Just to point out something about this whole battle that may not be readily apparent...
The article quotes the figure that a titan (the largest type of ship in EVE Online ) costs the equivalent of $1500 to produce. But that doesn't mean you can just walk into EVE, plunk down $1500 to buy ISK, and walk off with a titan. Far from it.
A titan has to be assembled out of over 7,000 individual components, each of which must be bought or (more frequently) manufactured, and, if you build them, you have to have the raw materials and blueprints for them. Assuming you have all that, it would take a single player two and a half months just to assemble all the components.
Then you can start building the titan's hull, which takes 40 days. But it has to be built inside a Capital Ship Assembly Array (itself a very expensive structure), which has to be anchored with a structure in player-controlled space. And then that structure has to be defended, because if someone comes along and blows up your structure, you lose the titan hull that's under construction.
And even after you have a hull, that hull has to be fitted with appropriate modules, such as the Doomsday weapon, jump bridge, and any other modules that suit the pilot's fancy. That can easily run to as much cost as for the hull alone, especially if you fit the kind of modules that can only be found in-world by defeating high-ranking NPCs (or buying them on the market from someone else that has).
Hell, just learning to fly one of those monsters can take months of training time, and skill books that themselves carry price tags in the billions of ISK.
Only the largest and most powerful organizations in the game, alliances, can actually build or fly titans, and they tend to jealously guard them. That really underscores just how big a loss 75 of them is. Such losses cause tectonic shifts in the balance of power.
Another point to mention is that 1 titan loss is generally reported and talked about for weeks/months after the fact.
75 titans were destroyed in one engagement.
edit
Also, Titans are mostly around as a deterrent. Both sides are aware the other has them, but I can't think of many engagements (other than a single, usually drunk, titan pilot doing a "drive by" on an unsuspecting target) that escalate to the point of people "dropping" titans on grid.
But you can totally walk into EVE, drop down enough real money to buy gametime coupons that you can sell for enough ingame money to buy a character (on the offical forums) that can fly a titan and then buy an existing titan. You don't have to bootstrap your way to your spaceship with a pickaxe and a roll of duct tape.
> "Hell, just learning to fly one of those monsters can take months of training time, and skill books that themselves carry price tags in the billions of ISK."
Is this training for the player, or training for the player's character? The skill books I assume are for the player's character, but are the ships hard for the player themself to fly?
But that doesn't mean you can just walk into EVE, plunk down $1500 to buy ISK, and walk off with a titan.
I am completely ignorant of how EVE works. So you're saying it's not possible for someone in control of a Titan in Eve that is hard up for money enough to turn the keys over for $1,500 in real life money?
>Only the largest and most powerful organizations in the game, alliances, can actually build or fly titans, and they tend to jealously guard them. That really underscores just how big a loss 75 of them is. Such losses cause tectonic shifts in the balance of power.
Additionally, War in EVE is largely about sapping the opponents' morale - it could take months of fighting for hours every night to take a defended region, but if you get the enemy's pilots discouraged and not logging in or avoiding the fighting or even switching to another group then you can win a lot faster. This is called a "fail-cascade" and it's how GoonSwarm (the infamous lead alliance of CFC) won a lot of early wars - key wins cause players and leaders not to log in which makes future fights easier which causes a "rats fleeing a sinking ship" effect.
That's also why the unpaid bill was such a big deal - it would have taken a week or more of victories for CFC to otherwise capture the system.
That said, it's unlikely in this instance that the losers (Pandemic Legion and friends) are going to fall apart as a result - they've gone from "most Titans in the game" to "second or third most Titans in the game", and they've survived and rebuilt from considerably worse losses before - both GoonSwarm and Pandemic Legion have at various points lost everything and been down to a few hundred demoralized pilots but clawed their way back up.
So you would say $1,500 + 3,4 months building + 3,4 months training + modules + protection?
Assuming this guys are all dev. at $4000 month (easy premise!). I would say $1,500 + $12,000 + $12,000 + $1,500 (let's say it's modules are equal to the hull) + $10,000 (arbitrary for buying protection)
it's a sign of the awesomeness of our times that we create such profound and significant fantasies in real time, and that people who've never played Eve (me) can read about this and be enthralled.
There's also a big trend of Let's Play videos -- people watching other people play video games on YouTube. Don't have time/money/patience/skills to play GTA V? Just watch someone else play it, start to finish.
Eve has always been about the fascinating politics and stories that come out of them. Most of what kept me playing for years was the political intrigue and being a part of it.
IMHO this is beginning to rival professional sports tournaments in every way possible. The viewer count (couple hundred thousand) might not me a lot compared to football, but is still pretty significant :)
Why would you use a URL shortener for reddit links? If you don't like the long ones (don't know why you'd care, but..) you can use reddit's short links.
/me hates url shorteners except for exceptional circumstances and feels they miss the entire purpose of a link
Reread the article. His "all-in" is referring to N3PLs move of bringing in their supercaps/titans.
> A big reason N3 has been able to throw its weight around recently is its enormous fleet of titans and super capital ships. When faced with its B-R5RB problem, N3 decided to bring out the Wrecking Ball, the pet name of its extremely powerful fleet. Manny and N3 were hoping CFC would blink.
then
> "It's like shoving all-in in poker," said Gianturco. "You're shoving all your chips into the middle of the table and hoping the other guy doesn't have better cards than you. Most of the time, the other guy will fold. Except in this case, we came across over the top and took all their shit away."
Weird simulation. You own a starship, have shown to be willing to use it in battle, and somehow lose it to the police once you are behind one payment, even if, presumably, you are guarding it at that moment?
Do these things come with a kill switch that the government can operate? Even if it does, how does the government take control of the ship? Remote control?
Also, if this game has one faction controlling half the universe, isn't the game effectively over, just like Monopoly often is long over before the last losing player gets eliminated?
I am not currently playing EVE and never played it much, so I may be wrong, but:
- The bill that went unpaid wasn't for a spaceship, it was for the right to control the area (B-R5RB). There's no particular explanation in the game, but the fee is relatively small and serves to make "open" the default system state. It's even sillier as this took place in 'null sec,' where the central government is supposed to be powerless. However, a game with the opportunity for mistakes is more interesting than the alternative, so you have sov payments.
- There have been several large alliances that nominally controlled most of the game's territory (the first was BoB, or band of brothers). The day-to-day mechanics are much more complex than a map shows (as in real life). The fact that your alliance "owns" a system does not mean _that_ much, and managing a large empire quickly becomes a command & control nightmare. Alliances have to repeatedly choose how to respond to various threats, thieves and internal power struggles, all while keeping the players with the keys to the kingdom happy. Large alliances have been brought down by high ranking members stealing large sums of money and abandoning systems for more money or our of boredom. Eventually, the large alliance makes a big mistake (like this case) and the balance of power shifts.
To clear up your points: the missed payment in question was not for a single starship but for the structure that designates control over a system. Simplified, the mechanics are such that so long as this structure exists taking the system is a difficult affair that favors the defender (structures have huge amounts of hp and then a invulnerability timer that gives defenders hours to realize they are being attacked and mount a retaliation). However, fail to put the resources into it and the time consuming step of removing sovereignty from a system is removed and the battle is more equal for both parties.
The way EvE is structured lends itself to shifts in the balance of power. Just because one faction is on top today doesn't mean they will hold their position indefinitely. The victors here, for example, come from much humbler roots and, when they entered the game, played a crucial part is annihilating the current ruling power.
The article said that the payment was for a star system, not a starship.
I'm not an EVE player and don't know much about how it works, but I'm guessing that it's something like a starship is your personal property, but a star system is considered "community" property. Hence, you have to pay tax for "sovereignty", or exclusive rights, to a system.
Every story I've seen said this was a 'bug'. How do we know there wasn't a spy who did this deliberately? It's hard for an outsider to tell, but some of the factors behind this appear to be a bit too convenient.
Unless you postulate a spy within the game company, I don't see how a payment that wasn't made even though multiple people checked it and thought it had been made could be the work of a spy.
Yup. BitCoin is actually the currency, but companies conducting banking operations with it are subject to financial regulation of banks. Look at BitInstant. Dudes didn't follow financial regulations written for traditional currencies when conducting transactions, so Charlie Shrem and Robert Faiella got arrested.
Iceland (where CCP is) treats Bitcoin as a foreign currency, actually. Which the means they've outlawed buying/selling BTC entirely, since all foreign currencies are restricted under the capital controls.
A crypto currency isn't a bank, but people that exchange crypto-currencies for money and back again are subject to financial regulations in most countries. For example, in the US I don't think that they would be considered 'banks,' but they would still be subject to Federal regulations. The point being that if you can convert back and forth you can use it as a way to launder money, so the government forces the exchange to have some sort of 'know your client' procedures in place.
If you're not interested, don't read it. If you really think it shouldn't be on HN, flag it. Four other people feeling the same way will send it careening off the front page.
The least appropriate thing to do is come into the comments and bitch about how HN is turning into x.
It depends on what you expect to find on and get out of this site, I suppose.
If you're looking for "Hacker News", you're here. It's still here. It's still stuff that interests hackers and techies in general. Maybe I'm not a "real hacker", but both articles you've highlighted (MS CEO and EVE) are interesting to me.
If you're looking for "Startup News", I don't really know what to tell you. Perhaps that's what this place once was (and a lot of it still does cater in that direction), but there's a lot more interesting stuff out there than just that.
[+] [-] erbo|12 years ago|reply
The article quotes the figure that a titan (the largest type of ship in EVE Online ) costs the equivalent of $1500 to produce. But that doesn't mean you can just walk into EVE, plunk down $1500 to buy ISK, and walk off with a titan. Far from it.
A titan has to be assembled out of over 7,000 individual components, each of which must be bought or (more frequently) manufactured, and, if you build them, you have to have the raw materials and blueprints for them. Assuming you have all that, it would take a single player two and a half months just to assemble all the components.
Then you can start building the titan's hull, which takes 40 days. But it has to be built inside a Capital Ship Assembly Array (itself a very expensive structure), which has to be anchored with a structure in player-controlled space. And then that structure has to be defended, because if someone comes along and blows up your structure, you lose the titan hull that's under construction.
And even after you have a hull, that hull has to be fitted with appropriate modules, such as the Doomsday weapon, jump bridge, and any other modules that suit the pilot's fancy. That can easily run to as much cost as for the hull alone, especially if you fit the kind of modules that can only be found in-world by defeating high-ranking NPCs (or buying them on the market from someone else that has).
Hell, just learning to fly one of those monsters can take months of training time, and skill books that themselves carry price tags in the billions of ISK.
Only the largest and most powerful organizations in the game, alliances, can actually build or fly titans, and they tend to jealously guard them. That really underscores just how big a loss 75 of them is. Such losses cause tectonic shifts in the balance of power.
[+] [-] 650REDHAIR|12 years ago|reply
75 titans were destroyed in one engagement.
edit
Also, Titans are mostly around as a deterrent. Both sides are aware the other has them, but I can't think of many engagements (other than a single, usually drunk, titan pilot doing a "drive by" on an unsuspecting target) that escalate to the point of people "dropping" titans on grid.
[+] [-] ben0x539|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Crito|12 years ago|reply
Is this training for the player, or training for the player's character? The skill books I assume are for the player's character, but are the ships hard for the player themself to fly?
[+] [-] 300bps|12 years ago|reply
I am completely ignorant of how EVE works. So you're saying it's not possible for someone in control of a Titan in Eve that is hard up for money enough to turn the keys over for $1,500 in real life money?
[+] [-] ZachPruckowski|12 years ago|reply
Additionally, War in EVE is largely about sapping the opponents' morale - it could take months of fighting for hours every night to take a defended region, but if you get the enemy's pilots discouraged and not logging in or avoiding the fighting or even switching to another group then you can win a lot faster. This is called a "fail-cascade" and it's how GoonSwarm (the infamous lead alliance of CFC) won a lot of early wars - key wins cause players and leaders not to log in which makes future fights easier which causes a "rats fleeing a sinking ship" effect.
That's also why the unpaid bill was such a big deal - it would have taken a week or more of victories for CFC to otherwise capture the system.
That said, it's unlikely in this instance that the losers (Pandemic Legion and friends) are going to fall apart as a result - they've gone from "most Titans in the game" to "second or third most Titans in the game", and they've survived and rebuilt from considerably worse losses before - both GoonSwarm and Pandemic Legion have at various points lost everything and been down to a few hundred demoralized pilots but clawed their way back up.
[+] [-] hartator|12 years ago|reply
Assuming this guys are all dev. at $4000 month (easy premise!). I would say $1,500 + $12,000 + $12,000 + $1,500 (let's say it's modules are equal to the hull) + $10,000 (arbitrary for buying protection)
$37,000? That's crazy! :)
[+] [-] lifeformed|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_spothawk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exhilaration|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tumes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrocat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psionski|12 years ago|reply
This is the crowd - http://cdn0.sbnation.com/assets/3517059/league_of_legends_wo...
IMHO this is beginning to rival professional sports tournaments in every way possible. The viewer count (couple hundred thousand) might not me a lot compared to football, but is still pretty significant :)
[+] [-] transfire|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 650REDHAIR|12 years ago|reply
It was another "FC" (fleet commander) that decided to go "all in". Here are a couple of Reddit AMAs with the commanders from either side.
http://bit.ly/1jcPJfp
http://bit.ly/1c0M2Bq
[+] [-] jimktrains2|12 years ago|reply
/me hates url shorteners except for exceptional circumstances and feels they miss the entire purpose of a link
[+] [-] swang|12 years ago|reply
> A big reason N3 has been able to throw its weight around recently is its enormous fleet of titans and super capital ships. When faced with its B-R5RB problem, N3 decided to bring out the Wrecking Ball, the pet name of its extremely powerful fleet. Manny and N3 were hoping CFC would blink.
then
> "It's like shoving all-in in poker," said Gianturco. "You're shoving all your chips into the middle of the table and hoping the other guy doesn't have better cards than you. Most of the time, the other guy will fold. Except in this case, we came across over the top and took all their shit away."
[+] [-] NDizzle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyrina|12 years ago|reply
In the same way that SC2/LoL is a bit like reading about sports
[+] [-] Someone|12 years ago|reply
Do these things come with a kill switch that the government can operate? Even if it does, how does the government take control of the ship? Remote control?
Also, if this game has one faction controlling half the universe, isn't the game effectively over, just like Monopoly often is long over before the last losing player gets eliminated?
[+] [-] aeturnum|12 years ago|reply
- The bill that went unpaid wasn't for a spaceship, it was for the right to control the area (B-R5RB). There's no particular explanation in the game, but the fee is relatively small and serves to make "open" the default system state. It's even sillier as this took place in 'null sec,' where the central government is supposed to be powerless. However, a game with the opportunity for mistakes is more interesting than the alternative, so you have sov payments.
- There have been several large alliances that nominally controlled most of the game's territory (the first was BoB, or band of brothers). The day-to-day mechanics are much more complex than a map shows (as in real life). The fact that your alliance "owns" a system does not mean _that_ much, and managing a large empire quickly becomes a command & control nightmare. Alliances have to repeatedly choose how to respond to various threats, thieves and internal power struggles, all while keeping the players with the keys to the kingdom happy. Large alliances have been brought down by high ranking members stealing large sums of money and abandoning systems for more money or our of boredom. Eventually, the large alliance makes a big mistake (like this case) and the balance of power shifts.
[+] [-] lordCarbonFiber|12 years ago|reply
The way EvE is structured lends itself to shifts in the balance of power. Just because one faction is on top today doesn't mean they will hold their position indefinitely. The victors here, for example, come from much humbler roots and, when they entered the game, played a crucial part is annihilating the current ruling power.
[+] [-] jordan0day|12 years ago|reply
I'm not an EVE player and don't know much about how it works, but I'm guessing that it's something like a starship is your personal property, but a star system is considered "community" property. Hence, you have to pay tax for "sovereignty", or exclusive rights, to a system.
[+] [-] Natsu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
um... isn't every crypto-currency a bank then?
[+] [-] forgottenpass|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_yy2Di|12 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Bitcoin#Icelan...
[+] [-] pyre|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cajuntrep|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosser|12 years ago|reply
“They put their dick on the table, and we chopped it off,” said Gianturco.
[+] [-] pyrocat|12 years ago|reply
a bit longer and more in-depth, but gives a great sense of scale.
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tumes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snide|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yincrash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukuriant|12 years ago|reply
It could have equally been
"xD"
"lol"
And I would consider those among many others to be laughter.
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthracis417|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] redthrowaway|12 years ago|reply
The least appropriate thing to do is come into the comments and bitch about how HN is turning into x.
[+] [-] BlackDeath3|12 years ago|reply
If you're looking for "Hacker News", you're here. It's still here. It's still stuff that interests hackers and techies in general. Maybe I'm not a "real hacker", but both articles you've highlighted (MS CEO and EVE) are interesting to me.
If you're looking for "Startup News", I don't really know what to tell you. Perhaps that's what this place once was (and a lot of it still does cater in that direction), but there's a lot more interesting stuff out there than just that.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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