The funeral he was referring to took place in March of 2006. A beloved World of Warcraft fan had passed away in real life and her guild mates wanted to do something special in her memory. The plan for the event was to have her father log in on her character, Fayejin. He would lead a procession through Winterspring towards his daughter’s favorite fishing spot. Once there, he would place her character by the water and players could come forward to pay their final respects. Frostfire Hot Springs was chosen for its significance to the recently deceased. Everyone who knew Feyejin knew she loved traveling to the western end of Winterspring to spend hours upon hours fishing on its calming waters. Calming and reckless. For, you see, Frostfire Hot Springs is a contested zone in a player vs player server. Essentially that beautiful lake where the grieving players decided to hold a most impassioned send-off is in the middle of an active war zone. And this guild announced the day, the time, and the location of the ingame funeral on the public WoW forums for all to see. They finished off by stating they planned to make a video of it for the family to see and “…would appreciate it if nobody comes to mess things up.” The problem with open door invitations is the devil might show up with his plus one.

The devil in this instance was an Alliance guild known as Serenity Now. It would’ve been a shame if the guild known for griefing other players ruined the event, but to Serenity Now it would’ve been a shame if they didn’t. There’s a special currency in World of Warcraft called honor points you can spend to receive specific gear and materials. You earn these by killing enemies within a few levels of your own. They become harder to attain at higher levels because the enemies require more coordination to defeat and other players are better geared. So imagine their reaction when they found out there was a dress code for this funeral. This was before the days of transmogrification. Transmogging is a way to make your weapons and armor look like normal attire. You might accidentally attack a fella in his business casuals before realizing his flip flops are actually Infurious Warboots of Impunity, but transmogging wasn’t added until 2011. This was 2006, and these high level players were showing up in their Sunday best with no weapons and no armor. I’m not saying Serenity Now were justified in crashing the funeral. I’m just saying I’m not surprised. 

It was a lovely day for a memorial. The procession was led through the lavender hued snowy hills of Winterspring. A line was formed at the top of the hill, and down by the water was Fayejin in her white dress and blue cloak looking out towards the rippling waters. A guard looked on as players approached in small numbers to pay their respects. More guards maintained a watchful eye on the perimeter. There was quite the turn out, a crowd of at least fifty or so, maybe even a hundred. If any one of them took that moment to put on their detection goggles they might’ve had a better chance to notice three rogues standing a few feet away from Fayejin. No one was equipped to see through stealth and everyone had their eyes in different places. The guests were looking north towards the ceremony on the water. The guards were scanning the open and vulnerable lands to the east. The three rogues were looking to the west.

Cause, in that direction, 18 or so guild members of Serenity Now and a few other players had set off on a winding road through Felwood to the east of Winterspring. It was a long and arduous trek in narrow tunnels. Travelers have nowhere to go if they were spotted out. It was a horrible path cutting into contested zones. No one thought anyone would be stupid enough to attack from that direction. Ain’t stupid if it works. The malicious company made it to Winterspring without a hitch. One more left turn and it was a straight shot to Frostfire Hot Springs. There was the ceremony. There was Fayejin. And right behind her were three rogues waiting in stealth, waiting for this moment.

The rogues sprang forward and attacked Fayejin with cold blood. Metaphorically and literally, Cold Blood is a spell that does extra damage on the first strike to someone’s backside. By the time one of the guards made it over to fight off the attackers the rogues had slain Fayejin and were making moves to the hill. The long line of guests were paralyzed in shock– or perhaps a few had stepped away from their keyboard to grab a sandwich. The rogues took a chunk out of the front of the queue with almost no retaliation. The rear was being cut apart by Serenity Now. In only a matter of seconds, half of the procession was lying prone on the ground. The other half was doing their best to fight back, but they stood no chance without their weapons and armor. Some fled to the waters, but were struck down mid doggy paddle. The entire massacre took about two minutes, from the murder of the host to the final guest. The rogue that dealt the first blow ran over the bodies before stopping at Fayejin’s. It was their turn to give their final farewell. “She loved fishing. And snow. And PvP”

The funeral was over, but the wake was just getting started. Serenity Now had recorded the entire event and put together a video as a keepsake. The start of the video was a montage of embittered comments from the forums and the open invitation before the actual event. It was all there. The ceremony, the winding trek through the west, the rogues coming out of stealth to attack Fayejin, and the massacre on the hillside. It ended with a plug to their website, because Serenity Now uploaded the video to the internet with the intent of using it as a recruitment ad of sorts for their guild. The players met no consequences from on high. They had done nothing against the rules of the server, so Blizzard took no action against them. Morally though, well, that was up for debate. The event can not exist without bringing to question social ethos. Where do we draw the line as far as civility is concerned? Right or wrong, this was an opportunity to have a look into the human condition. The Guardian wrote on the event. The University of Sydney used it as a case study for boundary-work. Interviews were conducted with the players, but as far as the leader was concerned, he didn’t really stop to think about why or why not. It was all in good fun and for 15 minutes of attention. Whether the audience was horrified or delighted didn’t matter. Attention is what they got.

Since Blizzard took no action against the funeral crashers, retribution was left in the hands of the other members of the server. Bounties were placed on the entire guild of Serenity now and their co-conspirators. Each one of them was marked for K.O.S and C.C., a rather unusual punishment in World of Warcraft. What this entails is you kill a player on sight and then you camp their corpse. In the game, when you die you turn into a spirit and you need to either travel to your body to retrieve it or resurrect it at a nearby graveyard. Regardless of how you collect yourself you’re in a weakened state when you get back up. If someone were to wait over your corpse as you attempt to get your character back they could send you down again with the swiftness. Teleportation spells took too long to cast and you wouldn’t get far running. You’d be at the mercy of the camper’s attention span. The goal was to never permit the guild a normal day of gaming ever again, and a few of the members did leave. But some, like the raid leader, accepted this life on the run as the new World of Warcraft experience, undesirables being chased for honor or for sport.

I’d love to tell you there was a concise outcome to this event. Something clear, cut, and dry you could take away with you. I’m sorry, but the world ain’t that. Don’t raid funerals or don’t hold funerals in active war zones, I guess. Fayejin’s friends wanted to do something kind in her memory and now her memory lives on, albeit for other reasons. 

Act 3

That brings us back to where we began, three players surrounded by a group of twenty. The group were bounty hunters looking for revenge, fame, and riches. They marked their three targets in front of them. These three took part in the massacre at Winterspring. The head of the trio, the one who was doing all the talking, was the raid leader that organized the event and directed everyone through the winding paths west of Frostfire Hot Springs before laying siege to the guests of the funeral. If he died in this fight, the players would stand over his corpse and wait for him to try to reclaim his body before slaying him again. How long would they wait? Hours, days, weeks? A few of his former crew had given up on the game because they couldn’t reclaim their bodies from bounty hunters for a month…and they were just lackeys. What would the twenty be willing to do to the four most sought after bounties, his own and the three rogues who had struck down Fayejin by the waters? The same rogues who now sat waiting in the shadows, slowly approaching the twenty who were facing the wrong direction.

Off the southern coast of England there’s an island called the Island of Wight. It is quaint. It is serene. It is…boring. You know how in movies sometimes they try to dump all of their criminals onto one island as a sort of supermax prison and accidentally create a chaotic hellscape that threatens to break out of its borders and destroy the world? Imagine that, but a supermax retirement home island thing instead. The Beatles made a song about it once called “When I’m Sixty Four.” It’s that slow and easy-going.

One day the island organizers must’ve accidentally swapped out their annual Bingo Bonanza for a racing event. Taken in by the sudden surge of adrenaline beyond legally-designated levels, Peter Buckland and Neil Barnden decided to make a demolition derby video game. But this game must’ve been programmed on desecrated burial grounds. It had to have been haunted. Every step forward was a step back.

Stainless Games, as they were known, searched high and low for a publisher that was willing to pay for the development of a racing game where the goal was to crash on purpose. Sales Curve Interactive was the devil that made the deal with them on the crossroads…on one condition. SCI liked publishing games with licenses, so the crew waited in limbo as they appealed for a Mad Max license. The Mad Max owners weren’t biting, so Stainless Games pivoted towards Death Race. No, not Death Race 2000, the retro dystopian death sport film starring Sylvester Stallone from 1975. The game was meant to be a tie-in with the sequel, Death Race 2020. The game’s development was inching towards the finish line as the license was being settled. Unfortunately, the movie died in pre-production and there went all hopes of acquiring the license. But when one door closes, another one is broken down by a souped up C3 Corvette. Because the team thought they were making a Death Race video game until they weren’t, Stainless Games cranked up the arcade violence to an 11, now featuring the point system for destroying the environment and knocking out civilians. Impressed by the carmageddon on display, SCI allowed the game to be published as its own thing instead of haggling motor sport films for licenses.

Glad that was all sorted out because everything else was on fire. The team was also trying to create their own 3D rendering engine, but it took so long to get the contract signed that their 3D rendering engineer took a job elsewhere. The physics engine they ended up using was unruly and difficult to work with, but in came Dr. Kev Martin, Peter Buckland’s math teacher and an absolute fiend of a programming wizard. He molded the engine to his command, stabilized the frame rate, programmed the collisions with pinpoint precision, and created 3D destructibility beyond the scope of anything in 1996. He also introduced a bevy of unintended consequences. Kev’s physics engine riddled Carmageddon with bugs. The bodies of pedestrians would get stuck to the surface of the car. The car would eliminate passerbys without touching them. One bug caused objects to gain momentum upon collision and sent everything ricocheting in all directions. The crew were a pragmatic bunch with a twisted sense of humor about their failures, so they kept the bugs and slapped some extra sound and effects on them. Potato, potato. You say bugs, I say death ray and pinball mode. These are now the defining power ups of Carmageddon.

The team’s energy was through the roof. Every bump in the road was seen as an opportunity to catch some air, and nobody embodied this mentality quite like amateur stuntman and professional madman Tony Taylor. A friend of the studio, Tony was initially brought in for recording in the PratCam. The PratCam is a little box in the game that shows your character reacting to your reckless driving. If you hit a pedestrian the PratCam hoots and hollers, egging you on to find another to continue your combo. If you crash, the man in the PratCam gets tossed around. Tony Taylor was committed to the bit. Reportedly, he had Stainless Games employees beating him with pool sticks to capture his very real reactions to quick and sudden hits of pain. Be wary of a man with two first names that does his own stunts. For his next trick, Tony Taylor wanted to help amp up Carmageddon’s pedestrian animations, so he stuffed his clothes with cardboard and demanded the developers record him getting hit by a car. They hit him once with gusto and once more with glee, but he had higher aspirations. Tony Taylor wanted to be sent over the car. And on the third hit he miscalculated the angle and obliterated the windshield. And would you believe that’s right when the cops showed up? As Tony Taylor’s mock screams while being consensually assaulted by a vehicle drew the attention of the neighbors who called the police thinking someone was running over homeless men in the parking lot. And here’s the kicker, the camera footage was on the wrong setting so it couldn’t really be used for anything.

Carmageddon giveth and Carmageddon taketh away. In one hand, a potential criminal record. In the other hand, free marketing for your small development studio– and Stainless Games were in for a lot of free marketing. They applied for a rating from the British Board of Film Classification for their video game so they could publish it. The BBFC found the game’s vehicular manslaughter premise to be so vulgar and offensive that not only did they reject the application immediately but the studio was raided and the CEO was threatened with jail time. Germany banned the game. Australia banned the game. The United Kingdom banned the game. In 1997 governments around the world didn’t understand that censorship only served to market games. A sticker from the United Nation of Prudes only made people more curious to see what was inside. Still, it does make it harder to sell your game to the people within the country that doesn’t approve, so Stainless Games changed the human pedestrians out for zombie pedestrians with green not blood instead of red blood. It seemed a shame to create a game with so much edge only to blunt it at the finish line. As one last middle finger to fate, destiny, and the British Board of Film Classification, the developers released an online patch that would detect an empty file within Carmageddon that restored it to its original intended state.

Carmageddon had no business existing. Somehow, every problem added more life and identity to the game as it raced past the licensing issues, swerved around the software and hardware bugs, and left the British courts in their dust before eventually crossing the finish line as one of the games that defined racing games, open world games, and physics engines. When life gives you lemons, make Carmageddon.

Out of options, Lycerius posted his problem in the reddit gaming forums. He explained that he was a fan of Civilization 2 and had let one game play out for far too long. He wanted to see what the world would look like in the distant future, but it caused him to stalemate into a never ending war that left everything in ruin. He lamented the state of the world and begged for help rebuilding it. I’ve dug up his old journal entries recounting his 10 year struggle.

“The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation” -Lycerius  June 12, 2012

“There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands. The ice caps have melted over 20 times due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn’t a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.”

“As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the world’s population (at its peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn’t any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout.

“You’ve heard of the 100 year war? Try the 1700 year war. The three remaining nations have been locked in an eternal death struggle for almost 2000 years. Peace seems to be impossible. Every time a ceasefire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the U.N forces a peace treaty. So I can only assume that peace will come only when they’re wiped out. It is this that perpetuates the war ad infinitum.”

“The only governments left are two theocracies and myself, a communist state. I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always overrule me when I wanted to declare war before the Vikings did. This would delay my attack and render my turn and often my plans useless. And of course the Vikings would then break the ceasefire like clockwork the very next turn. I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire. But of course the people hate me now and every few years since then, there are massive guerrilla uprisings in the heart of my empire that I have to deal with which saps resources from the war effort.”

“The military stalemate is air tight…all remaining nations already have all the technologies so there is no advantage. And there are so many units at once on the map that you could lose 20 tanks and not have your lines dented because you have a constant stream moving to the front. This also means that cities are not only tiny towns full of starving people, but that you can never improve them. ‘So you want a granary so you can eat? Sorry; I have to build another tank instead. Maybe next time.’”

“My goal for the next few years is to try and end the war and thus use the engineers to clear swamps and fallout so that farming may resume. I want to rebuild the world. But I’m not sure how. If any of you old Civ II players have any advice, I’m listening.”

The reddit gaming community were bewildered by the account of the 10 year war. They asked Lycerius to share his game file, and with it they helped him find a resolution to the never ending conflict. One year later, Lycerius returned to the reddit gaming forum and thanked them all for their input. Through their conjoined efforts, the players found different strategies to help him overtake the Vikings and end the Eternal War, but it wasn’t enough anymore. Time had changed Lycerius. All he knew was war. He could no longer live in a world at peace, because a world at peace didn’t need him. The players were shocked by what he wrote next.

June 12, 2013

“…in January of this year I decided to continue playing on my original save file, determined not to end this struggle through overwhelming force alone. I concede that at this point, armed with the knowledge that I have gained through this experience, I could if I want at any time, crush the Viking menace with relative ease. I continue the story now simply to see the narrative play itself out. Besides, keeping them around has its uses when considered from a certain perspective. Consider if you will, what need would there be for my glorious Celtic Communist state to exist in a world at peace? How would I justify to the masses the need for brutal dictatorship and big brother’s watchful eye if there is no longer an external threat to protect them from? I couldn’t. And so the external threat must be maintained of course. The parallels of my Eternal War to George Orwell’s 1984 were of course apparent, but I have since decided to fully embrace our inevitable Orwellian future. Or present, considering the headlines. Whether it’s the NSA spying on our communications, Turks being brutalized for wanting to preserve a historic park, or President Assad of Syria butchering entire cities worth of his own countrymen to remain in power, there are many lessons from life to draw upon.”

“The year is 4200 AD. The world is a nightmare of suffering and devastation. This has not changed. Two more centuries of war have yielded no victor. But of course this is now by design rather than stalemate. Rather than destroy the Vikings, my largest operation of the 41st century was a massive naval and land offensive to capture the new Viking capital of Piza, with the intention of instigating a civil war among their people. The naval campaign was a disaster. Viking cruise missiles wiped out most of the fleet along with most of the troops in transport before they ever made landfall. Eventually Piza did fall, but this did not result in a civil war as I had hoped. I soon withdrew from the city which was of course recaptured shortly thereafter. And so went 40 years of planning and preparation.”

“The 42nd century was dominated by an unprecedented number of uprisings and rebellions across my empire. Every other year it seemed as though fresh waves would replace the rebels I gunned down the year before. Even with my overwhelming military advantage, it became difficult to cope. The rebels would appear outside some of my most developed cities and tear up the roads and railways before I could react. With the roads gone, it became an ordeal to move troops close enough to attack them. Before I could, more rebels would appear elsewhere and thus divide my attention. This culminated in the sacking of the city Shoreside Vale. At that point for the first time ever, I had more troops engaged in quelling rebellions than fighting the Vikings. And not because they were particularly powerful; but because there were so many and so disparate, spread across all reaches of my empire. Eventually I created a squadron of fighters, not bound by roads, specifically to engage the rebels so that the rest of my production could be focused on maintaining the status quo on the front lines. This is where things stand now. My alliance with the Americans remains strong, and the Sioux remain weak. All is as it should be. I shall update you all on the situation once again before the end of the year. And remember: Big Brother is watching….”

Poor Lycerius, commander of the Celts, one of the three remaining super nations left squabbling for the irradiated remains of planet Earth in the year 4200 AD. He asked for help on the reddit gaming forums to try and crowdsource an end to his Eternal War, found it, and then didn’t have anything to do, so his world stopped. He rebooted the war and now keeps it going just so his world can continue to exist.

If the infinite starry expanse is where you wish to live out your life as a space pirate, a space engineer, a space navigator, a space etc then Eve Online is the game for you. But be warned, Eve Online’s initial learning curve is so steep you need to be a space mountain climber to get over it. This is a game for people who want another thankless full-time job to match the first or who think their creative arts degree is getting lonely and could use another equally useless degree to keep it company. There’s a lot of grinding, a lot of wikis, and a lot of competition to live out that space dream of yours. The good news is there are no rules in space. So long as you’re not hacking or exploiting bugs you are free to pull yourself up from the bootstraps as you see fit. For many, that dream is realized one mined resource at a time, slowly but surely, until you’ve saved up enough Interstellar Kredit to craft your own spaceship. 

Good space luck with that. You’ll be hard pressed to find resources that haven’t been claimed by one of the many space corporations fighting for control, backed up by a big enough fleet to keep space highwaymen from stealing their bootstraps. Regardless, space money, like real money, needs to be kept somewhere safe.

Cally wasn’t the name given to him by his parents, but it was the name he went by while working as the CEO of the EIB in Eve Online. Short for the Eve Intergalactic Bank, the EIB operated like a typical space bank. Players deposited their in-game money, the EIB used their money to invest into different projects or loans, and then paid back the players with interest. A novel idea in 2006, but there were enough smaller scams at the time to justify the suspicious looks Cally was getting. Here’s this guy, seemingly appearing from nowhere, putting forward 100 million of his own Interstellar Kredits to loan out to players with a handsome interest rate in return. As the saying goes, a space fool and his money are soon parted. One player in particular had a nose for sniffing out scams– an alleged con man in his own right. He played the role of space detective and went rummaging through Cally’s affairs looking for dirty laundry.

The detective pressed for proof of EIB’s legitimacy, practically audited the bank with how many questions he had. Answers were given, screenshots were shared, but the investigation had to be put on hold as Cally was injured in a bus crash. Unfortunate and untimely…or just the distraction that Cally needed. People were growing suspicious enough to break the barrier between video gaming and the real world. They cracked out magnifying glasses and conducted their own internet sleuthing into his real life. They scoured the web for news of the accident, and found one that fit the bill. Cally’s story seemed to check out, but the detective wasn’t convinced. He called the hospital and found no person of Cally’s description had been admitted. Obviously, hospitals can’t gossip patient details to cold callers, but enough was given to make Cally’s accident look more like a convenient fabrication. The detective dropped the subtleties and went straight to the source. He called Cally using a number he had provided during one of many email interrogations.

A man named Peter answered the phone. Rugged and slurred, like a hungover boatman who’d been kicked awake, Peter couldn’t make head or tail of the space detective’s questions. The detective asked him about Cally and the Eve Intergalactic Bank, but the confused gentleman on the other end wasn’t having any of it. He knew no Eve Intergalactic Bank and he knew no CEO named Cally who run it. What luck! This brash character had given the detective all he needed to bring the EIB down, and Cally with it. But further questioning took a hammer to the detectives’ hopes. As it turned out, Peter was a caretaker in the service of a man who had been in a bus crash. A man who spent an inordinate amount of time in his room playing a game called Eve Online “or somfin loik tha’.” The detective had hit another dead end. He retreated for the time being with his tail tucked between his legs. Cally returned days later to run the EIB.

For months the community was split with one camp calling the detective out for pushing things too far into the real world. Others thought the detective hadn’t gone far enough, as back then Interstellar Kredits could be traded for real world money. Paranoia grew. It was difficult to differentiate fact from rumor, and Cally’s routine disappearances were only stoking the flames. The detective dug deep for anything he could find. Cally was willing to help, but frequently claimed he had trouble logging on from time to time. The detective dug deeper still. The staffers of the EIB were interrogated. No one seemed to have their stories straight. To some, Cally was a chronically ill angel investor. To others, Cally was a high roller with a temper constantly getting into public fights and getting locked up in real-life. In spite of their polarizing reputation, the bank was steadily growing and handling everyone’s money with the utmost care. Then one day the EIB made a major announcement. Cally had been missing longer than usual without checking in with one of the staffers. Concerned, they called Cally’s home where a somber Peter delivered the news. Cally had passed away.

It was a tough time for everyone, but the bank needed to continue moving forward from what Cally built, for the good of the community. The Chief Operations Officer sprang to the steering wheel. The detective, torn between sympathy and skepticism, demanded more information. He spent months piecing together the enigma that was Cally, and knew even less about the new CEO of the Eve Intergalactic Bank. It’s better to deal with the space devil you kind of know than the one you don’t. The detective got in the new CEOs face and demanded he answer to an audit of the EIB, similar to the one he gave Cally. The new CEOs record keeping was pristine, but something felt off this time around. The detective scoured through his personal emails and cross referenced the new records with the old ones Cally had provided. The new CEOs accounts didn’t match the old EIB records. The detective had finally found a solid nugget of evidence that would crack the Eve Intergalactic Bank wide open, but the Eve Online community had bigger problems. The EIB had been completely drained of all its resources. 800 billion Interstellar Kredits, $170,000 worth of in game currency disappeared from the bank.

The detective stormed the EIB looking for the new CEO. The new CEO tossed him aside, had he not been dealing with the detective’s relentless auditing, maybe the bank wouldn’t have been vulnerable to theft. Everyone was so focused on the EIB that no one could blame them for not noticing the massive spaceship floating into open space at that very moment. It was a marvel of engineering. Every last square inch was reinforced, and no credit was spared to ensure this impenetrable Titan had the agility to match its firepower. This was the deadliest space ship that money could buy. It continued drifting and then turned to face the direction of the EIB. The pilot sent out a video message through the game and through the forums. The video was titled: “The confessions of an EIB CEO”. The username he used was “Dentara Rast.” It was a name the detective had briefly come across in his prior investigations, but now he knew with utmost certainty that this mysterious stranger was Cally.

The blocky bitrate made it difficult to assign any distinct features to the bank robber who now commanded the most lethal ship in all of Eve Online. An average looking white male sporting close cropped hair sat in a dimly lit room that gave everything in the webcam an orange tinge. He greeted the Eve Online community with an air of business casual familiarity. “This is an official announcement from Cally of EIB.” The formalities were betrayed by the smug grin filling his face, capable of being seen despite the poor camera quality. “Just to let you all know, yes, it was a scam.” “Sorry about that,” he off-handedly apologized like a friend who accidentally bumped into you at the pub and caused you to spill a bit of your drink, not as the guy who robbed his own bank of 800 billion Interstellar Kredits mere moments ago. The man everyone knew as Cally continued in this manner for 16 minutes. He laid bare his plan from the start. Cally’s intent was legitimate. The EIB was founded with 100 million of his own credits, it was making money, and players were paid back with due diligence, but it was a ponzi scheme. He was using the money from new investors to pay off older investors. The bank’s records were fraudulent, but seeing as this was one of the first space banks in Eve Online there were no space bank regulators to stop him.

That is until the detective encouraged the community to poke and prod at the EIB. Cally tolerated the targeted doubt, but found it tiring to fend them off and continue making the EIB appear legitimate as the months went on. The bus crash, like the detective assumed, was indeed made up, but Cally didn’t think the detective was willing to pursue it to the extent of calling the hospital. Cally gleefully explained the phone number was a red herring set up so the detective could run into Peter. Cally then introduced Peter on camera. He scrunched his face and put on the voice the detective had heard before while talking to who he assumed to be Cally’s caretaker. The detective couldn’t believe it. He   had been so close to uncovering the truth, but lacked anything substantial to expose the man who sat there mocking him. Perhaps if he had left well enough alone, he wouldn’t have provoked Cally’s heist.

Unlikely. The video continued and Cally seemed to relish in his own mischief. He believed the only people to blame were the players themselves. At the end of the space day, they were the ones who gave him the money. But the lion’s share of the stolen credits belonged to the “fat cats,” as Cally put it. The corporations that used their resources to force the smaller players into compliance. The EIB still had enough assets for the directors to sell off and repay the common folk of Eve Online. Only the rich would suffer, as Cally used the bulk of their money to pay for the colossal space fighter he was sitting in. The rest of the money, Cally used to place a bounty on his own character’s head. He was giving everyone a “sporting chance” to come reclaim their own money.

Outraged, the players reported Cally to the developers, but CCP Games found that he had done nothing wrong. He didn’t hack anyone’s accounts. He didn’t break Terms of Service or the End User License Agreement. As Cally put it, the players were the ones who handed him the money. Cally’s approach embodied and exaggerated the no holds barred approach of Eve Online. He set a precedent and scammers are as much a part of today’s community as honest prospectors, ruthless corporate entities, and thieving pirates. Before he logged off, Cally encouraged the players to build their worth in whatever way they saw fit, because he promised to return for another scam in 6 month’s time. I’m not sure if he ever made good on his promise, but it’s a haunting detail that floats through my mind every time a new scam breaks Cally’s old record. Did he return to one up himself? Maybe people should store their money in space mattresses instead.

Kerafyrm was the product of a forbidden love between two dragons of opposite elemental forces, and so was born as the first and only dragon of pure energy. Some saw Kerafyrm as an abomination while others believed this godly creature would bring about a new age for dragon kind. Unfortunately, it wasn’t too long before the unfathomable power and taboo nature of his conception overwhelmed Kerafyrm with a tremendous madness. Dragons cried out for his execution, but the laws forbid dragons to kill dragons under any circumstances. Kerafyrm violated these laws as well, killing his detractors. Eventually, he was subdued into a great sleep and sealed away in the Sleeper’s Tomb. Four dragons guard the entrance for all eternity. If the four were to fall, Kerafyrm would be free to wreak havoc over the entire world once more.

From a technical standpoint, the developers intended for Kerafyrm to be unkillable. During a time when the most powerful raid bosses had around 2 million health points, Kerafyrm’s health points were rumored to be somewhere within the range of 100 million to 400 million. He had multiple abilities that killed even the mightiest of characters in one touch and was immune to almost every kind of spell and crowd control. Even if one were foolish enough to attempt to awaken Kerafyrm they would have to first embark on a quest to find the appropriate keys and kill the four dragons guarding his tomb. Each one was a formidable raid boss in their own right and required guilds with highly organized and leveled players coming together to put all four guards down at the same time to begin the summoning. Once awakened, Kerafyrm would set off on a server-wide rampage to destroy everyone and everything in his path before disappearing forever.

His unstoppable rampage was a natural part of the story of EverQuest, and players were incentivized to set Kerafyrm off to attain better loot. But once the prismatic dragon’s rampage was over there would be no way to farm the items from the four dragons that guarded his tomb. As different EverQuest servers awakened Kerafyrm, the dragon guard loot was becoming rarer and even more valuable–keep in mind that this was during a time when MMOs had adjacent economies based on real world money.

Rallos Zek was one of the last servers remaining with an undisturbed tomb. In normal servers it was possible for any group of players with strong enough characters to slay the four dragon guards and awaken the slumbering giant. But Rallos Zek was a hardcore player-vs-player server where players could kill other players to take their loot and reduce their levels. It was difficult to make any form of meaningful end game progress in older MMOs like EverQuest, so being on a guild’s good side was vital. But the three strongest guilds of Rallos Zek did not wish to awaken Kerafyrm since doing so would make the old dragon guard loot impossible to attain. Ascending Dawn, Wudan, and Magus Imperialis Magicus guarded the tomb and made sure no one could set the end times in motion. Few guilds had the power and information available to open the Sleeper Tomb within Rallos Zek. If one did manage the members of the offending guild were to be hunted down on sight by the remaining guilds until they left the server. This was enough to keep players at bay, until a monk named Stynkfyst defected from Ascending Dawn.

The monk joined a guild of outlaws intent on setting the Sleeper’s Tomb event in motion in order to make it so no future guilds could acquire the old loot ever again. They had the power to kill the guards but lacked the information needed to find the keys, information that Stynkfyst’s time in Ascending Dawn would provide. Word traveled a lot slower in those days. There were always rumors of people wanting to awaken Kerafyrm. So it took a while for the top guilds to take notice of the defector’s plot and even longer to realize he was being serious. The three guilds set out to stop Kerafyrm’s awakening. While the monk never did manage to open the tomb, he had renewed the server’s interest in the beast of legend. The attitude of the time was changing. The guilds understood, in one way or another, Kerafyrm was inevitable, so they acquiesced to the request. In November 2003, battleplans were drawn up and the three hundred strongest players in Rallos Zek made their way to the tomb. The keys were collected. The dragon guards were slain. Kerafyrm was awakened.

The best tank player in all of Rallos Zek stepped forward to draw the beast’s attention. Kerafyrm’s first swipe took 95% of his health, and the follow up attack took the remaining sliver. In two hits, the strongest warrior in the server lay dead. The next tank sprang forward to fulfill the duties of his fallen comrade, but was snuffed out in a single attack. Kerafyrm’s rampage was building up as he unleashed attacks in an area of effect that wiped out dozens of players at a time. Through sheer discipline, the tank players continued to draw most of the dragon’s aggression. One at a time, each tank stepped forth in the chain of command and met the same fate as their senior officer, dying to a single hit from the great Prismatic dragon. Once the last tank fell, the rest of the players in the tomb would follow and the server soon after.

The clerics watched in shock as Kerafyrm made quick work of the strongest tanks of Rallos Zek, unable to contribute. Since it was impossible to heal the troops dying to one attack, the clerics were left to drag the corpses of their tanks out of harm’s reach. Once at a safe distance, the clerics used spells to resurrect the tanks. The tanks returned to the front of the battle where they continued holding Kerafyrm’s attention. Curiously enough, the dragon’s immense power forced the players into a better position than anyone else who had ever attempted to take on the god-being. Because the clerics were unable to use their heals, the legendary raid boss never targeted them directly. Out of sight and out of mind, the clerics could continue to resurrect enough tanks to replenish the frontlines faster than Kerafyrm could eliminate them. The most daring of Rallos Zek had found a way to stall out the inevitable.

Melee combat was out of the question, so the mages desperately looked for a ranged counteroffensive. Kerafyrm was virtually immune to all attacks. Only a few spells affected him  causing meager amounts of damage. Pets were summoned and sent in to scratch away at the dragon before being stomped out alongside the tanks. Eventually the mages settled on the damage shield spell. With this spell, a shield was placed around the pets that inflicted damage back on the attacker. The pets died, but they were resummoned and sent in again with another damage shield. For 15 minutes the tanks held the line, the clerics resurrected the tanks, and the mages sent in their kamikaze pets. Kerafyrm’s health bar dropped ever so slightly from 100% to 99%. The immortal dragon was made to bleed.

No one went into the tomb expecting anything short of their own annihilation. Somehow, the 300 had found a potential win condition. The other servers tuned into the chat rooms to discuss what was happening. A presumed suicide run had turned into a battle of attrition, and all eyes were on Rallos Zek. With renewed inspiration the raiders continued to throw themselves at Kerafyrm until another sliver of health disappeared from his health bar. And another and another. The improvised plan was working. An hour passed. Then another and another. Tick by tick the declining health bar kept the 300 motivated. By the 4th hour the tanks had lost tremendous amounts of experience from their accumulating deaths. They were considerably weaker than when the raid had been initiated, but they stayed their course. These players were no strangers to high stress situations. They were the best Rallos Zek had to offer, but this raid was unlike any other raid, designed to be impossible. Yet somehow the unkillable god-creature was undoubtedly dying. The light at the end of the tunnel was growing ever brighter until suddenly it vanished. With a quarter of his health remaining, the legendary raid boss had been despawned by the administrator of the server. The players were outraged and demanded to know why they had been robbed of their eventual victory. The administrator could give only one detail. He was told to pull the plug by Sony Entertainment themselves.

Official notice was given. Sony Entertainment accused the players of cheating, and then rescinded their accusation. Sony Entertainment then said Kerafyrm had been bugged during the encounter.  Allegedly, the dragon was focused on a random non-playable character in the tomb, or his rate of health regeneration was broken at the time of the raid. The players knew neither scenario had occurred. If the dragon’s focus was elsewhere then the players would not have died in the thousands. They suspected Sony didn’t want their pet dragon to be put down. After all, Kerafyrm was intended to be unkillable. He was meant to destroy the world and continue the story of EverQuest. There was no fall back plan because he was not meant to die in the tomb at the hands of overzealous players making a tank resurrecting conga line and bombarding the realm’s most powerful villain with their bodies.

Sony gave in to the outcries. The server was rolled back, and the 300 made preparations to finish what they had started. The tanks ran in with renewed gusto, the clerics resurrected them as they had before, and the mages sent in their pets with damage shields. 3 hours later, the strongest players of Rallos Zek had done what no other server had ever done. The great dragon was vanquished. Sony congratulated the players and gave them enough experience points to make up for the levels they lost while fighting Kerafyrm. It’s the least they could do since the most legendary raid boss in all of MMORPG history didn’t drop any loot.