I'll try to break it down.
Some guy, we'll call him R, wanted to join Dreddit, the EVE Online Reddit corporation (guild). His application was rejected, because he didn't meet our application requirements.
R made a post on /r/evedreddit complaining about this. These sorts of posts come about every few weeks, so everyone just kind of laughed at him and told him it was his own damn fault for not reading our application requirements.
That apparently made him very mad. At this point he started making threats against us.
Now, something you have to understand about the prevailing culture in Dreddit is that we really, REALLY like watching it when people get mad. We have an entire forum dedicated to posting 'pubbie tears', because people can get really serious about internet spaceships sometimes, and when things don't go there way, they can get MAD.
So at this point, links to the above posts were put up on our internal forums, in a topic titled "He Mad."
Chuckles were had all around, and we assumed that would be the end of it. His threats were empty. We've organized our structure in such a way that there is absolutely no way a single individual can threaten the organization from within, unless granted powers that would require YEARS of trust to gain. Most corps in EVE are structured this way, spies are a prevalent problem.
However, later that night, this happens. To summarize, he claimed to have put 1000$ USD in escrow, as a bounty to whomever could destroy our corporation. The prize would be claimed as game time card codes. These codes can be redeemed for playtime (roughly 56 months) or for in game money (roughly 30 billion ISK, the in game currency.) It was also around this time that R set up a website, dredditdownfall.com. It had an explanation of the bounty, and how to earn it.
Now, 30 billion ISK quite a bit of money for the average player. Some have more than that, but for the vast majority, even 1 billion isk is quite a bit of money. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, there's really no way that a single person can take down our corporation. It would require the efforts of an entire in game alliance to take down Dreddit, and the in-game war that would ensue would cost 100's of billions of ISK for the aggressor.
In other words, his 1000$ bounty was abso.fucking.lutely pointless. At this point, we actually were all convinced that this MUST be a troll. Surely no-one would be stupid enough to spend 1000$ of his own money because they got mad at people flying internet spaceships.
But then we got conformation that the money was, in fact, in escrow. At this point, we were in stitches laughing to ourselves. Meanwhile, our enterprising CEO MaximumAbsorbancy was behind the scenes, playing the double agent and exchanging e-mails with R about destroying Dreddit. MaximumAbsorbancy is one of the very few people in game who would actually have the power to pull the destruction off, thank goodness he's a benevolent dictator and loves us all.
MaximumAbsorbancy logged into a test server, which is a mirror copy of the play server, only nothing actually costs any money. MaximumAbsorbancy destroyed Dreddit, on the test server, where it doesn't make a single bit of goddamn difference. Fortunately, R is kind of stupid, and bought the 'video proof' MaximumAbsorbancy provided hook.line.and.sinker.
This is where things get REALLY JUICY.
R updated dredditdownfall.com mirror of the site after he updated it. He proclaimed his victory, gloated about how he'd won, and rubbed our faces in his victory. Myself and quite a few other players were on voice chat at the time, and holy shit, we had QUITE A LAUGH about that one.
Unfortunately, R revealed his masterstroke in all this. He planned on getting a refund on his 1000$, or else he would use a chargeback. We were all a bit sad that MaximumAbsorbancy would not be getting the 1000$ bounty, and revealed the trick that MaximumAbsorbancy had pulled off to R. [dredditdownfall.com](www.dredditdownfall.com) as it currently exists reflects R's feelings on the matter.
Internally, we reflected that despite how retarded this whole episode was, at least the guy was smart enough to not actually lose his 1000$. But wait, what's this!? R suddenly changed his mind, and has decided to give out the bounty anyways! WOW WHAT A GREAT GUY!.
Actually, as it turns out, putting 1000$ in escrow, then threatening to charge it back afterwards, is kind of fucking illegal, and the kindly gentlemen who had the money in escrow informed him that there was no way in hell that was going to happen.
About 24 hours later, here we are. R has been publicly shamed, his master plan failed, his bank account 1000$ lighter, and the Dreddit corp wallet MaximumAbsorbancy's wallet 30 billion isk heavier. Funny enough, it's our corps birthday today.
So, HAPPY BIRTHDAY DREDDIT! I don't think we'll be topping this one anytime soon!
well there you go ladies and gents, once again proving that EvE online is one of the best (and worst) games around
