Explained with pictures and explosions
As a general warning, the chat and comments in the following screenshots and links is poorly (if at all) censored and may contain cursing, sexual innuendo, and bad trolling. You have been warned.
Welcome to Jita 4-4, the central trade hub for all of eve. Part of the reason Jita is so loved is that it has a high security rating; meaning anyone stupid enough to shoot you will be blown up by CONCORD (space police) before they can get a second shot off.
This generally means in this system, you're safe from pretty much everything. It doesn't make financial sense (nor is it easy) to organize a large enough group of ships to blow up a freighter.
Except today, we've organized a bit of fun.
Today our story begins around Deadly Gaia. He undocked in his Charon only to find a large quantity of us (indicated here by the purple brackets) casually throwing Thrashers into the gaping maw by suiciding them into pods and small ships. We do this by coordinating the minimum number of ships needed to kill our targets with one shot. In many cases it's just one.
A quick scan of Deadly Gaia shows he's carrying quite the haul of loot and would be a very high value target, so we begin preparations by waking up our scouts and getting a tail on him
Deadly Gaia rightfully doesn't like what he sees and returns to the safety of the station, so our thrashers resume the ever important task of making shiny things go boom.
Not much exciting goes on for a while until our friend undocks again, still carrying his sweet cargo. This time he's more gutsy, likely riding the fact that it would take roughly 35 people suiciding their ships into him to kill his Charon and we only had around 15 at the undock. With this in mind he swallows the bait and warps off.
However, he doesn't want to make this easy, so he takes several difficult to follow jumps to lose our scout.
Unfortunately for him, freighters warp at roughly half the speed of any other ship in the game, and one of our scouts caught him warping out toward Perimeter. He actually was quite clever and changed his final route to be New Caldari but again, slow warp speed meant our scouts had plenty of time to notice this switch and adjust.
And now for some fireworks... courtesy of Deadly Gaia's 5.5 billion ISK Freighter
Now it's CONCORD's turn to make with the explosions. Every ship that fired at Deadly Gaia now must pay the price and will meet an unfortunate end. A few neutral ships jump into the frey to get their names on our killmails and loot the wrecks, but we've left nothing of value behind.
So we fly back to Jita, grab fresh Tornadoes, and resume the festivities.
Thrashers being Thrashers. It cost roughly 10mil to fit a thrasher, and one shot to murder anything smaller than it.
Sat360 Jr3 apparently didn't get the memo that we were blowing these things up.
And boom goes the freigher.
Another visit from our good friends CONCORD, so we can warp back and reset.
The final numbers aren't in yet on how much damage we've done, but two days in we were sitting at 55 freighters and an estimated 300 billion in damages.
The current value of a PLEX is 490 million ISK, and $20 USD. So our friend Deadily Gaia's lost ship and cargo amount to roughly $226 in damage, and our alliance total would be around $12,224 in damage to unsuspecting pilots
To add insult to injury, the Goonswarm alliance is reimbursing hulls at full value to it's pilots, so the cost to the average goon is 0, not to mention the free salvage. In effect, both the pilot and the alliance are likely profiting (or losing little) from this whole affair
The alliance cost is also buffered by the resulting spike in demand for Technetium (Something we have quite a bit of) due to all the freighters and high tech parts we've destroyed.
CCP officially sanctioned the cataclysm. They actually treated it like an in-game event, offering this tiny bit of advice on the login screen. It appears not many people got the message
After freighters go boom, many enterprising high sec pilots thought they'd be smart and warp (en masse) to the wrecks to loot and salvage the juicy remains. We have a solution for this: Smartbombs
Goon heroes jm24 and Sepohora Hail sacrifice two Typhoons to end the looting dreams of 33 pilots.
Someone was nice enough to take some quality shots of the opening moments of our little festivities as well, which can be found in a fantastic imgur gallery here
Around day two we had a minor problem. We had a juicy Freighter to kill, but someone had goofed and we were temporarily out of Tornados. We did however still have plenty of Thrashers. Now, the problem is it would take roughly 250 of them to kill a freighter, and there's no way we could...
The fun part of this is that every time someone shoots something, CONCORD spawns more ships. Here's the 400 ship CONCORD fleet that spawned in response to our Thrasher op
Seconds later, the thrashers were almost vanished entirely
The new pecking order didn't go over well, and many tried to organize a resistance.
Low sec pirate sec alliance Moar Tears organized this little movement. They worked up a few modest high sec fleets and opened a war dec on one of our partners in crime, TEST alliance. A few of their fights went well, but TEST had, like us, fit their ships as glass suicide cannons.
The interesting result of this is that this allowed many high sec players the first taste of proper fleet PVP in their careers. Most of the pilots reported having a "good time", much to the chagrin of our TEST friends.
A similar event, Hulkageddon, has recently kicked off. It follows a similar pattern except they pay bounties on high sec ganking of Hulks and other mining barges.
