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Heya guys,

I don't play eve, but I have a cadre of friends who do, and they've been blowing up my newsfeed all morning about this mega-fleet engagment.....all over a late rent payment or somatething.


The fact that this stuff can equate to real-dollar amounts is scary.

Anyone who plays, can I get your thoughts?


Please don't bypass the language filter like this, even in thread titles. Thanks.
Reds8n

 lord marcus wrote:



The fact that this stuff can equate to real-dollar amounts is scary.

Anyone who plays, can I get your thoughts?

I always loved the harsher reality of Eve when it comes to losing stuff. Though I was never a fan of large scale warfare like this, its certainly pretty epic. Its refreshing to see that the game is still doing really well considering the fights only get bigger.

EVE is one of those games that I like to look at with awe, but would never actually get around to playing. Mostly because it's more like a lifestyle than a game.

As for the damage done, it's supposedly valued at EDIT: $300,000 USD.

Oh EVE, you never seem to stop amaze me with the realworld money losses.. :')

Good stuff.

Really incredibly short inaccurate version:

there's star systems you can own as a player alliance. One alliance system holder forgot to have enough cash laying around to pay the rent on an important system used to stage attacks and store valuables.

Evreybody forever immediately descends upon this system to try and be the last one standing when the dust settles and get it for themselves.

Here's more details: http://themittani.com/news/b-r5rb-biggest-battle-all-eve

Enough words, let the pretty screenshots commence!

Damnit, I need to stop being an afk skill trainer and actually play the damned game again (especially since I'm supposed to be in a CFC corp right now...)

And we have a preliminary casualty count for people who care about such things:

https://zkillboard.com/related/30002157/201401272300/extended/12/

Just don't freak out if it takes some time to load. It locked up my laptop for about 20-30 seconds when I clicked on the link.

i have been thinking about giving Eve another go and trying a new path in the game. hearing about things like this keep pushing me closer and closer to jumping back in.

EDIT: just read the thread... someone already provided info... sorry

According to a twitch guy that a friend follow's the dollar amount so far for the fight has reached 200k, that's just insane.

I played for a number of years and the largest furball I ever got into was maybe a couple hundred people, which was over in a few hours. Here's hoping CCP engineers don't go to 'reinforce' the node they're playing on and kill the fight prematurely.

i didnt mind eve but the real world training time made me sad, it was going to take like 9 months to get the ship I wanted and I wasnt interested in waiting

 ironicsilence wrote:
i didnt mind eve but the real world training time made me sad, it was going to take like 9 months to get the ship I wanted and I wasnt interested in waiting

At least by the time you have skilled up you can afford, and more importantly, pilot your objective.

I wouldn't recommend playing the game to get into one particular ship alone. They're all tools for doing different things and you take the right one for the job.

The killboard link is pretty great. 9.2 trillion ISK of damage on it. That's quite a bit of ISK!

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
I wouldn't recommend playing the game to get into one particular ship alone. They're all tools for doing different things and you take the right one for the job.

The killboard link is pretty great. 9.2 trillion ISK of damage on it. That's quite a bit of ISK!

I've heard estimates of it being equal to $500,000.

By the way, if anybody is still curious about this here's about the single best rundown I have seen so far. It's kind of designed to make non-EVE players want to play the game though... so read at your own risk!

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-bloodbath-of-b-r5rb/

 djones520 wrote:

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
The killboard link is pretty great. 9.2 trillion ISK of damage on it. That's quite a bit of ISK!

I've heard estimates of it being equal to $500,000.

Some really rough math that is kinda consistent with current exchange rates (i.e. I guessed about what they are because I didn't want to look exactly) put it at 490k, so I'd back that up.

The war sounds like it would have been great fun to play in and/or behold, but seriously... 6 figures to play a video game? Is that like, a $20 monthly fee from tons of people? or do people buy $1000 space stations with their mom's credit cards, only to have someone that spent $2000 on a super star destroyer come and blow it up, just before a $5000 death star blows them up in return?

If so, I'm clearly in the wrong business.

You're not meant to sell ISK for $USD so the way you arrive at that figure has to be a bit arbitrary. A PLEX, which you can redeem in-game for 30 days of game time, is $20USD without discount and seems to be worth about 635m ISK right now. Napkin maths would put that a bit under $300,000 of overpriced PLEX game time on that killboard link.

It's possible whoever said $500,000 was including kills that aren't on that particular killboard page.

Comparing these to real-dollar amounts is a bit random, though, since you can't* sell the ISK for anything other than game time. But it can be fun to do all the same!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Necros wrote:
The war sounds like it would have been great fun to play in and/or behold, but seriously... 6 figures to play a video game? Is that like, a $20 monthly fee from tons of people? or do people buy $1000 space stations with their mom's credit cards, only to have someone that spent $2000 on a super star destroyer come and blow it up, just before a $5000 death star blows them up in return?

If so, I'm clearly in the wrong business.

When people are saying "$____ of stuff was destroyed!" there are a couple of things going on. Firstly, they're making a pretty arbitrary conversion - you can't swap $USD (or whatever) for ISK (the in-game currency) directly, so however you do it requires a fair bit of hand-waving. Secondly, the money spent to make those things wasn't destroyed anyway - it was just passed on to whoever made the ship, roughly speaking. No money was actually destroyed when those ships went boom. Actually, what happened is it will have made all the other ships in the galaxy that much more valuable. You don't buy ships from the game's creator company, you buy them from other players, who make them from materials harvested from the game world.

Even if you wanted to try and buy all those ships with $USD, you'd have to basically buy a ton of game time and drop it on the market, which would tank the game time market.

If you wanted to try to buy ISK with money via selling game time credits you can make a pretty good argument for it, though. How much $USD can you earn in an hour? Even really good ISK farming rates tend to convert to below the US' too-low minimum wage. Maybe you'd have more fun doing your farming ISK offline. When you do that you're basically paying someone else to farm ISK for you at third-world peasant rates. And of course the creator company gets a healthy profit out of this - game time that's redeemable in-game is significantly more expensive than game time bought directly from the company.

 Necros wrote:
The war sounds like it would have been great fun to play in and/or behold, but seriously... 6 figures to play a video game? Is that like, a $20 monthly fee from tons of people? or do people buy $1000 space stations with their mom's credit cards, only to have someone that spent $2000 on a super star destroyer come and blow it up, just before a $5000 death star blows them up in return?

If so, I'm clearly in the wrong business.

No, thats the equivalent real world value of in-game assets, you don't actually USE real world money to purchase it, you use in-game money which is (theoretically) acquired entirely via in-game means. Note that the more expensive assets (capitals and supercapitals such as Titans, Carriers, etc.) are usually corporation/alliance property rather than personal property.

As for the war being fun, well it depends. If you mean battle, no not really. It would have been a really slow occurring thing where all your time would have been spent locking primary/secondary/tertiary targets as called by your fleet commander, usually only getting one salvo off before whatever target was instantly vaporized by the combined fleet.... oh, and it would have all occurred at 10% of realtime...

Now, if you mean war... yes, absolutely, especially if you have a hardon for politics, etc. otherwise it was mostly nightly fleets blowing gak up.

That's kind of what keeps me away from EVE. The battles look all well and good until you realize that as an individual you're not really doing anything... just clicking on whatever you're told to click on. It's the grand scheme of multiple players' combined efforts through various means that are important.

A game like Planetside 2 is the exact opposite. The game is all about you being right in the thick of it all day erry day, but by comparison there isn't much of a "grand strategy" to speak of.

It's less politics and more a scramble to reach the Cold War as soon as possible and then someone lights it off before everyone starts all over again...
It's Humanity on fast forward...

 BlaxicanX wrote:
That's kind of what keeps me away from EVE. The battles look all well and good until you realize that as an individual you're not really doing anything... just clicking on whatever you're told to click on. It's the grand scheme of multiple players' combined efforts through various means that are important.

A game like Planetside 2 is the exact opposite. The game is all about you being right in the thick of it all day erry day, but by comparison there isn't much of a "grand strategy" to speak of.

It kinda depends. These things that make the news tend to be interesting feats of logistics and politics, and the actual battle itself isn't necessarily that fun to play (though I'm sure there are tons of EVE players out there who enjoy getting in their big fleets and pressing F1 on the primary). But that's not all there is to the game, and most people, I'd hazard to guess, don't ever play in those gigantic fleets. You can get into plenty of trouble with a single ship and some people spend most of their EVE time doing just that.

I'm a bit down on EVE, mostly because it's a bad game, but it can be worth playing because it actually tries to be an MMO in an industry filled with small group dungeon crawlers mistagged with the "MMO" label. That's worth a lot.

There's a new article up on The Mittani about the battle that contextualises it a lot better and provides more background information: http://themittani.com/features/largest-virtual-battle-ever

According to the new article CCP, the game's developers, have said their statistics show the total losses from the battle as 11 trillion ISK. That's quite a bit!

I have to agree. I was playing EVE for a few years. I have two absolutely amazing memories that came out from that.

1. Messing around in wormholes. I'd probe one down and if it was a class 2-3 I'd yell in corp chat, then a "fleet" of 3-4 really rag tag battlecruisers who had no idea what they were getting into would form up. I'd "FC" them through the sites while I hung one site behind and salvaged in my destroyer (because at the time I couldn't fly battlecruisers). I made great money doing that and had an amazing time.

2. One time I was mining away and on corp chat one guy said "there's a pirate in a cane next door looking to play". We were a mining/carrier construction alliance. We don't PVP, but with that the ~5 of us who actually liked PVP all dropped what we were doing and formed a posse. I was flying a kitsune (because I'm one of the 5 pilots in EVE who trained electronic attack ships) and we had a couple other battlecruisers. We baited him on a belt with a BC then all snapped down and got a nice killmail. Then I went back to mining.

There was other fun stuff, mostly involving low-sec exploration and nail biting moments, but those are the two that convince me how EVE is actually worth it sometimes.

We got into trouble in every kind of known and unknown space. As a newbie I flew a Badger into NPC 0.0 looking for lucrative trading opportunities, with another newbie in a frigate flying escort. I had a habit for a while of going into space with escorts flying beside me and them getting blown up.

Flying a freighter through lowsec? Awesome.

Shadowing a hostile fleet in a covops, reporting intel on them the whole way, and then landing in a bubble with all of them? Awesome.

Warping out of a fight on fire with half my modules destroyed by overheating? Awesome. Any fight fitting that description is pretty much great by definition.

EVE can be cool if you let it.

Oh, and the time I fitted a caracal for pvp and went out looking for trouble (wtf was I thinking?).

I wandered around for a while and finally jumped into a gatecamp with a bunch of Brutixes. You can guess what happened next, but my little capsule managed to make it back to the gate and get away. They had one frigate timed almost perfectly to afterburn towards me and bump my pod (really clever trick actually)... but somehow I jinked him.

I swear I was less than a pod width away from him at closest approach. I was zoomed in all the way clenching my fists and thinking to myself "if the collision mesh is one pixel off the actual model I am so screwed"

This kind of makes me want to play, but I'm assuming as a newb the pirateering (which is what I would like to do) would be not all that much fun.

 lord marcus wrote:
This kind of makes me want to play, but I'm assuming as a newb the pirateering (which is what I would like to do) would be not all that much fun.

You'll probably spend most of your time shooting lasers at rocks.

Piracy is weird in EVE. Most of what people consider piracy is more shooting everything that moves for kicks. Ransoms are uncommon. You can certainly do it, though. I'm not sure how much you'd generally make from looting. YMMV.

And don't shoot lasers at rocks. It's a trap.

Great stuff as always from EVE.
Never tried it myself, heard its a vicious timesink but keep an eye on it from time to time.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
And don't shoot lasers at rocks. It's a trap.

Welll....shooting lasers at rocks with your buddies when evreybody's drunk can be pretty fun. But other than that it's not much good as anything other than a time waster while doing other stuff, and even then it's really annoying to do with just one character and not the best way to spend your time (says the man who has pretty much 100% maxed out his mining skills)

Yes. even the refining ones. 100% refine on hi-sec ore in Gallente space. Oh yeah...such a good use of my skill training time...

I actually have had a lot of fun shooting rocks, but the fun for me has always been shooting them in places I shouldn't be. Mining in lowsec sort of has a similar vibe to flying a freighter through w-space.

I wouldn't recommend it as an EVE-career path, though, because the reward to the risk just isn't there.