Claiming Victory in Jita!

We’ll beat the bailiffs out of fun,
We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run
We are the boys no man dares dun
If he regards a whole skin.

-Verse from the Garryowen, a traditional Irish air

The “Burn Jita” event is officially over.

The thing about an event like “Burn Jita” is that it lacks any real, concrete goals.

Nobody, aside from the devs at CCP, can actually “burn” Jita.  Likewise, there is nothing any player can do to “save” Jita either.  Jita is a static element of virtual universe.  Players in the game have no ability to affect the virtual manifestation of the location in EVE Online known as Jita.  You cannot actually burn Jita.

So for the event, you can pretty much craft your own victory conditions.

Certainly The Mittani, back from his ban, is claiming total victory.  But his victory is a macro-economic victory bound up with the control of the technetium needed to replace all the ships blown up in Jita and the subsequent Hulkageddon event, leading to economic dominance.  To mis-quote Mao, power comes from the barrel of a Goon.

Others, such as the EVE Morning podcast seem dubious, though they seem to be focused on one aspect of the plan and only in the short term.  They are claiming victory for the opposition, I suppose.

Then there is the gank fleet.  The certainly blew up some freighters.  In the 12 months previous to the event, 23 freighters and 3 jump freighters had been destroyed in Jita.  The event took down 38 freighters and 9 jump freighters.  More than a year’s worth of carnage in just three days, plus a few more in the surrounding systems as well.  Jester has a “Butcher’s Bill” and some analysis on the big kills.

Freighters Destroyed

The Save Jita folks are certainly claiming victory.  They flew in Jita and sought out the gank fleet.  Having declared war on Goonswarm and other alliances, they were free to engage in combat.  And they definitely blew up their share of gank ships.

But the presence of the “Save Jita” forces, clear for CONCORD free combat, brought an additional group of players into the mix in the form of the gank defense fleets.  CFC players who had no real interest in suicide ganking got to come out to Jita and engage in fleet PvP fights.  And so they got to show up, PVP, kill stuff, and have a good time.  Another victory!

All of this adds up.  You can go to DOTLAN and see that jumps in and out of Jita seemed close to the normal pattern. (Though Burn Jita even hit DOTLAN hard, causing some data loss.)  Jita interdiction fail!  But the total number of ship and pod kills in the system, which usually sits between 2,500 and 4,000 on any given month, spiked to almost 13,000.  And that number was heavily weighted towards the last three days of the month.

Jita Jumps and Ship Kills in April

Then there are the other players, those in system neither to gank nor defend.  Some clearly “lost,” in that their ship was blown up.  But every hauler who entered the war zone, loaded or unloaded, and made the run back out, can claim a victory of sorts.  They lived while others perished.

And for those of us who were just there as spectators, it was a chance to see and be, if only in a small way, a part of one of those great EVE Online events.  Burn Jita will be one of those things mentioned for years afterwards, and we were there to see it and to suck up system resources.  We helped lock down Jita at times by sending it to the limit of its capacity.  I claim victory for myself.  And I have some video to prove it. (The most popular “Burn Jita” video in all of Poland!)

And finally, there is CCP.  They got a clear victory with the press coverage.  And, in an interview with EuroGamer, they got to make their stance on the whole event quite clear.

“Do you want to play a 15 minute match of Call of Duty that you won’t remember the next day, or do you want to spend four months manufacturing 14,000 Thrashers to do this? It’s just so big and awesome.”

“We want people to be able to do this. If Goonswarm want to do it, we want them to do it and we want them to have a great time doing it.

“The worst thing we could do is to stop it happening. It would be appalling for the game. It would be against everything we stand for.”

Not a lot of ambiguity in that.  CCP digs this sort of thing.

So there are many out there who can claim a victory.  That, in itself, is probably a pretty good sign that the event was a success.

Of course, one sign of victory is the desire to do it again.  And I think that will happen.

The musical question might just be, “How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve burned Jita?”

What do you think?  Who can claim victory in Jita?

And what will you do when it comes time for Jita (or maybe Amarr) to burn again?