Largest-Yet EVE Online Battle Destroys $200,000 Worth of Starships 463
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.
Re:It sounds cooler than it is... (Score:2, Informative)
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 [youtube.com])? 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:Strategy? (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 =)
Re:Wow (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.
Re:It sounds cooler than it is... (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.
Re:Hi. Eve player here. (Score:4, 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.
Re:Shock and awe (Score:4, 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.