When a plan comes together: Inside a massive Eve Online corporate heist

Last week, we marveled at the story of an Eve Online player who used the game's arcane corporate share voting system to take control of in-game assets worth tens of thousands of dollars. Still, as we noted at the time, there were some important questions remaining over how mastermind “Flam_Hill" was able to secure the voting shares necessary to call a CEO vote in the first place.

As it turns out, Flam_Hill is just one alias of Dave (last name withheld), a long-time Eve player who previously served as the CEO of the Event Horizon Expeditionairies corporation (EHEXP). And Dave tells Ars that his recent "hostile takeover" started as an attempt to reclaim assets from a corporation he felt had lost its way.

The motive

The story of Dave's EHEXP coup goes all the way back to 2011, when he founded EHEXP under the control of his Eve Online character Nikki Shea. Dave says he quickly transferred the CEO role to his "original and first" character, Sienna d'Orion.

Sienna quit the corporation in April 2018, naming Dave's friend and long-time player Mackkenzie Hawkwood as the new CEO. Crucially, though, that transfer of corporate control did not include a transfer of those 1,000 corporate voting shares, which Dave had earlier moved from a corporate wallet to Sienna’s character “for security."

By 2020, Mackkenzie had resigned as EHEXP CEO, naming character Chi Aki as the new head of the corporation. That’s where things stood in November 2022 when Dave said he came back to the game to find EHEXP had “sadly" become part of the massive Pandemic Horde alliance.

“Eve is a game of Alliances, and we play in many differing fashions," Dave told Ars. “I was never a fan of Pandemic Horde, so for me it was disappointing EHEXP had joined them."

Dave said Sienna officially quit EHEXP in disgust just three weeks after returning. He said he reached out at one point to corporate leadership via in-game messaging “to say hello and ask if [Sienna] could have some of her assets back that were left in [the corporation]."

When that request “was greeted by silence," Dave said he and some friends in a new corporation started “a discussion… about how to get these assets back. One of our new friends suggested [corporate] shares… so we began to investigate how."

"I toyed with the idea for a week as it’s not really how I play, but I resigned myself to the view that EHEXP had been run into the ground and was a husk of its former self," Dave told PC Gamer. "So I gave... the green light to infiltrate."