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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[geekoid]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[kamapuaa]

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

Re:Wow

[EvanED]

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

Your point?

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

[Khashishi]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.)

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?

[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.

The rent...

[Anonymous Coward]

was to damn high?

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...

[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]

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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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.

Slashdot

[pitchpipe]

News about nerds.

Re:Slashdot

[Megahard]

Stuff that doesn't matter.

In other news...

[ausekilis]

5 girlfriends went to bed alone.

EVE

[BobSwi]

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

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."

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?

space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9!

[Thud457]

and the spreadsheets involved are less complicated...

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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).

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

[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: 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."

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: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

[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: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.

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

[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.

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?