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

Posted by Soulskill on from the most-interesting-game-you-don't-want-to-play dept.

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.

40 of 463 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The economy just deflated 300k.

    EVE online has slightly re-valued the dollar.

    Do it more!

    1. Re:Wow by gr4nf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:Wow by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Wow by gnick · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    4. Re:Wow by CanHasDIY · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    5. Re:Wow by alexander_686 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Wow by vux984 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:Wow by Entropius · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    8. Re:Wow by seanvaandering · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    9. Re:Wow by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
    10. Re:Wow by thaylin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      When you cant win, ad hominem.
    11. Re: Wow by Wootery · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    12. Re:Wow by kamapuaa · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
    13. Re: Wow by Khashishi · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    14. Re: Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

    15. Re:Wow by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    16. Re: Wow by RivenAleem · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. These guys should try playing the stock market. by lxs · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:These guys should try playing the stock market. by girlintraining · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  3. $200,000 of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. The rent... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    was to damn high?

  5. It sounds cooler than it is... by Wulfrunner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

    1. Re:It sounds cooler than it is... by gr4nf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:It sounds cooler than it is... by geekoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      " 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.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    3. Re:It sounds cooler than it is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  6. Slashdot by pitchpipe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    News about nerds.

    --
    Look where all this talking got us, baby.
    1. Re:Slashdot by Megahard · · Score: 4, Funny

      Stuff that doesn't matter.

      --
      I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
  7. In other news... by ausekilis · · Score: 5, Funny

    5 girlfriends went to bed alone.

  8. EVE by BobSwi · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  9. The most interesting thing is what it looks like by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. News For Nerds by American+AC+in+Paris · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --

    Obliteracy: Words with explosions

  11. space spreadsheet armada battels v3.9! by Thud457 · · Score: 5, Funny

    and the spreadsheets involved are less complicated...

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  12. Nope... by just_a_monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    --
    How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
  13. Re: These guys should try playing the stock market by Reapman · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  14. Hi. Eve player here. by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:Hi. Eve player here. by X.25 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  15. Better article headline by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  16. Re: These guys should try playing the stock market by game+kid · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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."

    --
    You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
  17. Re:Strategy? by joelleo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 =)

    --
    "In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
  18. Re:Shock and awe by Lotana · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.