tl;dr: Four years ago there was an EVE battle where $300,000 worth of stuff was destroyed, and it made the news. After that battle, EVE’s greatest player, The Mittani, made a bunch of money selling out his massive 15,000 person super-organized gaming community to other games for cash. This went well, but then he tried to raise $150,000 in a kickstarter to get Sci-Fi Author Jeff Edwards to write a book about himself and a famous war he won in EVE Online. The rest of the EVE player community revolted against this idea, the kickstarter fell short in spectacular fashion, and the community then united to destroy The Mittani’s EVE empire once and for all, bank rolled by a massive EVE casino run by one guy. Towards the end of that war, the guy who ran that casino was banned because the CS:GO gambling scandal made the game company behind EVE afraid of lawsuits related to gambling. With no money bankrolling them, the EVE community split apart before they could deal the final blow, and now 15 months later, EVE’s greatest player is back for revenge in what could be EVE Online’s first $1,000,000 battle.
Hi, IAMA fleet commander in the MMO video game EVE Online. EVE Online is the game that many of you “love to read about, but would never actually play”. I don’t blame you, it’s a complicated time sink, and if you’re not careful it can add a few years to your college career (plenty of people take 6 years to graduate though, so it’s no big deal). It’s likely that the last time many of you read about this game was back in 2014 when roughly $300,000 worth of warships were destroyed in a single day, as reported by Wired, CBS, ABC, etc. Well, nearly four years later, a crazy timeline of events has led us to what is going to be EVE Online’s first $1,000,000 dollar battle, that will dwarf the size of the famous battle four years ago. This battle will be occurring tomorrow at roughly 20:00 UTC (3 pm US Eastern). Since plenty of you gamers enjoy reading about the crazy people who play EVE Online, I’ve decided to type up a simple guide to the battle happening tomorrow as well as the unbelievable events that led up to it, so you can continue to read about EVE from a safe distance.
A super basic guide to EVE Combat:
EVE combat really isn’t that hard to understand if you’ve ever played even just a few video games and understand basic video game concepts. EVE has many many ship classes, divided into three main groups: subcapital, capital, and super capital. But there are really only two that matter: Titans (the biggest super capital class), and Force-Auxiliary Carriers (the only capital class ship that can efficiently heal capital and super capital ships). Titans are the best ships in the game because they have the largest hitpoint pool by a large margin and they do the most damage. Titans are also the most expensive ships in the game by a large margin, which is why two sides with lots of titans rarely fight each other, and when they do it tends to make the news. The big fight that happened in 2014 that I mentioned above is the last time that two real titan fleets faced off against each other. In that battle, each side fielded roughly 80 titans, with the losing side losing 59 titans and the winning side losing 16 titans. Tomorrow, each side will field over 250 titans, and likely 1,000 support capitals and super capitals. The story of how the game went from a 100 titan battle to a 500 titan battle in 4 years, with no big battles in between, is truly amazing and worth reading for even the most casual observers, but before I get into that here’s a brief aside on why all the news media like to quote EVE battles in $$ values (hint: for clicks, but it’s technically accurate).
How did $300,000 get destroyed four years ago? And why is this a $1,000,000 battle?
Though a majority players are content to just pay the monthly subscription and play the game, EVE Online has a convenient method for calculating the conversion rate of in-game currency (called ISK, I’m going to use ISK from now on) to real world currency because it allows its players to buy “subscription time” and sell it on the in-game market for extra ISK. Basically, I can take $15 dollars, buy a 30 day subscription code, put that on the in-game market, and someone can use ISK to buy that game time and play the game for free. Using this, we can calculate the conversion rate for any ship or item to generate amazing headlines so the EVE players can justify how much time they all spend on this game.
Fun Fact: Just like other games with microtransactions, there are crazy people in EVE who blow stupid amounts of money on this game. Not many EVE players know this, but the current Chinese Player group (Fraternity Coalition) has had their current war funded by one guy for the last two months, and he has spent $70,000 doing that, and they’re still going to lose anyway, which is kind of hilarious.
But enough about that, let’s get to the fun part, the crazy story of how the game got to where it is today.
Why are $1,000,000 worth of nerds facing off in a battle tomorrow?
The great thing about this story is that we can pick up right where we left off in 2014. After that big giant battle, the winning side (The ClusterFuck Coalition, CFC from here on) were kings of the universe. While they didn’t own all of the space, it was clear that no one could challenge their power. Their leader, The Mittani, had built the largest and most organized online gaming organization on the internet, with an estimated member count exceeding 15,000 people, and capable of summoning over 1,000 players to login to the game at a moment’s notice. With nothing left to conquer, he decided to try and grow the CFC into something even greater. He had already started a gaming news website named after himself, so he started a Twitch channel to go along with it, and then started cozying up to people in the gaming industry. He started approaching different gaming companies and offering to bring the CFC to their game if they would give them special promotions and free ingame items, and this worked. They did this for Planetside 2 and H1Z1. The Mittani would constantly push these promotions on his members in the CFC, and for the most part this went pretty well.
Then, in late 2015, they decided to aim even higher. The Mittani had somehow gotten to know Sci-Fi author Jeff Edwards, and convinced him to write a Sci-Fi book about a war that happened in EVE Online. The Mittani was going to do a $150,000 kickstarter to pay Edward’s fee, and his media machine spun into full action to attempt to raise the money from not just the CFC, but the entire EVE Online community. There were two problems with this plan though: 1) The CFC was starting to turn on the idea of being constantly harassed for money, and 2) The war he wanted to write about was one that his side won, and The Mittani, famous among EVE players for his ego, was likely going to be the main character. The final straw was when he renamed his gaming organization to ‘The Imperium’, because ClusterFuck Coalition wasn’t advertiser friendly. The events surrounding the failed kickstarter are immortalized in one of /r/eve’s greatest post
The EVE community was ready to revolt, but it took the richest person in EVE Online to get them all together into a cohesive coalition capable of defeating The Imperium/CFC. That person was Lenny, who ran a wildly successful casino website where players could use ISK to play. Bank Rolled with virtually infinite money, the newly formed Moneybadger Coalition absolutely steamrolled the Imperium in a few months, taking every single piece of land they owned. The Imperium retreated out of their territory, and most of the Moneybadger Coalition was content to let them run away, satisfied that if the Imperium ever threatened again that Lenny would be there to throw money at the problem.Rock Paper Shotgun wrote a good summary of the war
Then, the CS:GO Gambling scandal happened, and the company that makes EVE Online, CCP, became scared that lawsuits could start coming their way if they continued to allow a giant casino website to run using in game money. This was exacerbated by the Imperium publicly whining and complaining about the casino website for weeks, until CCP made an announcement. The announcement declared that gambling was no longer allowed with ISK, and that they had identified one player who was trading ISK for real life currency against the rules. Though Lenny still denies it and no concrete evidence was ever provided, Lenny was banned from the game and all of his in game assets frozen. Moneybadgers bank disappeared in a single day.
It was August 2016 by the time the dust settled, nearly 10 months after the failed kickstarter, and the galaxy slid into a semblance of peace. But The Mittani swore revenge (publicly on his twitch channel), and what followed was the game’s greatest arms race, with the Imperium/CFC and the former Moneybadger forces each building massive super capital fleets. Over the past few months the Imperium has been hinting at a major invasion, even feigning a few attacks north into Moneybadger space. But that time is now over. Suddenly and without warning, the Imperium turned a harmless border skirmish into a full scale invasion, catching the Moneybadger forces with their pants down. Tomorrow is the first decisive battle of this new war, it could potentially dwarf the famous battle from four years ago.
So what will actually happen?
In all likelihood? Nothing. And it’s at this point that I must reveal the reason for typing this post. You may be thinking, “Wow, EVE has a really engaged community for someone to take the time to type up a post like this”, but oh how naive you are. The purpose of this post is to point out that the fleet commanders on both sides of this battle are nothing but complete cowards.
I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen. The Mittani will hype his people up for hours, and the Moneybadger people will do the same. Then their fleet commanders will get their fleets onto the field of battle and place them into their “safe zones” that they’ve setup for themselves (it’s a dumb new game mechanic). Then, they will stare at each other for literally hours, and send out NPC drones that they barely control that mostly do nothing, while leaving all of their Titans in complete safety. They will then each make up a bunch of excuses, declare the other side as “cowardly” for not directly charging into their defensive position, and tell everyone to log off from the game. Don’t believe me? Everyone in EVE knows this, even the players involved in tomorrow’s battle. I’m serious, here was the top post on /r/eve for most of today from a group within the Imperium
Don’t let these people tell you it’s “the game’s fault that they can’t fight each other”, it’s no one’s fault but their own. I’m just hoping that both sides don’t end up staring at their computer screens for 8 hours tomorrow doing nothing, but that all depends on the fleet commanders.
by CSMprogodlegend http://ift.tt/2Bl7KU5
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