I love stories about EVE. Though I couldn't give any minute to play it, I'm pretty sure this is the closest to a "hacker" game.
Sure, there are big factions, and ship-blowing and warfare and stuff, but all the stories we read about it, are about human interaction, and how it can be gamed: how VileRat made his way to the opposing faction as a mole, how he started a diplomacy corps, how this user found a loophole in the economy, how other users are playing the market everyday,... And EVE is rewarding: you "win" by thinking outside-the-box, you get points for being creative, the whole system WANTS you to think of something new.
Yep. The major alliances have numerous people that essentially have full time jobs running logistics operations (there is no instant travel, you actually have to move goods through often-dangerous space. Also the mechanism for controlling space, "sovereignty," is complex and requires constant maintenance), commanding fleets of hundreds of ships, and performing IT/security for their forum communities.
One thing that amazed me: since spying and infiltration are real problems, some forum administrators implemented a form of steganography where an algorithm makes imperceptible edits to posts, uniquely for each user, so that when a leak is posted, they can figure out who it was. This was a few years ago, I'm sure by this time a few rounds of counter-measures have been tacked on.
The depth and sophistication of strategy in this game are just way beyond anything else.
I wrote an API trawler for Sniggerdly / Pandemic Legion when the API key functionality got released. We tried catching alts and spies that way (applying required giving us their full API key).
Another way to get more info on people was putting images in forum posts and hosting those images on your own server.
Although it actually ruins the game for the majority of players? And usually because of extremely poor coding by the eve devs?
I remember when the BoB/Goon war was going on and Goon exploited the terrible design of the alliance/corp system and shut BoB down. No rollback from CCP. A massive war between thousands of players, perhaps even 10s of thousands of players over in seconds not because of any skill or battles but meta gaming completely outside the game by 1 player.
How much fun would 'legalized' aim-botting be?
That is Eve Online.
Eve is a game full of potential that it consistently fails to deliver on. And the 'stories' you hear are usually down to allowed griefing executed through exploiting poorly thought out game mechanics. It is hacking at its essence, but Sony Playstation password type of hacking, not the kind it's fun to be on the receiving end of.
Um, what? How did they exploit terrible design? They got a really high up guy to defect, and he happened to have the keys to a lot of stuff. Why would CCP roll that back? That's exactly the kind of metagaming they whole-heartedly encourage. You must have ties to BoB if you're going on about this "fair fight," e-honor stuff; this is how the game is played.
But really, what's most confusing is that you say a massive war was ended in seconds. BoB was highly entrenched in Delve and things had basically stagnated, there was less of a massive war going on than trifling skirmishes on the outskirts of their fortress. This singular event created a massive, chaotic free-for-all that injected a ton of life and activity into the region, and got a lot of people excited about the game again. Sorry for your loss.
the design is bad in that there's not good granularity of controls. You have to have someone holding pretty much all of the keys so there's not a way to even try to protect yourself against such actions.
One of the most solid news sources for EVE lately is http://themittani.com/ -- it's actually more than just EVE, but they have a large number of EVE related articles.
If you're not a player it can be hard to figure out what's going on, though, as many of the articles target people who are pretty familiar with the game.
Emergent gameplay requires quite complex game systems to happen. The tendency in modern gaming is to make games linear or "streamline" them. Another game that supports my point is Dwarf Fortress.
Big game publishers don't value (new) systems and mechanics. That's one reason why Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin and Sui Generis got funded on Kickstarter.
Sure, there are big factions, and ship-blowing and warfare and stuff, but all the stories we read about it, are about human interaction, and how it can be gamed: how VileRat made his way to the opposing faction as a mole, how he started a diplomacy corps, how this user found a loophole in the economy, how other users are playing the market everyday,... And EVE is rewarding: you "win" by thinking outside-the-box, you get points for being creative, the whole system WANTS you to think of something new.
Just like real life.