Largest-Yet EVE Online Battle Destroys $200,000 Worth of Starships

Space MMO EVE Online has been providing stories of corporate espionage and massive space battles for years. A battle began yesterday that's the biggest one in the game's 10-year history. The main battle itself involved over 2,200 players in a single star system (screenshot, animated picture). The groups on each side of the fight tried to restrict the numbers somewhat in order to maintain server stability, so the battle ended up sprawling across multiple other systems as well. Now, EVE allows players to buy a month of subscription time as an in-game item, which players can then use or trade. This allows a direct conversion from in-game currency to real money, and provides a benchmark for estimating the real-world value of in-game losses. Over 70 of the game's biggest and most expensive ships, the Titans, were destroyed. Individual Titans can be worth upwards of 200 billion ISK, which is worth around $5,000. Losses for the Titans alone for this massive battle are estimated at $200,000 - $300,000. Hundreds upon hundreds of other ships were destroyed as well. How did the battle start? Somebody didn't pay rent and lost control of their system.

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The economy just deflated 300k.

EVE online has slightly re-valued the dollar.

Do it more!

Re:Wow

[gr4nf]

While it's obvious that no actual money was lost (just transferred into EVE Online corporate pockets), I can't help but wonder whether or not wealth, in the economic sense, was destroyed. There was time put in to the construction of these ships and mining of the requisite minerals and such (real human capital). Of course, it's not a very concrete representation of that work since it is under the control of the sysadmins, but as long as they're consistent with the laws of their little universe, how different is it from the real destruction of real, valuable things?

Re:Wow

[EvanED]

how different is it from the real destruction of real, valuable things?

I'd argue it isn't, but I'd also point out that people destroy real, valuable things all the time for entertainment value. And participation in these EVE battles is pretty much that -- it's at least largely voluntary participation for entertainment value.

Re:Wow

[pitchpipe]

how different is it from the real destruction of real, valuable things?

Why are things valuable? Because humans value them. So if things were destroyed that humans value, wealth was destroyed.

If humans didn't exist would anything have value?

Re:Wow

[RailGunner]

It's completely different.

a new Titan ship is just an object stored in memory -- copying it is no big deal.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that EVE Online corporation who happen to be Icelandic, and therefore use the Icelandic krone instead of the US dollar? That EVE Online corporation who, when paid by American users, take that money out of America and store it in their own bank account?

Yes, that EVE Online corporation (more officially known as CCP Games).

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything lost in a video game is generally speaking a "sunk cost". You already paid for a subscription. You already spent time building a character or ship or weapon or whatever it is that gets lost. All that matters is at what point in time you lose it, whether through death, destruction, or simply failing to renew your subscription or log in to your account.

The only thing gained from a video game for the average person is entertainment. The only time you gain something else is if you violate terms of service and sell an account or items on an account. If you simply lose an item, account, or character, then nothing in general is actively lost or gained.

Now, if you continue to play a game past the point of losing something "valuable" in that game, then you will put more sunk costs into that game, be it time or money, to regain your losses and exceed your previous standing, if possible. However, that is a future sunk cost that will also be lost, unless terms of service are violated and the account or items are sold for real world currency before the player decides to abandon the account altogether.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Food, shelter, safety, and better mating rights have value to all living things. Humans have simply developed a system that doesn't require violence or a zero-sum predator-prey relationship to operate.

Re:Wow

[ackthpt]

Someone call the NFL and tell them they are soon to be history, when this is the sort of thing people get excited about, you know a bunch of sweaty, overpaid mugs ain't got a chance.

Re:Wow

[gnick]

Anything that people assign value to has value (e.g. it can be traded). The question is whether any actual wealth was destroyed or merely transferred.

Re:Wow

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Uhhhhh, there are people with real jobs who think nothing of buying Plex (1-month tradeable subscriptions) and selling them on the AH for in-game currency.

While most destroyed stuff was probably earned in-game, I'm sure plenty was bought currency via this method.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

well played

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

If humans didn't exist would anything have value?

Yes, as per definition of mice.

Re:Wow

[qpqp]

You sound like a WoW player opposed to open-PvP sandbox environments. No risk, no fun.

Re:Wow

[CanHasDIY]

Someone call the NFL and tell them they are soon to be history, when this is the sort of thing people get excited about, you know a bunch of sweaty, overpaid mugs ain't got a chance.

I have to admit, I'd much rather spend 10 minutes watching an epic, simulated space battle, than waste 6 hours watching a bunch of juiced, over-paid prima donnas chase a weird-looking ball around.

Re:Wow

[PopeRatzo]

Wait, you can buy stuff with real world money in Eve Online now? I played the game avidly for several years last decade, and there was no real-world economy in the game.

If that is the case, then I'm glad I got out of Eve when I did. Games that are tied to real-world money are never any good, and mostly likely can never be any good.

Re:Wow

[erroneus]

What certainly happened is money went to EVE Online pockets. The wealth? Well, let's just say those microtransactions could have stayed where they were a bit longer. People are trading money for recreation. It begs the question, for me, as to how good or bad this actually is. I want to say it's bad, but I don't actually know how much time and other resources were wasted in any of this. There are all sorts of costs here for the users. It's not just their money. It's their time and their mental energies of focus, concentration, planning and all that. Much of this is to the exclusion of other things they could be doing with their time and, indeed, their lives. ...says the man who spends X moments of his life commenting on slashdot.

Re:Wow

[CanHasDIY]

Aren't there some billy goats somewhere you should be harassing?

Re:Wow

[alexander_686]

Mod parent up.

It is no more destructive to the economy then drinking a good bottle of wine. While things are destroyed, they are not economically productive assets. EVE is about consumer consumption of entertainment. People pay to play – it just that the recognition of payment is delayed until the destruction of your ship.

Now, if they were an inflated asset that underpinned the credit market – that would be something different.

Re:Wow

[operagost]

No. However, as the summary states, you can buy a monthly subscription using the in-game currency. This is what they use to determine the approximate value of ships, compared to the cost of a monthly subscription in real currency.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It's completely different. a few new dollars are just objects stored in memory -- copying it is no big deal.

ftfy.

Re:Wow

[vux984]

Wait, you can buy stuff with real world money in Eve Online now?

Last I checked the only thing you could buy with real world money is a subscription token that lets you play the game for a month.

However, since the token is tradeable, instead of buying one yourself, you can instead trade in game cash or services to another player who bought one. In effect you give them X, they pay your subscription for the month. Or I suppose you can hoard the token and try and resell it again for "more than you paid for it"...

But eventually somebody somewhere cashes it in for the one month subscription, that was paid for in effect by who ever bought the token in the first place.

In the end, the developer gets paid exactly once for each player playing - so its not really a money grab, but which players pay for whose subscription exactly is a bit muddied by the economics of the tokens.

It does allow players with real money and the desire to spend it to effectively get in game currency and services from other players. But its quite different from typical real-world games, because the all the in game objects being exchanged are still player earned.

For example, you can't spend money to just buy a ship, you must buy subscription tokens and then trade them to a player who has the ship you want. Or sell them for in game cash to a player who wants them and has the cash, and then take that in game cash and in turn use it to get a ship from a player who has one.

Its probably the least objectionable use of real money in a game that there is.

Re:Wow

[AK Marc]

The act of destroying doesn't transfer wealth. If you buy a box of 100 rounds, did you destroy anything? No? Just transferred wealth? Yes. The same happened in Eve. The building of the ships and work to get the ISK to buy/build them was the transfer of wealth. Firing off 100 rounds at the range "destroys" the wealth. If you didn't fire them, you could sell them. After you fire them, they are worth less. If we call the brass worthless, then you have nothing left after use, and that would be the Eve analogy.

Re:Wow

[Scott Lockwood]

That is completely wrong. There are in fact real dollars behind all the ISK in the game. Real money was "lost". Just because you can't (legally) convert ISK to Dollars doesn't mean the money isn't real. There are quite a few people who convert Dollars to ISK by buying PLEX (Pilot License EXtensions) in game and selling them on the open market. The economy in Eve is a real thing. Some people (Such as The Mitanni) actually make a living off the game and no longer work. Me, I'm satisfied just making enough ISK to buy those PLEX's and not have to pay for my game in terms of Dollars.

Re:Wow

[unimacs]

I don't know enough about the game to say, but does the destruction of these ships slow down further economic activity either inside the game or in terms of real dollars spent?

Re:Wow

[geekoid]

You make the classic mistake of equating wealth and value.
These are different things.

Re:Wow

[geekoid]

There are a lot of good games tied to real world economy.
I"m not sure why you think that means they aren't good. TF2 for example...

Re:Wow

[fatphil]

Is $200000 "lost" (using the same definition as the article) when 100000 people's mario characters get hit over the head by a barrel thrown by a giant kidnapping gorilla for the 20th time that evening?

And that happened *every night* back in the 80s.

You put money in, you play, then eventually, almost certainly, you lose. For some the losing is lots of small successive losses, for others it's the occasional big one. The nett result in the end is the same.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

AKA "flowerpicker"

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

none that haven't managed to get restraining orders issued against him; he's not on great terms with any of his exes.

Re:Wow

[geekoid]

Don't define fun for other people.
It's rude and short sighted.

Re:Wow

[Entropius]

One of the draws of EVE is that it is an artificial economy, and perhaps the most developed one in existence.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to admit, I'd much rather spend 10 minutes watching an epic, simulated space battle, than waste 6 hours watching a bunch of juiced, over-paid prima donnas chase a weird-looking ball around.

Well, okay, that's good to know, but what about EVE Online?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol on which planet is this true?

Re:Wow

[Wintermute__]

No, quite the opposite in fact. The owners need to earn more to afford to buy or build replacements, and the producers of the replacement ships need to make more, which requires the production of more raw materials and components, on down the line.

The destruction of ships is one of the major drivers of demand in the Eve economy.

Re:Wow

[buswolley]

hOW WILL THIS EFFECT PRICES.

Re:Wow

[Ksevio]

I think a key part here was also "10 minutes" since this took many hours

Re:Wow

[idontgno]

The destruction of ships is one of the major drivers of demand in the Eve economy.

Wow. Someplace where the Glazier's Fallacy isn't a fallacy. It figures it would be in the economy of an MMO.

Re:Wow

[wjcofkc]

I only agree with you after watching the Chiefs blow a 28 point lead against the Colts, keeping them out of the playoffs. Maybe next year.

Re:Wow

[seanvaandering]

Currently, as I am a miner, i've been watching this with interest - mineral prices are spiking in anticipation of the amount of minerals required to rebuild those ships. As of this writing, Tritanium is already worth 25% more in Jita IV (one of the major ports) from yesterdays ask prices.

Re:Wow

[dkf]

All of which makes me wonder whether you can convert game currency into Bitcoins and so get the money out that way...

(Hey! We can't have a discussion of currency on /. without getting Bitcoins in there somehow! It's in the rules I think.)

Re:Wow

[mysidia]

While it's obvious that no actual money was lost (just transferred into EVE Online corporate pockets)

That already happened, when players paid for game time; which some of them may have traded for ISKs. They just hadn't realized the loss, until the destruction of the apparent in game thing they got; which is not a real-world thing.

Some lost money today..... as for others..... welll... . I think you can imagine, that Eve the game might not necessarily last forever.

Every ounce of time and energy spent, may eventually be thermalized into high-entropy valueless particles

Re:Wow

[ottothecow]

The explanation I saw made it sound like very little of the "money" lost came from selling subscriptions.

There were big corporations involved in this battle who make significant amounts of in-game money off of their resource monopolies and other money generating activities. The people whose ships were lost didn't buy them using thousands of dollars of USD, they bought them using the resources of their corporation.

Another way to value this (which comes up with numbers similar to the estimates I have seen) is just to take the # of participants * monthly fee * months. So if you had 2200 players, each playing $20 a month (or I guess earning the in-game currency and buying playtime that way...but no matter what, somebody paid for it), you are looking at $44k a month. These big battleships apparently take a very long time to build (and that's only after you have saved up the money), and these big battles sound like they occur maybe a couple times a year at most. So if you say that the losses in this battle were equal to 6 months combined effort from those 2200 players, you get $264k in losses. Those corporations have to rebuild ships valued at approximately the same amount as the battle participants put into the game in 6 months.

Keep in mind, its a game. You pay for the entertainment value...the reason they have the ships is so that they can one day join a huge battle. The money is not really lost. They got 6 months of enjoyment out of it, and they were going to keep paying for the next 6 months anyways. On an individual level, lots of players (especially the victors) didn't actually lose anything, and I read commentary that suggested the corporations generally cover the entire replacement cost of ships lost in battles like this...so yes, there is less in-game currency in the corporate accounts, but everybody had fun, made the news, and got their money's worth.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course sometimes the PLEX get destroyed in a ship loss and CCP keeps the money without having to provide gametime to anyone for it.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the point of EVE if not destroying each others ships?
If you don't like it stay in high security space.

Re:Wow

[ottothecow]

Hate to self reply, but I sort of forgot where I was going with that original comment.

I meant to add that it sounds like EVE doesn't make it *that* easy to buy your way into the game. In WoW. you can (illicitly) buy items and characters for not a lot of money (lots of max level characters for a couple hundred bucks on the sites I checked just now). EVE may have an allowable way to inject money into the game, but it is not at all like buying a maxed out WoW character and jumping into the server.

Someone on Reddit said that the raw material cost of the big Titan ships goes for something like $3000 if you sell subscriptions at the current rate. Then it takes months to build it (and you probably aren't going to do so well at keeping it unless you have other powerful friends). I could see employed people who want to ease up the grind spending a few bucks to make sure they never have to worry about small expenses, but the instant-gratification real-money guys probably don't want to pay $3000 and wait months.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the GP.

Do not give a fuck about watching sports.

In fact I don't give a fuck enough about sports to cancel my cable TV, I have no interest in subsidizing the ESPN tax--Fuck ESPN and Fuck the cable companies.

Re:Wow

[Algae_94]

You're so close to being 100% factual, but I'll chalk it up to the pain of the loss. That game was in the playoffs. The Chiefs did make the playoffs this year.

Re:Wow

[phantomfive]

Maybe next year.

Not with that coach.

Re:Wow

[JesseMcDonald]

The destruction of ships is one of the major drivers of demand in the Eve economy.

Wow. Someplace where the Glazier's Fallacy isn't a fallacy. It figures it would be in the economy of an MMO.

No, it's still a fallacy. However, the fallacy isn't in the idea that destruction drives demand for replacements. That's generally true. The fallacy is in the idea that the economic activity which results from the destruction will leave you better off than you were before. In fact, after all that activity you've only managed to get back what you lost, and in the process you've consumed resources which could have been used to better your position if you hadn't been forced to start over instead.

In this case the $200,000 worth of virtual ships weren't destroyed in hope if improving the in-game economy, so the fallacy doesn't apply. They were consumed in the course of providing hours of entertainment for some 2,200 players. That's a bit pricey at $90 or more per player—and that's assuming every player was involved for the duration of the entire battle—but it's certainly not the most expensive way you could choose to entertain yourself for an entire day. Some people pay that much just to sit in a stadium and watch others play professional sports for a fraction of the time.

Re:Wow

[thaylin]

The fallacy still exists. They could have used the money/time in game for other things, or to expand their holdings instead of rebuilding, they could have been larger. The only person who has a net benefit in this is the company that owns eve. In terms of the games economy there is a loss.

Re:Wow

[AK Marc]

So you never paid real money for game time?

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, no more destructive than breaking a few windows? Sure, due to the fact that a $200-300K loss is tiny compared to the size of, say, a national economy the effect of that loss may be negligible. That doesn't mean that the sum of all similar negligible effects is itself negligible. Depreciation of assets is a real thing.

Re:Wow

[lgw]

I thought he point of EVE was to mock and belittle other players (and especially players of other games) for not being "hardcore enough"? Doesn't the main form of resource mining involve posting "cry more, newb" on the forums, or are millions of such posts just an incidental by-product?

The space battles sure look cool, but wow what an abrasive community - who'd want to spend time with such people?

Re:Wow

[lgw]

Remember when the cool kids watched football and the uncool kids played video games? Yeah, that was the previous century. This century? Not so much.

Re: Wow

[Wootery]

I don't follow (though I'm not in any way well-informed regarding economics). If all the wine-bottle-owners of the world drank all the world's wine overnight, would that harm the economy? The wine-bottles had value, and are now gone, but the demand for them will surely increase.

Re:Wow

[vux984]

It seems stupid that if your video game starship is destroyed, that it doesn't respawn and you have just lost all of that money and/or time invested in it.

That is the entire point of the game. Ship respawn in Eve would be like playing poker and having your account balance reset after every hand.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to lose sunk costs in a video game rather than gambling (Many Freemium games have what's known as Gachapon, which is where you spend real money for a tiny chance of getting a good item, most items are vendor trash or untradeable because anyone who wanted the item already has it.)

Speaking of gambling, the limit a gambler can spend is whatever cash or credit they have access to, hence it's dangerous. But in subscription games, the most you can really do is buy more game time, and in the case of EVE, trade it to those that want it. This also happens in freemium games but usually as the equivalent to USD credit so that the game company doesn't have to deal with exchange rates, just selling the cards for whatever value fits best. Players of the game "in-region" then sell the cards to out-of-region players. For example Nexon NA players sell the cards to players in Australia, South America, Europe, etc. Players of PSO2 in North America buy cards that are only available in Japan. Some people will go to great lenghts to play games they want, subscription or freemium.

But if games are to survive and evolve, the developers need to move past taxing the enjoyment and leave DLC/Freemium content strictly to elements that do not impact the ability to play the game. I'm fine with paying extra to customize my avatar/toon beyond some basic level. I'm not fine with having to "subscribe" to keeping that appearance, and I'm definitely not fine with "restart with no time penalty" tokens, because the games I've played thus far lack the stability to make the analogy to putting more quarters into the arcade cabinet. When you put a quarter in to resume play, you resume right now, what happens in freemium games is that you may be on a quest that has a time limit, or the instance has a time limit, but for whatever boneheaded reason a server-wide crash or a instance will fail to spawn enemies, so you waste a good half hour waiting for things to fix itself, and then give up.

The point at which you really should quit a MMO is when you feel that you can't play the game and keep up with those who are paying for the cash shop items. From past experience, this is is good benchmark on if a game is just trying to shake the whale players hard.

In subscription games, ones that strictly do not have any cash shop items at all, this is a bit different, the point you quit these games is when the cheating (done with hacked/stolen accounts) renders playing the game normally impossible. If a game has a good GM/Customer Service, then this is not a problem. Unfortunately no game to date has figured out a way to minimize hacked accounts without mandatory two-factor password generation. Having to enter two passwords however makes the games login process tedious and chases away players.

Honestly I'm kinda done with MMO games until some giant leap in user experience happens. The current experience of having to deal with unwanted spam/robot play, combined with companies who don't give a care, makes playing a MMO feel more like an excuse to kill time rather than enjoyment.

Re:Wow

[kamapuaa]

Right, just google pictures of people at EVE conventions and you are looking at the very definition of 21st century cool.

Re:Wow

[Darinbob]

It depends on definitions. Sure you _could_ buy the ISKs with real cash and then lose them in the game, then that's money possibly wasted (but not wasted if you enjoyed them while you had them, same as money lost gambling may not be a loss as long as you enjoyed being at the casino). But players can potentially earn the same stuff in-game just by playing. And time is NOT money. So how much was lost depends upon how much of that was earned while playing, versus how much purchased with cash, versus how many of those ships would have been sold off to recoup a ridiculous "investment".

I see this confusion in some other games. For example, an item can be purchased with points, points can be purchased with cash or earned, but someone feels compelled to put a real cash value on every single item declaring that an item I got for free was overpriced.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Eve already had that "200,000" just think of it as 200,000 worth of consumables got used up at once.

Easier way to think of this

Legos, when you buy a kit lego gets your money you get the toy.

The legos get destroyed if you want new legos you have yo go buy more.

Re:Wow

[Darinbob]

Billions lost in Las Vegas every year! Even more, billions are lost every year in resorts around the world. I know someone who lost $20 just last week at the movies! When can we stop this economic devestation?

Re:Wow

[Darinbob]

A win-win!

Re:Wow

[Darinbob]

Isn't wall-street just a game tied to real world economy?

Re:Wow

[realityimpaired]

In game, it'll probably drive in-game prices up.

In the real world, probably no effect at all. The number of people who actually make a real world living from a game like that is extremely small, and so most of the money "lost" was already budgeted/removed from the economy before it was lost.

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

In this case the $200,000 worth of virtual ships weren't destroyed in hope if improving the in-game economy

not to improve the in-game economy, but perhaps for individual or group economic gain.

  much of the destruction in EVE happens in the course of in-game economic pursuits. players destroy ships to get their cargo. players hold other players at ransom threatening to destroy their ship. players control territory to reap the economic rewards contained therein. players kill other players for the right to salvage particular rich anomalies. and so on.

Re:Wow

[MightyMartian]

I just killed Bowser's son. Do I get a Slashdot article detailing my grand Mario exploits?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. You still don't get it. This guys are the ones leading you. Cry baby cry.

Re:Wow

[EvanED]

So could the time you're spending reading and replying to stories and comments on /.

Your point?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we looking at the same thing? I see a bunch of awkward weirdos who obsessively waste all their time at a computer game.

Re:Wow

[tibit]

High sec spaces sometimes see players with resources and bravado who simply don't care much about the repercussions, they kill for fun.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Fireworks displayed on new years totaled probably 80 million. Same deal.

Re:Wow

[JesseMcDonald]

Right, and I'm not disputing that, but no one's going around saying "Hey, if we fight each other and wreck a bunch of our ships, it will create a bunch of jobs and we'll both end up better off in the end." Naturally, in the original Broken Window Fallacy, the glassmakers and so on end up better off. The problem is that the benefit to them ends up being balanced out, and then some, by the negative externality to the person who's perfectly good window was broken. If you don't care about the losses to others then you can still turn a tidy profit by going around breaking windows.

In the case of EVE, of course, such externalities are just part of the game. We wouldn't expect anyone to step in from outside the game to put a stop to them even if the virtual assets being destroyed do have real-world value. The players know what they're getting into before they spend time and money acquiring these assets, and understand that they "own" them only so long as the rules of the game say they do.

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

you are trying to draw a distinction that doesn't exist.

all of the money in EVE is a result from people doing work. money doesn't just materialize in the corp accounts. it's a result of tax on members. just like a real nation / military, corp members have to expend time and expenses to control the territory that allows their members to earn money, and the corporation to earn money via tax.

when a players loses a ship in EVE, that is a real loss because that player, or another player somewhere had to accumulate the wealth to create that ship. they spent real world time doing so.

the money was really lost, in the same way if you had worked for 6 months and saved then went to vegas and lost it all gambling. just because you had fun gambling doesn't mean the money was not really lost.

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

EVE may have an allowable way to inject money into the game, but it is not at all like buying a maxed out WoW character and jumping into the server.

you can buy accounts in EVE just like you can buy an account in WoW. and yes you can buy EVE in-game currency with real world currency.

Re:Wow

[qpqp]

While I'm not an EVE player, and haven't played a perma-death MMORPG, I've had my fair share of Meridian59, Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, and Darkfall to value the adrenaline rush of possibly loosing (at least) all your gear in a fight. Maybe also control of a city/territory or spawn that you'd have to painstakingly build/conquer again.
Nothing quite like jumping on a much more experienced player at the right moment and getting some high-end gear (much) earlier than expected.

From my experience a good PvP system creates a lively atmosphere and the *need* to join alliances and guilds/clans.
However,
there are usually also a lot of whiners that landed in the wrong game,
there are usually also a lot of (power-tripping/sociopath) assholes exploiting their experience against newbies, and
there are usually guilds one can join as a newbie that will help you get on your feet and hunt rampaging player-killers for you.

There are also different age-groups/maturity levels of the players and as a more mature player, you would usually ignore comments like "hardcore enough." As a mature player, you would probably also stick to FPS or other games, where you don't need to play 10 hours a day every day to stand a chance.

YMMV.

Yet, IMHO and SCNR, games where you have to formally agree to a duel (due to game mechanics/rules) suck donkey balls and are for pussies. ;)

BTW, here's a wikipedia article on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
and PvP in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

Is $200000 "lost" (using the same definition as the article) when 100000 people's mario characters get hit over the head by a barrel thrown by a giant kidnapping gorilla for the 20th time that evening?

do you value your time?

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

For example, an item can be purchased with points, points can be purchased with cash or earned, but someone feels compelled to put a real cash value on every single item declaring that an item I got for free was overpriced.

this only makes sense for people with more time than money, like you apparently. it makes a lot more sense for most people to work longer at their real jobs and buy in-game items than to sit around earning them in-game. those people complaining that things are overpriced are doing something you aren't, which is actually considering their personal exchange rate between time and money. if you ground for days, or whatever, to get your item, it certainly wasn't free.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those people would have had just as much fun working?

Re: Wow

[jarfil]

In EVE you can't sell in-game assets in exchange for out-game ones. Wealth only flows inwards, never outwards. Even if you have assets in EVE that only you can manage, it's at most a delayed way of wealth destruction, initiated the moment you purchase non-refundable in-game assets with out-game money.

That this "destruction pending" wealth can be transferred in-game, accumulated and operated on much like any other wealth, leads to some spectacular chain reactions like this battle, but doesn't affect the economy in any way. Playing the game has already affected the economy long before that.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

Far more than $300,000 was lost if you count that way. The average income in EVE is well short of minimum wage on an hourly basis. Of course, most people play in their free time. On the other hand, the battle lasted pretty much all day yesterday.

Re: Wow

[Khashishi]

I don't know about the demand for wine bottles, but I suppose the demand for doctors and caskets should increase.

Re: Wow

[jarfil]

It's been some time since I played EVE, but why would you keep PLEX on a ship, instead of on a station or just cash them in right away?

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

Lots of people will have a net benefit. The people and organizations who lost ships will be poorer. The people who sell them minerals and ship and components will be richer. Over all the amount of wealth will be less, but the ones who make things will become wealthier while the ones who get their things destroyed will become poorer.

CCP (the company that owns EVE) doesn't benefit as much as you might think. Some people will undoubtedly buy some PLEX with real cash to fund rebuilding, but that PLEX is only saleable to other players, who will use it to NOT use real money to purchase game time. CCP sells PLEX for more than they sell a non-PLEX month of game time, but not that much more.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

People spend time doing things to build those ships. They will now spend more time doing things to build those ships. If you count time as valuable, which most people do, real wealth was destroyed, not transferred.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a WoW player opposed to open-PvP sandbox environments. No risk, no fun.

In general, the only people that have fun in open-PvP sandbox environments where there is a risk of loss are those that spend enough time on the game to be considered "professional gamers" - i.e., those that spend enough time to get good enough to win consistently.

An ideal MMO PvP world would have tiers of competition. Right now, to use a swimming analogy, you could be pitted against Michael Phelps or 350-lb. Joe Blobbo from his mom's basement, and both competitions would have the same in-game "value." WoW addressed this a little with the arena system, but the implementation of that system was seriously stupid.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

Except that CCP charges more for PLEX than they do for non-tradeable game time.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay to go to the movies. The money wanders into the theatre owners pocket. I get entertainment and a purely virtual (=imaginary) representation (memory) of the movie. No matter if I forget the memory or not, the real economy is not damaged.

I pay to play EVE Online. The money wanders into CCP's pocket. I get entertainment and a purely virtual (=imaginary) asset (spaceship) to toy around with. No matter if I destroy the ship or not, the real economy is not damaged.

The virtual assets in EVE do not have a real world value. You can buy subscription time by sending money to CCP, but you have simply bought entertainment. If you trade the virtual in-game subscription item for somethink else, the money still stays with CCP, and you will never be able to get $ out of it (except by external arrangements, which is against the game rules).

captcha: corrode

Re:Wow

[loonycyborg]

No real wealth is involved. Of course you can buy that ship with $5000 of real money, but it's hardly a good idea to do so. You can earn it in game instead. As far as RL economy is concerned it's just donation of arbitrary amount of money to CCP.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

"this only makes sense for people with more time than money, like you apparently. it makes a lot more sense for most people to work longer at their real jobs and buy in-game items than to sit around earning them in-game."

That only makes sense for people who don't like playing the game. There are a lot of ways to earn money in EVE. Some of them more fun than working a few more hours at your regular job.

Re: Wow

[jarfil]

You forgot about leaving a MMO like WoW after having done all there was you found fun to do during the las several years, and just not willing to do it all over and over again with the rest of your toons. So you stop playing until the next expansion that will change some of the gameplay and add new stuff.

No need to blame cheating/hacking. Even with the best MMOs you can simply have enough of them.

Re:Wow

[Dunbal]

The time spent by those thousands of people in playing a game could have been better spent

FUCK YOU. How dare you presume to have the right to decide what is "better" for other people to do with their time? Doing nothing at all has real value to any economy - it's called rest. Entertainment which you see as a total unproductive waste of time has real value to any economy - the entertained emerge as more satisfied individuals, better willing and able to cope with other tasks. Life is about balance, not production. And you sir are way, way out of balance.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

So I googled "football fans" for comparison to your EVE picture and I got mostly pictures of hot girls, mostly European or Brazilian. Then I googled "nfl fans" and got this: http://www.synergy-sponsorship....

So I guess it depends on what the GP meant by "football."

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The virtual assets in EVE do not have a real world value. You can buy subscription time by sending money to CCP, but you have simply bought entertainment. If you trade the virtual in-game subscription item for somethink else, the money still stays with CCP, and you will never be able to get $ out of it (except by external arrangements, which is against the game rules).

captcha: robbery

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It begs the question [...]

You troll you.

Re: Wow

[jarfil]

If they were to spend all that focus, concentration and planning on... like starting WWIII, I'd say better do it in a game ;)

Re:Wow

[Dunbal]

n this case the $200,000 worth of virtual ships weren't destroyed in hope if improving the in-game economy

Exactly, they are destroyed in the hope of one side improving their economic efficiency by exerting a larger military influence/dominance in a region (if only by locking down a staging system and all the military hardware stuck in it) and another side preventing them from doing it. Of course when the ball starts rolling no one knows with certainty where it's going to stop. CFC came out on top this time for whatever reason, so they gain $200k worth of influence in the area. How this will affect the broader EVE economy is anyone's guess. Either way, grrr goons...lol

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

And you sound like a moron who just wasted $5000 for the use of a polygonal model of a starship in a video game.

Re:Wow

[Dunbal]

They could have used the money/time in game for other things

Not really. Let me explain to you a little bit about Technetium moons and the OTEC cartel... seriously any economic player activity is a fraction of the passive wealth attraction created by harvesting Technetium from moons. While moon mining does not in itself create cash because the material must be sold, said material is in such great demand because of its role in advanced production there is always a market for it at any price. OTEC members could cease all "other things" and still finance all their activities from this passive mining. So the money/time argument isn't really valid in this case, whether the players log in or not they're rich enough to squish any upstart. The "other things" those players do with their time they do strictly for fun.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the equivalent of having to pay a company more money on top of the cost of the game every single time you die in Q3A.

Doesn't EVE online already require a monthly payment? What the fuck is that for if you can just lose everything? I could see having to pay for ship repairs, or maybe losing your cargo, but not the entire ship. It's idiotic and only idiots would get suckered in by such a scheme. No other game in the world handles player death like that, because it's stupid. Makes me glad I never gave it a try.

Re:Wow

[Arker]

You correctly identify the question.

The answer is that it was transferred, and to go further, it was transferred, not at the time of the virtual destruction, but over the many months leading up to it.

This was just the fireworks show at the end of the season, roughly.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Value is only truly determined when it is actually traded. A group of people can agree that the value of something at $10K USD, 1000 pounds of corn, or 3000 gallons of gasoline but until you actually transfer it and get that $10K, corn, or gasoline from someone, that predetermined value figure you came up with is useless. If I have a diamond ring valued at $100K but after three months of trying to trade/sell it, the best offer I have is $20K, it is really worth $100K?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it is. Go out to a club and start talking about how awesome some EVE Online battle was and see just how cool the ladies think you are.

Re:Wow

[PopeRatzo]

So you never paid real money for game time?

Well sure, I paid a monthly subscription fee, but this story is talking about Titans being worth $5000 in real money.

If you're talking about the amount of time you spend in a game as actual money, then I've got about $20,000 invested each in Skyrim and Just Cause 2.

How do they come up with this X ISK = X Dollars formula?

Re:Wow

[PopeRatzo]

Its probably the least objectionable use of real money in a game that there is.

True. Thanks for the explanation. Back when I played, the trading of real world money for ISK or ships was frowned upon and if I remember correctly could get you banned.

Re: Wow

[YukariHirai]

I don't follow (though I'm not in any way well-informed regarding economics). If all the wine-bottle-owners of the world drank all the world's wine overnight, would that harm the economy?

Well, yes. The number of people off sick the next day nursing the most epic of hangovers alone would have an impact, not to mention the number dead or very sick with fucked livers and/or alcohol poisoning.

Re:Wow

[Patent Lover]

Except he didnt' google anything, He found the Eveonline pictures on their own website. If you really want to make a google comparison google "NFL chicks", then "Eveonline chicks". 'Nuff said.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, never played WoW or EVE Online, but nice try.

So what happens if you start getting lag or the program crashes or you lose power or your internet connection goes out or you have something to do and can't stay in a protracted battle? That's pretty lame to lose everything you played or paid for.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't a draw at all. It means nothing.

Re:Wow

[camperdave]

Any economy that isn't the ecology is an artificial one.

Re:Wow

[GodfatherofSoul]

My problem isn't with playing video games (I'm a big gamer myself). It's with his insulting and dismissing comment about pro sports (which I also watch).

Re:Wow

[Darinbob]

But earning them in game is identical to playing the game! You can't say that time is money when the time is spent on something you like. Those "time is money" still manage to play with their kids for free. If you don't like playing the game then it makes sense to not play it, rather than buy items and spend even more money on it.

Re:Wow

[unimacs]

I'm sure you know better than I but I was wondering if the existence of these ships provided some economic activity that will now be lost. Further I'd have to wonder if at least a few people who have lost assets that cost real money to acquire might just decide that this a a good time to quit playing rather than spend another small fortune to rebuild what they had.

Re:Wow

[Cimexus]

Horses for courses - I love games like EvE. If death is meaningless, or just a mild inconvenience, there is little incentive to play well, to think strategically, to form alliances with people you can truly trust, etc. But the adrenaline rush when you have something valuable and irreplaceable on the line? It's great. You need risk vs. reward in games ... if it's just reward (like WoW and other 'modern' MMOs) then what's the point?

I haven't actually played EvE myself but I've played MMOs with similarly brutal mechanics. Games where attempting to craft good equipment takes literally months of work and careful trading, all for just a 50/50 chance of success (on a diceroll - failure to craft consumes all the crafting materials and money required and gives you absolutely nothing back at all). Games where you drop equipment on death that can be picked up by anyone, no matter if it's the rarest and most valuable item on the server. Games where you can attack and kill anyone, any time (but, there are consequences for doing so, so you better make sure you know what you're doing). These games require you to be be strategic, to be alert and understand the other people you are playing with, to hedge your bets and to think outside the box. They are driven by the players and the intricate politics between powerful guilds/clans/etc, rather than a pre-defined storyline or script.

Of course that's just my opinion and you are welcome to your own. But there is a market for this kind of cutthroat game ... EvE's long-term success is proof of that. I wish I had discovered EvE years ago. It's exactly what I want in a game but by the time I found out about it I figured it was too late to 'get in' and I'd never be able to catch up to the established players (in terms of wealth, power, or whatever). I'm waiting for the next similar thing ... if it ever comes.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly I googled the picture of eve online conventions. I don't have that as one of my bookmarks.

FWIW most of the pictures of NFL fans are cool looking people and stadium crowds and hot chicks, same as with Yuropean football except the camera is more wide angle with soccer pictures for some reason. Judging by anomalies isn't fair, as "nfl chicks" is all hot women despite this picture being a top result for "NFL chicks."

Re:Wow

[AK Marc]

You can buy game time in ISK that can also be bought with USD (or Euro, I presume). They are saying you could buy $5000 wort of in game time with the value of a Titan.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

Right, just google pictures of people at EVE conventions.

Except he didnt' google anything...

I see reading comprehension on Slashdot is still the same as it's always been. Wait, are you a football fan?

I'm sure CCP hires booth babes too (first hit for Google image search for "eve online chicks", BTW). The conversation is about how cool the people who pay to be involved are (yeah, it's stupid topic, but it's a slow news day). When I think of EVE players I think of geeks sitting in their basements in front of a computer with Mountain Dew. When I think of people involved in football, with the exception of the small number of actual players and cheerleaders, I think of shirtless fat guys with painted faces and beer. They're different, but I'd be hard pressed to say one group is cooler than the other.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. Not long ago, Norway had a butter shortage. It became famous. The supply of butter within the country declined greatly leading to a large inflation of butter prices, which in turn led to very expensive imports of butter from other countries. Wine is a product with long lead times. If all the known wine in the world were drank tonight, tomorrow, any wine remaining would go up in value until the world's supply was replenished. Then the price would scale back down as supply kept up with demand.

Re:Wow

[strikethree]

The fallacy still exists. They could have used the money/time in game for other things, or to expand their holdings instead of rebuilding, they could have been larger.

Not true. All of the space in Eve is claimed. Either by NPCs or player organizations. You can not "grow bigger" without taking something from someone else.

In short, the battle was about control of territory. The loss of ships on the winning side granted control of that territory. It is therefore, not a loss but a gain. The price was only the price of the lost ships. Granted, the people who lost, lost big, but even then the fallacy is not valid. They "spent" those ships in the hopes of having control of the territory after the battle was over. They lost so they did not have control.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't follow (though I'm not in any way well-informed regarding economics). If all the wine-bottle-owners of the world drank all the world's wine overnight, would that harm the economy? The wine-bottles had value, and are now gone, but the demand for them will surely increase.

I don't follow (though I'm not in any way well-informed regarding economics). If all the wine-bottle-owners of the world drank all the world's wine overnight, would that harm the economy? The wine-bottles had value, and are now gone, but the demand for them will surely increase.

Just because all the wine is gone (you don't really mean the literal bottles, yes?), it does not necessarily follow that demand will increase. It seems to me that demand would actually decrease. Why? If all the wine was gone we would need to wait for the next year's production. This is not going to come out all at once, so the vineyards that get it out first would essentially be able to set their own price (in a free market). If this price was high enough I imagine a majority of wine drinkers would simply wait until the market stablized. Do you rush out and buy gas when demand outpaces supply and the cost goes up? Granted that is poor analogy; most people don't have an option of not buying gas and/or waiting for lower prices. Still, I try to balance getting gas at the cheapest place until I get a large enough discount due to my grocery purchases to provide suffecient reason to head to the more expensive company.

alphaa

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't. There is no reason to ever put PLEX in a ship. That's by design by CCP so you never risk losing the one thing you trade real world dollars for.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy bad analogy, farbleman!

the money was really lost, in the same way if you had worked for 6 months and saved then went to vegas and lost it all gambling. just because you had fun gambling doesn't mean the money was not really lost.

Nothing was lost in vegas, the casino has the money now. It's more like building a giant wooden man just to look at for a week then light on fire... Although people doing that doesn't seem to cause the same silly arguments for some reason.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I do. Sleeping just drives me crazy! All that lost wealth every day... Oh man, the other day I watched some TV. Figure that cost me big too. Replying to you must of cost me a few bucks too... It just won't stop! Help!!!

Re:Wow

[Znork]

The difference being that wine bottles are scarce, while EVE assets are artificially scarce and could be replaced instantly without any labour or resources being consumed. If any 'real' economic damage is inflicted it's through artificial scarcity.

Of course, as that scarcity is a significant factor in the entertainment value of EVE, and the 'labour' required actually being considered entertainment by some as well it's not as simple as saying it's 'damage' and arguments in favour of the function can't be relegated to a reflection of the broken window fallacy.

You could rewrite the headline to 'Battle causes the opportunity of $200k worth of gameplay about building starships' and it would hold some validity as well.

Re:Wow

[Shinobi]

They didn't fight just willy-nilly, it was part of a large campaign. N3/PL were fighting to hold on to PL's staging system while CFC went in to try and take it from them. As is, one of the alliances on the side of CFC managed to grab sov in the system.

Re:Wow

[The_Dougster]

In the end, the developer gets paid exactly once for each player playing - so its not really a money grab, but which players pay for whose subscription exactly is a bit muddied by the economics of the tokens.

That isn't exactly true because EvE players usually have multiple accounts with various alts. At any given time a player might only have some of their alts active. When the market gets flooded with PLEX from other players rebuilding Titans, the free2play guys cash in and act like a sink for all the PLEX. Also you can train secondary characters simultaneously now if you spend a PLEX to activate that feature for a month.

So the amount of PLEX consumed in a month can indeed be more than the amount of subscribers, not to mention hoarders and ones that get destroyed.

Re:Wow

[Pi1grim]

Everybody has a right to decide. It's forcing your decision on others where we draw the line. Everyone can share their opinion regarding other people. Heck, that's called free speech (yeah, I know, you don't have that in US anymore), but stop with the attitude, please. From perspective on a global scale, from humanity as a whole to a local community - it truly is a time wasted and that could have been spent better, from individual perspective, some, I'm sure, would also agree they wasted their time, others will say they had the best time and consider it a time well spent. And yet still everyone is entitled to their opinion and it's expression.

Re: Wow

[Znork]

The fundamentals of the broken window fallacy means that if you break the bakers window you create a demand for another window and 'stimulate' the economy. The Fallacy aspect is the fact that the baker has now spent that money on a new window instead of a new pot that he needed as well, leading to a sum of a broken window, a new whole window but no new pot. The loss is the opportunity cost of something else not getting bought and produced.

The same applies to wine bottles (if they're drinking (or breaking) them to create demand rather than to enjoy them).

The same could theoretically be applied to virtual goods destruction, but the opportunity cost for virtual goods is actually in the creation side for them. As they are artificially scarce they could theoretically be instantiated en-masse without any cost at all, freeing up money for the production of actual scarce resources being created within the economy.

However, at least for games like EVE, a significant portion of the entertainment is derived from the production of artificially scarce virtual goods. People pay to sit around producing them, unlike windows where very few pay to hang around in a window factory making windows. This means that the failure to just instantiate a titan for anyone who wants one does not carry the same cost to the real world economy as would a failure to instantly replicate a window, could it be done at the same zero cost.

Re:Wow

[Raenex]

When I think of EVE players I think of geeks sitting in their basements in front of a computer with Mountain Dew.

Kinda funny that the picture has somebody with that drink in the front.

When I think of people involved in football, with the exception of the small number of actual players and cheerleaders, I think of shirtless fat guys with painted faces and beer. They're different, but I'd be hard pressed to say one group is cooler than the other.

True enough.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckally with eve online probably no one in that fight was drunk.
You learn early on in eve that even being slight intoxicated impairs your judgement too much to play eve online.

Re:Wow

[Raenex]

Yup. The story was that they hadn't gotten past the first game of the playoffs in a long time. The announcers were talking about it and how great Andy Reid was before the implosion.

Re:Wow

[luther349]

its not but eve players many of them on for 10+ years have more money then they know what to do with. and the more hi end null sec systems can generate billions a day.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

If CCP would create a ship outside of game mechanics and give it to player. The real cost to CCP would be the 100,000 players that would stop playing (and don't pay subscription).

A few years ago 50,000 players stopped playing, when CCP were just having an internal discussing (they didn't even discuss it with the players) about selling ships and ammo directly do the players through a store outside of the game economy.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes no skill to play a game like that. Just a lot of grinding and luck, which is both a pretty crappy way to win or lose, especially if the latter involves paying more money or having to re-grind back up.

Q3A requires real skill because the only disadvantage anyone ever has is their own lack of ability. The penalty for being careless and getting killed is that you don't improve your game.

Re:Wow

[Calinous]

They were warships, so they provided no economic activity.
As for people deciding to quit playing, it's their choice.
And I don't think anyone has used real money to acquire them - other than the monthly fee.

Re:Wow

[Firethorn]

For those who haven't played the game 'High Sec spaces' are basically the safe havens of Eve. Protected by the Concord, it's generally safe from PvP. It also compromises a smallish fraction of the systems, and rarer resources are either extremely rare or outright unavailable.

However, it's a bit like being in a courthouse - while there are certainly baliffs ready to stop anybody who commits violence, they aren't necessarily where YOU are, and an enemy sufficiently uncaring of being caught can still cause damage. It's a bit like the major raids on cities on WoW. As you transition from 1.0(most secure) down to .5(least), the response time lengthens and the responding forces shrink.

I've had the privilage of seeing them attack and actually get away - which is incredibly difficult in 1.0 space(most secure). I've also had Newbs open fire on me and get whacked before I could return the favor(they attack you, you and your party is free to attack back).

While permanent death doesn't happen in Eve, the penalties START with the loss of your ship.

Re:Wow

[Firethorn]

So what happens if you start getting lag or the program crashes or you lose power or your internet connection goes out or you have something to do and can't stay in a protracted battle? That's pretty lame to lose everything you played or paid for.

Depends on how bad it is. If you're NOT in combat once disconnect is seen by the servers your ship will automatically go into what's essentially a 'warp loop', the intra-system FTL drive, you're unattackable in this state and your ship is effectively removed from play. Call it ~2 minutes or so. When you log back in you'll warp to the same spot you left from(gives you some intel before you're attackable). If you're in combat, this will still happen, but takes substantially longer.

As for losing power - buy an UPS, get a better internet connection, etc...

'Losing everything' - unless you're a complete newbie with only 1 ship, highly unlikely. I have ~36 ships hanging out in hangers all over the place, I can only lose 1 from 'surprise disconnect', I'll still have my skills and ISK(in-game currency), etc... Even then you're always guaranteed to be able to get a crappy ship to start over.

Worst case - lose the ship, the clone(have to buy another), some implants. Could be very expensive, but still hardly 'everything'.

Re:Wow

[fatphil]

By "time" do you mean the time in "a lot of time, after which you lose a lot", or "a small amount of time, after which you lose a little"?

As I'm failing to see how your question and either a yes or no answer to it relates to my point.

Anyway, the answer is yes, so I will quite happily foe people who I consider are illogical idiots, so that I don't have to waste my valuable time reading their crap.

Re: Wow

[RivenAleem]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

This is very relevant. You might think that the destruction of good would lead to greater economic activity, but destroyed goods are gone, and though people will be employed in making replacements, they are no longer creating new works.

Re:Wow

[epSos-de]

You are wrong on the basics, because the destroyed ships can be recycled and looted in that game, so the loss of one is a win for the others. It was a wealth redistribution battle, that is why so many scavenger ships did participate in there and got smashed.

Re: Wow

[Wootery]

As I understand it, there is a difference between broken windows and empty bottles of wine: in the case of wine, where is the opportunity cost?

It's clear that the baker who had to spend on window-repair might have needed that money for a new pot, but in the case of bottles of wine, the customer buys them willingly, not begrudgingly and out of necessity.

To put it another way: there's no opportunity cost when buying wine, but there is when paying for window-repairs.

Re: Wow

[SkunkPussy]

They do have real world value. Just the same as an e-book or an mp3 has a value. At the end of the day e-books, mp3s and items in eve are all virtual things that don't really exist, but they all have value.

Re:Wow

[SkunkPussy]

As a manufacturer, the prices for certain items used in or by capital ships have increased significantly since the fight so its time to build a lot of those!

Re: Wow

[RivenAleem]

Yes, the wine was made specifically for the purpose of being drunk, while the windows were not made to be broken. The relevance of the parable gets murky when you talk about warships. Are warships built to be destroyed? They are most definitely built to destroy other warships, but the loss of a warship, even in a game, has an opportunity cost. You now cannot (or it is difficult) to maintain regular economic ventures (mining) when you have lost a lot of your defensive fleet.

I think that comparing the loss of units in a game is not the same as the loss experienced by consuming a bottle of wine. If the wine was destroyed by pouring it down the drain, then we are closer to the same comparison, an object designed for entertainment was not consumed in the proper manner, so it is a real loss.

Re: Wow

[Wootery]

If all the wine was gone we would need to wait for the next year's production. This is not going to come out all at once, so the vineyards that get it out first would essentially be able to set their own price (in a free market). If this price was high enough I imagine a majority of wine drinkers would simply wait until the market stablized.

That doesn't mean the demand hasn't gone up, though. People will be more inclined to buy bottles of wine. That means the demand has gone up. That market forces act such that the actual number of sales don't increase, is another matter.

Also, obligatory xkcd.

Re:Wow

[petermgreen]

Where things get messy is you can legitimately turn real money into game money by buying plex with real money and selling them for ingame money and you can turn in-game money into extensions of your subscription by buying plex ingame and then using them.

But there is no approved way to turn ingame money back into real money. They can't totally prevent people doing it but it's a violation of the terms of service and they can and will take action if they catch people doing it.

Re:Wow

[Beardmonster]

It's actually much less destructive to the economy than drinking a bottle of wine, if the wine contains alcohol that is. Worldwide 2,7 million deaths are caused by alcohol every year, according to the World Health Organization, and it's a huge factor in domestic abuse and violent crimes in general, etc. People tend to regard moderate consumption as non-problematic or even beneficial, but the net health effect of moderate consumption is very much negative. Next after tobacco, alcohol is the biggest cause of cancer, e.g. So yes, of course use of drugs like alcohol is more destructive to the economy than blowing up virtual spaceships.

Re: Wow

[alexander_686]

They are built to be destroyed. Or rather, the average warships built to be destroyed. When you buy your warship you hope it will take a longer then average time to be destroyed or that it will destroy more warships then it cost to build.

So I will take the opposite side. One can have economic value by having a large wine cellar. Their can be joy in knowing that you sit on top of one. Not for me but for some people. But if you sit on it too long it will turn into vinegar destroying the second economic value of the wine – the being drunk. I would argue that a large component of EVE is using the warships in a space battle. If there are no space battles why would anybody play EVE?

It is kind of like going to Las Vegas to gambling. On average you are going to lose money – you know the odds are against you – but that is not the point. You spend money gambling because spending money that way is more fun than planning EVE or going to the movies. (which honestly I don't understand but that is how my gambling friends put it.)

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Imageinary representation of movie in your memory could not be sold, but virtual spaceship could.

Re:Wow

[Dunbal]

"Wasting" time makes absolutely no sense when you consider that in the long run, we are ALL dead. Our parents. Us. Our children. There is NO future except for returning to the dust and ashes that make up our universe, only to eventually be transformed into iron-56 and sucked into the last black hole (or whatever). Therefore all that "production", all those "accomplishments", everything the human race ever was or shall be are mere meaningless fictions.

Where "production" and "efficiency" become important is where the politician, the priest, the capitalist, or any other person who wishes to enslave humanity to his will needs a tool with which to brow beat his peers, to stampede the herd in the desired direction - a direction that is always favorable to him, but not necessarily to the herd. When a man talks to me about how I should live my life and invest my time for the good of "all" he is either blindly repeating something he heard elsewhere, or is very obviously trying to take advantage of me.

The desire to achieve and to produce must arise from within through satisfaction and curiosity, not be enforced with the whip. Telling people they are "wasting time" is the whip.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you rush out and buy gas when demand outpaces supply and the cost goes up?

Why yes people do that all the time.
That is why the post Sandy gas shortage lasted so long.
Louisiana had a similar problem years back. A lot of extra fuel had to be sent in to flood the market.

Re:Wow

[CanHasDIY]

My problem isn't with playing video games (I'm a big gamer myself). It's with his insulting and dismissing comment about pro sports (which I also watch).

Oh, well, then a childish personal attack was definitely the right move to make, wasn't it? What better way to make your point and endear the audience than to insult someone instead of actually saying what's bothering you?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Vlad, still farting even in 2014.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

sigh...

http://steshaw.org/economics-i...
http://steshaw.org/economics-i...

Destroyed things to bring value.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

By that logic, cocaine wouldn't have real world value. People do, all the time, directly or indirectly, sell isk, resulting in real world value. Even if nobody sold or used isk outside of the game, it would still have a real world value, just as any currency does. This is because economics is fundamentally about control over human time, as long as a currency can be spent to in some way direct anothers actions (even if the sphere of influence isn't global), it has value as a currency. Bitcoin would be another example.

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

It's more like building a giant wooden man just to look at for a week then light on fire

considering the first law of thermodynamics, nothing is lost there either. and like you, i'll choose to read / consider no further because my brain is just incapable of continuing if i find one shred of information that doesn't work for me.

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

By "time" do you mean the time in "a lot of time, after which you lose a lot", or "a small amount of time, after which you lose a little"?

seriously?

As I'm failing to see how your question and either a yes or no answer to it relates to my point.

you go to work. you make money. you buy a car.
you play EVE. you mine and sell it. you buy a ship.

in both cases you exerted work (time, planning, physical work) to earn money and purchased a good with that money. the only difference is that one good is material and one is virtual, and the economies are different.

would you consider anything is lost if you car exploded one day? i'm guessing so. why? you put money in, then eventually, you lost. you had fun "playing" in your car for a while, and you may have even had fun earning the money to purchase the car.

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

But earning them in game is identical to playing the game!

how is that different than real life? you could live in a ditch, but you chose to "play the game" of getting a job and participating in the economy. you don't have to participate in that "game" either if you don't want to. most of us participate in life beyond living in a ditch because it's FUN and we get ENJOYMENT out of it ... how is that different than choosing to participate in a virtual world?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

So could the time you're spending reading and replying to stories and comments on /.

Your point?

His point being that those activities do affect the economy.

Re: Wow

[bruce_the_loon]

You wouldn't keep it there, but because of the regional market segmentation, PLEX might be 550mil ISK in Jita and 620mil ISK in nullsec somewhere, so you decide to buy a bunch of them, transship to the higher selling market and make a quick profit. Unless you undock from Jita 4-4 and get blown to pieces.

You don't have to ship it yourself, as you could run a courier contract, but they can get stolen and if you price the collateral high enough to not make a loss if they get nicked, then the chances of someone taking the contract up diminishes because of the not-able-to-dock-in-the-delivery-station scams making massive collateral contracts suspect.

Re:Wow

[Talderas]

It's no where close to $200k. It was $200k value with 52 titans destroyed. They editted it up to 92 so it's about $353k in losses. The losses were split 55-37 so that means each side lost $211k against $142k so the net for CFC was about $70k of military power advantage over their foes.

Re:Wow

[fatphil]

You expect cars to die eventually, certainly. So yes, you eventually lost that. Unless you sell them before they get to that state, in which case you end up with less money than you bought it for, so have lost.

And how does that relate to my previous posts, you're not being very coherent? The fact that you've completely ignored half of my comparison implies that you've not even been bothered to address the comparison, you've just typed something randomly without understanding what you are responding too.

Me: Compare A to B
You: But A is like C!

Re:Wow

[unimacs]

Thanks for answering those questions though I'm kind of surprised that in a game where raw materials for producing ships are bought and sold that goods and services for maintaining and operating warships aren't also bought and sold.

Re:Wow

[mcgrew]

Obviously the AC GP is a mammon worshiper, one of those poor fools who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. One of those poor fools who ask me "you're retiring? But what are you going to do??" Well, duh, any damned thing I want! Some people, like the poor fool you responded to, live to work. I work to live.

And as I've been writing in my spare time which I'll have lots more of, I'm greatly offended by the GP's post. What's the point of my wasting time writing a novel if nobody will waste their time reading it?

Besides, I'm guessing that the above AC was slacking off at work "wasting time" posting on slashdot. Lots of hypocrites who don't even realize that they are.

Re:Wow

[lgw]

That looks like a crowd of people very likely to be working high-paying tech jobs. Your average crowd of football fans? Not so much. Not so much.

It takes generations, but eventually society changes with the times - idealizing football players was a holdover from when physical prowess was actually important in life.

Re:Wow

[lgw]

With your UID, you should be fully aware of the generation of Slashdotters who were geeks-abused-by-jocks in school. From my point of view, one cannot belittle sports, sports fans, and anything do with sports enough. Vile scum, the lot of them.

Re: Wow

[Wootery]

the wine was made specifically for the purpose of being drunk

Not necessarily. If you buy the good stuff, you can enjoy it even in moderation.

Re:Wow

[donkeyb]

OMG - Harry Styles plays EVE? I'm sold! Oh, wait....

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that this is EVE we're talking about, so... probably yeah.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't play EVE, but my understanding is that you use different ships for fighting and mining. The only negative effect on economic activity I can concieve of is that now there's less battleships around to protect the miners from pirates.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on how bad it is. If you're NOT in combat once disconnect is seen by the servers your ship will automatically go into what's essentially a 'warp loop', the intra-system FTL drive, you're unattackable in this state and your ship is effectively removed from play. Call it ~2 minutes or so. When you log back in you'll warp to the same spot you left from(gives you some intel before you're attackable). If you're in combat, this will still happen, but takes substantially longer.

So basically you can be a coward and just yank your network cable any time you start to lose. lol, yeah real "hardcore" gaming there.

As for losing power - buy an UPS, get a better internet connection, etc...

So you want someone to pay for the game, pay for the use of s ship model, pay for weapons to go on it and now they have got to pay for MORE hardware? And how does a UPS stop your internet connection from going out? How does a UPS stop you from having things to do in real life? How does a UPS stop the game from crashing? How does it stop lag?

'Losing everything' - unless you're a complete newbie with only 1 ship, highly unlikely. I have ~36 ships hanging out in hangers all over the place, I can only lose 1 from 'surprise disconnect', I'll still have my skills and ISK(in-game currency), etc... Even then you're always guaranteed to be able to get a crappy ship to start over.

Unless that one you happen to lose was one you spent a lot of time and/or money acquiring. Or do you leave all of your expensive ships stored away while you fly around in crappy ones most of the time and if that's the case, what is the point? You don't even get to fully enjoy the game.

It sounds like a game only complete idiots would play. I guess it's ok if you're still living with mommy and daddy and can have them buy all of your virtual "possessions", but for us grown ups who support ourselves and can't spend hours in a video game every day, it is a foolish waste of time and money.

Re:Wow

[Cimexus]

Don't get me wrong, I was a big Q3A player back in the day too. And Counterstrike (1.5, not 1.6 or the newer Source-engine based ones).

I'm talking specifically about the type of MMO I like here. First person shooters are a completely different genre, with a different set of desirable attributes. I'm not a fan of some of the modern FPSs that require you to do RPG-like grinding to level your character or unlock certain weapons etc.

While you're right that grinding and luck play a part in the type of game described, it's not without skill. It's just not "twitch skills" like in Q3A type games. It's long term strategy, efficiency, crunching the numbers and risks to determine what the best way of going about things is. It's also your interpersonal skills: should your clan ally itself with Powerful Clan X for protection, or will their bad reputation among others on the server make you more of a target if you do so? Should you invest in buying up a lot of Crafting Material Y because certain player-driven events are likely to drive the price of that material up in the future? Etc.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi paying tech jobs? They look like fresh-out-of-college nerds who can't get jobs in the field because they have no life or management skills, and so much of the grunt techie labor is being outsourced to India.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK YOU BACK BUDDY. I am certain there are many many things in this world where you would have the same opinion. I'm sure you'd say that wasting time smoking crack and murdering people could have been better spent. So much a better use of time and resources that you (as a part of society) have made them illegal. So who the fuck are YOU that you get to tell me I can't smoke weed by the pound while paying this crackwhore for a $5 beej? Society places different values on different activities and some of them have been determined to have NO value whatsoever. Keep screaming "FREEDUMB" all you want though. Somebody has the right to tell you what you can do. Maybe not me, in particular, but my vote will contribute to it. Hell one could argue that the definition of society is "having rules and not doing whatever the fuck you want whenever you want to do it." That would certainly define "civilized" as well. Are you telling me you don't live in a civilized society? Regarding balance, it seems you're all the way over at the other end of the spectrum. So we're both unbalanced, just tilted opposite ways. You're no better than I am. Chew on that awhile.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The wealth was destroyed when people wasted their time building those ships.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the hell do you HAVE to bring up guns in every fucking thing you write here? You Alaskans are deranged.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

you can buy EVE in-game currency with real world currency

Which you neglected to mention you CANNOT do with WoW.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! What a coinky dink. I also foe people who are illogical idiots. I see you're on my list.....

Re:Wow

[AK Marc]

It's a discussion on a battle. Tactics are technology driven. War technology is "guns". Seemed like an on-topic analogy.

Re:Wow

[farble1670]

of course you can. it violates the ToS, just like it violates the ToS in EVE but it can and is done.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Exception: PLEX (game time that can be bought out of game, and used, or purchased in game and used or sold out of game)..

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Well...players have to mine the ore which is then refined to manufacture into ships which require the ownership or purchase (or discovery) of the proper blueprint, all of which are done in game by players with little influence by CCP. I think all CCP does is balance the availability of ore based on the economy...

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand that, but I still think being able to lose hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of virtual items is BS. I could understand a repair fee or losing some cargo as an added penalty (along with not improving your game and any embarrassment that goes with that), but not total loss. It's a game, it should be fun whether you win or lose.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, several of those people look like me!

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You can make your point, but you don't have to be so rude about it. Maybe should should spend some time on learning how to behave in a civilized manner instead of playing with imaginary spaceships.

Re:Wow

[gnick]

I'm assuming that the people building those ships were enjoying their time doing it - Otherwise, why would they pay for the privilege? Using your analogy, wealth is destroyed every time we use time for something that doesn't yield an end-product other than personal gratification (e.g. watching a movie, non-reproductive sex, posting on /., playing video games, etc.)

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the nerdiest sentence I have ever read (I love it, btw).

Re:Wow

[tibit]

I don't play myself, but a colleague has shown me how much damage one can do in a newb space with a suitably strong ship. From what I recall, Concord was no match for a good while. Maybe I'm just misremembering, it was a while ago.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I would counter that in saying that in the space of this economy, ships are very productive assets. They are the basis for all accumulation of wealth in this game, from the mining, to the building of factories and it's defence, to the acquisition of land and territory.

Re: Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

But we are not talking about real world value, we are talking about the Eve economy, in the context of the Eve economy we have just inflated the value of money. Not to mention that real world money can and will be used to regain that value at some stage, there are potentially millions of real world dollars worth of items in Eve that would be lost otherwise due to things like Sovereignty rent, and upkeep costs. These in turn will power botting areas which are likely making the larger corps in power quite a bit of real world money.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a core fallacy of economics however, not just eve. The idea that if I give you $2, and you give me back $2 then $4 of economic activity was achieved when really there is a net zero gain total.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The economy just deflated 300k.

EVE online has slightly re-valued the dollar.

Do it more!

Since one can only convert ISK to $ through subscriptions of EVE online it's really more like they are worth 'x' number of months of access to EVE Online.

Re: Wow

[jbee02]

Money never is really lost. Its simply transferred between people and organizations. Money lost during due to hurricanes damage isn't lost. Its merely transferred to people who repair damage and to others who are paid to deal with the after math. Its resources which are actually lost not money.

Re:Wow

[Firethorn]

A 'Suitably strong ship' isn't something a newb player stupid enough to violate the rules in front of Concord ships would have, and note that I said get away, as opposed to 'doing a lot of damage'. Of course you can do lots of damage if you're willing to write the ship off, but escaping with it intact is a much harder achievement.

In high-sec space you quickly have the problem that you're quickly no longer griefing the Newbs, but fighting the infinitely spawning Concord forces.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

People burn money every day.....I was in line behind a man spending over $1000 on cigarettes the other day.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

The people who lost those ships insist, vehemently, that they don't enjoy building them. I kind of doubt that's true, or at least doubt it's as true as they make it out to be.

I agree the wealth calculation is flawed, but it's at least as valid as most other commonly used wealth measurements. "$300,000 Destroyed in Internet Spaceship Battle" is no worse than "Amazon Loses $10 Million a Minute Due to DDOS" or "$100 Billion A Year Losses from Worker Sick Days." All of those are just big numbers we enjoy seeing in print because we're monkeys who like shiny things.

Re:Wow

[Fjandr]

Whether the fallacy argument applies or not depends 100% on it trying to satisfy both the means and the ends.

"If I flap my arms, world peace will be achieved."

If I flap my arms, and my intent is to achieve world piece, I'm operating under the "arm-flapping" fallacy.

If I'm flapping my arms simply because doing so makes me happy, the "arm-flapping" fallacy does not apply. Yes, it is still true that flapping your arms will not bring about world peace, but who's the moron talking about world peace? Not me; I'm flapping my arms because it's entertaining.

The same thing applies to the broken window fallacy. It should only be invoked if the stated intent is to create net positive economic value through increased economic output. Last I checked, the people prosecuting this war in EVE weren't concerned about net positive economic value. That is true even if they were concerned about a personal economic net positive, which would be assumed to be at the expense of an economic net negative to be borne by the loser of the war. That last part (the recognition that a micro net positive relies on a macro net negative as a result of the destruction) is what separates the fallacy from the truth.

And, as with real life wars, others can have an economic benefit. Particularly those who hold large resource reserves, The price of which will skyrocket as these giant alliances work to rebuild their now-decimated fleets. Basic wartime economics.

Re:Wow

[V for Vendetta]

Actually, the second guy from the bottom on the right is a CCP employee. So much for "can't get jobs" ...

Re:Wow

[murdocj]

Huh? No free speech? You sound confused. The USA is one of the few places on earth that has free speech. Try talking against the government in Russia, China, South America, Africa, and a number of European countries. Welcome to prison in those places. If you are lucky.

Re:Wow

[DexterIsADog]

I was persuaded by your argument, until the last word in your post.

Then you lost me.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a discussion on a battle. Tactics are technology driven. War technology is "guns". Seemed like an on-topic analogy.

Yes, and that's fine. But there's something about how you write, that when we read your posts about guns we can hear the fapping with your other hand while you typed.

Re:Wow

[AK Marc]

Huh? I get accused of being anti-gun most of the time, so it's always odd when I'm then accused of being a gun nut.

These guys should try playing the stock market.

[lxs]

Similar results without the distraction of all those tedious fake space battles.

Re:These guys should try playing the stock market.

[ackthpt]

Similar results without the distraction of all those tedious fake space battles.

Exactly. It was the result of a behind the scenes battle to see who could get the closest to insolvency without flinching, which brought about the end of Lehman Brothers.

And since the government just printed stacks and stacks of money to bail out the whole mess and put a splint on the economy, it's all pretty much the same virtual game.

Re:These guys should try playing the stock market.

[girlintraining]

And since the government just printed stacks and stacks of money to bail out the whole mess and put a splint on the economy, it's all pretty much the same virtual game.

There's a small difference: When you fuck up in a game, nobody trusts you anymore. This guy has a lot to answer for, and chances are good he won't be in a leadership position much longer. Those losses are just gone, and only the people who followed him pay for it, nobody else.

In real life, you can fuck up a lot and everyone else but you pays for it. Nobody's gonna pay this guy billions as a bonus for screwing up.

Re:These guys should try playing the stock market.

[onepoint]

you just might be right. if you read carefully about the server loads you will note that they prevented certain sides from entering into the system because of overload. interesting that EVE might have chosen a side.

$200,000 of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in, vitually NOTHING was lost.

yet another virtual FAIT currency, just like the dollar was lost. Nothing of real value was lost. News just in.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is modded down, but it made me laugh.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Carewolf]

Nothing of real value was lost. News just in.

That is not true, a lot of time was killed, or perhaps even brutally slaughtered.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

ok ok i agree, a lot of time that could be better spent masturbating over internet porn was wasted. But imagine the saving on KiloJoules of energy saved!

Re:$200,000 of what?

[ackthpt]

This just in, vitually NOTHING was lost.

yet another virtual FAIT currency, just like the dollar was lost. Nothing of real value was lost. News just in.

People's time to build this fleets up was expended. I don't think of that as nothing, particularly after I took a long hard look at how much of my life I spent glued to MMO play, which only gave me a lot of stress and very little to hold onto (nothing, actually, aside some memories) when I left the game.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[seanvaandering]

No kidding. The amount of time to manufacture a Titan, the skills required to pilot it, the rigging and equipment to outfit it, its a little mind boggling when you get right into it - hell I started playing again a month ago - the skills required to even run a battle cruiser is around 45 days, titan class ships must be 90 days or even more, even with implants, and that's just to train to pilot it - those skill books aren't cheap either!

Re:$200,000 of what?

[ceoyoyo]

Considerably more than 90 days. EVE is a long-term game.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[rtb61]

PvP purse vs purse, dainty psychopathic nerds batting away at each other with their Fabergé purses. Something was lost but it was lost long before the battle started ;).

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a brand new toon to sit in a Titan Class ship is about 170 days, just to sit in the ship without using any of the weapons or modules etc.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of that time was spent masturbating over the sweet virtual starships. Some of these players wouldn't know any more what to do with naked girl porn than with the real thing.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in, vitually NOTHING was lost.

No, everything that was lost was VIRTUAL.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[cbhacking]

Much more than 90 days. Even with top implants and neural mapping, I don't think you can hit all the skill pre-reqs for a titan in under half a year, and probably longer (disclosure: I've been playing much longer than you have, but I stick to sub-capitals). Unlike subcaps, where the progression is pretty simple (spaceship command - frigate - destroyer - cruiser - battlecruiser - battleship), capitals throw a whole bunch of additional requirements in there. You need jump drive training (which means training a handful of the Navigation skills pretty high). You need advanced spaceship command, which is basically great big speed bump between subcaps and caps. I forget if you need the superweapon skills just to pilot a titan or not, but if so, get ready to train a whole bunch of pre-reqs for that too. Etc, etc. And that's just to get in the ship at all. To actually use it, you'll spend months to reach even the point where you can mount its guns, much less use them effectively. You'll need a few months just to get the basic core competency skills maxed out, because there's no way you can afford to give up a 2% edge in something. You'll need to max the gunnery support skills so you have a chance of taking out a heavy interdictor tackling you, the navigation skills so you can actually get to the battle with everybody else, the rigging skills so you can fit the tech-2 rigs you'd be insane not to use on a ship so expensive, the repair skills to be able to keep the thing intact in battle, and so much more.

Being *ready* to fly a titan - that is, having the character skills required to actually be a competitive titan pilot - is probably at least two years of training.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Sockatume]

Not sure if a joke, but... you understand that the EVE economy is based on barter and exchange, right?

Re:$200,000 of what?

[TangoMargarine]

If you're going to all-cap a word, try to at least spell it correctly, mmkay?

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I think the entertainment value is in the journey not the destination or in this case outcome. Seriously nothing of real value was lost.

Re:$200,000 of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, my ships in eve are worth more than EVERYTHING you have, more than your life. Because they are more relevant to me. So stop trying to say something is not worth anything, because value is a correlation between a person or group of persons and a possession or service, its not an intrinsic poperty of the property or service.

The rent...

[Anonymous Coward]

was to damn high?

Re:The rent...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Actually, the rent was too high.

Worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

So was it worth it? Was something valuable gained? Does control of this system give CFC a strategic advantage, or remove a strategic advantage from RUS? Clearly CFC won this in terms of raw attrition which itself carries strategic heft, but that can be rebuilt so it's only a temporary strategic advantage.

Re:Worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

System was a staging point for one of the guys involved, can't remember which side though.

It sounds cooler than it is...

[Wulfrunner]

To manage the number of users involved in that battle, the system went into "Time Dilation". What that means in practice is that you queue an action, go make coffee, drink the coffee, then queue another action. Very cool in concept, but when a 30 "minutes" take 6 hours of real time to process, it looses its novelty fairly quickly.

Let's say you own a Capital Ship and want to play EVE, so you commit to the fight. An hour later you have to go get groceries / make dinner for the family / go to the toilet. You are unlikely to be able to disengage, and so you can just log off and your ship gets destroyed instead. Not much fun.

To me, the battle doesn't even look cool. The ships are all mashed on top of one another, pointing in random directions, and it's almost impossible for an observer to see what's actually going on. If I wanted to interest someone in EVE, I wouldn't show them a video of this battle, nor The Battle of Asakai. I would show them the Alliance Tournament XI (if anything).

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

To manage the number of users involved in that battle, the system went into "Time Dilation". What that means in practice is that you queue an action, go make coffee, drink the coffee, then queue another action. Very cool in concept, but when a 30 "minutes" take 6 hours of real time to process, it looses its novelty fairly quickly.

Let's say you own a Capital Ship and want to play EVE, so you commit to the fight. An hour later you have to go get groceries / make dinner for the family / go to the toilet. You are unlikely to be able to disengage, and so you can just log off and your ship gets destroyed instead. Not much fun.

To me, the battle doesn't even look cool. The ships are all mashed on top of one another, pointing in random directions, and it's almost impossible for an observer to see what's actually going on. If I wanted to interest someone in EVE, I wouldn't show them a video of this battle, nor The Battle of Asakai. I would show them the Alliance Tournament XI (if anything).

Yeah, not like a real starship fight at all. where quick thinking and fast fingers ends battles for control of light years of space in a few seconds so you can go watch the latest TV show live at its regularly scheduled time.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not into those time sinks either, but Eve is great at what it is.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[gr4nf]

To me, the battle doesn't even look cool. The ships are all mashed on top of one another, pointing in random directions, and it's almost impossible for an observer to see what's actually going on.

As beings raised in a mostly 2 dimensional plane, it's natural for a truly 3-dimensional no-gravity-bias large-scale interaction to bewilder us. I think this might be one of the things EVE got right.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Wulfrunner]

Yes, EVE is great at perpetuating broken game mechanics. For example, please explain how an energy transfer module can provide more energy to its target than it takes to activate? Or, explain how a starbase (POS) forcefield can "eject" the ships inside at a velocity that will literally "bowl" anything in their path out of their way (e.g. Drebuchet)? I'm sure you had fun in B-R5RB but let's face it, EVE's subscriber base isn't exactly growing.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Wulfrunner]

As beings raised in a mostly 2 dimensional plane,

I have stairs in my house, don't know about you. :)

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[CanHasDIY]

As beings raised in a mostly 2 dimensional plane,

Uh... come again?

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, EVE is great at perpetuating broken game mechanics. For example, please explain how an energy transfer module can provide more energy to its target than it takes to activate? Or, explain how a starbase (POS) forcefield can "eject" the ships inside at a velocity that will literally "bowl" anything in their path out of their way (e.g. Drebuchet)? I'm sure you had fun in B-R5RB but let's face it, EVE's subscriber base isn't exactly growing.

I've never played and have no idea what Br5rb is, but I'll take a crack at the others:
The energy transfer module is a self consuming catalyst. Eventually it malfunctions/burns out and is thus lost. This eliminates the infinite energy option. If things never break in Eve, no fuel is used etc for that thing, then, well, it gets blown up with the ship in combat or at the least you can consider the Plex things as fueling it. No Plex no Xfer or whatever. You could also have Maxwell's demon catching 1*K heat energy void of space and firing it out the other side, or a wicked efficient thermoelectric panel as your source.

The starbase push thing folds space. What you perceive as pushing them out of the way is in fact the "wake" of the fold/wave, where the ships "fall" out of the path of the fold. Simple enough, really. Once you cede FTL travel to a universe, the rest of the tech can get pretty darn exotic too, while being internally consistent.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Threni]

> It sounds cooler than it is...

It didn't sound at all cool. It made me think of Pacman-playing binges. I can imagine the story now..."if each dot costs 4p, then in the 48 hour session, almost £833 worth of dots were consumed". This is - easily - the lamest Slashdot story of the year so far.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[fatphil]

Close one eye.
Look at the nearest wall you are close to the middle of.
Now look at the corner of the ceiling at the left of that wall.
Then follow the ceiling/wall interface to the right until you get to the top right corner of the wall.
Now defocus and just try and take the whole into view. Move your head left and right if need be.

What you will have seen is
- the ceiling dips down to the left
- the ceiling bulges up to the middle
- the ceiling dips down to the right
- yet the ceiling is straight, a contradiction with the above three other things you have seen.

The human brain is *very* good at making *good sense* of sets of 3D clues which may confuse or even contradict in isolation. Even in the absense of binocular vision (which is why I asked you to close one eye at the start).

If the sum of all the 3D clues in the EVE image leave the viewer confused, then it's either deliberate optical trickery (which would be dumb), or far more likely, because it's not a believable or meaningful scene. 3D shoals, swarms, and flocks just don't behave that way.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[operagost]

So do I, but my second floor isn't directly over the first floor.

My buddy's second floor is, but every time he goes upstairs he has to hop. "Hrup! hrup! hrup!"

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[gr4nf]

By which I mean: well over 99% of the movement relative to the Earth that you will do in your life will be in 2 dimensions. We think of our world in maps (2 dimensional). We talk about the 4 cardinal directions (2 dimensions), and when we look at a multiple-player interaction (like a battle), we rarely consider "above" and "below" as valid relative positions on a large scale.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[geekoid]

" can provide more energy to its target than it takes to activate?"
There is no problem with that.
It takes me 12 pounds of pressure exert for about 10 seconds to activate a control valve on a dam that will produce many megawatts of electricity.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, please explain how an energy transfer module can provide more energy to its target than it takes to activate?

You're forgetting the powergrid requirements of the module.

For non-players: modules on ships have a fixed power consumption (measured in gigawatts) to just be installed and ready to use and some have an additional requirement of energy from the ship's capacitor to activate. The capacitor (measued in gigajoules) recharges continuously, but on a lot of ships not fast enough to run all the installed modules for long before it depletes. The energy transfer module he's talking about allows one ship to send energy into another ship's capacitor. If your skills are levelled high enough, it will give the target more energy than it drains from your own capacitor.

My explanation for this is that it uses its base powergrid consumption (which is higher than most other types of module) to feed the target's capacitor. This is in line with another module, the capacitor recharger that increases your own recharge speed, at a cost of powergrid.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[DarkOx]

Now now, don't judge we don't know anything about his childhood.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

As beings raised in a mostly 2 dimensional plane,

I'm a pilot, you insensitive clod.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

An inefficient one if most of your travel is in the vertical direction.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[AK Marc]

Ask people to describe a "highway" system if everyone had flying cars, and you'd get something like Jetsons, or even back to the future, where the flying cars all line up in lanes, with little to no vertial separation, except for "overpasses" and other things that are more like layered 2-d than an independent 3-d construct.

We conceive of 3d like radar systems. A top-down view.

People have no skills to do something like "throw a ball through a hoop and have it land on a specific spot". Such things can be trained in, but generally are quite lacking in our 2-d minds.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pak chooie unf?

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Salgat]

Mind you that a real starship battle would be done with lasers and thousands of miles between players, people would try to maximize distance between each other. Eve is more of a glorified star wars than anything else.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Thruen]

I'm not so sure about how you put it, but I understand what you mean. I'm currently reading A Mote in God's Eye which mentions how anyone accustomed to zero-gravity wouldn't feel the need to orient themselves in any upright position, whereas the natural tendency for a person accustomed to gravity would be to orient themselves all in the same direction.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, the battle doesn't even look cool. The ships are all mashed on top of one another, pointing in random directions, and it's almost impossible for an observer to see what's actually going on.

As beings raised in a mostly 2 dimensional plane, it's natural for a truly 3-dimensional no-gravity-bias large-scale interaction to bewilder us. I think this might be one of the things EVE got right.

Then why do most of the ships have ONE plane of symmetry and look like giant whales? If you put a bunch of whale shaped things in space in random orientations, it looks wrong. The ships look the way they do because of the artists's own gravity bias.

You're painting this as a problem with the viewer's perception when it has everything to do with deceptive appearances that serve no purpose in their environment, perceptible or otherwise. It's like they're wearing whale camouflage.

Our minds are wired for relating forms and functions. Sure 3D gravityless space combat is alien to us, but there are still forces at play that shape everything and we expect to find them. You can't throw forms we are familiar with into such space for no reason and expect us to be all chummy with it. A whale looks like a whale because of gravity and fluid dynamics. When you put a whale shape in space just for aesthetics, it's your own damned fault people can't make sense of it.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask people to describe a "highway" system if everyone had flying cars, and you'd get something like Jetsons, or even back to the future, where the flying cars all line up in lanes, with little to no vertial separation, except for "overpasses" and other things that are more like layered 2-d than an independent 3-d construct.

We conceive of 3d like radar systems. A top-down view.

People have no skills to do something like "throw a ball through a hoop and have it land on a specific spot". Such things can be trained in, but generally are quite lacking in our 2-d minds.

You have a more efficient design? You're only adding one dimension, people will still have to travel in lanes through congested areas just as we do at sea, but the lanes could also stack. As far as where to put lanes traveling in the opposite direction, be careful how complex you'd have it.

If your design doesn't make sense to the average person, you shouldn't ask them to drive under their own power in it.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Rich0]

Mind you that a real starship battle would be done with lasers and thousands of miles between players, people would try to maximize distance between each other. Eve is more of a glorified star wars than anything else.

Actually, I've given this a little thought. A real space battle with speed-of-light detection and weaponry would of course take place at long distance, but the ships would need to close in order to attack. The effective range of a ship's weapons would be dictated by their power output relative to the target's ability to absorb power without being destroyed, and the target's maneuverability. An armored target would require more energy to be concentrated upon it in order to be destroyed, which is obvious to most. What isn't obvious to most is that when you fire on a target at long range with speed-of-light detection/fire you actually have to fire a cone-like projection of energy (or beams directed across a cone of space which is effectively the same thing).

This is all caused by the fact that the target's position is uncertain, and the outgoing fire takes as long to get to the target as any possible updates on its position take to get back. So, if you just shoot at where you last saw the target then you're going to miss unless it is stationary. The more maneuverable the target is, the larger the uncertainty in the target's position, so maneuverability behaves just like armor - more dispersed fire means you can sustain more of it.

So, the ships close until one is able to direct enough fire at its target to take it out of the fight. That could be very far or relatively close, and it all depends on how much firepower/survivability/maneuverability the ships have.

Unguided kinetic weapons follow the same principles, but ranges are much lower and thus info about target position is better understood. The slow weapon speeds means you still have uncertainty in where the target will be, but the close range means that you know exactly where they are when you fire. Ability to detect incoming fire also means dodging becomes a factor (so just pulsing fire over an area probably won't be effective, but salvos with shotgun-like coverage would be impossible to dodge if the spread is large enough and the distance between the projectiles is smaller than the target's size).

Guided kinetic weapons would probably lead to tactics similar to what is done with submarines. You fire a stealthy weapon from very long range, and success depends on strategically anticipating the target's movements so that it is within the weapon's effective range when the weapon is able to detect it and start homing. Modern torpedos work this way - if the target chances course right after it is fired (for an uncontrolled weapon) then the weapon will be wasted, because you had to fire the thing at where the target would be in 15 minutes due to the slow speeds involved compared to the speed of sound in water (which is the speed of detection) and counter-detection range. If you had the weapons to spare you could of course fire a ton of them, and if they were stealthy the target's first warning would be a whole bunch of small seeking weapons at close range and no idea of where they came from, which is about what it is like to be the target of a well-executed submarine attack.

Oh, and the only thing humans would do is direct strategy (where you want the ships to generally head). Under automated control the ships would be constantly performing random evasive maneuvers, and directing continuous fire at any targets worth the expenditure. A ship not performing constant and sufficiently random maneuvers becomes a target at a MUCH longer range if the weapons fired against it can be fired with low dispersion. A low-dispersion weapon doesn't lose much power at all over astronomic scale and could be used successfully if you could predict the target position.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[freeze128]

It's probably because that any other "space battle" you have ever seen was between 2 (or more) fleets. The fleets obey the orders of the commanders, and are generally intended to adhere to a particular strategy. The EVE battle, while it consists of at least a couple of battling factions, doesn't have a single mind guiding them all. They just know that they have to secure the location, or destroy the enemy. How they do that is probably just up to each starship commander.

Try this: get a wounded rabbit, and throw it into a sealed room. Then add about a dozen random hungry wolves. That would seem more like the EVE online battles.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[AK Marc]

Why do I need to be able to solve a non-existant problem as a pre-requisite to pointing out that all other solutions are artificially constrained to 2-d answers?

If it were up to me, I'd abolish all lanes and have the flying cars communicate between each other directly to negotiate right of way if a conflict is detected. Come up with simple rules, not far from present airline rules, that would be used for determining who goes where. An organized chaos would work best. If that starts to get overly congested, then I'd separate them out by speed. Why are cars going bumper-to-bumper in air-lanes? Go faster, go up. There's no need to go out of your way to follow roads, if you are in a flying car. There are already well defined rules for aircraft, but they work mainly in low-congestion. Around airports, where congestion happens, a 3-rd party manages congestion.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[ceoyoyo]

Which is a little silly. Moties are efficient. They wouldn't build spaceships bigger than necessary. You'd tend to orient yourself so your faces were close together. Since our (and their) heads are at one end and there probably isn't space to be face to face with your feet sticking out in opposite directions, you'd orient yourself in the same direction, which itself could be arbitrary.

If you look at pictures of the space station where there are multiple people they tend to use that orientation. Arbitrary, but everybody mostly pointing in the same direction.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[WuphonsReach]

As beings raised in a mostly 2 dimensional plane, it's natural for a truly 3-dimensional no-gravity-bias large-scale interaction to bewilder us. I think this might be one of the things EVE got right.

Nope. EVE gets 3-d wrong. There is a gravity-bias in that all ships will by default orient "upwards" (like ships on the ocean surface) unless they are moving or pointing at something.

If you turn off your engines in EVE, you stop moving.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

powergrid is not consumed. The power grid is like the electricity cables in your house, the thickness of your cables will determine how much watts of electricity you can receive from it. The capacitor is like a battery, it can be charged, drained and holds a finite amount of charge, it even has a non-linear charge profile. The capacitor is needed when you need short bursts of energy, for example when firing your guns.

The power generator of the ship is never mentioned, but it is the thing that charges you capacitor and a rate that is described as GJ/s.

Your energy transfer module needs to be attached with very thick cables (power grid) to the capacitor because it needs to transfer a lot of charge per second through those cables. the energy transfer module will charge the other ships capacitor directly, somehow bypassing its powergrid.

The energy transfer module is moving more charge into the other's ship than it takes from the capacitor. There are two plausible explanations:
1. The energy transfer module includes its own power generator.
2. The energy transfer module, because it has a constant power draw can take part of the energy directly from the power generator, bypassing the capacitor.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Paradigma11]

To me, the battle doesn't even look cool. The ships are all mashed on top of one another, pointing in random directions, and it's almost impossible for an observer to see what's actually going on.

As beings raised in a mostly 2 dimensional plane, it's natural for a truly 3-dimensional no-gravity-bias large-scale interaction to bewilder us. I think this might be one of the things EVE got right.

But space is an incredible boring tactical 3d environment.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember - enemy gate is down.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[GNious]

EVE's subscriber base isn't exactly growing.

According to CCP and others, EVE is the only for-pay MMO, that is, in fact, still growing and has grown continually since its birth.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but are you protected?

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he meant in terms of direction. We are used to think of 2D planes in terms of directions, even when up and down gets involved we usually think as above layers of more 2D planes, like building floors or airplanes routes.

Space is a true 3D plane like water were you can truly go where you want and there's is no "pointing". As long as an object of propelled in a direction in 3D in space all it matters is the acceleration and inertia, the "pointing" is useless unless a part of that object is blocking the target (from a gun point of view).

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[CanHasDIY]

By which I mean: well over 99% of the movement relative to the Earth that you will do in your life will be in 2 dimensions.

You realize elevation exists, right? So no, you don't move in 2 dimensions, you move in 3. All the time. Whether you notice or not.

We think of our world in maps (2 dimensional).

I take it you don't know what topography is, then?

when we look at a multiple-player interaction (like a battle), we rarely consider "above" and "below" as valid relative positions on a large scale.

... nor do you know anything about combat. You might not consider elevation in those circumstances, but I assure you, people who actually know how to wage war very much do.

Dominate the sky, dominate the battlefield.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[johanwanderer]

You should read the Doom Star series by Vaughn Heppner: Star Soldier. He have put a lot of thoughts into the matter.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[MozeeToby]

If it were up to me, I'd abolish all lanes and have the flying cars communicate between each other directly to negotiate right of way if a conflict is detected. Come up with simple rules, not far from present airline rules, that would be used for determining who goes where. An organized chaos would work best. If that starts to get overly congested, then I'd separate them out by speed. Why are cars going bumper-to-bumper in air-lanes? Go faster, go up. There's no need to go out of your way to follow roads, if you are in a flying car. There are already well defined rules for aircraft, but they work mainly in low-congestion. Around airports, where congestion happens, a 3-rd party manages congestion.

You'd end up with swarming behavior. Which is fine, and probably the most efficient way to handle it, but that's what you'd get. Stay no less than X meters from the nearest vehicle, maintain within 5 degrees of the target heading, maintain speed unless required by one of the other rules to slow down. Those three simple rules will create systems that look shockingly like animal swarming behavior and would be a "good enough" first step to what you are suggesting.

Re:It sounds cooler than it is...

[Rich0]

Thanks for the link. One of Charles Stross's books also touches on space combat at relativistic distances, though is is not really the main theme of the book. I was surprised about how much like submarine warfare it actually is, but that is because the situations are similar - as in the scale of submarine warfare space is free of horizons and detection ranges are very long compared to maneuver speed. The analogy breaks down with speed-of-light weapons, because submarines do not have weapons that travel at the speed of sound in water.

Slashdot

[pitchpipe]

News about nerds.

Re:Slashdot

[Megahard]

Stuff that doesn't matter.

Re:Slashdot

[ejbvanc]

When it takes multiple guys six months mining/moving/acquiring/dodging/praying/cooking to get a titan... it matter :)

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

A comment modded as funny that's actually funny. A rare find these days.

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

It would matter if it were "multiple girls" ;)

In other news...

[ausekilis]

5 girlfriends went to bed alone.

Re:In other news...

[wonkey_monkey]

Five super-hot platonic friends who are doing better in math went to bed with their boyfriends.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Hundreds upon hundreds of other ships were destroyed

5 girlfriends went to bed alone.

LOL!

Re:In other news...

[ejbvanc]

5 girlfriends? My wife and I quote "Well I'm glad you didn't lose your titan, I don't have to worry about an anger bang tonight."

Re:In other news...

[antdude]

They have girlfriends? Prove it please.

If they did have girlfriends, then I wasn't playing and these lonely girls could have taken me. :P

EVE

[BobSwi]

Always more fun to read about EVE than it was to play it.

Re:EVE

[Anonymous Coward]

I was there, and your assessment is correct.

Re:EVE

[ackthpt]

Always more fun to read about EVE than it was to play it.

Disney does this with movies. Did you see the Lone Ranger?

Re:EVE

[GodfatherofSoul]

SO true! I signed up after that big battle headline from a year ago and quit 3 months later. EVE is an epicly huge and complex world that recreated all of the tedious boredom of real life. They should change the tagline to "Space: where more is less."

Re:EVE

[Billly Gates]

Always more fun to read about EVE than it was to play it.

Funny I feel this way about Star Wars the Old Republic after watching and reading the storyline which I find really good.

Re:EVE

[HnT]

EVE is generally the coolest on the "meta level" of the game. The interface is not great, most people who seriously play it use a lot of tools outside of EVE anyway and practically all organization and communication happens outside of EVE as well. Playing a fleet battle in EVE is mind-numbing boring even when it is just a few hundred ships and unless you are in a titan, you are more or less cannon fodder and won't have very glorious stories to tell. And 90% of the time you have no idea what is going on until later because restricting information flow is one of the key concepts of EVE. So, yes, it is WAY cooler to be reading about what was ACTUALLY going on instead of being one more or less tiny little grunt on the front line.

And in order not to be one of those tiny grunts, it takes a lot of learning the game and the universe inside out and crawling the ranks... EVE is so cool in so many ways but it is much too close to real life and real life jobs and being forced to do certain things to actually make it a fun distraction. Seriously playing EVE is more like having a second job with lots of rules, caveats and social climbing.

Re:EVE

[Daniel Hoffmann]

"Seriously playing EVE is more like having a second job with lots of rules, caveats and social climbing."

Raiding in WoW used to be like that in the old days, today not so much. When people cry "everyone has epicz" they mean that the people who invest a lot more time than the average player can't get the exclusive shiny stuff anymore, they get only a recolored of the same gear the noobs get.

But since raiding was never competitive except for the few "first-kills" guilds it was never as bad as EVE.

The most interesting thing is what it looks like

[JoshuaZ]

I've never played Eve Online and have no intention of doing so. But I'm continually fascinated by how cool the space battles look. Essentially we have a computer game today where the unchoreographed battles look better than the space battles made using special effects from the late 1980s. That's an amazing testament to how far the technology has come.

News For Nerds

[American AC in Paris]

Yes, yes, but more importantly: how good of news is this for Bitcoin?

Re:News For Nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes, but more importantly: how good of news is this for Bitcoin?

ANSWER 1: I don't know, but I'm sure the NSA and Google are behind it!

ANSWER 2: Disastrous. Once enough people learn PLEX is a fake currency with far more stability than Bitcoin AND it has even MORE fanatical followers, Bitcoin is doomed.

Re:News For Nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes, but more importantly: how good of news is this for Bitcoin?

About as much as for John McCain.

space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[Thud457]

and the spreadsheets involved are less complicated...

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Spreadsheets. In a game. Man, sounds like it must be loads of fun.

Is there any actual animation, or does this game boil down to a battle of mad Excel skillz?

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[vux984]

I quit playing in large part not because the game involved spreadsheets and analysis... but because the in game implementation of spreadsheets was horrifically unpleasant to use.

If I'm going "play spreadsheet optimization problem" I'd like to use a modern version of Excel, not Visicalc with tiny white text on a blue background.

A lot of stuff you can then turn around and export and actually use in excel... but then you are rapidly using stale data.

That and idiotic ganking in 0.0 wasn't much fun to be on the receiving end of, and I didn't want the tedium of forming a group just to fly around with just on the chance someone might be lurking behind a jump gate.

Realistic doesn't always make for much fun and Eve is a much more fun meta-game than it is actual game. Unfortunately.

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[ejbvanc]

This is true. Eve Online = Spreadsheets in Space

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh* I must be getting old: ganking.

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any game, if played competitively involves spreadsheets. And if it doesn't it should.

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[sysrammer]

*sigh* I must be getting old: ganking.

Ah. Bullying. Got it.

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[Yakasha]

Always I'm out of mod points when I see something that actually makes me LOL.

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[sysrammer]

I'll see your lol, and raise you a

Re:space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[Anonymous Coward]

Visicalc vs the aliens.

Nope...

[just_a_monkey]

But you've got to admit that this is at least a) news and b) for nerds.

Re: These guys should try playing the stock market

[Reapman]

I dunno, for me if the stock market involved space battles I'd be a lot more interested.

Strategy?

[phantomfive]

Looking at the picture, it seems like there are two sides with their ships lined up shooting at each other. Is there any use of strategy in this battle, or is it all about who has the biggest army?

Re:Strategy?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an armchair general myself, I'm curious as well. Do the corp's set up little squadrons of quick/nimble fighters to just grief or lure other ships away etc. etc. Basically is there any method to the madness beyond "hey! I think I'll target that guy next" with no coordination?

Re:Strategy?

[notea42]

There is a lot of strategy. However, since the battle happens in 3D and there's no real way to maintain formations, you tend to end up with these blobs of friendly ships and enemy ships. The strategy is in maintaining the proper range to friends and enemies. Weapons have different ranges and tracking speeds. Similarl, the repair ships (think healers) have limited range as well (roughly 50 km for the largest). In these big fights, a lot of the work is in choosing targets, trying to do enough damage to destroy the target before his repairs kick in. There's also a fair amount of complication from the electronic warfare possibilities - jamming and such.

Re:Strategy?

[joelleo]

There is a LOT going on that isn't encompassed by just the grid where the main battle is being fought. There were swarms of interceptors in surrounding systems preventing reinforcements, there were blockade fleets at our staging systems for much the same reason, there were strategic positions set up all around the grid to enable friendlies to get in and out avoiding bubbles. Things happen in waves - when the CFC jumped in 12 carriers and EACH ONE lit a cyno I knew we were in for a ride...

I was in the fight in a supercarrier and the sheer complexity and coordination necessary to make something like this happen is pretty astounding. We had 3 different alliances (NC., Pandemic Legion and Nulli + friends) in a "Wreckingball" fit for the main battle on our side - we had to be orbiting a certain way, aligned a certain way and within very certain ranges for all of it to work. Supers' Fighter Bombers had their own orders, dreads had separate orders, titans had their coordinated doomsdays + guns, archons and triage carriers all had their own parts to play as well as they could in the extreme tidi and this is before we even begin to talk about the support fleets for tackle, strategic warp-ins etc.

Beyond the in-game coordination, the out of game coordination is incredibly complex as well. I was on two different voice comms, different chat systems and we were all receiving pings via Jabber. Gameplay on this level is hard to comprehend, but I wouldn't trade it even with the tidi lagfest. Eve Online 2014 - Children and the ADHD-afflicted need not apply =)

Re:Strategy?

[vux984]

All true.

What kills it for me is that being realtime, events start to happen when they happen, not when I wish to play, and they do not stop when I wish to stop playing.

As much as I LOVE the idea of planning and managing battles on that scale, EVE doesn't work for me because I won't live around playing EVE.

Re:Strategy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not play EVE but I do read a lot about it. The strategy of a battle in EVE is a bit abstract. In the real world, ancient warfare could develop strategies focused highly on individual units of men; as technology adapted and logistics got better allowing for bigger militaries, "strategy" as a whole moved further from the battlefield and focused on regions, logistics, and reaching a concentration of mass, and how the battle was fought was delegated to individual unit commanders and became designated as "tactics".

The challenge with EVE is that each ship represents one player across the real world globe, so the trick is to concentrate players into fleets so you achieve concentration of mass. The war's been brewing for a bit so people have been roaming around in fleets for some time now. In this case one group made a mistake and the opponents sought to pounce on it and dropped a fleet in. The first group brought in another fleet and called in reinforcements. As the size grew and the battle dragged on, both sides used smaller fleets to block off the neighboring systems; basically you can't just fly anywhere, there are links between systems, which creates "terrain" of sorts as you can attempt to choke off reinforcements. The battle was essentially a stalemate, so the deciding factor became attrition; essentially as the hours wore on eventually people left the fight and went to bed, and as new time zones had morning coming their players woke up and could reinforce the primary force. So then as the stalemate wore on, the strategy was how well one side or the other could block off the surrounding systems, keeping their opponent's reinforcements from joining the battle. The RUS group was more effective at doing so, blocking off N3PL's reinforcements as well as their point of escape. So this would be akin to a full encirclement and destruction of an army, similar to Stalingrad or Sinai during the 6 day war.

In terms of tactics, a fleet is usually a mixed-arms unit. You'll have within a fleet squadrons of carriers for long range attacks; carriers are weak themselves but fighters are strong hitters. You have tacklers, which are ships designed with specific modules that prevent other ships from jumping out, these are designed to lock down an important enemy asset so their heavy hitters can whittle it down. Titans are obviously the big guys, with the biggest weapons and most health, dreadnoughts are a step below that. Ideally you want to take out the titans and dreadnoughts and carriers as they represent the biggest threat but they're also the hardest to take down. However taking them down can represent a significant medium term strategic blow to an opposing force, as replacing one not only costs significant resources but also takes weeks of real time to construct, and they are visible, expensive, vulnerable targets in the system where they are being built so they need to be defended during that time.

That's what little I've been able to figure out just from reading about the game.

Re:Strategy?

[Xaedalus]

Gotta say, I love it when you expert EVE players come in and comment on what happens. I won't play EVE, but I'll sure cheer it on though, because it does sound amazing.

Re:Strategy?

[keytoe]

Thanks, this is what I was looking for when I clicked into this discussion.

EVE wasn't the game for me, but I am truly fascinated by it abstractly. One of the first thoughts through my mind after reading the headline was to wonder how it felt to manage logistics and strategy at that scale. I appreciate that you shared a glimpse into that aspect.

Re:Strategy?

[AK Marc]

One thing that happened in "old" wars was to flank someone. What would happen if 10% of a force were to form up in a different system and come in behind the enemy, perhaps targeting the repair ships? Or is the chance of spies enough that you couldn't get that big of a force to form up then, and you'd need to have them form up together, then fly away, and come in later from behind in a flanking maneuver? Can you not FTL in a battle? Short jump FTL through the enemy formation to optimal distance behind, come about, and rip apart the healers. Then jump back to "your side" + some to be out of immediate range of the other side, and come about, for a stand-off with healers on the other side gone. Oh, and lay mines behind you so that they can't do the same to you in retaliation.

Re:Strategy?

[Rich0]

That's my problem with MMOs in general, and multiplayer-anything longer than 10min. Real life just isn't conducive to can't-walk-away-from-keyboard-for-next-hour or gotta-set-the-alarm.

Re:Strategy?

[ceoyoyo]

Sort of. The big ships just shoot at each other. The smaller ships get up to other things. Stealth bombers on coordinated squad bomb runs can do a lot of damage to things like drones, which provide a lot of the damage from some types of ships. Specialized ships disable the drives of other ships, use various kinds of electronic warfare, suck energy out of enemy ships, provide repairs or energy to friendly ships, etc.

There's quite a bit of strategy, both in designing the fleet and in the battle itself. This particular engagement is notable because everybody didn't just pile into the same system. The winning side was apparently quite successful at harassing the enemy's reinforcements trying to get to the battle.

Re:Strategy?

[ceoyoyo]

Things like that have happened. You don't even necessarily have to go after healers. Most ships have specific ranges where they're most effective. You could jump in a squad to attack long-ranged ships at close range.

Generally ships that are engaged can't just jump around freely because their drives are disrupted by specialized enemy ships. But unengaged fleets or squads can be used for surprise attacks.

Stealth bomber wings routinely jump in, decloak, drop bombs and jump out again (hopefully) before anyone can catch them.

Re:Strategy?

[AK Marc]

Eve has sounded like an interesting game, but it also sounds very hard to get started in. How would one go about making the most of the 14 day trial? What can be accomplished in that time? With the unlimited free (level and feature limited) WoW, you can explore at your leisure.

Re:Strategy?

[ceoyoyo]

EVE is famous for it's vertical learning curve.

There are two ways to go about starting EVE. Sign up and join some corporation that's newbie friendly or attached to some out of game group you happen to belong to. Newbie friendly corps are Red vs. Blue (RvB), Eve University, etc. They'll teach you.

The other way is to go it alone. My suggestion would be to concentrate on PvE to get some income. When you've figured out how to make money you can use the proceeds to buy some cheap frigates and go do some PvP. Doing PvP you're going to die a lot. If you do it with a group like Red vs. Blue you'll learn something doing it.

EVE is big and complicated. You will never master everything, and it takes quite a bit of planning and time to get good at even individual specialties. The key at the beginning is to try a bunch of things and see what you enjoy. PvP is the headline item, but the majority of EVE players actually concentrate on other things like manufacturing, research, exploration, trading, etc.

The 14 days is enough time to do the introductory tutorials, which try to give you a taste of most of the different career paths, and, if you play a decent amount, to do the Sisters of EVE epic arc missions (which are PvE).

It really is helpful in EVE to have someone to mentor you, but you have to be careful about randoms who are out to scam you. Scamming is a major part of the game. So joining a recognized newbie friendly group that does something you think you're interested in is probably a good move.

I enjoy how complicated EVE is. I've become an okay trader, specializing in smuggling, starting to get into manufacturing. And I really enjoy flying a stealth bomber. There's a rush that moment when you've maneuvered into position and you're about to click uncloak and introduce some unwary ship to your torpedo launchers. Particularly when 50 of your friends are about to do the same. But it takes a while (a few months) to get there. And losing those bombers hurts a lot less when you've got a solid in-game income doing something else that you enjoy.

Re:Strategy?

[Patch86]

I used to play EVE years ago. There's an absurd amount going on, tactically and strategically, in these battles which isn't really visible just from a video play back.

As another poster pointed out, formations don't really play any part in things, so everything will just appear to be a big mishmash. But within the two opposing fleets, you'll have dozens of different groups with different tasks. You'll have your capital ships and largest sub-caps duking it out- if the whole fleet's big hitters coordinate and focus on a single target at a time, that target will not last more than a dozen or so (realtime) seconds. Each ship that is targeted will probably try and warp away and escape before it can be destroyed, where it can repair and rejoin the fight. There will be ships tasked with repairing and shield-boosting other ships- mostly in the battle (to "tank" a targeted ship), or stationed at a retreat point (to repair escapees). Other ships will be "warp jammers", to try to stop targets escaping. Others will have "electronic warfare" equipment, and will be coordinating to try to break targeting locks of either the big-hitters or any other class of ships (jammers, repairers, other ECM ships). Then there will be specialist hunter-killer ships designed specifically to take out these smaller support ships. And THOSE hunter-killer ships will themselves be targets of other hunter-killers. And that's just the tactical bit.

Strategically, you'll have fleets jumping from system to system, trying to ambush each other, blockade "warp gates", cut off reinforcement lines or escape routes, fleets pulling off feints and double bluffs.

It's all hideously complicated.

As others have pointed out, it's often more fun to talk about EVE than it is to actually play it. It is a game which is hugely about the meta-game, more than it's about actually flying your internet spaceship. It's possible to get quite a large portion of the fun of EVE Online without ever actually logging in and playing. All the planning of these battles will have taken place in internet forums outside of the game, and the actual battles will probably be being commanded via Skype and IRC as much as via in-game channels.

Re:Strategy?

[Shinobi]

Actually, Jabber and Teamspeak/Mumble are the big tools for coordination. Jabber for strategic communication, and Mumble/TS for tactical(Ventrilo is dead outside the smallest corps who keep on using Vent because that's what they've been using since they started...)

And yes, fleet commanders in these large battles usually have 4-5 voice channels active at any one time: Fleet commander group, scouts channel, capital ships group, supercapitals/titans group etc etc, and also speak to general fleet chat. Also maintaining an overview of spies etc, because a POS password might be changed etc.

In small-scale PvP, you usually don't have the same amount of channels, but otoh, you also don't have the same chain of command, so as a commander there, you have to keep track of more tactical stuff such as tactical target calling, keeping track of cyno use etc, which in a large fleet you have other officers do for you. Many commanders who shine in small-scale harasser group PvP can't handle commanding a large force, and vice versa.

Tried getting into EVE but..

[GrBear]

I quickly discovered how big of a time sink it could be.

To fly a Cheetah coverts op ship, my character requires 302 days of 24/7 training to meet all the necessary requirements. And this wasn't even an uber ship at that!

I mean, thankfully you don't have to be online for your character to train, but come on.. who plans their MMO for the next year's worth of gameplay?

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[Anonymous Coward]

302 days for a Cheetah? You did something incredibly, terribly wrong.

Either your stats were ruined during character creation (and worth resetting) or you're trying to max every potentially related skill (which is completely unnecessary). It shouldn't take more than 30 days, 60 at most, to be able to competently fly any T2 frigate in the game.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[Spiked_Three]

I started Eve this week. I tried to cancel this week.

What a horrible game. inconsistent user interface, out of date (if any) documentation. Terribly inadequate tutorials, of which there are two ways to get there, and partly but not fully the same.

I am unable to cancel since the web logon requires a character name I no longer have since I uninstalled the POS.

Seriously, why would so many people put up with something so poorly done? Pretty pictures?

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[GrBear]

I was going by what EVEMON said for my character *shrugs*

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[Anonymous Coward]

I could see that timeframe if it created a plan to literally train every tangentially related skill to max level (all supports, all specialties, all passives, all equipment-affecting skills, etc), but that's about it.

As massive and overwhelming as the game can be, if you specialize correctly you can get into the game and be "almost" as effective as players with 5+ years of experience in just a couple of months.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Eve has a unique way of doing skills. Some of the skills are transferable between ship types, some aren't. You can be the best cheetah pilot out there in about 75 days from a new character (where you got 302 from, I don't know) You don't have to have everything to 5, most the time 4's are just fine (and take 1/4 the training time) And half those skills you train transfer over to flying a stealth bomber. Plus you don't have to fly nice ships. a cheaply fitted tackle Rifter (which you can fly with 1-2 days of training) can easily ruin someone's day. It'll die, but it's a disposable ship.

Bigger and more expensive is not necessarily better in eve. PL came in with a lot more titans than CFC, but CFC had the dreads to support knocking out the titans. PL didn't.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[tibit]

Bigger and more expensive is not necessarily better

This is true in many games. Even in something as simplistic as Kenway's Fleet minigame in AC4, you will be bleeding time and money by only using the most powerful, most damage-resistant ships. Many battles take more than a minute of real time with big, heavy ships, that would take just one salvo to be finished with a fast schooner or two. That's just a very trivial example, of course.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[AK Marc]

That's my experience too. People make fun of WoW, but a first time player could play it and learn passable play without any outside resources. Eve seems impossible to play unless you already know how to play, so you have to work very hard to learn how to play, what to do, and how to progress.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[AK Marc]

I am not the OP, but I found the following:
To fly the Cheetah, Eve Online pilots require training in the following skills; Minmatar Frigate level 5, Covert Ops level 1, Spaceship Command level 3, Electronics Upgrades level 5, Electronics level 2 and Engineering level 2. Eve Online recommends the following skill certifications in order to maximize potential Cheetah fitting options; Core competency, Cloak Operator, Frigate Projectile Turrets and Cartographer.

Having not played Eve, I don't know how long it would take to get the certifications and Electronics Upgrades 5 and Minmatar Frigate level 5 (the 5s sound harder than the 1s, 2s, and 3s).

Would also need 16M Isk. However long that takes.

As you note, it's a small frigate. So even 30-60 days seems like a long time. How long would a new player need to grind for 16M Isk?

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have attention span longer than 30 seconds you can usually work things out. I do agree that the character name thing is annoying though.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[genkernel]

Well, it depends on what you are doing. Guaranteed ISK is very hard to get starting out, but you could be making 2M ISK an hour mining tritanium (which requires a not quite AFK level of attention) in a venture in hisec after a couple hours of play. However, doing nothing but sit and mine is boring, and in the grand scheme of things, not that profitable (though probably a great deal more profitable after something like this happens). You can do missions in lieu of this, in fact I recommend it to some extent because that will give you some insight into how to perform other tasks in the game, but will be less profitable starting out.

After some small amount of training, you can start "exploring" (this is an eve term with a specific meaning). In hisec, the profitable ones are primarily data sites and combat signatures, though relic sites can be worth your time. Combat signatures are only profitable if they escalate, but I digress. Ultimately, your goal is to score an expensive item from one of these, which could easily be worth over 100M ISK, quite possibly significantly more. If you focus on this, and especially if you can get someone to help you with combat signatures early on, you could have such an item found and sold within a week of exploration.

Once you have some capital to play with, options of earning more ISK open up to you.

For this reason, 16M ISK generally falls into the category of "very disposable" by established players. Such players could buy almost 14,000 rounds of PvP ammo (in this case based off of the current Jita price for Republic Fleet Phased Plasma L) to be fired at the rate of 4 per second or something like that, all for about that same price.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[TangoMargarine]

If you're really masochistic, try miniconomy. The creator is Dutch, the interface is horrible, and there's negligible documentation (unless you translate the Dutch doc, maybe) :)

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[AK Marc]

There doesn't seem to be a published number for skill points to skills (probably easy to see in game), but 6 skills and 5 certifications, with skills at 1,2,2,3,5 and 5, would seem (to this outsider) to be about, lets say, 1M skill points. That'd put it at 15 days for skills alone. Add in the certifications (no idea there) and the money to buy the ship (should be gathered without really trying over the weeks to get the skills), and one should be able to get close to a Cheetah in the 14 day trial, for both owning, and able to fly.

I might just give that a try.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[genkernel]

Please note that you cannot train for that ship with a trial account, on account of the fact that you cannot train Cloaking or Covert Ops. A complete list of skills you cannot train on a trial account can be found here. Furthermore, ultimately, even though you could train fleet command in about 20 days, actually fitting a cheetah would take closer to 30 (small projectile turret, motion prediction, basic fitting skills, etc).

I think a large reason for the skills that cannot be used on trial accounts is the fact that some skills with attractive names cannot actually be effectively used within a few weeks (battleship fleet command), or are really only useful to established players anyways (cynosural field generation). Cloaking is probably an exception here, but hisec might be a more dangerous if people's trial alts could cloak up.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[AK Marc]

Nah, I gave up. a few hours of play, and the introductory quests are not obvious. "go to this system and kill the bad ships" but you start in that system, and see no red ships. Where do you go? And the tutorial gave no directions how to fly, only how to go somewhere. Apparently there's no way to fly your ship FPS style. The flying physics seem to mimic an airplane, despite the lack of atmosphere, so why can't I fly it from the cockpit to explore areas?

It's hard, and that'll turn off casual new players. It's not worth the dedication to learn how to play, just to learn how to play. Like smoking, if the first time sucks, maybe it isn't worth the time to keep trying until you are addicted.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Its just a game that do not presume that you are a 7 year old child. It takes the assumption that you are an adult that can think.. only that.

Re:Tried getting into EVE but..

[AK Marc]

No, it presumes you already know how to play before you start. There's a difference.

"Somebody didn't pay rent"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's up there with "who the hell is Archduke Fernidand?"

Re:"Somebody didn't pay rent"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's up there with "who the hell is Archduke Fernidand?"

Who the hell is Archduke Fernidand?

(Or did you mean Ferdinand?)

I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

In real space battles this large in the far away future

In my mind space battle this large would be neutralized by a huge neutron bomb , and it would annihilate all those little "sharks with lazers"

I doubt futuristic space combat will be fought on this scale. I envision stealth nuclear tech doing the job - Not a million ships shooting lazers.

It does look cool though.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

Nukes? Try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

Go read more sci-fi. More than one series I've read had indicated that nukes are useless. In the time it takes to get there, the other ship has moved. And if you are firing on something more stationary, it'll burn it up with lasers first. Nukes are good only as mines, and for flares (pop a few to detonate just outside range of killing yourself, turning off everything electronic first, and the enemy will blind itself from looking hard at you and staring into the blast). But to actually kill someone in a ship to ship battle, the closest anything comes to that is anti-matter missiles (guided, often with strong AI), which could be argued to be nuke-like enough, but then, often antimatter missiles are often anti-matter fueled, so they detonate at their target, "igniting" unspent fuel.

Much like future warfare is generations, it's hard to imagine the future. Someone from midieval times might question why we don't use metal armor against bullets. We've "evolved" past the point where a person from that era can even understand why we are where we are. Lasers are the only thing that has a chance to hit something at space-battle distances. And even then, you can out maneuver a laser. Though, I just came up with a way to defeat that.

Send out 100 probes between you and the other ship. Shoot them with the laser, and have them lense/reflect it to the other ship. So the final aim is close, but the energy generation (the expensive part) is far away. Kill a drone. I'll send out more. That's the level of evolution that we can't even really conceive at this point. Millenia of military advance will make us cavemen. So it's all wrong. The answer is beyond our comprehension. We don't even know what will cost money in the future. Will we be material rich and energy poor, or material limited and unlimited energy?

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

You can hide from, but you can't out maneuver a laser. The further you are from the laser, the less the laser needs to move to track you. Nothing says if space battles will be near or far. Maybe we'll have shields that work well enough against long range weapons. Perhaps the best bet would be to sneak in a missile or lay some type of mine. Close range could be laser, electronic, magnetic, acid clouds, whatever. If we can artificially generate gravity, then gravity weapons might be best. All over the Si-Fi I've seen makes little use of teleportation as weapons and nothing has touched on the idea of entangling some particles you control with your enemy's particles and some how destroying them that way.

We can conceive almost anything, we just don't know which ideas will pan out in the future. For example. if there's unlimited energy then we can create any materials needed (as we could use the energy to create stars which create the minerals needed for the material).

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

You can hide from, but you can't out maneuver a laser.

When you are 30 light-seconds out, the laser will always be aimed at where you were 30 seconds ago. Move one shiplength every 30 seconds, and they'll never hit you, if they are shooting at your current position. What range are you presuming these space battles take place?

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[ceoyoyo]

Antimatter missiles have all the same problems nukes do.

Now, antimatter bullets there's a nightmare.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[archer, the]

Same way you hit a running receiver with a football: lead the target.
You would need to change your acceleration such that you never are where you were headed 30 seconds ago.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

Nuclear missiles can't use the nuclear reaction as a motive force, and are fragile and heavy. Antimatter missiles are a chunk of antimatter, surounded by matter. You have more antimatter than matter, and you propel yourself by throwing matter at the antimatter (in small amounts, obviously), and focusing the energy out the back. There is no similar function with nukes. And when you get where you are going, you don't even need to detonate, you just crash and go boom. If you burn up all your matter getting to your target, the extra antimatter you have on board will contact the target and cause destruction. Or detonate it early with 1/10th matter left, and 9/10th of the payload will be matter, spewed out at possibly relativistic speeds, hopefully in proximity of a pile of enemy ships, or very close to a capital one.

Antimatter missiles are still targetable, but the best you can do is destroy it while it's headed to you. Then you have a pile of antimatter fragments headed toward you in a growing cloud. The vacuum of space won't dissipate it much, or slow it down. Best not be where you were when it gets there. The remains of a nuke are relatively inert. Your hull will likely give 100% protection to the remains of a destroyed nuke. Not so much with the antimatter bomb. That, and many stories elucidate on the exotic radiation released by antimatter, and its effects on ships.

Or, more likely, a real war will be 1,000,000 anti-matter powered robots the size of Iron Giant released into a star system, designed to locate life and destroy it, with a 20 year timer to power down all weapons and return home. When we have Iron Giants working, we'll be close to interstellar war. He needed time to heal, but survived a direct nuclear blast.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[ceoyoyo]

"Nuclear missiles can't use the nuclear reaction as a motive force"

They can just as well as an antimatter missile. Your description of an antimatter missile would be ridiculously inefficient. An antimatter drive would use reaction mass that is vaporized by energy from the antimatter reaction just like nuclear drives. The actual bomb part would need to be very similar to a nuclear weapon, with something (like a well designed shaped conventional explosive) to compress the matter and antimatter together. Otherwise the reaction pressure just blows everything apart before you get very good conversion. No, you can't just crash a large amount of antimatter into some matter and expect it to go boom. You'll get a little boom and lots of annihilated antimatter flying away. Which admittedly is pretty nasty, but not in the "earth-shattering kaboom" kind of way. If you slam some nuclear bomb fuel into something hard enough it will go kaboom too, by the way.

Yes, blowing up an antimatter missile means a cloud of antimatter flying around. But assuming you did it in space, with a laser, it's a long way away from you (missiles are pretty trivial to track), you're probably moving pretty fast compared to the missile, and there may be annoying things like gravity to consider. Thus the need to have missiles guided. By the way, in the situation you've described, guess what you've got? Lots of (poorly aimed) little antimatter bullets.

Exotic radiation? Gamma rays aren't exotic. You've probably got a couple of matter-antimatter annihilation gamma rays passing through your body right now.

Missiles are pretty useless, particularly in space where they can't hide in terrain and the travel distances are much longer, as soon as you have decent lasers. Since we've got lasers that can shoot down missiles now, they're not likely to be good for much in space battles. Supposing you have a way to make cheap antimatter, you're going to want to use it to power the lasers. Possibly (but still not likely) you might want to shoot inert, undetectable little bits of it at your enemy in the hope that some of them will hit him.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

30 light seconds... Thats 4x the distance between the earth and the sun. They are aiming how exactly? I expect the distnace you can travel will be insigificant compared to the ability to focus a target over those distances! minute changes in angle will put their laser way off anyway.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[strikethree]

What range are you presuming these space battles take place?

No more than 200km. Usually quite a bit less. 30km is fairly normal.

(I should have been in that battle but I have not logged in for over a week now :( I imagine my corp and alliance are quite disappointed in me.)

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

"When you are 30 light-seconds out, the laser will always be aimed at where you were 30 seconds ago. Move half a shiplength every 30 seconds, and they'll never hit you, if they are shooting at your current position."

FTFY.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

You'll get a little boom and lots of annihilated antimatter flying away. Which admittedly is pretty nasty, but not in the "earth-shattering kaboom" kind of way. If you slam some nuclear bomb fuel into something hard enough it will go kaboom too, by the way.

Nope. You don't need to compress it to get a good explosion. Like you state elsewhere, a poor explosion is very very damaging, as you end up with antimatter bullets. Now, imagine the initial explosion being on the outer hull and most of the antimatter bullets being released within the outer hull of your ship? It might take longer, but no good can come from that.

And no, nuclear bomb fuel slamming into something hard enough will be unlikely to cause critical mass. Uranium isn't sufficiently compressible for that to matter. A paper I read on it indicated that the compression is mainly to extend critical mass, so that it doesn't blow itself apart before it generates enough neutrons to cause fission in a gram or 10.

If you don't have critical mass, you won't get an explosion, no matter how hard you compress it. Also, critical mass will not cause an "explosion" unless it's held together and compressed. Critical mass in a lump will not explode. It'll pull a Chernobyl. That can cause some problems, but not devistating destruction of a space ship when you throw it at them.

Yes, blowing up an antimatter missile means a cloud of antimatter flying around. But assuming you did it in space, with a laser, it's a long way away from you (missiles are pretty trivial to track), you're probably moving pretty fast compared to the missile, and there may be annoying things like gravity to consider.

How do you hit a missile with a laser? I don't think you could do it more than 1000 km away. Unless it was unguided. But, what's the kill range of a missile? I have no idea. And what do you do when all your sensors are trained on the missile 1000 km away when it detonates, burning them out, and the 100 that were 20,000 km behind them will be nearly impossible to find. All guided with an AI that shields sensors before its friend detonates.

Possibly (but still not likely) you might want to shoot inert, undetectable little bits of it at your enemy in the hope that some of them will hit him.

Probably that will be a phase. Maybe what the "poor" navy uses. Bullets are still killers at relativistic speeds. Even if it's more like a particle beam of He2. We might even call them ion cannons, though the "poor" navy will use slower, heavier projectiles, gauss rifles.

Exotic radiation? Gamma rays aren't exotic. You've probably got a couple of matter-antimatter annihilation gamma rays passing through your body right now.

Yeah, and I have millions of neutrinos passing through me today. Maybe there can be a "tune" of antimatter to generate enough neutrinos to harm people within some radius, and given the trouble blocking them now, the idea is some tune that would be hard to block, but still be fatal. Why do you think that's impossible?

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

Earth to sun is 8.something light minutes (we'll call it 16x30 light seconds). So you are off by a factor of 16x4=64. Maybe you should try basic science before you work on astrophysics.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

I was talking generalities. It would be impossible for space combat to happen at about 30km. That's within kill range of standard unguided ballistics within a gravity well. If combat was really at that range, why isn't everyone armed with 8" battleship guns? That'll rip through an armored building, built with no concern about weight or movement. I can't conceive of a space ship that wouldn't be a kill shot to, unless the ships are all the size of small moons. Even if firing it is a fatal act for the ship using it, a dying shot would take out a single ship of anything up to city size. Things like that would be why in actual combat, I'd expect every compartment to be vacuum. Everyone in spacesuits for battle. Why? A battleship shell striking something the size of a city (imperial super-star destroyer size, maybe up to Death Star size), would send shockwaves through strong enough to open up the whole structure like a can opener, if the inside is 15 psi and the outside is ~0.

I was mainly thinking about future actual space battles, not how EVE emulates a fictional universe.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[strikethree]

If combat was really at that range, why isn't everyone armed with 8" battleship guns? That'll rip through an armored building, built with no concern about weight or movement.

Actually, one of the four main "races" does indeed use those types of guns and yes, they are quite devastating.

I was not trying to contradict you. I was just answering your question about ranges. :)

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[great_snoopy]

The same limitations apply to todays warfare as even modern artillery and ballistic weapons impose a certain time delay between the moment of firing and the moment the projectile hits the target. We ALREADY aim not at where the target IS but at a the estimated/computed point of intersection between the target's trajectory and the projectile's trajectory. This will even more so adapted and evolved for space combat, no matter if you apply this for short range combat with classic projectiles (explosive missiles or purely kinetic) or long range where you will have to take into account delays imposed by light speed. Also consider that most missiles are in a way or another intelligent and will adapt trajectory to follow the target, in this way a nuclear missile can be argued to have more hitting chances than a laser fired from far away. Challenges for future : If future ship design will not reduce/zero the ship's mass, then inertia may very well be a problem: it will limit it's maneuverability. It may also impose to actually maintain greater distance between the ships with hostilities happening from afar. We ALREADY use technology to attack and hit targets that are way out of visual range, current fighters can engage and hit an enemy fighter from many miles away. This will happen even more so for space fights. If future ships will have the ability to neutralize mass and annihilate inertia, then extreme maneuverability will become possible making the job of the attackers harder. BUT, for EITHER scenario the way to gain the advantage would most likely come from computational power (be it AI or not) : the ship having the better computer will be able to better anticipate the actions of the others in order to either have a better trajectory estimate or better alter its course (constantly) in order to be in another place than where the next enemy hit will "land". If i remember correctly this issue of computing power used to better predict enemy actions in order to adapt its own actions is already exploited in SF. I don't remember if I read it in a SF story or if it was part of a game's universe. Or both.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

Move in a predictable way and the laser will point where you WILL BE in 30 seconds after the laser fires.
The good random generator for plotting movement is a must in such a battle.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[TangoMargarine]

There's also this little thing we call "leading the target."

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

Lasers over a vacuum would be nearly as devastating at 100Gm (roughly 1 Au, or 8 light minutes), presuming a space faring race could keep them focused. So why would anyone without those guns get anywhere near someone with them?

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

Yes, and if that target makes random maneuvers of one ship width every 30 seconds, you'll still never score more than a glancing blow.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

Yes. That was implied my statement. It doesn't matter where you aim, you are only guessing where you think they might be. So long as they are constantly accelerating, you'll never score a direct hit.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

You can hide from, but you can't out maneuver a laser.

When you are 30 light-seconds out, the laser will always be aimed at where you were 30 seconds ago. Move one shiplength every 30 seconds, and they'll never hit you, if they are shooting at your current position. What range are you presuming these space battles take place?

I wouldn't think so. The attacking vessel would calculate your relative velocity and lead the shot just like any other marksman would. If parallax can't solve the equation for them, I wager they could narrow your velocity down by the third shot. The first would be aimed at where your ship currently is; the second would adjust for how much it missed by. The third would start targeting integral systems like thrust generators. Unless you're capable of generating a lot of thrust, capital ships and cruisers aren't getting out of the way all that quickly. It's one reason why I appreciate B5 and BSG; their ships are designed to absorb damage instead of somehow elegantly dancing between attacks.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and if that target makes random maneuvers of one ship width every 30 seconds, you'll still never score more than a glancing blow.

This is dependent upon what ship is doing a random maneuver. The heavier the ship, the more thrust required to make that correction. Capital ships and cruisers (the ones that will likely be capable of generating enough power to fire lasers) would need a significant amount of thrust to move one ship width, let alone one per 30 seconds. The way I'd envision that battle playing out would be to use predicted fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicted_fire) and determine relative velocity. If you're still generating thrust, targeting computers would compensate for tonnage and thrust. When more thrust is used in the random maneuver, targeting computers can already compensate for attitude adjustment and tonnage. Unless the ship is completely alien to the attacker, they will compensate for weight and engine output.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

EVE apparently has battles so close you could hit the other ship with a slingshot. Also, the graphics of the battle indicate stationary firing platforms. I would expect that mutual kills would be much more likely at those ranges with such weaponry. At that range, hitting someone with a laser is trivial. From fictonal space battles, the distances are more interplanetary. At those ranges, you can add 1g of acceleration and they'd guess wrong for the next shot. Cut power for a shot, and turn 30 degrees, then accelerate again. A simple zig-zag would allow for great avoidance. Works for ballistics today, you can't lead a zig-zagging target (at least not with accuracy).

As far as absorbing damage, at the range of EVE battles, a naval battleshipmain gun would be useful (roughly the same 30 second lead time I was assuming before, but with light), as the ships appear to fight under a full-stop. A strike by a 15" gun would likely open up a ship like a can opener. The point of impact would shred open, and the force of the 15 psi air inside would blow out the rest of the ship. At least, have the ships pressurized with 5 psi pure O2, but a fire would then be insanely deadly. So, if not that, then 0 psi. But so few mention 100% pressure suits for everyone.

Unless you're capable of generating a lot of thrust, capital ships and cruisers aren't getting out of the way all that quickly.

We call those "space stations".

EVE combat sounds like the equivelent of 1700s wars. Go to an agreed upon place. Line up. Shake hands. Shoot. Any ship capable of reasonable movement would not be armored well enough to withstand much damage. So one hit one kill, like Redcoats, would be about right.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

So you are asserting that a capital ship is incapable of generating 1g of thrust?

How much thrust can they generate? How big are they? At 30 light seconds, the information available for the targeting computers is already stale (by 30 seconds) and if you were correct, they'll be 30 seconds away from that position when your beam gets back.

I envision the battle playing out with 10,000,000 tiny AI drones in a cloud around the target, using local information to get the last 1km to the target, for pinpoint accuracy at 100Gm distance.

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[ceoyoyo]

You do need to compress antimatter to get a good explosion. You can get a messy explosion without compressing it. I agree, that might be messier. It depends.

All known current nuclear bombs are implosion type, which use a subcritical mass of fissionable material and compress it to criticality using conventional explosives. The Hiroshima bomb, a handful of follow-on US bombs, some artillery shells and some early designs by other countries were gun type, where two sub-critical masses are brought together, but the vast majority of bombs made or exploded have been sub-critical implosion types. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G....

Hitting a missile with a laser isn't very hard. The Chinese can hit satellites. Even Boeing can hit missiles. In atmosphere it's hard to hit one very far away because the air scatters the beam, but in vacuum it's not hard at all. Since lasers travel at the speed of light you can't outmaneuver one unless you're VERY far away. And missiles have to get close. In the hypothetical future where you have enough cheap antimatter to make lots of bombs with, big lasers guided by sensors that don't burn out isn't a particularly big leap. We've got lots of ways of shielding sensors from overloads right now. Realistically, you wouldn't let anyone's missiles get anywhere near 1000 km of you.

A "tune" of antimatter? Low energy antimatter annihilation doesn't generate neutrinos, and you wouldn't want it to. Neutrinos are a crappy way to kill things because they interact so poorly: they're very inefficient. Gamma rays, which are what antimatter annihilation does produce, are much better at it. Of course, a more efficient weapon would be a nuclear (or antimatter) explosion that pumps a gamma ray laser. Then you deliver more of the explosion's energy to the target.

Explosions really work much better in air. In vacuum, you're always wasting most of the bomb's power, unless you happen to get it inside an enemy ship, or get a bunch of them to sit still in formation and stick one in the middle. Lasers are much more efficient. EVE actually models this - missile damage is lessened if the target is smaller (less of the explosion hits it) or faster (the target is farther away when the explosion hits it, absorbing less).

Re:I wonder if it will hold true

[AK Marc]

"tune" antimatter? Sure, the same way we "tune" the material in nuclear bombs. If we can create arbitrary antimatter, why not antimatter uranium? Make a nuclear bomb out of antimatter, then detonate that, and the fireball that explodes when the 99% of the rest of the bomb, mostly antimatter, dust impacts the surrounding material.

Or when we can hold a nuclear blast in a jar. Focus the blast towards something. Yes, I understand, the blow-back would be as bad as the shot out the front, but materials strong enough to contain a nuclear blast would have a big change in the use and damage capabilities of them. That and when we get non-nuclear EMPs of nuke-level power (one big one over Kansas could take out almost all the USA - the real worry we should be focusing on, not deaths.

"Destroyed"?

[RevWaldo]

Destroyed as in vaporized, or destroyed as in lots of wreckage and parts and metal floating about, with armadas of salvage ships waiting on the outskirts to hoover it all up?

.

Re:"Destroyed"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Destroyed in Eve online means that half of the fitted modules are removed from the game, half are dropped into a container as loot and the ship itself is removed from the game and a wreck that may or may not give salvage components is put in it's place(on average the salvage components are worth about 0.01% of the cost of the ship).

Re:"Destroyed"?

[seanvaandering]

Some will be salvaged and some will be destroyed as you put it. Whatever is salvageable will be refined back into materials/minerals and sold on the market for the next battle.

Hopefully this will provide good analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the WOW plague was an excellent simulation of a pandemic, I feel like this is an excellent simulation of a World War 1-style global conflict. Hopefully sociologists and historians are taking notes.

Hi. Eve player here.

[girlintraining]

Everything in that story just about is wrong. Firstly, "Over 70 of the game's biggest and most expensive ships, the Titans, were destroyed. Individual Titans can be worth upwards of 200 billion ISK, which is worth around $5,000." ... They aren't actually worth that. Because the game offers the ability to exchange realworld money for a "plex" -- this valuation is almost twice what you'd pay for game time if you bought it straight up. In other words, it's the highest valuation possible. Realistically, it'd be worth less than half that.

Secondly, the guy responsible, a 29 year old banker who was literally asleep when it all went down, insists that the virtual money was in the account and it was set to autopay. People close to this suggest the word for this is "bullshit", but it has been "petitioned" -- a claim by a player that the server screwed up. This isn't without precident, as the game is currently limping about with it standings system broken. Standings is basically Eve's IFF system. Right now, nobody in the game can tell friend from foe. Needless to say, it's a massive issue. So it's possible they farked up, but unlikely.

There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened. And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.

In short, while the cover story smells of stupidity, greed could also be in play.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting point. I wonder how much subscriptions were driven up from the last big battle that got a lot of news; I remember it clearly. If battles like this gain CCP free press that then drives up subscriptions for a time, I could see an incentive for them to force these big battles to happen to drive up sales. Considering the lack of ethical behavior they've shown before as you described, I wouldn't put it past them.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[X.25]

Secondly, the guy responsible, a 29 year old banker who was literally asleep when it all went down, insists that the virtual money was in the account and it was set to autopay. People close to this suggest the word for this is "bullshit", but it has been "petitioned" -- a claim by a player that the server screwed up. This isn't without precident, as the game is currently limping about with it standings system broken. Standings is basically Eve's IFF system. Right now, nobody in the game can tell friend from foe. Needless to say, it's a massive issue. So it's possible they farked up, but unlikely.

Standings issue is the screwup that occured after deployment of new update, yesterday,

A day after the 'autopay' thing you are talking about.

Stop talking nonsense and trying to rationalize, please. I understand that losing hurts, but don't be a silly liar.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[jandrese]

Quick question: Is it customary to setup autopay to pay for the account on the very second it comes due in EVE? Normally with any autopay type system I set it up to pay at least a week in advance, because you never know when it will fail for whatever reason and you want to have time to fix it manually if it does. You never know when a credit card processor will be down for maintenance or have spotty network connectivity or what have you and cause your autopay to fail.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[bug1]

There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened. And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.

Thats an almost slanderous claim, there was one case (5 years ago?) where one employee went "Rogue" and consipered with players for personal benefit, that event caused the company to create an internal investigation unit to make sure it doesnt happen again.

The company involved goes to great lengths to ensure they dont interfere with the games economy without good cause. They have an economist to monitor the health of the economy, and a reserve bank for the rare occasion that the ingame value of PLEX varies too much (i think they have only acted once or twice and there is oversight).

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[tibit]

Why would CCP do this, though? How does the price of resources other than PLEX affect their real-world business?

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[girlintraining]

Quick question: Is it customary to setup autopay to pay for the account on the very second it comes due in EVE?

Depends. Most serious eve players have multiple accounts. Some have them backed by credit card, some don't. It isn't strictly necessary thanks to PLEX to actually pay to use the game... some do, some don't.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[girlintraining]

Thats an almost slanderous claim, there was one case (5 years ago?) where one employee went "Rogue" and consipered with players for personal benefit, that event caused the company to create an internal investigation unit to make sure it doesnt happen again.

Yes, the "slanderous" claim... that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. Firstly, for it to be slander, it would have to be untrue. Alas... as you just said, it is totally, completely, and utterly true. Oops!

The company involved goes to great lengths to ensure they dont interfere with the games economy without good cause. They have an economist to monitor the health of the economy, and a reserve bank for the rare occasion that the ingame value of PLEX varies too much (i think they have only acted once or twice and there is oversight).

They don't "interfere with the game's economy"? A month's worth of game time costs $9.95... a plex costs about $15 and does the same thing in game. And since Sir You Obviously Weren't There has forgotten... players protested en masse in a place in game called "Jita" over this "pay to win" model, many quit, and the server crashed several times as they tried (and succeeded) to overload the blade the busiest system in game. So yeah, please stop drinking the koolaid... Eve is a very interesting game, but CCP can and does make mistakes. Big ones. Stackless Python for the backend comes to mind... necessitating this "time dilation" they speak of... which is really code for "The server's so fucking overloaded everything's running like shit."

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[the Haldanian]

Useful post. But why the tinfoil?

There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened.

Er.. instead of them just buying stuff off the market, to the same effect?
Or are you saying they're breaking their rules to avoid breaking their rules?
And is your 'has happened' actually the one time they did the exact opposite, with legitimate PLEX stocks, to their loss, to foil a playerbase-harming PLEX monopoly attempt?

And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.

Tiny bit of context missing there, like what happened to that game admin when CCP caught him, seven *years* ago, and *why* it's never happened since.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear god man! Someone could write a Masters thesis on this shit! Unbelievable..

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[khallow]

Firstly, for it to be slander, it would have to be untrue. Alas... as you just said, it is totally, completely, and utterly true.

As the previous poster, it was untrue. The company didn't give out this gear, the employee did.

They don't "interfere with the game's economy"? A month's worth of game time costs $9.95... a plex costs about $15 and does the same thing in game. And since Sir You Obviously Weren't There has forgotten... players protested en masse in a place in game called "Jita" over this "pay to win" model, many quit, and the server crashed several times as they tried (and succeeded) to overload the blade the busiest system in game. So yeah, please stop drinking the koolaid... Eve is a very interesting game, but CCP can and does make mistakes. Big ones. Stackless Python for the backend comes to mind... necessitating this "time dilation" they speak of... which is really code for "The server's so fucking overloaded everything's running like shit."

I see you don't actually refute the claim. I do agree that CCP interferes hard with the game, but not in this way. Every time they have an expansion they whack on the game with a mallet. First, there's the flavor of the month changes with ships, tactics, resources, and industry which are always overcompensating. This causes in turn a massive shift in the economy as huge portions of the Eve world retool to meet the new need. Second, there's the new technologies and industries developed which always require people to do things which they weren't doing before.

Either way, the economy gets kranged hard as people go for the new hotness.

As to stackless Python, anything else would have the same trouble, though perhaps at somewhat different levels of load. The time dilation is required because players bring lots of friends and there is a huge interaction load when a lot of people are in the same place at the same time.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[WuphonsReach]

The bigger issue is that EVE has (over the past 2-3 years) become "bring titans / supercaps or go home". A budding organization who wants to try and compete in low-sec? They'll get blobbed by super-caps and titans.

CCP really needs to exclude super-caps and titans from low-sec. Which would make low-sec the playground of capitals and smaller. (Titans, super-caps, and caps are already excluded from hi-sec, so this would be a natural progression.)

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[SkunkPussy]

TBH I hate that WoW and Eve force you to have an autopay. I would rather make the decision each period whether to continue to subscribe, so I always immediately cancel the autopay and wait until the subscription expires.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats an almost slanderous claim...

The word you're looking for here is 'libelous'. One is spoken, one is written. Just an FYI.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[Cammi]

Due to the fact that both eve and wow does not force you to autopay .... I think you have your games mixed up.

Re:Hi. Eve player here.

[SkunkPussy]

If I want to pay by card for either game it forces you into an autopay.

Better article headline

[Andy Dodd]

"Largest-Yet EVE Online Battle Destroys $200,000 in game time Worth of Starships"

You can't purchase real life money for ISK. You can only purchase game time cards for ISK (or other ingame items).

When someone buys PLEX for real life money and sells it for ISK ingame, they forget that intermediary step where CCP got the money, not the person who gave you the ISK.

Re:Better article headline

[Anonymous Coward]

darn there goes my money laundering scheme, back to bitcoins

Re:Better article headline

[the Haldanian]

So gift-vouchers for services aren't worth anything to you?

Re:Better article headline

[Anonymous Coward]

When someone buys PLEX for real life money and sells it for ISK ingame, they forget that intermediary step where CCP got the money, not the person who gave you the ISK.

However the player that gave the ISK has the opportunity to redeem the PLEX token for game time, which is worth the same as the original purchaser of the PLEX token could have done instead of selling it on the in game market.

Re:Better article headline

[Anonymous Coward]

I sold tons of ISK for real life money. There are of course other ways to buy things from people then official forums and stamped/endorsed money transfer systems.

Re:Better article headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yeah you can get real life money for it. You just need to find someone willing to trade real life money for your ingame value.

Re:Better article headline

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't purchase real life money for ISK

Yes you can. So called RMT (real money trading) is the practice of selling virtual stuff (ISK, gold, rare items, etc.) for real money. RMT goes on in all MMOs that allow trading, including EVE.

Re:Better article headline

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an irrelevant distinction. If I'm in the UK, and I purchase a meal for £10, it's perfectly accurate and helpful to say that it's a $17 meal, even if the restaurant wouldn't accept payment directly in dollars.

Re:Better article headline

[Andy Dodd]

OK, to clarify: You can't without violating the EULA.

The risks involved in getting caught RMTing (ban plus all assets in question get eliminated from the game) mean that:
1) The exchange rate is going to be far poorer than the PLEX exchange rate
2) The ability to scale the operation is going to be severely limited

The PLEX approach CCP implemented was a pretty ingenious way to combat real money trading. What CCP did was satisfy a market demand that existed (new players want to "get ahead" financially by spending some extra real money) while combatting "undesirable" methods for satisfying that demand (classic farming sweatshops). The sweatshops have to provide far more ISK per dollar than the PLEX exchange rate for them to make any money, while also being limited in how they make ingame money. (nullsec players have zero tolerance for RMT farmers and can easily take care of them, while they're also filthy rich ingame and love being able to play the game for free by putting a small portion of their income into PLEX.)

Note: Yes, I'm quite familiar with the PLEX affiliate kickback fees loophole, but that doesn't scale either... Even the largest such operation in the game is only netting around $75k/year so would take years to convert this much ISK into RL money, and there is basically no room in the game for another e-casino.

Re:Better article headline

[Anonymous Coward]

YEt it COST to the player.

Same thing in real life. The money you spent in the car does nto vanish. It goes to Ford or GM... if your car explode is still a money loss. Even if GM got the money you paid for it.

Its EXACLTY the same as in the game

Re: These guys should try playing the stock market

[game kid]

"Coming up: Unilever's share-price nosedives after a terrorist cell's orbital laser blasts 1TUSD of exoplanet megafarm, but first, a look at the company that's building Amazon's delivery-ships: how the VeloTech's hyperdrives and mass drivers will turn FedEx's C-895 into smoldering U-235. Don't go anywhere, you're watching Fox Business Rigel."

Going stupid with afterburners engaged.....

[rts008]

You took the time to look at that image, got confused, then posted a worthless comment.

In that same amount of time and effort, you could have RTFA (it's very short) and had the answers to your questions.

Talk about stupid and lazy....

And no, I will not answer your questions and further enable/contribute to this phenomenon of posting stupidity instead of RTFA.

Re:Going stupid with afterburners engaged.....

[phantomfive]

In that same amount of time and effort, you could have RTFA (it's very short) and had the answers to your questions.

I did RTFA and it doesn't answer the questions.

And no, I will not answer your questions and further enable/contribute to this phenomenon of posting stupidity instead of RTFA.

Hey, I can gratuitously insult you too! Stupid git.

Re:Going stupid with afterburners engaged.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you even know that much about EVE indicates that not only are you a fat, lazy, ugly virgin in your mother's basement, you're also one or two standard deviations to the left with respect to IQ. Anybody who dedicates that much time to an abstraction instead of whipping real life's ass (e.g. investing, starting a real business) is a moron.

Re:This is a game for dorky button mashers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have $3000 to spend on a ship that might stand a chance, it is a great game.

Otherwise expect to get your derriere podded the second you hit space where the CONCORD ships don't come...

Play to get ganked, pay to actually have a chance.

Not bad!

[PPH]

Lets host all of the world's conflicts on EVE Online. In the real world, we can't even dent an M2 Bradley without running up a bigger bill than that.

Trade Federation

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, for me if the stock market involved space battles I'd be a lot more interested.

Someone should create a Trade Federation to combine the two things.

Re:The most interesting thing is what it looks lik

[nemo]

So with the right setup, all the Babylon5 CGI could be re-done by mechanimation?

(Google for "Babylon5 cgi lost" as to why redoing the Babylon5 CGI is in serious need)

The game is shit...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and anyone who thinks WoW players are lifeless husks have never met eve online players.

Re:The most interesting thing is what it looks lik

[Anonymous Coward]

The space battles are dull, and the navigation system is fucking terrible, and to even begin to fly a respectable ship takes real world months of "training" your character in the ridiculously overcomplicated skill trees. Everything about the game is designed to slow the experience to a crawl while they siphon more money out of your bank account each month. Since currency can be purchased from other players in exchange for game time which you buy with real money, it largely becomes a pay to win game.

Also, you can't just "steer" your ship in whatever direction you want to go, you have to vector on objects. It's the dumbest most useless system for piloting ever invented.

Why...

[Anonymous Coward]

is this news?

Enders Game

[Anonymous Coward]

We have just eclipsed the minimum necessary for thousands of people to take part in the strategic defense of Earth against hostile alien invaders.

So Himlar.. how many ..pants... is this worth?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Himlar.. how many ..$1000 pants or monocles... is this worth?

Mining Veldspar

[PsyMan]

is at least much more lucrative than mining bitcoin with only a GPU, AND you get whizzy laser effects and music to sleep to.

And...

[Anonymous Coward]

nothing of value was lost.

ONN: World of World of Warcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

"...that recreated all of the tedious boredom of real life."

Onion Network News reports on the sequel which lets you play a character playing World of Warcraft!
World of World of Warcraft

Eve battle costs $1,000s

[Anonymous Coward]

Who in their right mind would pay that much money for a virtual item in the first place? What is this a playground for millionaires? A Titan costs $5,000? Who the hell has that type of money?

Re:Eve battle costs $1,000s

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously not you. You jelly?

Re:Eve battle costs $1,000s

[Arker]

"A Titan costs $5,000? Who the hell has that type of money?"

20 people who have been playing this thing for 5 hours a day all year. And they do not have it in cash, but that is what it would cost if you tried to buy it with money instead of time.

That's my read at least, someone correct me if I am wrong.

Re:Eve battle costs $1,000s

[luther349]

eve does not sell ships for real money they are just using that figure on the amount of plex you would need to sell to buy one. with isk. but hi end ships are rarely bought by a single player but built by a corp it takes around a month game time for a corp to gather enough resources to build one.

Re:Eve battle costs $1,000s

[angel'o'sphere]

I know plenty of people who in fact BUY the ships for real money (of course as explained by others via PLEX the in game time codes).

And I would halv of the people who lost a Titan now will again buy one for real money, or at least parts of it with real money.

Re:Eve battle costs $1,000s

[SkunkPussy]

That's exactly correct.

Re:The most interesting thing is what it looks lik

[tibit]

Are you serious?? This time dilated, point-and-click style of play is quite visible, and it sucks. It's almost like a card game with visual effects thrown in as a second thought. It's a game where flying is like entering data into the fucking flight management system on an A340, as far as I can tell. If you call that fun, you're nuts, as far as I'm concerned. Ask any professional pilot how much fun FMS is, and the answer equally applies to EVE Online. To me, a space battle is when you need to keep a 3D representation of what's where to some extent in your own brain, and actually use proportional controls to steer the ship, acquire targets, etc. There were some simulator games in the 90s that were way more fun to play than that thing.

How many players?

[manu0601]

200 kUSD is a fair amount of money. How many players were involved in that loss?

Re:The most interesting thing is what it looks lik

[Rich0]

"What's it doing now?" Something you never want to hear your pilot say, lest this happen...

Shock and awe

[Boawk]

when the CFC jumped in 12 carriers and EACH ONE lit a cyno I knew we were in for a ride...

HOLY SHIT!!! That's crazy! [discretely turns to friend and whispers, "what the hell is a cyno?"]

Re:Shock and awe

[seanvaandering]

Cynosural Field Generator

Generates a cynosural field for capital ship jump drives to lock on to. A "titan" is a capital ship.

Re:Shock and awe

[Lotana]

Imagine a giant beacon lighting up that is visible to anyone within the solar system. Capital ships in other solar systems within several light-years around the beacon are able to sense it and lock their inter-stellar navigation drives on it.

There is a capital ship called Titan that has the ability to open a warp tunnel from its current position to the location of the beacon. Any ship type in the game, that is located near the Titan, is able to use that tunnel to instantly appear at the beacon's position.

Effectively, once this beacon (ie. Cynosural Field ie. cyno) lights up, you will have an armada of ships of all different kinds, from smallest fighters to huge capital ships, appearing momentarily. To watch 500 warp tunnels opening up simultaneously, at one location is a breathtaking and frightening sight to behold!

In this case, the enemy lit up 12 of those beacons at once. This just gives the scale of how much resources they are willing to commit.

Re:Shock and awe

[Daniel Hoffmann]

That is like reading about an epic battle from the classical ages. This stuff should be recorded in history books.

Re: These guys should try playing the stock market

[mjwx]

"Don't go anywhere, you're watching Fox Business Rigel."

Yotz

Re:The most interesting thing is what it looks lik

[ceoyoyo]

That's why people who are looking for fun don't play in the giant null sec battles. You go fight people in small to medium size gangs where seconds (actual seconds) matter. The big null battles get all the press but to me that's the most boring part of the game, and completely avoidable. Worse than mining.

Re: These guys should try playing the stock market

[imikem]

You didn't put your URL in your advertisement. Geez, are you from the 20th century or something?

i beg to disagree

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

"When you are 30 light-seconds out, the laser will always be aimed at where you were 30 seconds ago. "..."What range are you presuming these space battles take place?"

Way to pull a number out of thin air. Eve online battles generally occur less than 120km from targets and frequently within 30km. Considering 30 light seconds is 9 million km, I think your space physics needs some work.

Re:i beg to disagree

[AK Marc]

30km is well within conventional weapon range. Sure, it'll take 30-60 seconds to get there, but you could send a bullet there in a reasonable timeframe. If you are using lasers, why would you get close enough for guys with rifles to shoot at you? If you are in a space tech scenario, they could be shooting lots of things, like antimatter bullets, or other explosives and such. I imagine that in a real space battle, the distances would be much greater. Many books with lots of detailed battles have combat at light hours, using planets and such as shields. I've never seen a well-researched fiction with battles so close boarding parties could walk the distance.

Re:i beg to disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't see much accurate science fiction space battles, because they'd be pretty boring to write about. There's usually some fantasy technology that changes things enough to make it exciting.

Re:i beg to disagree

[AK Marc]

I'll have to dig up some of my sci fi library, but there were some that weren't bad to read. Yes, they were time-compressed (hours of battle compressed to a couple pages, as relativistic warheads took minutes to get there, and seeking mines and missiles were used that take hours to get there, many relying on ECM to get close enough, and the ECM were often explosions. Send a missile of your most powerful explosive directly at a ship, when it's at the edge of the enemy's kill range, they'll be looking at it, ready to kill it as it enters the kill zone. Then detonate it. Meanwhile, you sent similar weapons indirectly at it (perhaps sling-shotting around nearby planets for maximum speed towards the target without moving directly at it). When the one they are looking at detonates, the sensors aimed at it will be overloaded, and (at least temporarily) blind. That's when the other missiles enter detection range, making best time to the target. Hours (or days) for one shot (with distraction). It's not boring, it's just time compressed.

Sadly, based on the description of Eve battles on Slashdot, it seems that there are space boardgames from 30+ years ago that are more realistic. Seems Eve compressed the ranges to make the battles more realtime, and less plot in strategy for the next 3 hours, and go back to your cabin while the AI executes it, as many of the books have it. That, and exotic weapons are also in there. Missiles of 1000+ warheads where each warhead is a self-guided AI. Fire it at something, and when countermeasures are taken against it, it spreads into a cloud of warheads. Or antimatter missiles designed to give kills with near misses (destroy the warhead, and a lethal cloud of antimatter is released, blocking return fire, as well as killing your ship if you don't get out of the way.

Scream

[Anonymous Coward]

"Losses for the Titans alone for this massive battle are estimated at $200,000 - $300,000"

In space no one can hear you scream.......

Re:Scream

[luther349]

those super corps don't care they have more isk and resources then they know what to do with. however this does help the miners because the price of resources will go up.

Re:Nope...

[Anonymous Coward]

> No matter how many storys we see here about EVE... It's still not a cool or fun game.

Yes, you're correct. But it is also awesome to read about, so bugger off.

And very apparently not everyone agrees to your or my estimation it's boring and not cool. So what you're showing here is a standpoint: An opinion with a mental horizon of 0.

No, your an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

The only association with real world cash and ISK is because you buy plex from CCP which can be used to pay for your subscription OR be sold to other players for ISK who can then use it to pay for their subscription. Basically you buy game subscriptions from other players for in game gold.

So CCP already HAS the cash and you are just a moron who doesn't understand busines.

The "value" of a ship doesn't exist anymore the memories of a holiday have monetary value. If I eat a mars bar and expend the energy from it during a vigerous work out session (hey, it is just an example, I didn't say it was likely) is the money I spent on it lost?

No money was lost unless people engaged in illegal real money trading. And even then, the point of getting a big ship in the game is to use it. These people used it, they probably consider it time well spent.

No more value is lost then when I draw on an etch&sketch and then shake it. You play games for FUN, the FUN is why you pay for it. Do people who go to a sunny place to get a tan then complain their money was lost when the tan fades?

What kind of sad fuck are you then?

Real economic cost of spawning a virtual asset

[Anonymous Coward]

People keep repeating that: 'eve assets could be replaced instantly'. Technically this is true, however economically this is not possible for eve.

Ask anyone of those players in that battle if they want CCP to respawn their ship, you will find that no one wants this. If CCP respawns a ship for someone after a legit kill (CCP does respawn ships due to bugs in the game) the whole community will be more angry then they were a few years back.

At that time CCP toyed with the idea of a micro transaction store which would include reskinned ships, these ships were not better then the players could build themselves, however the ships would enter the eve economy without a player making it. People are really opposed against assets like ships comming into the game outside of the rules of the game itself. Later CCP said that they could change the store by requiring people trade in a normal ship for a reskinned ship, and that the reskinning cost money. But it was already too late, together with some other issues, the players revolted, and it costs CCP real money.

The amount of people that would leave the game if eve would start respawning ships after a legit game mechanic destroyed it, would be devastating for CCP. It would take years, if at all, to recover from this.

In short: It would have real economic cost if CCP would respawn a virtual asset.

PLEX can be used for other real things too now

[Anonymous Coward]

I am guessing that CCP found that there are more PLEX entering the game then used for subscriptions.
To curb this imbalance they have been adding new services and goods for PLEX.
- The subscription (like it always did)
- Graphics cards
- Micro transaction store for clothes on your character
- To watch the HD stream of fan fest
- To go to fan fest
- charities
- a plex can be destroyed when it is in space.

Re:The most interesting thing is what it looks lik

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you can "steer" you ship in whatever direction you want. Simply double click in space and your ship will go where you clicked. It is not super action oriented, because the simulation ticks only once per second, so you can only change directions once per second.

Also in advanced combat you rarely use the vectoring controls (approach, orbit at range). Examples:
- When you need to get into orbit of another ship as it is firing at you, it is best to spiral into the orbit to increase the angular velocity and reduce the damage projected on your own ship.
- When you have slow tracking guns, you will need to reduce your angular velocity to the other ship, you do this by flying in exactly the same direction and speed as the target speed.
- When you need to find a cloaked ship, you need a fast ship (with a cloud of drones following you) trying to cover as much volume as possible trying to find the ship.

All of these examples requires manual steering.

wrong way round

[SkunkPussy]

"This allows a direct conversion from in-game currency to real money"

There is only a direct conversion from real money to in-game currency. If the link operated in both directions then the prices would be very different.

New Players: What you need to know before playing

[SkunkPussy]

There is some useful info for new players over in the eve subreddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/co...

Missing the point

[Patch86]

I can't help but feel that this thread misses the interesting point of all this.

EVE Online has just managed (just about) to have a multiplayer game with 2200 players all playing against each other in the same in-game instance. That is, 2200 players in the same arena, being run by a single interoperating server. That is an absolutely absurd technical feat. Has any other multiplayer game ever come ever remotely close to this?

CCP have always been a fascinating one to watch in terms of their technical abilities. Arguably they've built one of the most advanced (in novel complexity terms) supercomputers in the world, certainly the most advanced in the entertainment industry. Both the hardware and the software of it, the load balancing and instance management, the ability to maintain uptime under unexpected loads, and the ability to maintain a playable state rather than submit to downtime in some of the worst conditions, is all extremely impressive.

I haven't looked into the technical details of CCP's set up in many years- does anyone have any details they'd care to share?

Re:Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

It was kept at 2200 because when we have near double that in system the server just dies like a few weeks back currently due to how AI controlled drones work. Around 4000 players fought in some system last July where there was less drone use and it was sort of playable.

Just keep in mind that the current limit of ships in one system is not a limit of the hardware really it is due to the server being written in Python and so does not support multithreading as when it was designed over 10 years ago the current trend in computing was driving CPU speeds higher and higher with single cores. If that technical problem could be solved (i.e. by writing the server in something other than python which is not something a small company like CCP can commit to easily) then you could see battles of the size we are discussion running possibly without lag or Time Dilation and even larger battles.

Re:Missing the point

[SuiteSisterMary]

Last time I checked, it was a hacked up version of Python running on Windows servers.

Re:Missing the point

[Sqweegee]

The current record for people in a single battle at once is over 4000, I was in one last week that surpassed 3900 at one point.

Unfortunately once the fights get that big it becomes difficult for anyone to do anything and the fight becomes very lopsided due to the overhead of newcomers entering the system. Whoever was first on the field can usually hold it simply because they can slaughter their opponents before they can defend themselves. In this one the numbers in system were kept low on purpose so there could be a "good fight".

This is the first fight with such a huge number of titan losses (75), the previous record for any battle was 12. Last time the developers revealed the number of them that exist on the server the total was about 950 but I think that was at least a year ago.

Re:Missing the point

[TangoMargarine]

Well, technically I'm sure there are ogame universes (instances) with 2200 players, but a lot of those are inactive or in vacation mode, and the CPU work in the game is infinitesimally complex compared to Eve from the sounds of it. I'd be interested to find out how many simultaneously acting users their servers can handle. Ogame doesn't, however, dilate time.

Hi. Non-Eve player here.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

We don't care. We just want to see animated GIFs of things blowing up.

I would pay CCP good money just to have this happen on a semi monthly or semi annual basis

Re:Hi. Non-Eve player here.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should start with the EVE expansion trailers - CCP have a Youtube channel. Some of them are very explosion-tastic. Also search for "This Is Eve", there are three very good videos from tournaments (especially the third one is awesome).

WHAT's in your wallet?

[Thud457]

yeah, but is that convertible into airline miles?

It's really your time that's devoured

[jollyreaper]

TV watching in this country averages between 150 to 200 hours a month. The average cable bill is $150. So you could say it's a dollar an hour for some people.

In EVE, you earn as you play. Each hour of gameplay gives you in-game money to apply to your toys. So it's really more accurate to look at how many credits you make per hour and how many hours of time a ship represents.

If people were battling with model airplanes, you'd factor cost of kit and time invested. Since the subscription is cheap, it's the time lost that really kills.

Because you can buy in-game currency, you can either play 100 hours to get a great ship or just drop money and buy it now. Either way, losing one in a fight is expensive, in time or money.

The Other News About EVE Online...

[Anonymous Coward]

That you have not heard about is that CCP released Rubicon 1.1 yesterday [Tuesday 1/28/14] and once again, has broken many things. The excuses are many, the effects are the same, can't play the game.

For the past ten years, generally twice a year, CCP releases major game expansions and then the rest of the patches are the fixes to problems that popped up. The idea of beta testing the software before it goes to the actual game server (where the paying customers are) seems to have not sunk in to CCP's minds.

Some official repair options given is to re-download the client and reinstall it (the client is now 12.9GB worth of space) and this is told to customers who had their game working perfectly fine the day before the patch but bjorked since. Some customers are reporting blue screen of death or display driver resets, both requiring hard restarts of their computers. Does not sound like a game I'd play if it affects the actual computer hardware.

Simulation

[Anonymous Coward]

You pay taxes to live in an area of the simulation we refer to as Earth.
You are entertained with life.
Eat, sleep, shit, and shut up :)

And lead just a little less for children

[Anonymous Coward]

And lead just a little less for children um in space.

Not really

[DarthVain]

I have dabbled in the EVE free trial and some research, and it doesn't seem to work that way.

While yes, a great deal of "assets" were destroyed, all that value was not lost to the players. It is likely some of it was, but some percentage of all those ships get turned into scrap, that are then salvaged, then crafted into things or sold, and turned into new ships, etc... the EVE cycle of life continues...

Even after the main battle is over, there will be a frenzy of salvage ships moving in for the kill and likely fighting among each other for the tasty bits.

Re:The most interesting thing is what it looks lik

[tibit]

:) Someone gets it, at least.

2200?

[phorm]

It's not as if this were a realtime fast-action combat, it's time-dilated which basically allows the server to handle things at a fair pace.
2200 connections to a given server isn't that huge of a number for something that's being processed in such a fashion.

How many Plex...

[Anonymous Coward]

do I have to pay for better mating rights?

Little prolonged

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue actually does rest on the point of whether of not you can convert ISK to Dollars. The article is claiming that $200,000 worth of starships were destroyed. Seemingly what some commentators have supposed, is that the $200,000 was destroyed along with the starships, because that is what they were worth, in other words, the value of $200,000 was in the starships itself (almost). They get to this number from a ratio of the in-game money necessary to buy a subscription to the real-world money necessary to buy that same prescription. "Now, EVE allows players to buy a month of subscription time as an in-game item, which players can then use or trade. This allows a direct conversion from in-game currency to real money, and provides a benchmark for estimating the real-world value of in-game losses."

Notice that it provides a "benchmark for estimating" a real-world value of in-game losses. It is an estimation contingent upon many other things. I don't know the actual cost in ISK or dollars of the subscription, but we can also ask if those two things are also equal. For example, does it take you longer to earn the amount of ISK necessary to buy that subscription than it does to earn the amount of dollars necessary? Would that difference affect the "benchmark for estimating" that difference?

Regardless, the point is that, so far, many comments and possibly the article as well suggest that there they are equivalent. $200,000 = 200,000,000,000 ISK (or whatever the price is, doesn't matter, point being that there is somewhere a direct correlation). So, Dollars = ISK because we can convert dollars to ISK. But, if Dollars = ISK, meaning, $200,000 = 200,000,000,000; wouldn't you have to be able to convert ISK back into dollars as well? If you cannot, then there was no actual loss of money at the time of the in-game loss. If you could trade the ISK you make in-game (by your labor, the time you spend in-game doing something) into actual money out-of-the-game; meaning that, for all practical purposes, players in the game would sell those $5,000 ships, and whatever else. Then perhaps we could say that what the article argues is true.

However, if those people spend money to entertain themselves and play the game, then they accrue ISK in-game (which though we can represent ISK in terms of dollars, are actually NOT dollars because we cannot make them into dollars) and buy things in-game, they do not actually "lose" the dollars the starship is worth, since the starship is only in ISK and ISK is not convertible to dollars. The only money they have actually "lost" (real money worth real value that they cannot retrieve what so ever) is the money they pay to play the game.

P.S. I know in some games you can spend 500 real dollars for an in-game shield (or whatever), and then risk the possibility of having that shield stolen by another player (as happened to my friend). He said "That guy stole my $500!". Again, he lost the $500 the moment it went to Steam. Seeing as you cannot sell that shield back for $500, that other guy just stole a virtual shield. Not $500. "But he has something worth $500" That is a different question. Two men can visit the same prostitute for the same service at different prices. What is she worth?