The Unpaid Bill that Launched a Thousand Starships | Hacker News Reader

The Unpaid Bill that Launched a Thousand Starships

giantbomb.com

206 pointssnide99 comments

Interesting story on that big EVE battle from last week. Talks with a lot of the involved parties.

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.

This is true. Bear in mind, my experience in EVE doesn't extend quite that far. My own character is capable of flying battleships (the largest sub-capital class of ship) and freighters (a special type of capital ship), but I've never even seen a titan in-game. (The largest class I've seen is a carrier, owned by friends in an allied corp with a POS in lowsec.)

All that work makes paying $1500 USD sound almost like a better deal!

But it wouldnt be as much fun :)

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?

No, that's possible. I'm not clear on CCP's policy on character transfers, so it may be illegal, but it's certainly possible. That said, a titan pilot is almost certainly worth more than $1,500. I have heard rumors that players are paid real money for their participation in alliances; it wouldn't surprise me to have confirmation.

Titan pilots are like 20-30b. So they'd cost you ~$650 if you bought GTCs and sold plex on the market(legitimate way of buying characters with cash).

First search got me [1] which has a buy-out of 35 billion ISK. According to currency convert [2], this comes out to around 1,000 USD. The buy-out was taken, too.

It's extremely hard to believe that such a player is actually piloting a titan at time of transfer, though, and this thread [3] starts the hull cost at 40bil ISK. So you're looking at north of ~2,000 USD for the pilot and a useless hull, which is past the 1,500 mark. Assuming that the "travel fit" mentioned is a combat fit (unlikely), that's a total of ~4,000 USD.

Which means you'd have to get back to 300bps's "hard up for money" remark and recognize that anyone in possession of a titan is going to have an alliance full of people willing to handle this kind of thing more directly than a stranger walking up offering less than market value.

And we'll just ignore the fact that, unless you had an alliance backing you up (meaning all of this contrivance gets pretty moot), you wouldn't be able to do anything meaningful with it except wander around a little and die.

[1] http://eve-search.com/thread/1382980-0/page/all

[2] http://isk.thealphacompany.net/?isk=35000000000&conversion=i...

[3] https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=63093

Your first link is over 3 years old. Prices in characters fluctuate quite heavily during the time of the year and during various events. And links 3 years old in the Eve economy are worthless. Though you're right you won't get the titan with the pilot in any of those.

Your currency converter is also converting at $15 = 481m isk when in reality $15 will now get you over 700m isk.

Lastly hull cost for a titan hasn't been 40b in years. That guy was very wrong. They are closer to 90-100b if you get a deal and 110-120b on the market.

Read the full context of their hard up for money comment and it's clear they are using hard up for money to mean rich not poor.

You are right that without an alliance you won't do much with your titan.

My qualifications for my statements are as a super capital pilot and a capital builder and I have been one for a number of years now.

I wasn't going for finely-tuned accuracy; I was making the point that $1500 is not enough to go from never-played-EVE to flying-a-titan. Your numbers make that more true, rather than less.

> Read the full context of their hard up for money comment and it's clear they are using hard up for money to mean rich not poor.

The context was that the titan pilot needs $1500 badly enough that they're willing to sell their character for it. That doesn't mean "rich". "Hard up for money" is not an ambiguous idiom.

You're right. I read the hard up comment wrong repeatedly somehow.

When people say $1500 though they are generally just referring to the ship itself not the pilot and modules. $1500 has been pretty standard price for a long time though you're also correct that now it's tilted towards $2K as the price of some materials has gone up quite a bit over the past year.

> 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?

Possible, sure. But, CCP is very quick to drop the hammer on transactions like this that involve converting in game assets to real life money. This sort of transaction is explicitly banned.

You could just buy $1500 worth of GTCs and sell the plex in game and buy one.

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)

$37,000? That's crazy! :)

Training a new character to fly a titan properly is ~2 years of time not 3,4 months. Even most capital pilots are looking at around another year.

If you're going to go your route it would be best to just add 20% of the purchase price on and buy a character and another 10% premium on to buy one off the market.

I used to have fun in World of Warcraft by telling people to type /played and then multiply that by the minimum wage.

If you look at the cost of labor involved involved (assuming real world wages for the time spent) in building a Titan the cost would be absolutely massive, even discounting the huge infrastructure requirements.

Mine was counted in months when I finally left WoW... loved that game.

I'm nearly 2 years /played on my main alone. I've been a hardcore raider since vanilla, though.

Good point, although as I understood it a lot of the actual time it takes to build the titan, is time spent waiting, and you do not have to be logged 8 hours per day for months at a time. This is at least very true for the "training" system in the game. You purchase a skill book, start training, and based on your characters stats the training will take a certain amount of time, no matter whether you are logged on or not.

Of course, as I believe someone else pointed out, you (or your alliance more like) need to guard the construction site while the Titan is being built -- so the cost of building one of these is definitely huge. I guess $1500 is a bargain, all things considered?

A lot of that is passive time though - it takes a year to train the skills, but if you've already bought the skill books that just means logging on every few days to rotate the skill you're training according to an optimized plan you pre-determine. Similarly it takes months for a Titan to build, but that means moving components between the factory and the CSAA and the storage every once in a while and re-fueling your tower-stations weekly or something. It's not someone working 40/hours a week to build a Titan.

The hard part of that is the infrastructure - you need to own a star system and put up a bunch of towers and fuel them and haul/build/mine the components and minerals to your (hopefully out-of-the-way) system, and you need to have firepower on call to defend your operation if you're attacked. And the character training to pilot the Titan needs implants that are expensive and mean he can't be risked in combat (so you need a second account). Most of that (owning star systems, on-call firepower, maintaining towers, hauling/mining minerals, having spare/secondary accounts) is stuff that large alliances have to do anyhow for their other strategic needs (equipping sub-capital players, paying bills, constructing jump bridge networks, etc.) so for them it's just a bit of extra load on the logistics team, and they usually have economies of scale (they have so much money and space they can have 3 Titans in the hopper at once).

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.

Right, but SOMEBODY had to.

In actual practice, no single player will construct all the components for a titan. An alliance will spread the work of building the components around, especially since some of the same components used in titans are used in other capital ships and can be allocated to building whatever is necessary.

Yes, that's true, you don't buy them from the hat shop.

So how much would it cost to actually buy a fully functioning and outfitted titan? Assuming your character can already fly it, you have the personal know-how to use it, and that all other practical considerations are separate.

~$1500 for the ship ~$650 for a character

Fitting is harder to say since you can go cheap or expensive but probably another ~$250 minimum.

titans are useless on their own however, without a large force to back it up, flying it around is inviting almost certain death.

Admiral Ackbar knew this better than anyone...

Conversely people doing this has usually led to hilarious and expensive individual losses.

> "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?

For the players character. Eve has this weird/cool system where certain skills can be selected for your virtual player to train on. The skills take a set amount of real time, and the training continues even when you're logged off.

>>"but are the ships hard for the player themself to fly?" Not really - flying ships in eve is less flight simulator, more spreadsheet. You usually choose another ship/structure from a drop-down menu and choose approach, orbit, etc. Most battles are not about individual pilot skill at all (especially very large ones like this).

Lol eve is a thinking man's mmo. Action is kind of... meh. There is no simulation. Your character for better or worse can just be replaced with an AI that listens to commands of the leader. You are basically a body in a giant battle. Your goal is to click the little red dot designated for you to click on, and click your weapons. The end.

The game is all about maneuvers. How to out-maneuver your opponent to catch them with their pants down, block reinforcements, prevent retreat, maximize damage while minimizing yours.

Imagine a battle between two countries, its not just about what is in the battle, but what led up to the battle occurring, how people behave, etc.

I find it funny ow "eve is the thinking mans MMO" when I gave up Masters of Orion in the 90s because I felt as though I was playing excel....

Albeit - that was playing Excel solo vs playing Excel against many other CPAs...

I do not want to play a spreadsheet...

But, I am FARKING AMAZED about how well eve does and how amazingly in depth their eco-system is.

In eve you do not "fight" for xp. There is no "xp" in eve. You get skill books which teach you things. Then you set the skill to train, and via your stats your training time decreases (which is why implants are so valuable). To learn to fly a titan is a skill that with the best upgrades your character must spend about 3 months (real time) just learning the skill. Meanwhile if you die, and don't have the money for an appropriate clone (by that time your clones cost tens or hundreds of dollars) you lose the skills, and thus months of training.

Basically building a titan takes a community effort, and finding a pilot for it is equally as difficult.

> but are the ships hard for the player themself to fly?

"Hard" isn't the right word. It's more... knowing when and why to do things, and knowing how to work with others. EVE isn't very twitchy (and if I understand the Time Dilation technology, what little twitch is there isn't even present anymore): about 70% of the fight is dictated by your ship's fit, and only 25-30% is in-the-moment skill.

If there was a continuum between chess (10) and Street Fighter (1), I'd call it a 7. This opinion comes with a grain of salt, though, since I'm incompetent at PvP.

Well Time Dilation only matters in fights with hundreds or thousands of people which would have otherwise been so laggy that skill was irrelevant anyhow.

The "in-the-moment" skill that matters in EVE isn't accuracy (FPSes) or mashing the correct 6-step ability rotation every 9 seconds (WoW), but rather tactical skill like teamwork/coordination or laying clever traps or straight up situational awareness. There's also knowing your opponent's build and responding accordingly - you want to try to out-range some shorter-range weapons and you want to try close-range fast orbits against others.

>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.

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.

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.

"such profound and significant" and meaningless

as meaningless as most works of science fiction.

Just like all works of fiction, art, and ultimately everything.

Mm. As meaningless as what most believe (without all that much justification) is the 'top level' reality - life.

I'm with you on that, I've never played the game nor do I plan to, but I love reading accounts of these enormous battles.

Reading about these battles after the fact is almost always better than actually sitting at your computer for 20+ hours dealing with unbearable sluggishness.

I stopped playing after awhile because it started to feel more like a job and less like a game.

Doubly so because Klepek is a hell of a games journalist. It's a really exciting time to be a fan of this stuff, no matter how casual.

Yes. It takes a very good journalist to make this stuff interesting and accessible, and Klepek is about as good as they get.

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.

I suffer greatly from game addiction. Watching those video's gives me some of the fun, without having to install the game and loose my life.

Even if you have all of those things, sometimes it's just a hell of a lot of fun to watch a good Let's Play. Some of the better ones I remember for years, and I have a feeling that one which showed a lot of promise but was discontinued far too soon will bother me for years to come as well.

Agreed - I have to mention necroscope86 on YouTube. By far my favorite LP'er. I think he had a snafu with his account that deleted a bunch of videos, but he had some very funny X-COM play throughs. It was more about his commentary and British accent that made it worth watching than the actual games themselves.

I'll have to check them out.

Some of my favorite LPs have come from LtMkilla (Dead Space and the ill-fated Bioshock LPs come to mind). His humor probably isn't for everybody (whose is?), but I love his videos.

If we're highlighting great LPs, I'll have to throw in a recommendation for ChipCheezum's LPs of the Metal Gear Solid games. The humour is spot on, and the games themselves are covered in exhaustive detail. His LPs of Mega Man Legends and the Uncharted series are great too.

Watching Beaglerush lose at X-Com impossible is great.

What makes a good Let's Play?

I think it varies in terms of what a given viewer is looking for, but generally having a voice I can listen to for long stretches, some amount of humor, and competence at the game you're playing. You also need to be able to commentate on it in an interesting manner and do interesting things - nobody wants to watch a Let's Play when they don't understand what's going on, and nobody's going to sit through an hour of you strip-mining some mountain in Minecraft.

GeopLP's Assassin's Creed series is to me the gold standard in a lot of ways: http://www.youtube.com/user/GeopLP/videos?view=1&flow=grid

But people like different degrees of all that stuff - I generally find YogsCast to be too silly, but thousands of subscribers obviously disagree with me, and I'm sure there are Starcraft or LoL watchers who hate all the contextual strategic commentary that I find absolutely vital in those videos. Similarly, different people and different formats like differing amounts of audience participation - I usually watch stuff on YouTube or Twitch weeks after it was recorded, so Q&Aing with your chatroom means I'm missing half the conversation, but for guys watching it live that's pretty awesome.

eSports is a trend where people play computer games (semi)professionally. This goes to the point where global tournaments are organized and live casts are done on the web.

I personally fancy to watch episodes of FAF (Supreme Commander - Forged Alliance Forever) episodes on YouTube, just because the game is so good. I have nowhere near enough time to play to get to that level of proficiency sadly and I prefer to play single player.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_sports http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=faf

I was amazed by the production value of a recent League of Legends tournament - I mean, look at the stage: http://i.imgur.com/pSpoBjWl.jpg

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 :)

As always, Mittani overplays his role in the situation and tries to capture all of the spotlight.

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

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."

Eve is probably the best game around to read about rather than play.

Perhaps. I feel EVE is a bit like reading about politics.

In the same way that SC2/LoL is a bit like reading about sports

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?

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.

All thanks for the replies. Makes more sense, but I would have put it in as "this defense system needs X amounts of this rare fuel Y each Z" (or, maybe, bring a statistical aspect into it: "the Foo in your bar are wearing out faster than usual. Please make sure you have spare parts"), not as "yes, you have a zillion extremely powerful guns, but if you don't pay rent in time, we, will take your guns away from you.". This, to me, makes this universe feel like some toy system with some all-powerful entity who really is in control (a bit like Q, but less disinterested).

Also, what would an all-powerful entity need that money for? It would have to be some accountant-deity to enjoy such regular payments. Or was that apparent glitch that showed the bill as paid to some part of the fun?

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.

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.

Someone could've turned off the setting after they checked it or any number of similar things.

ISK cannot be legally exported to real-world money, however. It would mean CCP could be treated like a bank and be subject to financial regulations

um... isn't every crypto-currency a bank then?

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.

Didn't the BitInstant guys get busted for specific allegations of money laundering?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25919482

That's what a lot of the money handling regulations are about. Hence why you need to declare when you're going through an airport with more than 10k of currency (USD, AUD, etc).

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Bitcoin#Icelan...

Thought it said startups... Starships?

This is much less dry than the last version of this article that showed up on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7136603

Yeah, it's chock-full of the testosterone I'd have expected to see from something like this. To wit:

“They put their dick on the table, and we chopped it off,” said Gianturco.

I prefer the version that appeared on The Mittani: http://themittani.com/features/largest-virtual-battle-ever

a bit longer and more in-depth, but gives a great sense of scale.

Oh I meant this version. http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-bloodbath-...

Wow, posted by Dave himself. Hi Dave!

/waves

Yay!

Hello Dave!

His friend sent him a text that said "[laughs]"?? that seems improbable

Different people use different characters for actions. Asterisk, colon, dash, angle-bracket, bracket are all common enough to be heard about.

It could have equally been

"xD"

"lol"

And I would consider those among many others to be laughter.

Square brackets indicate that an editor has modified a quote. http://askville.amazon.com/purpose-square-brackets-sentence/...

since it is in square brackets, it is pretty clear the journalist translated an emoticon or acronym.

The face that launched one thousand shits

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