That’s the premise behind suicide ganking, and it wouldn’t be EVE if someone didn’t turn this most heinous of crimes into a huge player-run event or even an annual tradition. Starting in 2012, the Burn Jita event sees hundreds of players in the Goonswarm Federation alliance flock to EVE‘s main trade hub system of Jita for a weekend to suicide gank as many industrial ships, freighters, and random passers-by as possible. Burn Jita 4 took place recently, and killboard records estimate the final damage total to be over 750 billion ISK (worth roughly $10,000 to $14,000 via PLEX conversion at current rates). According to the latest economic report, this impressive figure is actually only around 2% of the total ship value destroyed game-wide throughout February.
Burn Jita 4 was different than previous events in that the attackers made use of the new free-to-play alpha clone account option to create hundreds of disposable gank characters to join the group, thereby bypassing the normal security rating punishment for suicide ganking in high-security space. When the free-to-play option was added, CCP said that it could potentially lock the weapon safety systems on for all free players if abuse of free accounts became a problem. Developers would of course rather not artificially restrict what free players can do in the game, so it remains to be seen whether this event will force CCP’s hand.
