# Immense 3,000-ship battle erupts in 'EVE Online'



## editor (Jan 28, 2013)

I know bugger all about this game and I've no idea what's going on in the footage, but the video looks very pretty.









> Gamers were agog this weekend when screenshots and videos of an enormous (and somewhat accidental) battle in EVE Online hit the web. All told, 3,161 players duked it out in the Asakai system; 222 ships were killed, resulting in a loss of 470 billion ISK (the in-game currency), according to EVE-Kill.net.
> 
> Reports from Reddit and EVE bloggers indicate the fray was sparked when the pilot of a titan ship (the most expensive class in the game) prematurely jumped into enemy space, rather than warp allies to his location (a technique known as "bridging"). A lone titan in "low security" space is like blood in the water, and players from multiple factions rushed in, with reinforcements piling on to attack and defend.
> Essentially, one pilot's accidental click ignited one of the largest impromptu capital ship battles in EVE history.
> ...


----------



## zenie (Jan 28, 2013)

jesus christ


----------



## Johnny Canuck3 (Jan 28, 2013)

This is like some sort of commercial.


----------



## editor (Jan 28, 2013)

I don't understand what they're talking about or what all the onscreen data is supposed to mean.


----------



## Johnny Canuck3 (Jan 28, 2013)

You don't own shares in the company by any chance?


----------



## IC3D (Jan 28, 2013)

Listening to them talking and hearing the accents makes me proud that so many people from across the globe can come together and not have girlfriends.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 28, 2013)

You could have fed everyone in one of the rim clusters for a decade on what that Leviathan cost!


----------



## sheothebudworths (Jan 28, 2013)

IC3D said:


> Listening to them talking and hearing the accents makes me proud that so many people from across the globe can come together and not have girlfriends.


----------



## Kanda (Jan 28, 2013)

This is making me consider re-activating my account....


----------



## starfish (Jan 28, 2013)

editor said:


> I don't understand what they're talking about or what all the onscreen data is supposed to mean.


 
Youre not alone there but it does look quite impressive.


----------



## Fez909 (Jan 28, 2013)

The video says the ships destroyed were worth $30,000. That's obscene.


----------



## 8115 (Jan 28, 2013)

Fez909 said:


> The video says the ships destroyed were worth $30,000. That's obscene.


 
It's not real money though, right?  You can't convert it to real world money?  It's like if I could earn money watching iplayer.  I'd be rich.


----------



## editor (Jan 28, 2013)

8115 said:


> It's not real money though, right? You can't convert it to real world money? It's like if I could earn money watching iplayer. I'd be rich.


Some people will have lost actual 'real' money in that virtual battle.


----------



## Fez909 (Jan 28, 2013)

8115 said:


> It's not real money though, right? You can't convert it to real world money? It's like if I could earn money watching iplayer. I'd be rich.


 
It's as real as any other money.  The ships could've been sold to get pounds or dollars or euros.


----------



## agricola (Jan 28, 2013)

Fez909 said:


> The video says the ships destroyed were worth $30,000. That's obscene.


 
Internet spaceships are serious business.


----------



## Fez909 (Jan 28, 2013)

agricola said:


> Cyberspaceships are serious business.


----------



## agricola (Jan 28, 2013)




----------



## 8ball (Jan 28, 2013)

editor said:


> Some people will have lost actual 'real' money in that virtual battle.


 
Really?

I have no idea how it all works tbh - I thought you just played and traded pretend slaves and catnip and stuff until you could afford a big bruiser ship.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Eve is brilliant. The only geeky thing about it is thayt it's played using a computer and set in space, but that is only the surface of it. I stopped playing it because of what agricola's post so concisely summarises about the game; have enough addictions as it is.

That game chatter isn't really representative though, most people talk the same kind of shite you read on here


----------



## 8ball (Jan 28, 2013)

8115 said:


> It's not real money though, right? You can't convert it to real world money? It's like if I could earn money watching iplayer. I'd be rich.


 
I suppose, thinking about it, 3,000 ships, if people have put hours into playing to get those ships...


----------



## 8115 (Jan 28, 2013)

Well, the hours is one thing, it's part of the game.   But the money value is another.  I thought most games were quite strict about not being able to buy too much of value, or trade.  Someone was talking to me about something farming.  I can't remember, it's all a bit hazy.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 28, 2013)

8115 said:


> Someone was talking to me about something farming. I can't remember, it's all a bit hazy.


 
Farmville?


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

8115 said:


> Well, the hours is one thing, it's part of the game. But the money value is another. I thought most games were quite strict about not being able to buy too much of value, or trade. Someone was talking to me about something farming. I can't remember, it's all a bit hazy.


 
You won't really see it on ebay but Eve profiles go for hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds.


----------



## 8115 (Jan 28, 2013)

8ball said:


> Farmville?


 
Gold farming.  I don't know if it's an urban myth.


----------



## Kanda (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> You won't really see it on ebay but Eve profiles go for hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds.



At the peak of my Everquest phase, I could have quit and sold all 6 of my characters for 12k+

Also all the gold I had I could have sold for a few k


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

This is what the unemployed should be doing


----------



## UnderAnOpenSky (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> This is what the unemployed should be doing


 
I'm obviously wasting my unemployment.


----------



## agricola (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> This is what the unemployed should be doing


 
International finance would probably disagree.


----------



## Tankus (Jan 28, 2013)

Did he have chicken......?  

Leeeeeerroyyyyy


----------



## Santino (Jan 28, 2013)

Neal Stephenson's latest novel, REAMDE, is partly about gold-farming and the crossover between  real and online worlds.

It's disappointing though.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 28, 2013)

As immense as it all looks, I'm still not sure it compares to that moment in _Freespace 2_ where that 4-mile long Shivan motherfucker drops out of FTL right in front of your face.  x 1000


----------



## Random (Jan 29, 2013)

Santino said:


> Neal Stephenson's latest novel, REAMDE, is partly about gold-farming and the crossover between  real and online worlds.
> 
> It's disappointing though.


That's a shame. 

I love following Eve events because it's like some kind of petri dish for politics. The battle in the OP is basically the result of two huge coalitions facing off, deciding neither would win a full-on war, and so keeping to a cold war. But then someone's finger slips, they make a mistake, enemies jump them, they try to cover up by calling for help, enemies call on their friends and suddenly all the alliances are fighting a major battle. This is basically the kind of chaotic event that I think will provoke the next major power war in the real world.

Plus - one of the three US Embassy staff killed in Banghazi was a major leader in one of the big Eve alliances, so there's a huge crossover straight away with real world politics. I can't help thinking an era of mass drone warfare will in some way be influenced by what goes on in a place like Eve...


----------



## Gromit (Jan 29, 2013)

editor said:


> I don't understand what they're talking about or what all the onscreen data is supposed to mean.



All I got was DPS. Damage per second. Oh and nuke and heat is usually about pouring on the damage too. 

But there was something about hicks and caps. No idea.


----------



## Random (Jan 29, 2013)

Gromit said:


> All I got was DPS. Damage per second. Oh and nuke and heat is usually about pouring on the damage too.
> 
> But there was something about hicks and caps. No idea.


Caps means capital ships, i think


----------



## Kanda (Jan 29, 2013)

firky said:


> This is what the unemployed should be doing



I'm soon to be unemployed... Good plan!


----------



## Kanda (Jan 29, 2013)

Gromit said:


> All I got was DPS. Damage per second. Oh and nuke and heat is usually about pouring on the damage too.
> 
> But there was something about hicks and caps. No idea.



Heat is about overloading your energy banks or taking shield damage. HICs are heavy interdictor ships....


----------



## Gromit (Jan 29, 2013)

Would I assume that the combat won't be all that different from a lot of MMORGs. 

Where you have tanks (take masses of damage), DPS (deal large damage), healers (repair everyone to keep em alive) and buffers (makes people's abilities stronger).


----------



## Yetman (Jan 29, 2013)

Kanda said:


> At the peak of my Everquest phase, I could have quit and sold all 6 of my characters for 12k+
> 
> Also all the gold I had I could have sold for a few k


 
So why didn't you? Or did you?


----------



## Kanda (Jan 29, 2013)

Yetman said:


> So why didn't you? Or did you?


 
I was too attached to my main 6 characters (where do you think the name Kanda comes from? ) I gave up hardcore raiding and 6 boxed for a while (playing 6 characters at once) and sold items/flags in game for a bit, sold a couple of other characters then the game kinda died off when people went over to World of Warcraft and I just stopped playing. I didn't want some idiot running around in game with my characters names...


----------



## Gromit (Jan 29, 2013)

What he means is that he was holding out for more and missed the bubble.


----------



## Kanda (Jan 29, 2013)

Gromit said:


> What he means is that he was holding out for more and missed the bubble.


 
Not at all. I knew the market and playerbase was dropping. I carried on playing because I couldn't stand WoW.


----------



## Yetman (Jan 29, 2013)

Kanda said:


> I didn't want some idiot running around in game with my characters names...


 
NOT EVEN FOR 12 GRAND!!?!


----------



## Kanda (Jan 29, 2013)

Yetman said:


> NOT EVEN FOR 12 GRAND!!?!


 
They'd dropped in value by the time I quit. I could've got a few grand probably but no, didn't bother.


----------



## Sunray (Jan 30, 2013)

My friend, who was in one of the worlds top 20 WoW guilds, got offered a share of 20000 eur to take Saudi prince with them into the highest instances of the game.  They turned them down for a series of weird and unfathomable reasons.


----------



## Tankus (Jan 30, 2013)

I would get my avatar to bend over and take it up the gary for that...!


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 30, 2013)

Heh listening to this reminds me of that Peep Show episode where Mark and Gerrard play WoW.


----------



## moochedit (Jan 30, 2013)

8115 said:


> It's not real money though, right? You can't convert it to real world money? It's like if I could earn money watching iplayer. I'd be rich.


 
If it like the "linden dollers" they had in second life, "30,000 dollers"  is probably about a fiver in real money.


----------



## Tankus (Jan 30, 2013)

what about the time involved


----------



## Bernie Gunther (Jan 30, 2013)

moochedit said:


> If it like the "linden dollers" they had in second life, "30,000 dollers" is probably about a fiver in real money.


 
Nope, for the sort of stuff they're talking about, with multiple titans and super-carriers killed, that' $30k will be real money equivalent.

Presumably calculated by figuring out how much it would cost to buy that much in-game currency using real money, as there is no legit way to sell in-game currency for real money. You _can_ do it via dodgy Real Money Traders, but you'll probably be selling at a steep discount if not actually getting robbed/hacked/whatever.

In practice, apart from a certain Russian aluminum mogul, nobody buys titans and hardly anybody buys super-carriers with real money though. They're more typically produced by a collective effort, e.g conquering systems with valuable resources used to fund them, building and defending the specialized shipyards in which they can be built, etc. This is done by the rank and file of the alliances in question and is justified because such ships are useful for taking more territory. Typically the most 'senior' players in such organizations get to drive such ships and become the center of massive internal after-action drama when they lose them in a cluster-fuck like the one being discussed here.

It sounds like what happened was the pilot of one such titan was supposed to use a capability called a 'jump bridge' to surprise some enemies by projecting a fleet of smaller ships into a certain system without going via the 'front door' (normal travel in Eve would be through a sequence of systems connected by star-gates) This nifty trick is peculiar to titans (more or less) and is a good way to do a surprise attack because they don't get spotted by scouts while en-route through normal space. The titan wasn't supposed to be going with them, it was just supposed to project them there.

What he did instead was accidentally push the button that sent his titan there with no support fleet. The really big expensive ships don't go anywhere by themselves normally, any more than a US Navy carrier does and like US carriers, they're rather vulnerable without a battle group of supporting ships.

The locals got very excited at seeing an unsupported titan, so they sent out some ships that can jam its drive and hold it in place. Those were the HICs or 'heavy interdictors' that were mentioned above. A titan is a bit like the Death Star, not really designed for shooting smaller stuff.

Being on the kill-mail for a titan or even a super-carrier, is an enormously exciting prospect for most Eve players. The system it had landed in was pretty accessible, albeit a pirate-infested scumhole, and fairly near the center of the galaxy rather than way outside the frontier of 'civilized' space where this sort of stuff usually happens. I suspect that influenced what happened next.

A rival alliance dropped their capital fleet into the system to kill the titan, so the organization that owns the titan dropped their capital fleet in to save it and things escalated from there. By the sound of it half of Eve was on the way to the fight by the time the servers finally crashed.

The commander of the side which owned the titan which kicked this off has a sort of General Custer type reputation, not necessarily the most competent and prone to exciting but not necessarily victorious fights. So controversy is still raging I suspect.


----------



## Private Storm (Jan 30, 2013)

Sunray said:


> My friend, who was in one of the worlds top 20 WoW guilds, got offered a share of 20000 eur to take Saudi prince with them into the highest instances of the game. They turned them down for a series of weird and unfathomable reasons.


 
A friend of mine was paid rather handsomely to go to a well known British artist's house and help level his kids in WoW. Lily Allen and her old man came over for lunch, but my mate had to sit at the table with the kids  (he'd have been about 30)


----------



## Bernie Gunther (Jan 30, 2013)

Here's an Eve trailer which gives you a pretty good feel for what it's like to be in one of those fights.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 30, 2013)

Bernie Gunther said:


> A rival alliance dropped their capital fleet into the system to kill the titan, so the organization that owns the titan dropped their capital fleet in to save it and things escalated from there. By the sound of it half of Eve was on the way to the fight by the time the servers finally crashed.


 
This is one of most awesome things I've read online today.


----------



## Pingu (Jan 31, 2013)

Kanda said:


> They'd dropped in value by the time I quit. I could've got a few grand probably but no, didn't bother.


 
give you a tenner for the server fund for them...


----------



## Random (Jan 31, 2013)

I also understand that, to avoid lag, the servers simply slow time for the players involved in such a mass fight. So they will have effectively have been trapped in a leaking stasis bubble, fighting in slow motion, giving those outside the bubble plenty of time to travel fast enough to get involved, and further slow down everything...



Bernie Gunther said:


> The commander of the side which owned the titan which kicked this off has a sort of General Custer type reputation, not necessarily the most competent and prone to exciting but not necessarily victorious fights. So controversy is still raging I suspect.


Which commander do you mean? The one who was actually in the Titan? I do agree with the Mittani's point that Eve wars (like so many others) are won by morale, not battles, so I'll be interested to see how this fight affects Goonswarm/CFC. from looking at the Reddit/Dreddit response I think there will be even more enthusiastic noobs on their way now to HBC.


----------



## Tankus (Jan 31, 2013)

better footage


----------



## Callum91 (Feb 1, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Heh listening to this reminds me of that Peep Show episode where Mark and Gerrard play WoW.


''Those trees are not real trees''


----------



## Stigmata (Feb 2, 2013)

8ball said:


> As immense as it all looks, I'm still not sure it compares to that moment in _Freespace 2_ where that 4-mile long Shivan motherfucker drops out of FTL right in front of your face.  x 1000


 
Oh god... I thought it was the sun, then I wondered why there were four of them, then I realised it was their main cannon charging


----------



## sim667 (Feb 3, 2013)

Im quite tempted to have a free trial on eve....

but £84 a year thereafter...... 'kinell!


----------



## Kanda (Feb 15, 2013)

Yetman said:


> NOT EVEN FOR 12 GRAND!!?!


 
I've started playing again  So glad I didn't!!


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Feb 16, 2013)

sim667 said:


> Im quite tempted to have a free trial on eve....
> 
> but £84 a year thereafter...... 'kinell!


That's nothing though really, is it? £1.60 a week - about the cost of a half-pint of beer, or a small coffee, and you get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of several hours playing games than drinking a small latte.


----------



## Tankus (Feb 16, 2013)

made me laugh anyway ......................................................................this is interesting  ....in parts .... although with an ego seen from orbit


----------



## sim667 (Feb 18, 2013)

Buddy Bradley said:


> That's nothing though really, is it? £1.60 a week - about the cost of a half-pint of beer, or a small coffee, and you get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of several hours playing games than drinking a small latte.


 

It depends how much you like latte.

I fucking love latte.


----------



## souljacker (Dec 1, 2016)

Just had an email saying eve has gone free to play. Do I want to try it again? Bearing in mind I'm a month in to a league of legends addiction.


----------



## Pickman's model (Dec 1, 2016)

souljacker said:


> Just had an email saying eve has gone free to play. Do I want to try it again? Bearing in mind I'm a month in to a league of legends addiction.


yes, yes you do


----------



## souljacker (Dec 1, 2016)

Pickman's model said:


> yes, yes you do



Come with me pickers, we can explore the stars together!


----------



## sim667 (Dec 13, 2016)

I'm going to give it a bash as its free now too.


----------



## Buddy Bradley (Dec 24, 2016)

The single best tip for anyone thinking of playing EVE is to join a player-run corporation. Playing solo is the easiest way to get bored of the game, especially running missions (the equivalent of questing in every other MMO), but join a new-player alliance like Brave Collective, Pandemic Horde or KarmaFleet and you'll receive so much more guidance and opportunity to explore different aspects of the game.


----------



## Bernie Gunther (Jan 4, 2017)

Thanks for the heads up. Just started a noob alpha clone and doing the (much shinier than I remember) tutorial. 

Is faction warfare still a good way to get into low skill-point PvP?


----------

