From Polygon's "Even online wages largest war in its 10 year history":
A massive battle involving more than 2,200 players in main battle is underway in CCP's massively multiplayer online game Eve Online, easily the largest battle in the game's decade-long history, according to Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco, the CEO of Goonswarm Federation.
An exact real-life currency figure of the in-game damage is not currently cemented, but unconfirmed estimates put the amount at more than $200,000. An automated battle report will be generated from server data once the battle concludes. The current battle stems from 'The Halloween War" which instigated multiple warfares betweenunofficial political alliances.
"But today's battle happened literally by accident: system control (sovereignty) was dropped in a key staging system due to a mistake," Gianturco told Polygon about the war underway in B-R5 sector in Immensea, a Nulli Secunda system. "This then escalated into the largest battle in Eve history, which delightfully our forces seem to be winning."
A description of the events from the Mittani:
On Monday morning at approximately 7:30 EVE sov dropped in B-R5RB in Immensea, a Nulli Secundasystem which Pandemic Legion has been staging from since Janurary 8th.
Replacement Nulli Secunda Territorial Claim Units were onlining in B-R5 in an attempt to recover the system until approximately 14:00 EVE, when a group of RUS and CFC forces attacked and destroyed them. While the system is unclaimed, the station itself was captured by RAZOR Alliance during the attack.
At the time of writing both N3/PL and RUS/CFC are mobilizing forces to either defend the system or attempt to exploit this opportunity; we may see a supercapital battle result in early Euro timezone.
If the RUS/CFC want to make a serious play to control the system they will need to guard their onlining TCUs until approximately 23:00 EVE.
When asked about the sov drop, Manfred Sidious of Pandemic Legion described it as the consequence of a bug, stating that he had enough isk in his holding corp wallet as well as having autopay checked.
The B-R5RB Bloodbath is an example of what can happen when a small event reverbeates through a complex system like the alliances of Eve Online. Massivisely multiplayer online roleplaying games like Eve Online can generate interesting case studies like the B-R5RB bloodbath which can help us understand the concatenation of events in complex human interactions. Picking out case studies from online video games may provide us with insights into the pattern of actions which lead to such catastrophers thanks to the wealth of data which the servers are bound to have.
That video games can be used to study complex phenomena is shown by World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood Incident becoming a model for epidemic research, as Time's "World of Warcraft: A Pandemic Lab?" is testament to:
Who says video games are a waste of time? World of Warcraft — a virtual online world where millions of players quest for power, wealth and magical items — has got public-health experts considering new ways to track the spread of disease.
That's the message behind a new paper appearing this month in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, and also behind a separate, similar paper published in Epidemiology earlier this year. Both papers document the path of an unexpectedly virulent virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood," which swept through World of Warcraft's online characters starting in September 2005. (The game's administrators introduced the disease as a challenge for some high-level players; they didn't expect it to break out of the caves and into the virtual world's cities and towns.) The disease then ravaged the player population — despite administrators' efforts to quarantine the infected — and gave World of Warcraft its first virtual-world pandemic.
In real life, epidemiologists have long used complex mathematical models to predict how an outbreak of, say, pandemic flu might spread around the world. The problem is that testing those models isn't very easy, which makes it hard to judge whether the models are accurate. Scientists can't just release pathogens into cities and see how many people die. So, instead, they base their models on past outbreaks, where information collection was imperfect, or on people's stated (but hypothetical) beliefs about what they would do during a future outbreak. The resulting models can be remarkably sophisticated, but they "lack the variability and unexpected outcomes that arise ... not by the nature of the disease, but by the nature of the hosts it infects," according to Eric Lofgren and Nina Fefferman, authors of the Lancet Infectious Diseases paper. For example, they say, the failure of the World of Warcraft quarantine "could not have been accurately predicted by numerical methods alone, since it was driven by human decisions and behavioral choices." In other words, no model will know whether or not people ignore infection-control rules in the real world.