Early this morning, four Battlecruisers flying Goonswarm colours, flanked by their Clusterfuck Coalition comrades, closed in on a six billion ISK Golem and blew it to smithereens. It was only the most expensive explosion in a long series to rock high-sec space since Burn Jita 2 began on Saturday.
The Battle of Asakai, is what they’re calling it. The use of the definite article should give you some idea as to the scale and import of the fisticuffs that exploded for a couple of hours across Eve lowsec space on Saturday, which soon escalated to include more than 3000 players.This weekend saw one of the joys of emergent gameplay: unplanned mass slaughter.
Above all things, EVE is a community. Eve players are all in the same boat, held together by a common space and a common interest; while they fight and they bicker, and tensions can run high at points, they’re still part of the same universe, and when a tragedy rocks that universe, they all respond. Yesterday, Sean Smith, AKA Vile Rat, in the real world an IT consultant working out of the US embassy in Libya, in the Eve world, a senior member of Goonswarm and part of Eve’s Council of Stellar Management, was killed in Libya. Overnight, EVE paid tribute to him.
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Early this morning, the BBC reported that a US State Department Official had been killed during riots in Benghazi in Libya. The US State Department Official that was killed was also known as Vile Rat within EVE circles, one of the most influential and powerful diplomats that the Goonswarm has ever had.
So Pandemic Legion decided to take a little trip south into Delve to pop some hulls and have a little fun. Boys will be boys, you know how it is. Then Test moves down to join in the fun, and Vera Cruse and Pengu come into to support Nulli, and all of a sudden you’ve got a minor fracas on your hands. Nothing to be worried about.
Things have escalated, rather quickly. It’s war. Goonswarm, Test, Pandemic Legion, Evoke, RZR, Tasha and 99% are going up against Nulli, Vera, Pengu, -A-, Rol, Fail, Engarde, Gypsy, Solar and maybe even BL, in the largest Bloc war in a long while. EVE’s lazy truce has been broken, and the galaxy is going to be set ablaze. Or at least, the south east part of the galaxy.
UPDATE: And now TEST has only gone and done a pretty bloody professional propaganda video. Embedded below, for your viewing pleasure.
At the tail end of last week, a few enterprising individuals within EVE’s Goonswarm Federation figured out a way to manipulate the way the newly reworked Faction Warfare system paid out Loyalty Points, to turn it into the kind of money fountain you don’t want to go near for fear of death by a thousand papercuts. The rumoured figure is five trillion ISK, but some say more. CCP have already responded, and while it’s still under investigation, it’s not looking all that promising for those involved; they’ve already stated that “We will be monitoring for attempted manipulation of the LP market and will reverse any proceeds deemed to have been obtained through manipulative means.” 
Following on from our report on the Goonswarm's latest heist in Eve Online, we grabbed CCP's spokesman Ned “CCP Manifest” Coker for a quick comments. Were CCP aware of the market manipulation? Is this going to destroy Eve's economy? What can you do with FIVE TRILLION ISK anyway?
Since Eve Online: Inferno was released, the Goonswarm have been busy. They’ve been drawing up graphs, plotting statistics in moving averages and looking at the huge, huge piles of minerals they’ve got and then having a bit of a think. And then they turned the revamped Faction Warfare system into a money factory. They are now five trillion ISK richer than they were before the patch hit.
