Largest Ever EVE Online Battle Destroys $300,000+ Worth Of Starships

It's not a uncommon for large battles between rival groups to break out in the space MMO Eve Online. But a battle that began yesterday may rank as potentially the most expensive virtual battle in the MMO's history.

It apparently began when a player didn't pay rent which caused sovereignty of the staging system of one of the two current power blocks in the game to go neutral. A rival group soon dropped in a small fleet of capital ships to capture the system and the battle quickly escalated. The fight eventually included more than 2,200 players in a single star system, with the battle spilling over into multiple other systems.

The MMO allows players to buy a month of subscription time as an in-game item, which players can then use or trade. So while the costs of the battle aren't directly paid, it's possible to estimate a general overall cost of the in-game items lost in the massive battle.

The servers will eventually spit out the final damage count, but at least 92 of the Titan ships were destroyed and they can cost as much as the equivalent of $3,500 each. Each ship takes about two months of real-time to construct and sucks up an enormous amount of game resources. It also involves spending 2-3 years of game time to train a character to fly one.