Fortunes are won and lost in EVE Online all the time. Sometimes, you lose $15,000 in real-world money in a single battle.
Ever since CCP started its Pilots License Extensions program (PLEX) in EVE Online, measuring destruction and theft in-game has been significantly more entertaining. PLEX allows players to trade the game’s currency, ISK, into paid game time – essentially, turning the in-game currency into the equivalent of real-world cash. So whether the ISK is being destroyed or stolen, we can roughly work out how much real-life money has been thrown away.
The video seen here to the right depicts a mammoth space battle in EVE as an alliance of corporations attempted to destroy three Titan-class battleships under construction. If we told you that the battle resulted in widespread destruction estimated to cost about 300 billion ISK, that probably wouldn’t mean much, would it?
On the other hand, if we told you that the 300 billion ISK had been worth $15,000, that starts to put it in perspective. That is a lot of money to blow on one single space battle. Yeah, it’s certainly pretty (though you’d think there’d be a huge explosive payoff for that much cash), but you have to imagine that some of the players in question might have to reconsider what they’re doing with their time – and money.
(Reddit Gaming, via PC Gamer)
