Eve-Online player loses a $9000 digital spaceship | Hacker News Reader

Eve-Online player loses a $9000 digital spaceship

forbes.com

74 pointsiwwr76 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

I've managed it quite happily. I would say that you need to be part of a group in order to claim territory and keep it defended 24/7, but there are plenty of other things to do than claim territory.

Also, "be alone" and "be a follower" aren't the only options, there's also plenty of room for leaders (well, plenty of opportunity for a leader to make room for themselves and their followers :P).

A lot of people go solo. They mine, they work in the markets, they work as couriers, they roam around the universe and kill other people's ships to sell for scraps. It's a sandbox mmo, you can do whatever you like.

It does hinder your ability to participate in big battles like this and money making will be slower. But some people don't mind since they just want to be independent.

So if I had the inclination to live out a Cowboy Bebop fantasy, that would be completely possible?

http://www.eveonline.com/sandbox/bounty-hunter/

Well, unless you're hunting NPCs (which is pretty boring), bounty hunting is not a reliable source of income.

But you can run a small or even solo pirate operation, preying on lone travelers. Or run goods to dangerous markets in stealth transport ships. Or in a much much larger, much more expensive jump transport ship (just don't get ambushed!). Or start a manufacturing operation. Or for the truly hardcore (and really best done in small groups) go make a living in a wormhole for a month or two.

There are nearly countless things you can do solo or with a small group. The easiest way is to be part of a large alliance and have "safe" space to operate from - this does not, generally, mean you have to follow orders. Or you can operate in neutral space - everyone you see is a potential friend or enemy (more likely enemy). Or you can go deep into enemy space and play cat and mouse with an entire alliance for hours or days.

So... yes, I guess?

A big part of the best PvPers are lone-rangers. It is possible to do it, and when you start to be one of these you are like a god in the system. I remembered a guy named Ephemeron, he had two accounts with two incredible ships. They were the Formula 1 of Eve online, costing more than a fleet of 20 pilots, each. When he entered in a system, it was like Darth Maul was here. Awesomely fitted, awesomely skilled. Everyone wanted to kill him to harvest his items and also to fight him because he was a master in PvP. But at the end everyone died every time. His main vessels had an mean of 500 ships destroyed before he lost them... Famous across a good 1/4 of Eve.

So yes it's possible and it's even one of the most fun part of Eve.

Why couldn't an organized fleet from one of the big alliances just kill a lone ranger as soon as they gained the slightest notoriety?

When you are a lone ranger, PvP is 4 times harder. In fleet it is easy to warp out when you start to be the current target, but when you are alone you are the target, if you do a mistake they will catch you and the only solution will be to fight to the death or to know several technics to disengage. You gain a lot of experience and it's a huge advantage to defeat your enemy. You will learn by yourself which ship should be killed first, how to outmaneuver your enemies, how to devise them, etc. Many pilots have an excellent k/d ratio but they can't compete against a lone ranger even with a lone ranger with a "bad ratio".

So he had two Formula 1 but the real key to his success was because he knew each law of the world and he was a master when he fought. It is one of the best point of Eve, you can have a Formula 1 but if you don't have the experience to use it, you will die at the first engagement. And at the same time, when you are excellent you can engage enemies even by being outnumbered by 10, and this is awesome.

(Another key point on Eve is: each ship have different size with different role. It is like to have catapult to greek titan in World of Warcraft. And even with one of most hardest task in any games, Eve stays balanced and coherent for a 800 vs 800 as well as a 1 vs 1 with different tactics at each size)

There are many many things to know in Eve. For instance, only after 4 years I could say I started to see the whole thing in PvP. If you want to see "Hackers" in Eve at fleet level, you have all the Rooks and Kings videos. [1][2] For lone rangers' videos, you have the Garmonation series, or Eve is Easy's video [3], and Darkness' videos with the Dark Perspective 3 and 4. [4]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwql_Sp0QG8

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYe_4vHzgE

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcRAx-uwk40

[4] http://dl.eve-files.com/media/0904/Dark_Perspective_4_final....

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

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..

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 ;-)

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

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.

People are also drunk / sleep deprived / have an attention span of a goldfish, or doing several things at once so you might miss who to shoot, where to point your spaceship et c unless it's repeated. I don't know if this is normal for Black Legion's voice chat, but when killing high-value targets the commander can sometimes get riled up over potentially missing the kill.

He was repeating every small phrase three times though, it was hard to tell if it was automated or habit.

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!

Oh man, that brings back memories. "Im in fire? WHAT? (dies)"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"I'm not complaining these games exist...But to people who are into this whole 'buying excitement linearly by the dollar' thing"

I realize you said that this was "not a critique" but most of your comments, especially this little gem, come off _very condescending_. When you preface your comment with "I'm not complaining that these games exist" you have to realize that what follows is a critique? Similarly when I hear someone start off a sentence with "I'm not racist but" I know some ignorant shit is about to be said.

As far as video games go, Eve is so different than the kind I enjoy (CoD/BF) that it is hard to believe they are in the same category of leisure activities. Half the reason I watched as much of the replay as I did was that I was hoping someone was going to yell "LEROY JENKINS!" But I also watched as much as I did because it is interesting to see people (that are very different than me) playing a game they deeply enjoy.

Can I ever imagine playing Eve? Not a chance. But that does not mean I am going to try and pass my condescending passive aggressive bullshit critique off as a rational analysis of why people should not get emotionally invested in their hobbies. As far as I can tell there is nothing "linear" about playing Eve.

I have to imagine that if you put your favorite hobby on display everyone could come up with equally witty ways of demeaning your personal choices/preferences.

I didn't realize this, no. And it wasn't meant like that.

> I'm suspicious of people with mixed case usernames on HN.

Ah, I see.

I might as well ask. What did you mean when you said "buying excitement linearly" ?

Might as well answer.

There are a lot of games where you're paying a fixed price or at least a comparatively minor contribution that isn't necessarily tied to the level of enjoyment or participation you get from it. In these cases, you're expending the monetary equivalent of activation energy and then the game is basically whatever you make of it.

At the other end of the spectrum are games where you have to make an ongoing investment to get something out of the game that matches this investment with a linear factor or worse. Online Poker would probably be an example, but it lacks the social pressure exerted by some MMOs, games where you actually feel you're going to a kind of workplace and where real money is at stake constantly (which in turn is a large part of the players' motivation to achieve things).

Diablo III made me feel this way, for instance, it's more a free market simulation than an action RPG. Eve would be in that category, too. Many other MMOs either discourage trading for money and/or are making time and effort the primary player currency. Contrast this with games where real money is closely coupled with any kind of high-level content.

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.

Money isn't the problem, it's the entire reason the game is so engaging.

If poker wasn't about money it would be a different game. There has to be an element of risk otherwise decisions do not have any consequences. Without consequences there is no incentive to attempt to play in an optimal manner.

The problem is a player's aversion to risk and fear of loss, both of which are important psychological elements when playing the game.

EVE: Very true. It's a game that's entirely possible to get involved in to a level that is a different kind of obsessed than, say, WOW.

EVE is all about people, interaction, politics, planning. WOW Raids, however complex thy get at higher levels, just can't ever compare. I've started, and stopped playing, many times, because of it.

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.

> or maybe he spent thousands of hours

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

Very possible, but people aren't perfectly logical and are unlikely to consider the opportunity costs of having fun.

If the thousands of hours came from time that could otherwise be billable. If you're the sort of person that's never going to sell your Saturday, maybe not.

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.

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

That is some quality rage right there.

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

video games.

>{"errors":[{"error_message":"429-TooManyRequests"}]}

That clip is popular.

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?

Fraps is screencap software.

> 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).

Many thanks. Can I bother you with one last question:

Around 1:20 into the replay a little cat picture comes up that says "Get Dunked." Is that the Eve equivalent of a tea bagging? Can someone explain the significance of what proceeded the Eve Bagging?

Nah, it's just a "bam, you got owned" image macro. The GIF plays right as the Revenant is destroyed.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Generally not. You can salvage wrecks of ships to regain some cost (a very small fraction of the metals used to manufacture them). Oh and if the ship is carrying cargo then you can sometimes snatch up what's left, but there's about a 50% chance I think of each item that a ship is carrying being blow to bits.

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

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.

I'm confused? If someone is willing to give "$9000 worth of ISK" for it, then it follows that someone is willing to give $9000 for it.

$ -> ISK is a one-way conversion, which creates a lot of debate over the definition of "worth". I'm not enough of an economist to have any idea over which definition is right :P

There are unsanctioned (might get you banned) ways to convert ISK to $. The unofficial rate is of course much lower because of the risk, but even counting that way, the Revenant was worth $3k.

No. I think what he meant was that let's say people are willing to trade X ISK or whaever it's called for 1 USD, and the spaceship is 9000X ISK therefore it might cost 9000 USD.

The conversion/trade I suppose doesn't always work that way.

The game devs sell game time for real cash. When you buy some, you get an in-game item called "PLEX", which you can either convert to 30 days of playing, or, sell for anyone in the game in the in-game market for in-game currency, at whatever price you both agree to. This creates a floating exchange rate from $ to ISK, by which count the Revenant was $9K. However, since the conversion is one way, it's questioned whether this means the ship can be said to be worth $9k.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

Please do, I'm also curious

http://www.shazam.com

According to the description in youtube:

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

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.

Sorry, I incorrectly assumed that the youtube link you provided was a direct link to the video in the article.

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

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

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