EVE Online Mega-Battle Breaks $300,000 In Real-World Losses

[Andy Chalk]

EVE Online Mega-Battle Breaks $300,000 In Real-World Losses

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CCP Games is creating a permanent memorial to an EVE Online battle estimated to have caused more than $300,000 in real-world damages.

I don't play EVE Online but I absolutely love it, because it's the only game in the world in which something like this could happen. As we reported a couple of days ago [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131710-Epic-EVE-Online-Battle-Erupts-Because-of-Missed-Bill], a missed bill payment sparked the biggest battle the game has ever seen, with more than 2200 participants, and now that it's over and the cost is being counted, it's estimated that between $300,000 and $330,000 in real-world money has been lost.

In a blog post entitled "The Bloodbath of B-R5RB, Gaming's Most Destructive Battle Ever," CCP broke down both the causes of the battle and the staggering losses that resulted. Easily the most telling fact is that no more than 12 Titans, ships that "take thousands of man-hours to produce, take months to train to fly, and are capable of fitting massive doomsday weapons that obliterate lesser ships with a single volley," had ever previously been destroyed in a single battle; at B-R5RB, a total of 75 were lost.

A few other numbers of note: 123 Carriers, 13 Supercarriers, 370 Dreadnaughts and "lots more smaller ships and probably a bajillion drones and fighters" were destroyed and roughly 775 doomsdays were fired during the 21-hour battle, representing a quarter of all doomsdays fired over the past two years. The economic impact of the battle comes in at around 11 trillion ISK, which CCP said could translate into as much as $330,000.

[gallery=2054]

As soon as the fight was over, CCP said it began receiving emails demanding a monument to the battle, something it was already considering. Thus the studio is using the new Titan wreck models that were recently introduced to the game to create Titanomachy, which will be a permanent ship's graveyard around the seventh planet of the B-R5RB system. The "hauntingly beautiful" arrangement of destroyed ships will hopefully be installed during the January 31 downtime.

And that's why I love EVE Online.

Source: EVE Online [http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-bloodbath-of-b-r5rb/]


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[StraightToHeck]

in other related news, several people known to have played EVE Online were found dead in their basements due to suicide

seriously, someone's gonna get reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal mad about this

 

[Erttheking]

Jesus Christ, EVE online is turning into a battlefield for a clash of titans, entire armies of titans! If only there was a game like this where the learning curve wasn't a brick.

 

[BrotherRool]

The levels of smug coming off the guy in charge of the CFC are pretty crazy.This is the official 'statement' he chose to give on behalf of his coalition.

The CFC offers the following as its official statement on the battle of B-R5, posted three weeks ago by Pandemic Legion member Richter Belmont.

"If at any given moment, N3 ping for all hands on d*** supercarriers and capital ships, they will get more individual people in fleet than your entire coalition can combined on its very best day.

This isn't conjecture, this is something that has been proven again and again because your leaders like to bury their heads in the sand and ignore the game itself in favor of posting and posturing and writing tl;dr CEO updates about garbage that will never see the light of day (and if it does, the only place it will be is on the killboard of my alliance) instead of realizing that every capital and supercapital pilot with a pulse and a will to use their dread/super/titan/slowcat is gravitating towards one side because hey, guess what, that side actually DOES use their big toys on the regular and when push comes to shove as evidenced by the fight in DY- your alliance is literally impotent.

If a super 'fight' actually happens, it isn't going to be an actual fight, it is going to be a CFC g***r*** hosted by Manny, Grath and Vince and you'll have no one to blame but your own leaders and FCs for being yes men f****** instead of growing a pair of balls and equipping some initiative."

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

I wonder if these battles are at all representative of mankind's later exploration of the cosmos.

"HEY! WHERE'S THIS MONTH'S RENT?"

Result:


They do make for lovely wallpapers if the screenshots are done right though ^_^

 

[Quazimofo]

in other related news, several people known to have played EVE Online were found dead in their basements due to suicide

seriously, someone's gonna get reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal mad about this

I'm honestly not sure. They might get mad, but when shit goes down on a scale like this you can't help but feel a sense of awe. Like if.... well damn I really can't think of good examples right now. It's just the sheer scale of how things went down, the sheer scale of the destruction, it's hard to be mad and not just think "that's kinda really damn awesome".

I imagine it'd be not unlike Hannibal's campaign through Rome, if he had managed to conquer the city itself. Guy managed to smuggle a whole army over a strait and 2 mountain ranges (the army included f*** ELEPHANTS by the way) under the nose of one of the biggest empires on the continent and then thoroughly whop the asses of everyone who came at him for over a decade, to the point that Rome had to try to invade his home city to get him to leave. No matter what side you were on in that conflict, it's damn near impossible to not admire the sheer skill.

.

This has got to be the most awesome thing to happen in EVE yet. I think a monument is not enough, but that the system itself should be renamed in honor of the events.
Bloodbath would be the most straightforward name, but it's perhaps a bit too blunt. Any other suggestions?

 

[Spacewolf]

So who actually won, and are all those little red dots players or are they missiles or similar NPC drones?

 

[uchytjes]

I now have a rotating stock of screenshots from this battle as my desktop. It looks amazing.

It almost makes me want to play EVE. Almost.

Also, I have to wonder how much of a hayday for their PR this whole debacle was.

 

[synobal]

in other related news, several people known to have played EVE Online were found dead in their basements due to suicide

seriously, someone's gonna get reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal mad about this

Not really, it is a loss but like Elisa Randolphe said the loss of swagger is the big deal here not the RL dollars amount. Especially since none of them paid actual money for said ships. Also these alliances have a ton of money.

 

[BrotherRool]

So who actually won, and are all those little red dots players or are they missiles or similar NPC drones?

The red dots are a mixture of players and NPC drones. I'm guessing a lot of them are drones. In terms of who won, the tl,dr is the Clusterfuck Coalition and Rus (which is basically a hodge podge mix of all the Russian alliances in the game working together to try and take back the space which was traditionally 'theirs')

The longer answer is basically: The CFC.

The CFC and Rus won the battle pretty definitively. They now control the system being thought over, which means their enemies can't access the hundreds of capital ships they'd stored in the area, and they destroyed a lot more money and a lot more ships.

It's given them a morale boost (and a reputation for undeniable capital superiority) which probably means they can escalate any fight they choose in this war for quite some time. In someways unless N3 and Pandemic Legion can pull something out of the bag it's hard to see them not losing this war and all their space because of this. Pandemic Legion are famous for being the EVE's elite in terms of this kind of ship warfare, but they've kept that reputation and stayed alive by very carefully pulling out of any war that it looks like it might lose and they're willing to do the diplomatic dance. As a matter of fact just a week before this war they signed a deal which meant they'd never seriously threaten the CFC in a fight, and could only damage them through proxy wars like this. They could easily abandon their allies now.

And Rus are basically being exploited by the CFC to attack N3 because N3 was the only credible threat and equally sized coalition that could've beaten CFC in a fight. Because no-one believes the russians will stay together once they've achieved their objective it means they can be used by the CFC to overwhelm what could have been a dangerous enemy, and once the war is finished there's no organisation remaining which can go toe to toe with the CFC.

So in the long run, this may destroy every enemy CFC has in the game and leave them unopposed in EVE

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

This stuff about it having a real-world loss of $300k is misleading. ISK might have a real world value, but only those ships which were actually funded through real money ISK purchases will have a real-world loss. The rest is basically just the opportunity cost of not selling everything in ISK instead, which is highly unlikely to actually happen.

Don't get me wrong, EVE is a cool game to follow, but what was mostly lost were all the Doritos and energy drinks that went into building and training those ships.

 

[fix-the-spade]

So in the long run, this may destroy every enemy CFC has in the game and leave them unopposed in EVE

In the long run nobody stays unopposed in EVE online.

Something will happen, probably something unpredictable, since that's kind of EVE's stock in trade.

 

[ryukage_sama]

Such a battle would make Yang Wen-li cry.

 

[Arawn]

Wow, that's one of those epic battles you wish you were part of, but know you'd be the first one to get on the wrong side of a nuke. None the less I love the political aspect of the game, but not actually playing it. I tried it long ago, just couldn't get into it. Still stories like this really make me want to try again.

 

[the doom cannon]

They do make for lovely wallpapers if the screenshots are done right though ^_^

Speaking of wallpapers, hers a link to the gallery of 4k screens that were used in this thread
http://imgur.com/a/ikc3o#0

 

[delroland]

Theoretically, what would happen if CFC owned all of nullsec? How would it affect lowsec and empire space?

 

[BrotherRool]

So in the long run, this may destroy every enemy CFC has in the game and leave them unopposed in EVE

In the long run nobody stays unopposed in EVE online.

Something will happen, probably something unpredictable, since that's kind of EVE's stock in trade.

I'm actually still betting on Goonswarm. They've been so careful with their manoeuvring, they play the PR game all the time to an exhausting degree and I don't think anyone else in EVE has come even close to as skilled in making ideas dance. They cultivate their enemies to propogate their own myth (I would put money on there being EVErs suggesting this was actually a CFC orchestrated sabotage, or even Goonswarm bribing CCP to let the rent the slip). Better than that, they know just the right time to be generous and give people an offer they can't refuse. It's kept their coalition loyal and allowed their members to believe they aren't pets, it's kept Pandemic Legion in check.

Even more than that, they know how to turn people's self-interest to their own advantage even whilst people hate Goonswarm. The most impressive thing about this war is how the CFC have managed to arrange things so that the Russians, many of whom should hate the CFC, and friggin' Black Legion found themselves fighting a war on behalf of goon interests.

But most of all they know never to bite off too much, never to be completely overt, never make it seem like they're going to achieve everything. So they're never quite a big enough threat for the entire game to unite against them and they never have soul crushing failures because they never make it look like they're gambling the bank.

EVE is unpredictable, but the CFC are cautious. They've got a complete machine of logistics and PR and they know what they're doing. I'm holding out for them trying to take over the entirety of null-sec eventually.


Of course after that they'll have to break up, or they'd have no game to play. But it'd be worth it for the achievement

EDIT: For the record, I do think the CFC were at their most vulnerable immediately before this battle. They might be the best at politics, but Pandemic Legion are the second-best and the N3 coalition really did have a chance of crushing them. A few more key victories and some of the Russian alliances would have started to crack and then maybe the russians could have even been turned against the CFC. The momentum alone might have led to a serious threat on CFC homeland. But I think it's too long and too difficult for a new enemy to rise up after this before the CFC does what it wants to do. There's so much logistics and social history and organisation that goes into a successful coalition and I think it'd take years to become a credible threat

 

[DazBurger]

Firstly.
Daaaaaamn! I wish I liked to play EVE.


Secondly.
How about making it a huge debris-field, which over time forms a space-hulk, which will be a new fighting zone in Dust 514? Or a new pirate harbour?

 

[Soviet Heavy]

I'm actually still betting on Goonswarm. They've been so careful with their maneuvering, they play the PR game all the time to an exhausting degree and I don't think anyone else in EVE has come even close to as skilled in making ideas dance. They cultivate their enemies to propagate their own myth (I would put money on there being EVErs suggesting this was actually a CFC orchestrated sabotage, or even Goonswarm bribing CCP to let the rent the slip). Better than that, they know just the right time to be generous and give people an offer they can't refuse. It's kept their coalition loyal and allowed their members to believe they aren't pets, it's kept Pandemic Legion in check.

Even more than that, they know how to turn people's self-interest to their own advantage even whilst people hate Goonswarm. The most impressive thing about this war is how the CFC have managed to arrange things so that the Russians, many of whom should hate the CFC, and friggin' Black Legion found themselves fighting a war on behalf of goon interests.

While I'm not an Eve player, I can attest to the Goon alliance. I frequently keep watch on the Eve threads at Something Awful, and the amount of manipulation that some of those guys pull off can be astounding. Goonswarm is what happens when you let a bunch of nutjobs whose only goal is to troll the shit out of other gamers and play for laughs get really freaking powerful.