Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

The last war redux

I want to get in a couple of quick posts related to other things I've written lately. They're not Comment of the Week posts so much as they are "reaction of the week" ones because I'm not interested in calling out a specific person. Still, there are trends associated with the comments on two posts that deserve to be answered directly and in a bit more detail than I can do in a reply comment.

The first has to do with my post "The last war" from last week. This post has generated a lot of really good discussion, and also came up for discussion both on Reddit and on the EVE-O forums. I've done my best to follow the discussion in all three places and have found it really interesting! Still, one point keeps coming up again and again that I want to address. In "The last war", I stated that I believed B-R will be the most expensive battle in EVE's history, unless there is a specific attempt by EVE players to exceed it as part of EVE's death spiral (if EVE ever has one of those).

Some of the comments on the post are dismissive of it because "people said the same thing about Uemon" when that happened two years ago. At the time and until B-R, Uemon was the site of the most expensive battle in EVE's history with something like one trillion ISK in ships destroyed. B-R, of course, exceeded this value by more than an order of magnitude: about 11 trillion ISK was destroyed in B-R.

Now it would be cheeky to simply respond that "I didn't say that about Uemon, but I'm saying it now" and indeed I wrote a comment to that effect in the comments of my blog post. But again, the general reaction deserves a more thoughtful response.

As I've said again and again, if you present evidence to show that I'm wrong about something that I've written in this blog, I will agree with you and my position will change. Bill Nye had a really cute moment in the "Science vs Creationist" debate the other night where he basically said the same thing when asked "What -- if anything -- would ever change your mind?" (his opponent's response to the same question was rather priceless). So here is the chain of logic that I was following in "The last war". Attack just about any of the links in this chain and my reasoning falls apart. Which link would you like to attack?

1. B-R cost the EVE players involved 11 trillion ISK. To exceed it, you'd need a battle costing more.
2. To exceed it, some entity out there would have to be both willing and able to put something like four or five trillion ISK at risk in a single battle in a single system (and probably more).
3. By my count, there are currently four entities in the game capable of doing this.
4. Thanks to the B0TLRD accords, shared history, and other diplomatic agreements, three of these entities appear to be allied or for all intents and purposes at least very friendly.
5. The fourth might engage in a war with one of the remaining three but this challenge is unlikely to be on a grand or expensive scale.
6. The CFC would be intelligent to regard any future entity not already at -- but approaching -- this level as an existential threat that should be eliminated before it can reach this level.
7. CFC leadership is and is likely to remain intelligent.
8. The other scenarios that I can envision that might create a fifth entity capable of bringing this level of combat (a CFC civil war, say) also seem likely to me to cause an overall reduction in EVE player count, resulting in a reduction of the size of EVE's economy and therefore, both the size and cost of a future expensive battle.

So that's it. Disprove one of those eight statements and my overall statement falls apart. As Bill Nye put it, "bring on any of those things and you would change me immediately." Can you?

Thank you to everyone that's been commenting on that post! Really interesting reading for me!
Source: The last war redux