As EVE Online was headed towards downtime last week in anticipation of its next expansion, Havoc, a player named Jay Amazingness, decided to wreak a little havoc of his own. Ahead of downtime, the longtime Goonswarm player decided to strike at the very heart of the alliance he has spent his EVE career within, pulling the clone bay from two structures in 1DQ and stealing pretty much anything that wasn’t nailed down - from cold, hard ISK to ships, including multiple Titans.
As a result, Havoc kicked off with what could end up being the biggest heist in EVE Online history.
Many people reading or following the story will shrug it off as “This is EVE,” which is fair, given that this MMO is one where betrayals happen daily, whether they make headlines or not. However, Jay’s heist of the Imperial Palace and his subsequent enlistment in The Imperium’s long enemy, Pandemic Legion, has led many to ask, “Why?”
It’s a question we’re still waiting to answer, even a week later. Jay himself has not gone on the record (and our outreach has gone unanswered as of this writing), but one thing is certain - when the dust settles, this might be one of the largest - if not the largest - heist in EVE Online history.
Jay Amazingness Sends His Regards
While Jay himself hasn’t spoken publicly about the heist, as well as his motivations, a new video released today puts to bed the question of what exactly he stole. Speculation had been running in the EVE community regarding what was really taken, especially with early reports conflicting that even the Titans were stolen.
The video released today is a sped-up recording of the entire heist, from when Jay starts emptying The Imperium's vaults, draining them of valuable blueprint originals, incredibly powerful ships, implants, fittings, and the Titans themselves, among other things. Jay also shows himself pulling the clone bay from not just the Imperial Palace but another station in the system, resulting in even more clones at risk if it hadn’t been saved by downtime. The heist played out on two characters and didn’t just attack The Imperium’s holdings in nullsec - Jay also drained what he could from the offices in the largest trading hub in EVE Online - Jita 4-4.
A lot of buzz was made surrounding the clone bay at the Imperial Palace - and for good reason. Over 52 thousand clones were at risk there alone, though Jay also pulled the market module and the rigs on the structure, sowing even more chaos and making it just that little bit harder for those who came in to clean up the mess once it was known what happened.
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Image via Grarr_Dexx on Reddit
The market pull is particularly hard to swallow for some players as it returned all active market orders, with players who had orders listed losing out on the taxes incurred by posting them. As a result, Grarr Dexx, a pilot in Pandemic Legion who seems to have worked with Jay to pull this heist off, claims that the market tax has been set to 0% at the Imperial Palace to help reimburse their members, hopefully.
When the dust settled, Jay’s heist got away with trillions of ISK, from the cold hard cash he took to the material value of everything now sitting in his various hangars, away from the clutches of a vengeful Imperium.
Yet, the end of the video also answers one of the bigger questions that has spawned since the heist was made public last Tuesday: Did Jay act alone, or was this part of a coordinated effort by Pandemic Legion?
Sowing Chaos
One of the last few shots of the video posted by Jay Amazingness shows Discord conversations, one with Grarr Dexx, while the other screenshots show conversations with Goonswarm members themselves. Speaking with Grarr Dexx over Discord last week, he disputed the claim that Jay never lost his roles needed to pull off the heist, rather, he simply lost access to the “upper echelon channel” used by leadership in The Imperium.
However, when he gained access to it, Dexx says they used it for “the better part of two months to glean their upper leadership’s plans and intentions” to counter them.
However, it seems that this move caught everyone but Grarr, Jay, and anyone else involved in the planning completely off guard - even CCP Games.
“It was totally nuts,” CCP’s community developer Peter “CCP Swift” Ferrell told me in an interview yesterday. “So we go into downtime, and it’s like, just before lunch. We have our stand-up right around there. And then I see these screenshots start popping up and I am like, ‘No, this can’t be real.’”
Swift says the team then tried to validate what happened using their own internal tools, shocked when it became clear that the heist did, in fact, get pulled off - and it was much more than the 52K clones being flushed down the drain.
Swift says he reached out to the players involved, from Asher at the Imperium to Jay Amazingness himself, to try to understand why. This is something I’ve been trying to understand as well since the first Reddit post. However, the motivations are something that is being kept close to the chest. When I spoke to Hedliner via Discord DM, the leader of Pandemic Legion, the response was simply that this was “Jay’s story to tell.” However, he did provide some insight into Jay’s history with Pandemic Legion, stating that he did have friends there. It seems the seeds to leave Goonswarm and join with Legion were being sown for months.
“What I would say about Pandemic Legion specifically is we have bit of history with Jay,” Hedliner told me. “[H]e's had friends here for years and maintained a dialogue with them. I have been aware of that, and the direction it was taking over the last couple of months. From my side, I have always been amicable with him but not had a super close personal relationship. He and I had a frank discussion recently though, about why he wanted to join up with us, and I am happy with how that went (as he's here!).”
However, neither Dexx nor Hedliner would state whether Pandemic Legion sanctioned the heist or if this small spy cartel acted alone. As of now, on the record, we still are left questioning whether this is part of a coordinated assault on The Imperium, using someone from within to launch the opening salvo, or if this is simply a one-off for the record books. The result of the heist is in the mid-trillions, especially when you factor in the loss of the clones destroyed before downtime.
“As for the big question, ‘Why?’ I feel [it’s] important we keep them guessing and biting their lips for a while longer,” Dexx told me in our conversation.
Maintaining public war footing, especially concerning the public relations battle, has already started. While speaking with Asher last week, I didn’t get the sense that anything was being downplayed, but there is always the kernel of doubt when putting these together. The Mittani, long-time leader of The Imperium who left the game after serious allegations were levied at him, came out of his retirement to do damage control on The Meta Show.
Meanwhile, those involved on Jay and Grarr Dexx’s side seem content to slowly drip feed any information about the “why,” keeping everyone - including CCP Games - on the edge of their seats. Both sides are helped by talking about this - Goons by downplaying while Jay, Grarr, and, by extension, Pandemic Legion by amplifying the story.
One very interesting thing to note is that this heist feels right out of the Goonswarm playbook. This was something Goons had done to other alliances for years. As Swift put it, Goonswarm got “Reverse Uno carded” with this heist.
Grarr points back to a similar situation that hit Pandemic Legion by one of their own members a few years back as inspiration - though he quickly states it’s not the reason why (which, funnily enough, Swift’s old EVE Online persona is quoted in the article).
“So this was a little call-back to that,” Dexx told me. “Just the pull, not the reason why, particularly.”
Picking Up The Pieces
One major part of this story is that not all the clones slated for destruction were actually destroyed. Thanks to starting this process so close to downtime, Asher estimated in our conversation last week that 70% of the clones were saved. While the publicized account was over 52K at the Imperial Palace, over thirteen thousand were slated for destruction at the 1DQ1-A structure called "Do Not Use Thetastar."
Grarr mentions that a support ticket has been put into CCP to get them to finish the job since it was interrupted at downtime.
“The clone pull was stopped by the downtime and patch process,” Dexx says. “However, a ticket has been created for CCP to investigate whether or not they are willing to complete the process. People will say that one should account for server performance in all of your actions; however, the outcome of pressing the button should have a pre-determined result and has caused a situation where people have items in a place where this item could not exist.”
This is a sticky subject that CCP Games and their playerbase have had to contend with since the sandbox was launched 20 years ago - just how much does the developer meddle in the sandbox? While everyone is going to have their own personal opinion on this - and there have been spots where even CCP would likely admit it may have stepped over a line - this situation doesn’t seem to be one of them where they are going to get involved.
When asked to confirm the amount of clones actually destroyed, CCP Swift would not say anything other than confirm that not all of them were destroyed. He also states that CCP Games made the “conscious decision” not to go ahead and destroy the rest.
“We looked at a bit of precedent, and it’s basically always been what happens on the server, even through downtime, is taken as that. That’s what would have happened. We don’t go and say, ‘Well, this other stuff could have happened. Let’s go ahead and do that.’ We just always say, ‘You know when downtime happens, it’s a fact of life.’ It’s been that way for 20 years, players know it. Even if you don’t know how something’s going to respond around that time, we can’t really anticipate anything else”
So, as a result, CCP Games isn’t going to be destroying clones saved by the downtime. However, Swift makes a major point to say that they are also not going to be replacing anything lost.
Image via Jay Amazingness on YouTube
The Imperium may have already replaced a large chunk of the material lost in the Alliance (though if you were Blue or flew with them you’re SOL, as Swift told me), thanks to the uberwealthy players in the Alliance. Dexx claims to have sold one of the Titans back to Goonswarm, though when asked for evidence so we could verify this sale, Dexx refused to provide it.
One interesting aspect of all of this seems to be how the EVE community is banding around one side or the other. Thanks to the one-shard nature of EVE Online, these events are more far-reaching than they would be in other MMOs. Players who may never have any real entanglement with Goonswarm or Pandemic Legion are talking about it, whether on forums, Reddit, or in-game comms. The sentiment of “screw Goons” or “poor Asher” have floated around in conversations, something both myself and CCP Games noticed when we chatted yesterday.
The “watercooler talk” of EVE, as Swift put it, sows even more life into this story, but also the complicated game of EVE telephone as people recount heists pulled off in the past - oftentimes with only part of the information thanks to it becoming urban legend in New Eden.
This small cartel of players within Pandemic Legion - at least how we understand it now - might have just pulled off the largest heist in EVE Online history - at least from a material and monetary perspective. I joked in my last article that this is a story that EVE Online historian Andrew Groen will devote part of his next book to, and I don’t think I’m off the mark realistically. This will definitely sit alongside some of the other incredible player stories that EVE Online capsuleers have produced over its two-decade history.
