The life, death, and rebirth of EVE Online's player-created cemetery

- EVE Online player and cemetery caretaker Azia Burgi, conversing with PC Gamer about the experience of rebuilding their cemetery after a major attack by other players.

CCP's EVE Online, that long-running massively multiplayer game of spaceships and spreadsheets, is nothing if not an engine for generating fascinating player stories.

Today PC Gamer has one that devs might be curious to read: it's an interview with an EVE Online player who goes by the alias Azia Burgi, a person who says they've spent years working as the primary caretaker of what seems to be EVE Online's one and only graveyard.

Devs who aren't familar with EVE Online's design should know that there is no support for death rites or graveyards. Burgi tells PC Gamer that years ago they just decided to start collecting player corpses (which will remain in space for some time after a player dies and respawns), loading them into cargo containers emblazoned with epigraphs, and jettisoning them into space near a player-maintained starbase, where they will remain as long as the base exists.

"It was just something that nobody else seemed to be doing so I thought I'd have a go and see what happened," Burgi told PC Gamer, explaining that what started as a lark eventually expanded to be a time-intensive hobby with a gang of helpers and (of course) a dedicated spreadsheet. "Suddenly I was the person who collected corpses."

The full PC Gamer article is well worth reading, as it sheds light on how the graveyard has come to be a place where some players memorialize real people who have died, as well as what happened in 2008 when the graveyard was nearly destroyed by a concentrated "Goonswarm" attack.

"I'd gone to university and had to wait a week or two for my internet to be installed. They took that chance to attack," said Burgi. "There was a period of about three days after the destruction of the starbase where some friends worked in shifts to re-intern about 500 graves."

Now, with changes planned for the game that will affect the way the graveyard works, CCP's Paul Elsy tells PC Gamer that the studio is looking into how to preserve it for the future.

"We’re obviously going to have to consider the future of the cemetery and what we can continue to do to support it and preserve the legacy of the site going forward," he told PC Gamer in an email. "We want to make sure that we preserve and protect the history and legacy of our players. We’ll be looking to engage with the community and figure out how best to tackle the situation. The community created the cemetery, so we’ll be reaching out to the groundskeepers to make sure that we do what’s best for the site, its history and its meaning to our players."