After complaining that his Secret Santa gift wasn't good enough for him, EVE Online player receives thousands of pieces of coal in his space stocking.

It's that time of year again and Secret Santas are making the rounds. Generally people are pretty happy by what some random stranger from halfway around the world has gifted them, but one player in space simulation EVE Online was not and also more than willing to share his thoughts on his benefactor in the Goonfleet forums. That turned out to be a mistake.

“I don’t even use f****** Purifiers,” the player said regarding his Secret Santa gift, a custom exterior for the Purifier class ship. “I would have liked anything else but a nasty looking skin.” This didn't sit well with his corp mates on the forum, who tried to make him see that a gift, any gift, is something to be grateful for, especially when, as in this case, the giver was relatively new to EVE Online. Not everyone can have Bill Gates as their Secret Santa, after all.

The Grinch in this story was having none of the spirit of Christmas, though, and his rant degenerated further and further into obscenities as others tried to calm him down. The discussion ended on a low point with the player saying “my point is and still stands: This guy put little to no effort in giving me a meaningful gift." Even for a game as morally ambiguous as EVE this was a bit much.

It wasn't just what he said, but also where he said it: the in-game alliance Goonfleet is the prank-happiest bunch around and angering them is a horrible idea at the best of times. This wasn't one of them: not only did Scrooge get banned from the forums, the alliance, and his corp, his once-fellow goons decided to send him pieces of carbon by in-game mail (the game doesn't have coal, so it's most basic component would have to do). At time of writing, the Secret-Santa hater has received six thousand lumps of the black stuff and it's not looking to end soon.

Poetic justice, indeed. While young Ebenezer's cargo hold fills up with carbon, the people sending it will most likely escape any sanction from EVE developer CCP as they rarely step in between two fighting parties, preferring to applaud them from afar. The only time, in fact, when they got directly involved is when a group of players degenerated their in-game trolling into real-world harassment, banning all of them from the game for life.

EVE Online usually makes the news because something outrageous happened, like the theft of $13,000 in in-game assets, but it's nice to see that sometimes even a gang like Goonfleet can come together and show the gaming world what the spirit of Christmas really means. In this case, sending coal to an ungrateful, spoiled fellow player. Merry Christmas.

EVE Online is currently available on PC.