EVE Online’s “Vile Rat” aka Sean Smith Killed in Libya; Memorialized in Game

It’s been a rough few weeks with Muslims rioting in fury and anger over the release of the “Innocence of Muslims” video trailer from a would-be-unknown dumbass—of course, the protest in Libya was hijacked by violent militants who used it as an excuse to assault the embassy. Four US citizens were killed; amid them Sean Smith, aka Vile Rat.

In the coming weeks, he has been memorialized in text and video.

The death of this amazing individual was unnecessary, and even the Libyan people have shown an understanding of that with the production of “The Sorry Project.” As they’ve stood up against the villains who caused the death of these people. That’s how the culture of the country where this happened have reacted to the event.

Gamers have seen a different way to mourn the passing of their favorite in game diplomat.

They have done tributes in videos, even CCP Games and Something Awful have posted articles remembering Vile Rat’s contribution to their community.

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

Stumbleupon is impressive vis-a-vis EvE Online mining scandal

So we got this article posted on Vox ex Machina about the newest drama to hit EvE Online. It's about a terrific bug in the moon mining that allows large corporations to exploit moon masses for basically infinite minerals.

Stumbleupon found this article, and hyped it to hell in back. We have managed to exceed—and survive—the greatest numbers of the slashdotting that took out the server earlier this month. Over the past two days we have absorbed over 15k impressions just from Stumbleupon, punking us straight up into 10.2k impressions in a single day. The spikes from the slashdotting (and Redditing/Digging) only reached 4.8k and 5.0k on their respective days.

Moon mining was added to EvE online in November, 2004 during the Exodus expansion, a patch originally called Shiva. Since then certain people have been taking huge advantage of this. One corp in particular, Band of Brothers, which has basically been the pet of CCP (the parent company that runs EvE) had been siphoning this exploit for a very long time yet managed to sail through this unscathed.

Who knew?

Wow to Stumbleupon; and thank goodness for the quick caching that I wrote into the Wordpress installation, otherwise we’d be down again.