Or so you thought.
Out of nowhere, half a dozen of unknown ships open fires at you, overwhelming all you defenses.
Before you can even make sense of what just happened, you’re already floating in your pod in space colored by flashes of lasers and missiles aimed at other unsuspecting industrialists just like you. You just lost your ship, along with millions of credits worth of cargo.
That was the experience of hundreds, if not thousands of players of EVE Online last weekend. The infamous player alliance called Goonswarm had recently launched a military campaign targeting the most-populated trading hub of all the 7000 solar systems in EVE universe. It is aptly named “Burn Jita”.
This was not just a band of pirates running wild. This was an organized operation, where Goonswarm has reportedly prepared more than 14 000 suicide ships for the campaign.
It is said that the goal of this campaign is to traumatize the universal market, raising the price of minerals and, consequently, all derivative products, including weapons, modules and ships.
While Burn Jita is an unwelcomed surprise to the many victims caught in the fire, it nevertheless excites the curiosity of gaming communities, and impressively illustrates how alive EVE universe really is.
Because EVE Online is operated in a single game server, everything is connected. Your action, especially in a campaign like this, affects all hundreds of thousands of other players in the world.
There are very few other games that offer this rare gaming experience. To quote the game’s lead designer, Kristoffer Touborg,
“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 (Destroyer-class ships) to do this (and make history)?”
Burn Jita follows the EVE tradition of player-perpetrated dramas. It will be written in the evolving history of EVE, side by side with the corporate assassination of Mirial (1), the political betrayal in Band of Brothers alliance(2), and countless others.
With the universe expanding via DUST 514, all pilots in New Eden can undoubtedly expect to read the next epic event in the chronicle of EVE, or if they are lucky enough, be part of it.
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(1) http://www.computerandvideogames.com/18 ... ed/?page=1
(2) Band of Brothers was a huge player alliance, a major rival to Goonswarm. That was until one of the high-rank directors disbanded the whole infrastructures and emptied the corporate accounts. He effectively dissolved the alliance overnight, changing the political maps forever. It is believed that this event inspire EVE promotional clip Causality:
Watch on youtube.com
