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.
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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.)
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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)
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.
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).
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.