telephone conversations.

Excerpt from ‘The Big Scam’:
“Tell me something, Nightfreeze, WHY haven’t you picked up the phone yet? AFRAID? I knew you would do something like this, you fucking scumbag. FUCK YOU! [...] I swear to god, if I ever find you in real life, I will beat the everliving piss out of you, YOU LITTLE SHIT.”

I remember one failed (vapor-ware) MMORPG of my youth where our guild-members – a small guild – had shared and confirmed RL ID details in an attempt to make the guild impervious to internal scams in-game. The idea was that it would give us an edge over the other guilds.

In the RL overlap in these MMORPGs, people talk about their medical ailments, financial worries, issues with their family, relationship problems. Sometimes deeply personal stuff. I wonder if any of the key figures in this Eve scam knew each other in Real Life. If so, to what extent might they have also lied and betrayed each other within their Real Life relationships?

– Neal