I'm a little surprised nobody is talking about this one. I thought this was both brilliant and horrifying. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes gaming fascinating.
Ever wanted to see 222 spaceships die in a video game? Now you can. My recommendation is to watch the lower of the two videos on that link. It gives a great view of seeing this thing develop and go completely downhill.
So, if you don't know EVE online, this will seem a little nuts. But this isn't actually the first time something like this has happened. It is the first time it happened by accident...between two nominal allies. 400 to 700 billion in-game currency is the current damage estimate, with somewhere around 222 dead ships. Additionally, the folks over at
Checkpoint (go to 2:30 if you want to hear the whole story and the background of what happened) have mentioned that translating to real-world dollars, the Something Awful affiliated guild and the Reddit affiliated guild manage to waste over $20,000 in a single monolithic space battle. Many of the ships you are seeing there take months of gameplay time. Not as in "you play for a bunch of months." As in, you have clocked
months worth of hours in this game for just this one ship. It is completely insane, completely awesome, and one of the cooler parts of seeing how games can showcase the complexities and foibles of human interaction.
