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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why was everyone trying to stick it to Something Awful ?

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.

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.

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.

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

It's actually more the other way around.

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...

Nowadays of course SA generally stays away from 4chan, which has become about a lot more than anime and games.

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.

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).

(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.)

It's a very fascinating read.

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

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.

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.

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