CCP plans to watch EVE players wage war while economy takes possible hit

CCP is looking forward to Goonswarm and the alliance of corporations know as the CFC's assault on the Council of Stellar Management and its in-game economy's center, the Jita trade hub. The initiative, titled "Burn Jita", was organized to coincide with the end of the 30-day ban on the former, and controversial boss of the organization, Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco.

Several other organizations and corporations have joined the battle, while others have decided to refrain. We don't play EVE Online, and don't really understand a lot of this, but it sound absolutely mental.

According to an email we received from an EVE Online player, this all started when Mittani was banned from EVE for comments he made during an Alliance pane during EVE Fanfest. In the public talk, he mocked and then urged others to mock a player harboring suicidal thoughts stemming from depression.

“Incidentally, if you want to make the guy kill himself, his [in-game] name is [...]“, Mittani he said, via RPS.

Stating the reason for his remarks was due to being intoxicated at the time, he issues a lengthy public apology and promised to resign as Eve Online Council chairman. CCP felt his actions breached the game's EULA and handed him a 30-day ban from the game.

"The general public of EVE was split on the decision and the aftermath," an EVE Online player told VG247. "The Mittani then decided to drop politics and get back into the game and to have fun and see whether CCP will ride the storm called Jita Burns or whether CCP would take offense in the action and succumb to the hi sec dweller pressure that will definitely will pile up as people lose billions of isk (in game currency) to said actions.

"Why would something like virtual money mean anything to anyone? Simple, for 500 million isk a player can extend his playtime for 30-days. These items are called PLEX'es and they are traded on the EVE market. The real life equivalent would be around €15 or roughly $20. So, if people lose ships worth billions of isk they actually lose real money too."

Indeed, many players were worried the assault will hurt the game's economy, but as some 14,000 odd Mittani's Goonswarm alliance Thrashers start prepping for war, instead of intervening, CCCP was busy popping popcorn.

"I tell you what, it's going to be f**king brilliant," EVE senior producer Jon Lander told Eurogamer. "Absolutely brilliant. There was one bug [the 'bookmark escaping agro bug'] in the game that meant that if they do the things they're going to do, they could have escaped the in-game consequences. So we fixed that bug about three weeks ago. And they went, okay.

"They're going to do exactly what you're able to do in the game, and people will have to roll with it. It'll be great.

"Last night I got an email - Jita was at 2100. Time dilation kicked in at 15 per cent. And there were people just watching the s**t that was going down. It was brilliant. It was absolutely great. We want people to be able to do this. If Goonswarm want to do it, we want them to do it and we want them to have a great time doing it."

Lead game designer Kristoffer Touborg said player-driven events such as this are what makes EVE different than your average MMO, and it's CCP's policy to sit back and watch it all unfold.

"It's what makes Eve a really good game," he said. "Do you want to play a 15 minute match of Call of Duty that you won't remember the next day, or do you want to spend four months manufacturing 14,000 Thrashers to do this? It's just so big and awesome.

"The people they're going to hurt now are people who have quite a lot of security. There's not a lot of turnaround on ships and goods in Empire. I think it might be healthy if we lose a lot of this industrial power, if they have to go back and save up for their ships again and be a part of the cycle of life everyone else is a part of.

"I don't like complete security, and I do like when a large group of players who live in complete security have that pulled away temporarily. It's going to be healthy."

CCP prepared for the event by switching out servers and beefing up the kits, and hopefully, no matter how this all turns out, here's hoping all involved have a bit of fun in the end.