EVE-online-heartwarming-moments

Our interviewees include NASA scientists, CCP devs, EVE Online world champions, and a space pope. Get your tissues ready.

Last month, at EVE Fanfest 2022, we spoke to devs, spacepopes, and capsuleers alike and asked them the same three questions. "What was your most heartwarming EVE Online moment", "What was your funniest EVE Online moment?" and "What was your most epic EVE Online moment?"

This is the first of a three-part EVE moments micro-series which forms part of our ongoing Stories of EVE series. In this article we'll be focussing on the first question - the heart-warming moments, the tear-jerking moments, and the poignant moments that reveal the heart of the longstanding EVE Online community.

Azawrath Moon, Fraternity – "That's EVE"

EVE is super unique, as we all know. Is it objectively the greatest game in the world? No, probably not. But the community is what makes it worth playing and worth paying $20 a month for. You see these heartwarming moments all the time. When someone's mum falls ill, the people in the corp are like "Hey, let's set up a Patreon or a GoFundMe so that they can stay in the hospital." I've seen things like that happen again and again.

And when tragedy strikes, and you have a corpmate who passes away, you'll see everyone get together in a DQ. Both sides come together with their supers in the same grid in tribute. Nobody shoots each other. We've all seen what happens in other MMOs when people try to do nice things like that. But that's EVE for you. You don't get that anywhere else.

Peter Farrell aka CCP Swift – "Space Snowballs"

One of the cooler things that shows you the impact of the community itself are our PLEX for GOOD campaigns. We've actually run several, but the one that comes to mind involved Scott Manley himself.

Scott Manley, incredibly famous YouTuber, used to play EVE Online quite actively. And in his time in EVE, he accrued a lot of wealth. And during one of the PLEX for GOOD campaigns, one of our star PvP players had won a very unique ship, there were only four like it in the game, a Gold Magnate frigate. And he thought, "Hey, I'm not going to fly this ship anymore. So I'm going to auction it off for PLEX for GOOD."

Enter Scott Manley who just strolls up and says, "All of my assets, everything I've ever accrued in the game, 1-million Plex, I'll buy the ship for charity." And that was just such a cool heart-warming moment. It's essentially $40,000 US dollars that we're talking about that this guy traded for a unique ship, just because he knew the money was being used for good.

The beauty of it was that that one act of generosity rallied the community. CCP Convict ran a lot of this PLEX for GOOD campaign; he was showing me graphs of daily donations and following Scott's one huge spike, you could see how much snowballing momentum it kicked off, with people trying to match and beat this huge donation.

Max Singularity aka the Space Pope – "Real Weddings, Real Love"

I've had so many heart-warming EVE Online moments that it's hard to name just one. But probably when I'm asked to permanently wed players in EVE, which we did first at Fanfest. There are YouTube videos of it somewhere. That was very touching and special. Bringing two people together and getting to pronounce them as married. It's a life commitment. I've done it four times now! Then there's the sadder times, leading memorials truly reveals the human element of the game.

There are people here at Fanfest who quit playing EVE five years ago. What's that about? Why are they here? They don't play the game, but they're here. It's community.

So, for me, the most heart-warming moments are bringing people together, in whatever form that might be.

David Griffith aka StarFleetCommander aka EVE's PvP World Champion – "Friendships from the ashes"

EVE is great because you can destroy people's worlds and still be friends. Just yesterday I had someone come up to me and say "Hey, it's you! Do you remember devastating our entire alliance four years ago?!" And I was like "Oh yeah! That was great fun." and then we laugh it off. It's the ideal place for frenemies to become friends.

But there's more depth to it than that. About four years ago, I had a period in my life, my real life, where I was going through some stuff. Some guys in my group went really out of the way to contact me in real life and check up on me. They said to me, "We know it's a game, but if you need to talk about stuff, real stuff, serious stuff, we can do that. We're here for you." I've been friends with them for ten years now, much longer than I've known many of my close friends and colleagues outside of EVE.

EVE is an incredibly social game. You can't play it on your own. Well, you can, but it'd suck.

Be sure to search our website for "Stories of EVE" if you enjoyed these EVE tales. And remember, we've got "most epic" and "funniest" EVE Online moment compilations still to come. Plus, stay tuned for full interviews with the Space Pope and StarFleetCommander.