Eve-Online player loses a $9000 digital spaceship

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/07/09/eve-online-player-loses-a-spaceship-worth-approximately-9000/

by iwwr • 13 years ago

74 76 13 years ago

zaroth• 13 years ago

Tried to watch the video of the battle, couldn't understand a thing that was happening. MMORPG has seriously advanced since the last time I played ;-)

udp• 13 years ago

Why do they seem to repeat everything they say? I can't work out if it's automated or not.

cdash• 13 years ago

They are giving commands to possibly hundreds of people that might not speak english as a native language. In addition sometimes there is more than one voice talking at the same time and their mic might not exactly be clear. Also, many times they are calling a persons name out and then people have to remember the name and search for it through a list of hundreds of other names. It's repeated so they don't have to remember the name.

nemof• 13 years ago

having done 40 man raiding in wow, you need to repeat a helluva lot of commands constantly to keep people on their toes. similarly so with pvp, but that's more about making sure your partners are always on top of what's going on. things get insanely hectic.

No it's still not ok to stand in the fire. DONT STAND IN THE FIRE!

Luyt• 13 years ago

I played EVE for a few months, just to try it out, and I noticed this too. I played EVE for a few months, just to try it out, and I noticed this too. I played EVE for a few months, just to try it out, and I noticed this too. The endless repeating was one of the things that put me off eventually. The endless repeating was one of the things that put me off eventually. The endless repeating was one of the things that put me off eventually. I also play WoW and we use mumble there too, and we seem to get pretty good along without repeating everything three times. I also play WoW and we use mumble there too, and we seem to get pretty good along without repeating everything three times. I also play WoW and we use mumble there too, and we seem to get pretty good along without repeating everything three times. Maybe it's part of the EVE culture. Maybe it's part of the EVE culture. Maybe it's part of the EVE culture.

contingencies• 13 years ago

If a spaceship is eviscerated in virtual space, but nobody cares, was anything really eviscerated?

yvdriess• 13 years ago

If you lose $9000 in poker, I would not care, but you and the people at the table certainly would.

gambiting2• 13 years ago

Did other players of Eve gain $9000-worth of resources as a result of destroying that ship? Genuine question, never played that game.

arnarbi• 13 years ago

If somebody cared enough to be willing to give $9000 for said virtual spaceship, then yes you could consider that money lost.

nolok• 13 years ago

Nobody was willing to give $9000 for it. That number is the value of the in-game price in ISK, then converted to $. It's not even a good ship, only a rare and thus expensive one in game's terms.

fu9ar2• 13 years ago

Historical note: the Mittani has been Goonfleet's spymaster and head of black ops since 2006 or so.

redthrowaway• 13 years ago

He's been their CEO for years. Mittens is probably the single most powerful person in the game.

fu9ar2• 13 years ago

That shows how long I've been out... I played off and on as Goonfleet combat pilot until the culmination of the B.O.B. war.

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

I'd love to play Eve, because it seems like a pretty intense sort of game but it also seems like you need to really commit a lot of time and resources to it. So instead I live vicariously through battle reports like this.

SeanDav• 13 years ago

I played EVE intensely for a few months, fairly soon after the game came out. I stopped because it is not a game you can succeed at without being part of a corp. Effectively you have a "boss" in game that tells you what you need to do.

If you have plenty of free time and don't mind taking orders as to what you should do in the game and with your free time - then this is the game for you. Seriously, it is a great game but not for solo players.

You better be a "company man" if you want to get ahead in EVE.

tome• 13 years ago

Is it really not at all possible to be a sort of lone-ranger?

loup-vaillant• 13 years ago

So, while EVE looks like space opera on the surface, it's actually cyberpunk. Hmm…

nazka3• 13 years ago

Former player here, 7y. Yes, you need at least to be able to spend your sunday night, and one or two nights during the week. It is the minimum in the majority of alliances and even if you play alone you will need the half of this time to earn money.

When you start to roam there is "no way" to stop to play when you want. Because several rules of gameplay and because you will be in enemy territory, you will have to stay with your mates until the Fleet Commander decides to go back in your HQ. So you need to stay 4h and be flexible with that (5h, sometimes 6h).

It is one reason of the main reasons I quit EVE. Not because you need to spend all these hours, but because sometimes you can roam for hours and don't be able to find a fleet to fight and sometimes you need to run away because you are on the road of the main army blob of a main alliance. So you spend hours without any fun..

jeswin2• 13 years ago

Does anyone know which tracks are being played in the bg http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=G5Cph...

Sorry, not exactly on topic. I couldn't find this info among comments. Recommendations appreciated too.

Edit: Just messaged the creator. Will post if I hear back.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Why not just send a message to the video creator through Youtube?

talkingquickly• 13 years ago

Please do, I'm also curious

willyt• 13 years ago

http://www.shazam.com

arscan2• 13 years ago

According to the description in youtube:

  Shady Business - Mr. Nagasaki
  PrototypeRaptor - Drive Hard
  Flo Rida - I Cry

jeswin2• 13 years ago

Are you referring to the same video? I can't see it in the description. The video I posted isn't the one from the article.

llgrrl_2• 13 years ago

9000 USD is OK. When you get OVER 9000, it's ridiculous.

rschmitty2• 13 years ago

I've never watched an EVE battle before... was anyone else expecting a battle like in Star Wars?

I dunno, felt kinda weird, all zoomed out, no aiming, just a big coordinated zerg ball

Tuna-Fish3• 13 years ago

Eve is a point&click MMORPG. To pilot a ship you basically activate modules when you need to and choose where to fly to and what to shoot at from a list.

In practice, it's more exiting than it sounds, but not by much. The game is about dealing with other people, trying to work together for some common goal, or trying to clean them out, and never knowing what the other side is up to.

gambiting2• 13 years ago

Well, one could argue that Star Wars-like battles are completely unrealistic, because in the future aiming systems will become so good that it will be nearly impossible to miss, so a battle might as well take place like it does in Eve, where the only thing that counts is the strength of your weapons vs. strength of their shields. It's not like you can do a quick evasive maneuver in a super carrier like that - although I am pretty sure that fighter battles still have them moving around since it's on a much smaller scale.

rschmitty2• 13 years ago

Very true, however would we want to watch Star Wars with no human element? Why are there pilots at all, should just be a bunch of R2D2s built into drone ships :P

I feel the same about playing a game, I want to have some influence besides my stat column being bigger.

Obviously the game must be fun to get the kind of following it has, I guess I was just expecting something else.

Shish2k3• 13 years ago

You /can/ zoom in, and turn off the UI to just see spaceships in space blowing each other up, and it is beautiful. However, the spreadsheet view with zoomed out camera is more efficient for actually getting things done, which is why all the serious players in serious battles do that.

(It would be really nice if some of the big alliances could spare one guy to be dedicated cameraman when landmark events happen, but I'm not aware of anyone doing that :P)

alex_c2• 13 years ago

They often do, it makes for great material for propaganda videos. It's easier to do for pre-planned battles though, and/or they may have felt they didn't want to spare any ships and risk sacrificing firepower. Or most likely just nobody thought of it.

Udo5• 13 years ago

I never understood the allure of having a real-money economy (or something that is closely tied to real money) in a game. On that note, many MMOs seem to be structured like actual work places, complete with command hierarchies, politics and territory. This must be immensely appealing to a lot of people, but it's pretty far removed from my understanding of a fun pastime.

But once you're past that, does it really make a difference if that item is worth $90 or $9000? There will always be really rich and influential players around and I'm sure it's not that big of a deal to them. After all, if there was no risk of losing that item, they wouldn't have bought it in the first place. In a real-money game, the material worth of an item is a direct measure of what's at stake, and if the stakes aren't high people aren't having fun.

megablast• 13 years ago

Did you ever play old arcade games? The fact that you had to spend money made playing the game more exciting, you actually had something to lose. I guess it is the same in these games.

Udo5• 13 years ago

As you might guess, I was never into arcade games. They just never made sense to me when I could play much better games at home or at friends' places. Then again, maybe I just missed the height of the arcade wave based on timing.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Ever played poker? Playing with and without real money are two completely different games. As long as we aren't talking scummy DLC tactics like Zynga's, I think it's a great idea, but it's obviously only something skilled developers should use.

Udo5• 13 years ago

I'm not complaining these games exist, I just don't see the appeal. It's not a critique, just an observation. But to people who are into this whole "buying excitement linearly by the dollar" thing the occasional loss of a $9000 spaceship should not be that shocking.

berntb• 13 years ago

EVE I can see myself playing enough to destroy my life, money or no money. It scares me. Poker is a different kind of money game.

Poker seems fascinating, but the problem is the money.

If poker wasn't about money, the ideal players to play with are a bit better than me. Since it is about money, the ideal players to play with are overconfident drunks/halfwits with money. Just not fun.

socillion2• 13 years ago

Any sufficiently popular online game is closely tied to real money, it doesn't matter whether the vendor officially endorses it - or even actively tries to stamp it out.

The sensationalist dollar amounts seem to be the main reason that these stories get read so widely. Someone could have bought it for that amount, or maybe he spent thousands of hours accumulating the resources in game and bought the ship because it was one out of 3 in existence. Just because you can put a price tag on it doesn't mean the player saw it as losing that much real money.

"Don't fly it if you don't want to lose it" is common advice among EVE players.

DanBC• 13 years ago

or maybe he spent thousands of hours

Wouldn't that make it worth much more than $9,000?

dedward2• 13 years ago

It's not closely tied to real money; not by design. That's a side effect, due to the relative stability of the in-game currency, and the ability to convert in-game currency into in-game stuff, and the number of players. This creates a real-world demand for in-game stuff, and bingo, you have a market.

cheald2• 13 years ago

Mumble recording after the event: https://soundcloud.com/marxismftw/mumble-07-07-18-15-42-mumb...

That is some quality rage right there.

prawks• 13 years ago

If there was ever a time to say it, it's now:

video games.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

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That clip is popular.

dfc4• 13 years ago

Elsewhere in this thread I said that Eve was so different from CoD that its hard to believe they are in the same category of leisure activities. However, I immediately felt right at home when I heard that the level of rage. Can I bother you for a couple of quick questions:

Around 5:10 into the mumble recording someone says "the cougars posting is so bad i cant even read this." Do you know what the post is that he is referring to?

In a discussion of the leak someone wrote:

"6) I didn't leak the sound cloud to the eve press. My laptop barely is able to run multiple Eve clients let alone fraps and record soundclouds are the like."

What is/are "fraps"? And why would one player need to run more than one Eve client?

lifeformed• 13 years ago

Fraps is screencap software.

BigKRex• 13 years ago

the cougars posting is so bad i cant even read this

He's talking about kugutsumen.com, an Eve meta-gaming/trolling forum.

What is/are "fraps"?

video capture software

And why would one player need to run more than one Eve client?

Many, if not most, Eve players multibox more than one account at a time (the average number of accounts/person is probably ~2). Especially people who own supercarriers (such as the focus of the article), as those ships can never dock, thus one for all intents and purposes needs another character to fly other ships.

Other common uses for multiple accounts are dedicated support characters (haulers, boosters, healers, etc.) and mining fleets (some people will run dozens at once, crazy I know).

rcamera• 13 years ago

Some background facts, there is only 3 of those ships in-game so far (iirc). That one belonged to the best mercenary alliance in-game, Pandemic Legion (PL for short), which are very notorious for having the best and largest spying network in-game (EVE metagaming is pretty unique), some of the best players and are not only one of the richest alliances, but one that has many of the largest ships in-game.

That guy, with a few other corporation mates, were trying to hunt some enemies who were in expensive ships (not a 9k dollars ship though), while there was an entire fleet from Black Legion, another alliance, trying to hunt that guy.

There are two fun facts to all of this... Pandemic Legion has 12 spies in Black Legion, and many of the people online during that time in PL knew that Black Legion were trying to hunt something (they just didn't know what). That guy lost his very expensive ship because he didn't make use of the spy network PL has, by not asking people if there was anyone trying to hunt him. The second fun fact is that the commander of the fleet that guy in the expensive ship was in, was actually a spy for Black Legion! He commanded the fleet right into a death trap. EVE metagaming is pretty unique.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Here's what I don't follow... Did he lose a spaceship worth $9000, or did he actually pay $9000 for it?

Eve-Online player loses a $9000 digital spaceship

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