Think your landlord is tough? The largest ever conflict between players has erupted in EVE Online and is estimated to have cost thousands of dollars in lost ships, including over 70 Titans.
Someone forgot to pay rent. A player corporation let their station rent lapse which soon led to a sector becoming ‘available’, and so a whole lot of pew-pew ensued.
This sector - B-R5RB - was EVE corp Nulli Secunda’s home where they stored a lot of their assets. Once the territory was declared ‘unowned’ a rival corp moved in.
Nulli gathered their forces to retake the station only to find the offending corp, RUS, was joined by another much larger group, Clusterf*ck Coalition. A massive battle erupted with over 70 Titan-class vessels being destroyed throughout the chaos. One ship alone - the Kan’s Erebus - is worth 222 billion ISK, which equates to $5,500.
“As vengeance for Asakai goes, it’s somewhat ironic; our forces lost three Titans and seven supercarriers last year in Asakai, and lost the battle,” Clusterf*ck’s The Mittani told Polygon. “This year we’ve killed 40+ hostile Titans and we have seven more hours of killing before downtime.”
So far over 9,628,129,832,493 ISK is said to have been lost in the fighting as over 4,286 exploded ships have been detected. That’s roughly $284,500 USD in losses.
“We’ve already won the fight, what remains is just killing work,” added The Mittani. “When someone breaks and tries to run from the field it becomes a rout. They’ve lost the ability to kill any more of our Titans and we’re still killing theirs, as their force quality has degraded. So this is mop-up as they try to extract.”
This opportunistic strike comes on the anniversary of the Battle of Asakai, which at the time was considered the largest EVE Online battle ever recorded in the MMO’s history. That all started when a single pilot accidentally jumped into enemy corporate space and things escalated exponentially.
Spectacular images of the battle are available here.
EVE Online creator CCP Games has responded to the massive ruckus:
”This sort of conflict is what science fiction warned us about: a massive space conflict made of thousands of people around the globe fighting in pitched battle for hours in desperate attempts to destroy each other while tens of thousands of people watch on from afar because the outcome truly means something to them.”
”It dwarfs any other online PVP fight in terms of scale and sheer destruction. And while it was only one battle of a month’s long war that’s raged across the universe, it was as bloody as can be and oh so satisfying, even to some degree to the losing side.”
”These ‘butterfly effect’ moments are why we make the game the way we do - where actions of players drive the experience from a humble, initial unpaid sovereignty bill through the frenzied first assault, upon waves of propaganda, beneath the burning touch of doomsday weapons, under marathon fleet commanding and back out again to a starfield littered with wrecks,” continued the elated developer.
”It’s a good day to be an Eve player, or to take that first step from peeking in from the outside to undocking your first ship.”
