Revisiting The Losses Of B-R5RB Vs Atioth

In another sign of a resurgent EVE Online, on 6-7 April players held a massive battle involving over 10,000 ships fighting in a system before the server node crashed. In Atioth, the only named system in Geminite, invading forces from The Imperium defended an onlining keepstar against counterattacking WinterCo forces. When the servers finally shut down for downtime on 7 April, both sides lost a combined 9.89 trillion ISK. Not only had the servers handled (kind of, for an hour or so) 10,000 ships in a single system, but the fight was the largest since those in M2-XFE during World War Bee 2/Beeitnam over 5 years ago.

From the Clash of Atioth dev blog

Friday was a really busy day at work so I didn't get a chance to read the dev blog. Instead I read Wilhelm's EVE summary over on The Ancient Gaming Noob. Sometimes things don't pass the sniff test and the ISK total for the battle of B-R5RB was way off. Back in February 2014 CCP published a dev blog proclaiming the losses for the battle at 11 trillion ISK. Wilhelm, who's lived in null sec longer than I've played EVE, asked a very simple question. How did the losses in the battle only total 3 trillion ISK when titans were valued at 400 billion ISK each 12 years ago?

I spent a few hours yesterday manually looking up the supercapital and capital losses during the battle on zKillboard. The totals were kind of surprising given the losses inflicted during the battle.

• 75 dead titans: 33.1 trillion ISK
• 13 dead supercarriers: 2.5 trillion ISK
• 370 dead dreadnaughts: 1 trillion ISK
• 123 dead carriers: 260.7 billion ISK

Then while composing this section of the post I took my own advice. Did 441.7 billion ISK in 2014 for a fully-fitted titan smell right? The answer was no. I looked back and found a Wired article which listed a build cost for titans of around 100 billion ISK. The figure makes sense as back in 2016 I found that titans were selling for 75 billion ISK, but I didn't know if that was a special price for members of the Imperium or Goonswarm.

Then I tried an app Wilhelm mentioned in the comments of his post: killboard.app. I played around and the titan fits generally came in between 100 billion to 150 billion ISK. 

The link to the report.

The report shows an extra titan kill and some extra ISK destroyed but the overall destruction of 11.6 trillion ISK falls close enough to the 11 trillion ISK listed as destroyed in the 2014 dev blog that I'll continue using the 11 trillion ISK figure.

From the Clash of Atioth dev blog

Now on to the second bar chart from the Atioth dev blog. At first glance, thinking that 9.9 trillion ISK in 2026, which were the losses in Atioth, are worth more than 11 trillion ISK in 2014 doesn't pass the sniff test. After all, the New Eden economy holds more than twice the amount of ISK today than in 2014. But let's go through the exercise. The dev blog covering the first battle of M2-XFE describes the calculation of the real world value of ISK.

Based on the average sale value of PLEX. This number is simply given as a way to represent the effort-value of the destruction and not an actual amount of money spent by participants on this fight.

Back in January 2014 EVE still used the original type of PLEX in which 1 PLEX equaled 1 month of gametime. The average price of PLEX in The Forge on 28 January 2014 was 637 million ISK. After converting the amount to modern PLEX, 11 trillion ISK would purchase 8,634,000 PLEX. The store price of PLEX, after doing all the conversions to make the PLEX compatible with today's premium currency, was 3.5 cents, ($USD 0.035). So back at the time of the battle of B-R5RB the real world value bandied about would be $302,000. A figure at the lower end of the original dev blogs estimation of $300,000 - $330,000. And quite a lot higher than the $87,120 in the Atioth dev blog.

Now for the final step. When converted to today's ISK, does the amount of ISK lost at the battle of B-R5RB equal 3.04 trillion ISK? Since I had figured out the PLEX equivalent lost in the battle, I just needed to plug in the average price on the global PLEX market for the date the battle of Atioth into my spreadsheet. The result? A order of magnitude greater than the amount listed in the bar chart: 37 trillion ISK.

I also did the conversion to USD to 2026 dollars. My valuations of these events is always lower than most others because I use the two month sales price in the cash shop. The reason goes back to the dawn of selling game time in EVE. Most of the game time codes were 60-day time codes and in order to maintain historical equivalency I have kept that standard. The rule also makes the math simple as today two months of gametime equals 1000 PLEX. The regular price of the 1000 PLEX package is $45, making the real world value of a PLEX 4.5 cents, ($USD 0.045). Using that amount the real world value of the B-R5RB in 2026 dollars was approximately $389,000.

I don't want to undervalue this month's battle in Atioth. In my research into the subject (not using AI), the battle in Atioth was the fifth largest in terms of the PLEX equivalent lost in EVE Online history. I just don't want to see some of the old battles like 2014's battle of B-R5RB diminished. One of the unique qualities of EVE is its player-created history. I just want the data presented by CCP to be accurate.