It cost the participators a combined $17,000 and involved over 4,000 people. Here's a run-down of what happened by a redditor. A couple of uses of strong language, please read at your own discretion. http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/17ebak/eve_online_how_exactly_a_war_can_cost_multiple/c84qb54 Discuss.
I don't play EVE either. I waded through all the jargon and got this out of it. Please correct me if I'm wrong: Two large groups acquired control over the supply of the most valuable resource in the game. They made a non-aggression treaty. Then they changed the treaty so that they could fight, but not destroy the facilities where they were extracting resources. One of the groups were setting up a raid on a third group. Someone made a mistake that lead everyone to dump all their resources into a large battle. It looks like you can buy items in the game so an estimated amount of 17k dollars was dumped in the toilet over the weekend by these guys.
I've read about similar happenings in EVE here (#7): http://bit.ly/X43Cw1 and here (#2): http://bit.ly/14oznXM Take the time to read the other entries. Some of them are really epic, like the Legend of Angwe, which was memorialized in a South Park episode.
You don't buy items, but EVE is the #1 game for economy. Everything in EVE gets an RL value because ingame money can be used to pay for gametime (So hardcore players can play the game for free) It also gives you a way to purchase in game money with real money through indirect ways (You're essentially paying for other players subscription for ISK in return) So, thats where the RL values come into play. http://www.eve-markets.net/detail.php?typeid=29668 1 PLEX is currently 550mil~ ISK, so that puts 36.5mil ISK = 1 USD roughly (rounding to simpler numbers) Now, when an 87 billion valued ship blows up, that has an RL cash value of 2.37k USD on a single ship. Many of these people spend tons of RL cash to get in game cash, and when entire fleets are wiped out, I guess thats where they get the #'s. Havent read the article yet but going to later since I do like EVE.
Hey this is so true : Stagnation is bad. Stagnation leads to boredom. Boredom leads to bad decisions.