theweaselking | Because I know I have both EVE players and economic fans in the audience:

Something Awful Forumites manipulate EVE's economy to generate infinite money. After pulling out more money than they figured they could ever possibly spend, they documented the exploit and notified the developers.

(Which is to say, they stopped pulling on their infinite money sink because they got bored, not that the sink was finite.)

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From:

lafinjack.livejournal.com

Like Snow Crash, Eve is an excellent commentary on libertarianism and the inevitability of shittiness when you let humanity's freak flag fly.

Also, when thinking of Eve money, drop three decimal places and imagine Bank of America doing something similar. A $5 billion banking scandal would be significant, but not exactly unheard of nor world-shattering.

Five trillion isk is certainly nothing to sneeze at and the money they pulled out of the exploit was all gravy, but "more money than they figured they could ever possibly spend" is a bit hyperbole-y given the amounts of money a corp as massive as Goonfleet throws out on a regular basis. A trillion apiece for each of the people involved can go really quick when you can easily drop a billion on a decently equipped version of the smallest class of ship.

From:

dreamshade.livejournal.com

I was reading a thread on Kotaku or something in which the libertarians were countering by saying that true libertarianism, stemming from objectivism, disdains taking things from others by force, and the piracy that drives much of these massive EVE events is thus not a part of libertarianism, the parts where Goons blow up ships and steal their cargo in order to fuel their market advantage. Though that's sort of like saying that Stalin's concentration of power at the top wasn't a part of true communism.

From:

jerril

The "No true scottsman" defense tends to fail in the face of demographics. Or another way of putting it is "Yes, but there's like, only three of you guys, and a few million of them. So good luck with your ideal society."

From:

theweaselking.livejournal.com

Or, more directly, their supposed "prohibition" on force necessarily requires a monopoly on force. And Libertarianism is so logically incoherent that once you have the monopoly on force, it's impossible to not use it.

Which is why all True Libertarian Paradises look like EVE, or Somalia.

From:

harper-knight.livejournal.com

I'm allied to those dudes, so this is entirely a good thing in my book!

Actually, Goons are pretty good at breaking all sorts of things in EVE.. besides anything individuals do, the leadership has organized two major strikes against the industry of the soft-living people who think they live in 'safe' space in the last few months alone. And the coalition I'm part of, which Goonswarm is effectively on top of, hasn't been in a war that actually threatened them in ages.. although we provoke many people. There's one group at the moment that has been giving a good shot at taking a fair fight to my alliance alone, but we just pulled the whole coalition down on top of them so it probably won't end up so well for them.

From:

loopback.livejournal.com

I'm really torn on the goons. On the one hand, they do really complicated scams & attacks that 'exploit' the game world and the people in it in ways that expose the game mechanics and the interactions between people. They have some very smart people and come up with really interesting things to do. Hulkageddon, Burn JITA, the year+ war against Band of Brothers (ultimately won by corporate espionage and disbanding the corporation, then immediately stealing their corp name), the list goes on.

And at the same time, they're full of the kind of internet scum that I wouldn't go near if you paid me. People for whom racial/sexual/religious epithets are just standard orders of the day.

Which means I'm not so much torn on them, I suppose, as acknowledging that good ideas can come from anywhere. But they're still people I would avoid socializing with.