A ritualistic mass murder of freighters, jump freighters, haulers, and targets of opportunity is playing out with Shakespearean grandeur this weekend in the high-security systems surrounding Jita in the Forge. This is the work of Goonswarm Federation’s Ministry of Love (MiniLuv), a community of players dedicated to improving highsec by systematically culling botters, exploitative miners, and autopiloting haulers. Once each year, MiniLuv and its allies descend upon Jita to raise awareness about these abusive forms of gameplay by chastising, killing, and looting all worthy targets in EVE’s primary trade hub. Burn Jita 2019 is dedicated to protesting botting in EVE Online.
Burn Jita Six
This weekend marks the sixth edition of the event, which began in 2012 and has been held annually with the exceptions of 2015’s Burn Amarr and a hiatus in 2016 due to the ongoing Casino War. The impact of Burn Jita on Goonswarm, the players of highsec, and the broader community of EVE is hard to overstate.
“Burn Jita isn’t just significant to the alliance, it’s significant to the game,” MiniLuv Fleet Commander (FC) Knackered Old Goat said. “Everybody knows that this is happening. This is a big thing, and it’s player driven content. CCP has nothing to do with it, and it affects all of EVE. That’s pretty huge. Just being able to be a part of it is a cool feeling, and I think everybody in the alliance that gets involved feels that same sense of pride.”
Even CCP has taken note of the phenomenon. Perplexed by the first Burn Jita, the developer analyzed data from the event, noting that the scale of player involvement and their raw damage output was extraordinary, with over 45,000,000 hit points of damage inflicted. MiniLuv reported 518B ISK destroyed in that year’s edition. That figure climbed to 776B in 2018’s event, in which participants expended 25,000 pre-fit Coercers, forcing MiniLuv to fit signifcantly more this year.
Individual kills are frequently devastating, and sometimes amusing, such as this 17B Ark killed last year by 361 pilots from multiple fleets. This 15B Charon was one of the first kills of 2019’s event and involved 143 pilots. Another Ark killed in this year’s event reached 413 players involved. The complexities of the event sometimes create preposterous situations for members to kill such ships- one participant last year reported seeing a Goonswarm character named Frozen Corpse Trader following fleets to scoop up the corpses of famous MiniLuv FCs to sell on the Jita market.
Each year also brings forth its own unique episodes of depravity and disproportionality. MiniLuv FC Vulkyn said a highlight of 2018’s event was one fleet’s destruction of a cheap Obelisk that should have been covered almost completely by insurance. However, the owner, a disaffected fellow named Michael Tindall, spent many hours spamming anti-Goonswarm messages in Jita local chat, leading to Reddit memes and widespread mockery. To Vulkyn and others in the community, the free publicity was its own reward.
Sometimes the most unusual circumstances involve the participants themselves.
“My most memorable moment was back in 2017 when I was doing so many support roles and running a freighter looter for Fleet 1 while very drunk,” Vulkyn said. “I AFK’d on a gate, and ended up being killed by Fleet 2!”
Origins of Burn Jita and MiniLuv
The first Burn Jita was organized by the broader Goonswarm alliance, and MiniLuv was created in response to the success of the event, Vulkyn said.
“These days it’s a huge event, with silly themes (BJ5kids last year, Beep Boop Delve Bots Come to Highsec this year), providing a weekend of fun for the Imperium and beyond.”
The past two Burn Jitas were organized as children’s charities, named BJ4Kids and – although the numeral no longer created a double entendre or even made sense – BJ5Kids. Prior to that, Burn Out Warr Akini celebrated the departure of legendary MiniLuv FC Warr Akini from EVE Online. Earlier events simply commemorated the destructive power of large fleets of cheap ships in the hands of undiscerning pilots.
“I joined Goons when KarmaFleet was formed, and so my first Burn event was Burn Amarr [in 2015],” Vulkyn said. “Back then I was just F1ing on two characters, but over the years I’ve got more involved with Miniluv, bringing more characters over the years, although this year I’m back to two DPS characters, with the rest of my many accounts all running some form of support.”
MiniLuv Today
MiniLuv continues to bring quality PVP content to highsec year-round between Burn Jita events. Since 2018’s BJ5Kids, the organization integrated numerous new FCs including Knackered Old Goat, while others such as Vulkyn stepped into larger roles.
“It’s been a really good year for Miniluv,” Vulkyn said. “Obviously we continue to kill trillions of ISK’s worth of freighters, but we can only do that if we’ve got a strong set of support players doing things other than just pressing F1 so we can find targets, loot targets, build ships to kill targets, etc etc.”
“I was in CODE. for a while,” Knackered Old Goat said. “I think I had gone AFK somewhere around late 2017 to mid 2018… came back, and decided that I was going to make my main focus what I’ve enjoyed in this game all along: high sec ganking. It’s all just developed from there.”
CODE., a parallel highsec ganking community, used to join MiniLuv during Burn Jita events but announced it would not participate in 2019 after drifting away from the event for a few years.
2019: Early Impressions
During the first day of Burn Jita 2019, FCs maintained three fleets from downtime to late evening. Kills included the Charon and Ark linked above, as well as many pedestrian haulers such as this Charon, this Charon, this Fenrir, this other Charon, and a Leshak for good measure. Some kills even produced a lucky pod snipe.
“This year we’ve seen a good increase in people stepping up to run regular fleets,” Vulkyn said. “We now have a regular Monday night EU fleet and Tuesday night US fleet, in addition to the regular Friday night EU fleet Zul Eto and I run… These regular fleets are also open to [allies who are not members of MiniLuv], so it’s been a good recruitment tool too. So all in all, it means the future of Miniluv looks great.”
INN will update this report with any noteworthy kills that may emerge in the coming hours.
