[rauljara]

The report of the battle they link to (http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getting evaporated because of a mis-click.

In most of the games I play, the pay off of the grinding is getting to enjoy fighting more. But I could never play EVE, because battles would be so anxiety provoking. There would be no pleasure at all in earning a Titan, because I would be forever terrified of losing it.

Of course, all games are kind of there to destroy your time. But for some reason it doesn't feel quite as wasted when you have a virtual thing there that is bad-ass in proportion to your time investment.

[ben0x539]

Funnily enough, losing a ship doesn't really make me feel like I've just wasted hours and hours in that way. The real "investment" isn't the time converted into money through ingame activities, be it generating money through fighting NPC pirates or playing the market, it's the time you spent getting into a position where your characters can effectively make money for you, and that isn't so easily taken away from you again.

I don't really think about a pvp ship much differently than about ammunition. They're an expendable resource, and you probably have a hangar full of replacements just waiting for you to wake up in your cloning pod. It's probably a bit more involved with capital ships and the like, as they are really a group effort so the replacement capacities might belong to your alliance and not you personally, but they're still accounted for before a shot is fired.

In a way, this is really what makes EVE interesting. Losses needing to be replaced doesn't only make EVE battles meaningful on a different level than matches in other games (though I hesitate to say more meaningful...), but it also allows the internet spaceship economy to be very central to the game rather than just some mini-game-like distraction. "Item creation" becomes a question of securing resources and production pipelines and supply lines and whatnot, rather than a one-off effort that precedes the "actual" game.

[fatbird]

That feeling of "My ship! My beautiful, beautiful ship!" is offset by the fact that major alliances tend to have strong reimbursement programs. If your dreadnought goes boom in a fleet op, you get the cost of another hull and gear, and get to draw on corp/alliance stores as well.

Otherwise, they'd never get their supercap pilots out of the hanger :)

[VonGuard]

If you don't have insurance on your Titan, you shouldn't have a Titan.

[baddox]

What would be the point of having all this cool stuff if no one else even gets to see it and you don't get to use it?

[fatbird]

If you spent six months grinding the ISK to buy and outfit a carrier, how willing would you be to take it into a battle where any of a hundred things could destroy it, including server lag or a random disconnection?

[baddox]

I would invert the causality. Why would I spend six months outfitting a carrier if I had no intention of using it in combat or even flying it anywhere where other people would see it?

[glesica]

Same reason people spend hours tending their farmville farms...

[baddox]

I've never played Farmville, so I probably shouldn't speculate, but I'm under the impression that it is at least ostensibly a social game where you invite people to help with or at least view your farm.

[arcatek]

Well, you wouldn't do it at all. That's why the alliances try to help their members after fights.

[kamkazemoose]

Maybe you just want to use it to pick off all the smaller guys. You enjoy driving it around and being the Big Man On Campus. But, you don't want to take it into a real fight, you might avoid an actual conflict with it.

[Cthulhu_]

Whipping it out when there's a major battle going on, becoming the star and centerpiece (or one of them) of it, :p.

[illuminate]

Strategy isn't just about throwing everything out as soon as it's created and ready to go pew-pew.

[Ntrails]

In the words of the Lord, our Saviour, Mr Robert Downey JR...

"Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy"

Alliances accumulate supercapital fleets so they can fly their collections around with relative impunity. Of course it tends to be awful for everyone who doesn't get to be in the big fleet - as they rarely get to play. This leads to the congregation of supercapital pilots in the same alliances.

Pandemic Legion is famous for this - as they have long had the biggest fleet, used it the most, and thus attracted large numbers of other supercap pilots. But they do not hold space.

And to correct a seemingly prevalent misconception - most titans and supercarriers are personal possessions. There are some alliance/corp owned ones - but the majority are simply owned by long time players who either botted (completely un-policed for a very very long time), scammed, traded, speculated, Wormhole'd or Ratted/missioned (Oh god please no - boring monotonous PvE in the extreme for low returns) their way to 80b isk fortunes.

[RickHull]

One thing to note, there is a major typo which makes the history between these two coalitions confusing.

Original > Years before, the Test Alliance was part of the HoneyBadgers in a hulking super-coalition. Seeking to carve out a piece of the galaxy for its own, a large portion of Test broke away from the accord to form HoneyBadgers, an independently operating group still pledging allegiance to Test but not to GoonSwarm.

Years before, TEST was part of the Clusters (really: Clusterfuck Coalition, aka CFC). Only in the past year did TEST split off from the CFC and form the Honeybadger Coalition (HBC). TEST and Goons are old friends, so it will be very interesting to see how the current hostilities shake out.

[redthrowaway]

Nobody actually "earns" titans. It's simply not something that an individual would ever fly. Titans belong to the biggest corporations, alliances, and coalitions, and are essentially floating cities that support fleets of other ships. They're a strategic resource that individual players would never use.

In the case of this particular battle, CFC lost 3 titans. This alone is several thousand dollars worth of real-world money, but it will barely be noticed. CFC has hundreds of titans, and the pilots who lost ships will simply have them replaced by their corps. So no one actually lost anything; the coalition will have to drag a few titans and a few dozen supercapital ships out of its reserves to re-arm its pilots.

[lflux]

> They're a strategic resource that individual players would never use.

Except for that year or two when they could shoot smaller ships with immunity, a LOT of people in nullsec alliances got one with their own funds just to shoot bigger guns with impunity.

[jcrites]

If they have so many Titans, why not bring out ten of them and sweep the battle?

[redthrowaway]

They already had more than 10 titans. There were almost 3000 ships in the battle at its height. Also, this battle is a bit different in that it happened in low-sec space, where certain rules are enforced by the game's NPC Empire. So you can't use the Titan's most powerful weapon, which makes it vulnerable. Conversely, you can't use area denial interdictors, so many of the CFC's ships were able to escape when it became clear that they were doomed.

Also, travel takes a long time. This battle lasted 2.5 hours and both sides scrambled everyone, waking people up at 4am to go fight. The coalition headed by reddit arrived with 500 ships just as the battle was ending. Part of the reason the folks from Something Awful got beaten as bad as they did is that many different alliances, not just TEST, showed up just for a chance to stick it to them.

[taligent]

Excuse my complete ignorance but I can't resist.

Why was everyone trying to stick it to Something Awful ?

[redthrowaway]

They're the most powerful faction and have been for ages. They've also mastered metagaming and have pioneered some new, truly evil tactics.

For example, Sovereignty Wars in EVE (taking territory from others) is a long, gruelling process that can go on for months. So the goons started launching their attacks at 3 or 4 AM on a monday, to force their adversaries to wake up and go into work with no sleep. They'd do this daily, for a month. In the end, rather than defeating their foe militarily, the opponent would get demoralized and give up, surrendering all of their territory rather than have EVE continue to affect their real lives.

Beyond that, though, they're simply an incredibly powerful faction. There's a resource called technetium that's needed in order to build any of the massive ships, so it's vital for any sizeable corp to have. The Goons grabbed a virtual monopoly on it, and formed OTEC which is a cartel whose goal is to fix the prices of technetium to make it so other groups could never match the goon's strength in massive ships, while growing ridiculously wealthy in the meantime.

Basically, the goons are just really shitty to play against. Couple that with the fact that they and reddit (who used to be the closest of allies) own about 2/3s of everything there is to own in the game, and many players really, really want them to go to war and kill each other off.

[Cthulhu_]

All's fair in love and Eve, :p.

In a case like this, it seems the non-SA folk got fed up and ganged up on them. As it should be. No dominant force can remain dominant; if they piss off enough folk, either by being evil or just by owning all the things, said folk will band together and take them on.

And that's one part I love about Eve (despite not playing it); the dynamic and self-organizing nature of the universe and its market.

[bonzoesc]

I played Eve prior to Goonfleet, and I get a similar impression: they're an entity run by adults who are smart and find meanness hilarious, instead of the usual Eve alliance management of European teenagers.

[saraid216]

Hopefully someone can give you a better answer, but you might have heard of 4chan? Something Awful is where they came from.

They're actually a major cultural force in EVE. ("Shoot blues" "Little bees") They're a bit like America in international relations, except there are fewer redeeming qualities.

[bmohlenhoff]

Something Awful (~1999) was around way before 4chan (2003)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

[JonnieCache]

>you might have heard of 4chan? Something Awful is where they came from.

It's actually more the other way around.

[DuskStar]

4chan might literally be "something awful", but the site Something Awful came FROM 4chan. As did half the "meme" sites on the internet, unfortunately...

Just reinforcing JonnieCache's point.

EDIT: Apparently SA was around before 4chan. grr. In any case, they are fairly independent cultures. One charges $10 to register, the other doesn't require a username/login...

[romland]

Goons are pretty much well-known for being trolls in every game. Sort of their trademark to be annoying, so... :)

[Zenst]

They play to have a fun laugh and how much you expend is upto you. Like any big entity at the top then they get haters and fans alike. But they do it basicly for shits and giggles and don't roleplay the honour card unless it suits them at the time for a laugh.

[JanezStupar]

Because Titans are shitty fighting vessels. They are essentially portable warp gates with fireworks. And they are expensive.

[mephi5t0]

Not just that. You will train over a YEAR to fly a titan, and by flying I mean not just be able to undock it but actually be useful in it. The books costs hundreds of millions to learn so Titan is not a solo adventure it's is always a corporation's operation.

Oh, and since you cannot dock Titan (it won't go inside the station) you will need to park it somewhere, most likely near POS. And if you plan to do something else with your pilot - you need to have TWO pilots to be able to pilot Titan because once you exit ship - someone can steal it. So you need an alt who will be always sitting in the Titan when you log off :)

That's why ppl fly blops in cruisers and battlecruisers. Fun. Fast. Cheap.

[OmegaHN]

One of EVE's sayings is "Don't fly what you can't lose."

In general, you get that kind of ship especially for these types of fights. There isn't much base-building or PvE inside of EVE; it's all about the PvP. Being able to say that you flew a Titan into a battle is a major accomplishment inside of the EVE universe, so you don't care as much if you lose it (of course, you want to keep it safe, but only to fly it into more battles).

[alex_c]

Right on the money, but titans are also arguably most valuable for logistics - "jumping" large amounts of ships over large distances. Some may never see battle because the corp or alliance needs them for this purpose and doesn't want to risk losing them.

(Unless, that is, the pilot presses the wrong button and jumps the titan itself into battle, rather than the fleet it was trying to move. Which is what started this whole fight.)

[Khoa]

Here's a much more in depth report of the battle. http://themittani.com/news/asakai-aftermath-all-over-cobalt-...

It's a very fascinating read.

[swdunlop]

It's a lot better read than the PCGamer article, considering that it points out the negative metagame aspects of Time Dilation (TiDi). Part of what made that battle a slowly increasing shitstorm was the fact that reinforcements could arrive much faster than combat could resolve.

That means that what socially could be called a flash crowd accretes in that sector and drags the servers further and further down.

[runn1ng]

Except I don't understand a single word of it.

[vmind]

The risk element, to me, makes EVE a much more fun game than many others when it comes to combat. The pay off in fun, excitement and stories to be told is so much greater when there was a risk involved.

[snogglethorpe]

Kinda like real life...

[mbell]

To be fair, most people who are using the high end ships aren't getting their funding by grinding anymore.

Its much easier to play the market and/or prey on new players moving expensive stuff in areas they think are safe.

Incidentally, probably the most fascinating part of Eve is really the economy. It's by the closest thing to a 'real' market ever created in a virtual setting.

[alex_c]

Most income for large alliances comes from mining moons and from taxes on members' income. Ships lost in these alliance-level battles are usually (at least partially) reimbursed by the alliance.

Incidentally, this is what makes some territory more valuable to hold for an alliance, and worth fighting over - some areas can generate much more income than others. Most of the high-level metagame happens over who controls what moons, which is actually invisible to the average player.

[adrr]

It risk vs reward. To own the resources that generate large amounts of ISK/Resources, you'll need to risk your ships to defend it. You can grind all day long in places which has little to no risk to your ship, but it will take a long time to earn enough resources for a nice ship.

[cdash]

In general, this is actually a major problem with EVE right now. The risk vs reward balance is off with the game at least in the sense of an individual player. About the only thing this applies to is alliance income from moon minerals and market speculation.

Most alliances who own space in EVE though don't actually hold the moons that are valuable and so its pretty much all risk for them and no reward at least in terms of money, you do get a reward of having fun.

For the player as I said the risk vs reward ratio is very off balance because there is really no advantage to living in an area that you are more likely to be killed or participating in any pvp of your own choice

[hosh]

Heh, I could never play EVE because stuff like this would make it more addicting for me.

[warfangle]

In EVE, you have to think of your ships as ammo.