Have you ever infiltrated a corp, faked an alliance, or depleted the markets? Somebody queue the heist music because we've got another great community-suggested bounty for you.
EVE is notorious for meticulously crafted plans gently nurtured over weeks, months, or even years. We're not looking for fiction for this bounty, we want true tales from your EVE Online gameplay - tales about cunning long-term heists, operations, and schemes.
We're ideally looking for operations that you yourself have thought up and participated in. Although if it's an exceptionally good story about a corpmate, fleetmate, or friend, we'll accept that too.
There are only six prizes for this bounty. As well as their popularity with the Just About EVE community, winning submissions will be decided based on attention to detail, storytelling flair, writing skill, and how epic the story is. Aim for between 300 and 800 words. Stories longer than 1,000 words will be disqualified.
already paid
$66 / 66
Reward details
This reward closed to entries at 11:45am on January 15, 2024 but you can still reply, react, and join the conversation below! If you’d like to enter other rewards which are still open, click here.
This story may not be as relevant in the world of EVE Online, as it was a conflict within the Hispanic community. However, given the interesting topic presented, it's time to share it.
III ALAS NEGRAS III was a wormhole corporation that sowed discontent among the Hispanic community during the years 2019-2020. According to their ideals, they proclaimed that all other corporations were imperfect, and only under their guidance would the community emerge from the shadows, rising above the rest to form a great alliance of Spanish speakers capable of facing the powerful Imperium (when you hear this, you know the role-playing is quite intense).
My first interaction with them was quite unpleasant, to be honest. I had to play with them for a month while my corporation mates managed to extract their assets and find refuge to avoid losing everything. But that's a story for another topic (perhaps stories of things you never thought would happen in EVE Online).
After freeing myself from them and gaining a better understanding of the game, we lost track of them for a few months. However, one day, the coordinates of one of their wormholes leaked into a community group. Without hesitation, we sent numerous alts to keep an eye on them, waiting for the right moment.
In less than a month, we saw the opportunity to use that information. They were preparing to leave that system as its location was compromised and considered unsafe. So, we decided to share this information with some wormhole colleagues to deliver the finishing blow.
When the operation started, they tried to defend the entrance a bit, but they were quickly overwhelmed, and the destruction of their structures began, which, being reinforced as they were being unanchored, was a relatively quick job.
In total, they lost two Athanors, an Azbel, and some ships, not counting the Rorqual they had logged off with an alt and later removed from the corporation to destroy themselves.
I would like to say that they disappeared after that, but it wasn't the case. They tried to recover and start again in high sec, but all that happened repeatedly was that they lost their structures war after war. As of today, they are inactive, but you never know when they might return from their retirement to try to dominate the galaxy.
I'll leave you with the Zkill links for the operation, as well as what, to me, is a source of shame in my character's history, having belonged to III ALAS NEGRAS III
Although not really a heist, (the only thing that came out of this event was dank frags, some loot, a killmail and some in game high fives and o7's) this is going to be a top level run down of one of our long games that we undertook a few years back which involved around 25/30 members of FUN INC.
No killmails will be linked to protect alts and to remove the likelihood of linking characters.
During the course of my time in EVE online, I have often taken the preferred role of scout / skirmisher. This means going ahead of a fleet and trying to find targets to kill. Over the course of many roams in an [undisclosed] region of nullsec, I would regularly come into contact with a player who had the penchant for dropping Carriers onto targtes.
Now these targets were varied - they could be a lone battleship, a blingy cruiser, or even a skirmishing interceptor. Now the trouble with this guys tactics is that he has a number of "eyes" set up at key locations, thus making his traversal of these systems very risk averse, and thus engaging soft targets with next to no likelihood that he will be beaten.
We had a number of plans:
Run a normal fleet into the HVT in conjunction with a corp blackops fleet, engage tackle on the HVT, and cyno in the BLOPS fleet onto an alt.
Run a pure BLOPS fleet with a bait BS and cyno.
We opted for option 2.
After a failed attempt a few months before, we let this one slide for a few months, eventually opting for a corporation event, where as many people would logon to take part. I believe we had about 30 people in fleet which for a corporation our size, we had a really great turn out.
The plan was as follows. Move a battleship through from losec to nullsec gate to gate, and deliberately get caught in a bubble (we knew that the HVT would see the battleship) moving between systems, and get the engagement on a certain gate where we had a cyno capable ship setup ready to cyno our BLOPS fleet in.
We had the plan so all formed up, and it went like clockwork.
We had a dictor cloaked in the next system, and our helios ready near to the target gate, and hopped the Battleship into the first nullsec system. Our battleship pilot then warped to one of two gates - both gates are on scan - so the HVT would see the battleship so knew that we would be going to the next system, so would meet us there with his heavy.
Now i should mention - the battleship we used, was a brick Dominix. Full bulkheads, all neuts, and grappler and scram. If - as we had planned - the Carrier would land at zero on his own cyno on our Battleship in a bubble, we would have it instantly tackled and would be able to engage freely.
Our battleship landed in the destination system - local was as it should be, four of the expected pilots - the hostile cyno ship and his heavy tacklers and dictor - harbinger and gnosis and myrmidon and sabre - which curiously could kill a dominix without the need for the carrier (Thanatos).
Our Dominix warped to the outgate as planned, calling the recon over comms, and advising what he could see on scan. As the outgate came on scan, the hostile bubble was up, and all the HVT tackle ships were present. We had found his trap. We just needed to spring his cyno and for him to bring his Thanatos in.
As our Dominix landed, the hostile rapier decloaked, lit the cyno and the Thanatos loaded grid, it was at this moment that I knew we had Him.
The Dominix immediately overheated his tackle and called for the fleet to come in. Our dictor in the next system, decloaked warped down to gate, jumped and overheated and burnt to our Domi and bubbled the Thanatos, whilst our Helios simultaneosuly decloaked , lit our friendly cyno and brought in the friendly fleet. 15 Stealth Bombers, and some force recon ships.
As the bombers and me loaded grid, I warped down my arazu and got an overheated ranged long point onto him - he wasnt going anywhere. We had him. The bombers warped down and locked the Thanatos up and we destroyed it in less than 2mins.
We lost the battleship in the process, but destroyed a 4BN isk Thanatos.
This was not just about the kill - this was about the planning. This was about the logistics, this was about understanding and detecting and predicting peoples movements. We had the intel, we had the knowledge, and we delivered.
No killmails have been linked to protect alts and to remove the likelihood of linking characters.
However please do see my reactions which i feel are worth more than killmails!
Massive kudos to @npsi.rocks for the setup on this one!
I once almost stole a Titan. For this story we have to put on our way-back machines and teleport ourselves all the way back to 2009. Back then I was living in Providence and spending time flying around enemy space logging bookmarks and gathering intel. This was incredibly boring and time-consuming work. In order to pass the time I started working on breaking into enemy POS towers by guessing their shield passwords.
As I got better at this over time I realized that passwords came in essentially two flavors - impossible and predictable. The predictable ones just took time, but eventually patterns would emerge and often Alliances or Corporations would even use the same passwords on multiple towers. So once they were cracked, you had access to several towers at once.
The screenshot above is from one such incident. I snuck into a -A- POS and got as close to the Avatar Titan as I could to take that shot. In the months I did this I managed to appropriate Nightmares, Rattlesnakes, and billions of ISK worth of other goods, modules, and ships. But it was the Leviathan that really stood out.
I was extremely far from home one Saturday when I spotted the Leviathan on scan. It didn't take long to track it down and find it floating in the POS shields. This was a russian corporations tower and they had only recently started evacuating the region. The code was easy to break and suddenly I was face to face with a free Titan. But then the realization hit me - what to do about it? I managed to get several friends to help me start bumping the ship out of the shields, but none of us could actually fly a Titan.
Frantic calls on comms and Alliance forums returned no answers. Back in 2009 finding someone who could fly a Titan was not as easy as it is today. Eventually, after hours and hours of trying, all we could do was sit and watch the Leviathan recede in the distance as we warped away.
This tale transports us back to 2004, the early days of Eve Online. It was a time of Mining Apocalypses, 15 drones on Dominixes, incredible speeds, and Yulai as the bustling hub for buying and selling.
Null space was untamed, with only a handful of static outposts and no POSes or Citadels. Scanning probes were merely a concept at CCP Games, and 'safe spots' were genuine sanctuaries. Pilots anchored containers with ammo and parked fully-equipped ships in the open cosmos, switching from PvE hunting battleships to PvP interceptors by simply boarding them in space. They called them Safe Spots. (evil laughter)
Most pilots believed their assets were secure, floating in the vacuum while they were offline or occupied elsewhere. But, oh, how mistaken they were.
My hunting grounds were the Wicked Creek and Detorid regions. Armed only with a basic d-scan and an MWD+AB Interceptor, I specialized in hijacking ships and assets. The technique was straightforward, albeit time-consuming, yet the rewards often justified the effort.
I started by scanning the system for ships, then pinpointed their location with my directional scanner. The next step was to deduce the original A and B points of the safe spot bookmark. After determining the distance, I zigzagged along the same path, creating bookmarks to get closer to my target. When within about 20k KM, I stopped warping and traversed the final stage in normal space. Propelled at speeds of around 35,000 m/s, it took about 10 minutes to land amidst the floating treasures.
Back then, I operated in complete silence and caution. My victims never realized why some ships vanished while others remained. This discretion, coupled with strategic bookmarking, allowed me to raid some bases multiple times. Rumors began circulating about Jovians stealing ships - these conspiracy theories in chat were amusing, but I remained a silent observer, watching from the shadows with a knowing smile
Target: United Players Syndicate
Target Stations: Kihtaled, Agil, Khanid Prime
Chars At The Time: Lord Dawn, Nirat, BioNeb
We picked this corporation for multiple reasons because at the time, in Eve Online, the industry side of things was not quite in full swing, we didn't have capitals, we didn't have T3, etc. We picked UPS because they were the only corporation at the time making T2 destroyer bundles, this is to say the Coercer (Amarr Destroyer) with full T2 fits, at this point there was a situation called RP Agents that did a T2 BPO lottery, you did what were essentialy "dailies" and you had a chance of a T2 BPO reward. UPS top brass had been very lucky, they had the T2 BPOS for Dual Light Laser, Small Armor Rep II, Cap Recharger II, etc.
So for this first month, we simply joined as "new players" and joined the mining operations, the mission running, and the frigate PvP. We were super "active and supportive members" and soon began to move up their "promotion" system.
After around 1 month we identified the three stations that were being used for production, this meant that is where the "gold" was stored, i.e. the BPOS we were after. We spent several more months until we had been in the corporation for around 7 months, Nirat and BioNeb had already achieved the Director role by this point and had carefully been working on "Hot Space" the CEO to get me into a director position as well, then I logged in one Sunday and I was convoed, invited to a "command" room and made a director.
We then learned when new directors are brought in, production stops and the BPOS are placed in the CEOS hangar for safety, kind of a "security check" to make sure they didn't immediately rob the place. So we spoke on our private TeamSpeak server and said we needed to wait, before long, we realized this had taken so much time.
Then when "hot space" was convinced we were genuine, production was put back into place and we waited, then on night at around 2-3 am, we struck, we had spent the day making sure everything we wanted, was where we wanted it and we moved on it.
Nirat Hit Agil, I hit Kihtaled, BioNeb hit Agil, and My personal job was the Armor Rep II BPO and the entire stock of finished T2 Bundles, any finished T2 modules, ships, etc, I walked away with the main corporation wallet which was ALOT of ISK. Around 400 finished T2 bundles, Two Armor Rep II BPOS, hundreds and hundreds of modules, tons of Destroyers, and every other ship/mineral stockpile we had.
Once we finished, Hot Space logged in and remained silent, corporation roles meant you had to wait 24 hours to leave a corporation. So we sat on our TeamSpeak, discussing what the reaction would be, to our surprise, she simply typed into corporation chat "well played" and logged off.
That; 's the story of our longest heist in Eve Online, this was around 2004 so, obviously, we don't do this anymore. But yeh, a good haul.
TL;DR - I stole someone’s Orca and explained how in the text body. So to commemorate the heist, I decided to draw a Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas style poster; with all the key components to better visualize it.
I once found a guy using his Orca as a container, while he mined in his Hulk, so I immediately got myself into an Anathema to get into boarding range while cloaked so not to spook him, but I didn’t realise he had the Orca locked; so no-one could board it - fortunately he was AFK and didn’t see my failed attempt.
I then fixed out a 500mn Stabber to bump him out of targeting range; but a friend of mine had the genius idea to just suicide jam him instead. So I grabbed a Blackbird for my alt and loaded it with a full rack of Magnetometric ECM II’s and while I was fitting the ship out I made a ping off him, so I would be within my optimal range for the jammers and repositioned my Anathema right next to him ready for the heist!
I then set my safety to red on my alt, preheated all the ECM’s, warped to the ping I made, locked him up and successfully jammed him and jumped into his Orca on my main and docked up.
I really wasn’t expecting it but it was somewhat blinged out too.It turns out that he came back in a Gnosis and tried to kill my empty Anathema and got himself Concorded, so now I have a killright on him which I can activate in my leisure XD.
What really surprised me was that nothing was said in local, no salty messages or anything; they guy took it like a right champ!Unfortunately in the excitement I completely forgot to press record :(
Anyway long story short, it’s definitely worth keeping your eyes peeled for people using their (now somewhat useless) Orca’s as containers.Happy hunting o7
