Last week, the nerds of the MMORPG EVE Online were shocked by a surprise attack—no, not of heart disease from all the Dominos consumption—but by a hoard of NPCs that have destroyed everything in their wake. Enter the douchebag Drifters of EVE online.
Attack!
For losers, a NPC (non-playable character) is someone created by the developers, meaning there’s no human on the other side of it, just a bleak computer-generated consciousness. In EVE, one of these NPC factions are the Drifters—think space pirates—who, until now, have been but a minor annoyance.
That is, until completely out of nowhere, hoards of them attacked every square inch of the Null-sec region of space—more or less the wild, wild west of EVE—en masse, destroying everything in their path. Nerds around the world sat in shock as they watched their carefully constructed citadels and ships fall to what they would have previously considered mosquitos. Seriously, watch it on Twitch. It’s comedy gold.
Ozymandias returns
While this might seem like a normal thing to happen in an online game, in EVE, it’s completely unprecedented. The foundation of the game has always been player-on-player drama, complete with all the espionage, theft and war that entails. Never has NPC-drama even entered the consciousness of players as a notable problem. Before this, getting killed by a Drifter would be totally embarrassing.
That said, with the onslaught of Drifters, all other wars in the system have been halted. The Imperium and TEST Alliance have retreated to their home stations and all over-space campaigns called off. Multiple Reddit threads had players pleading surrender to the developers. So perhaps this was a good thing, an Ozymandias-esque move to promote peace in the system.
When reached for comment, the Drifters simply burned down the Grapevine office. Pity.
For more War Of The Nerds like that of the EVE Online Drifters, click here.
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