A consortium of EVE Online players produced a report on the game’s latest galactic threat that was so good, so comprehensive, and – perhaps – so accurate, that the developers feared they had a leak.
The world of EVE Online is bracing itself for the final chapter in the Triglavian Invasion, a year-long event in which a deadly new foe has been ruffling feathers in the game’s corner of space.
A great many questions are about to be answered about the mysterious Triglavians: why are they here? What do they want? Where do they come from? But players won’t be going into the showdown blind, thanks to the efforts of the Arataka Resarch Consortium, a player coalition motivated to dig into the game’s biggest mysteries. Triglavian activity over the past year has been ARC’s main focus, and the product of their work is the Triglavian Primer – a breathtakingly comprehensive report published in four issues.
On a call with press ahead of today’s digital EVE Fanfest, the developers cited the findings of the report’s fourth issue that the Triglavians preferred settling systems with hot, blue stars. These findings were used to justify the placement of defensive measures by EDENCOM, the new organisation players can join if they want to fight back the Triglavians, and the devs hinted that this preference is just one of many mysteries we may explore in Invasion’s final chapter, which goes live today.
We had the chance to ask the devs a little more about ARC’s work. “The report from Arataka is the single most magnificent piece of work I’ve seen from the community, and we’ve seen a lot of things. I was just mind-blown,” senior brand manager Sæmundur Hermannsson tells us.
“It’s so wild,” adds creative director Bergur Finnbogason. “When I saw it for the first time I had to stop and think – I wasn’t sure if it was from someone in-house, like if someone had leaked something – I had to read it twice just to be sure what was going on. EVE Online players are some of the smartest people around. Yes, there’s plenty of tinfoil, and there’s plenty of war, and there’s plenty of backstabbing, but when everything comes together it’s a bunch of extremely smart people, and this is just a testament to that. This research is just magnficent. I think it should be put into a scientific paper somewhere.”
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“EVE Online is not the most popular game in the world in terms of player numbers, but we are incredibly blessed with the hardcore-ness and passion of the community, and this is a symbol of that,” Hermannsson concludes.
You can read ARC’s Triglavian Primer on the EVE forums, and get into EVE Online for free via its website or Steam.