Eve online

[Nathangun]

While I have never played this game nor I wouldn't have the time that it demands but I do like some of the stories that come out of this PvP universe.

This is one of those stories.

EVE Online player thinks no one will notice if he hauls $5,000 worth of items, is wrong.

Being attacked by another player and losing your ship in EVE Online hurts, but few understand the pain a player named Lactose Intolerant is feeling right now. Yesterday, he was ambushed by other players while hauling a lifetime's worth of treasure, losing an astonishing 150 billion ISK, EVE Online's in-game currency. But that isn't even the full number: If you take a look at the the kill report, the damages are much higher, with players estimating the total loss to be closer to 500 billion ISK—which is the equivalent of nearly $5,000 USD when converted to EVE subscription time. It's easily one of the most expensive ship kills since EVE Online first launched 16 years ago.

Though we don't yet have the full picture, what we do know is that Lactose Intolerant was flying an Orca, an industrial command ship that's primarily used to support large-scale mining fleets in EVE Online's more resource-rich systems. Due to their enormous cargo bays, Orcas are also frequently seen hauling goods between EVE Online's various trade hubs.

Hauling anything in EVE Online is a risky endeavour. Players often camp along major trade routes scanning the cargo bays of players as they warp into and out of systems using stargates. If they find someone hauling something particularly expensive, they'll quickly rally an attack force to blow it up. Whether or not that expensive loot drops is random, but these pilots will risk it anyway just to punish other careless players.

Up in smoke

In high-sec space, where Lactose Intolerant was killed, players are protected by an omnipotent NPC police force called Concord. But, just like real police, it takes time for Concord to respond to a crime in progress. Assassins exploit the delay by coordinating a fleet of ships that deal extremely high damage in a single volley, destroying their target beforeConcord shows up. Because of that risk, players looking to haul particularly expensive cargo will typically use highly-specialized ships reinforced with mods to make them extremely fast and hard to target. But not Lactose Intolerant.

Though it's not clear exactly what this player was thinking, his Orca was filled with a treasure trove of blueprints that players need in order to craft ships, weapons, and modules. Some blueprints are relatively cheap, but others can be ludicrously expensive—so much so that their value is almost impossible to estimate because they aren't sold through EVE Online's in-game market but rather through special contracts. What's more, blueprints can be upgraded (called researching) to improve how efficiently they craft items, which any serious EVE industrialist will do in order to save money in the long run. This also vastly increases a blueprint's value.

That's why Lactose Intolerant's loss is hard to properly measure. Looking through the nearly 800 lost blueprints, there are dozens whose value isn't properly measured by zKillboard, the website most players rely on to track kills. zKillboard estimates that Lactose Intolerant lost 150 billion ISK (or roughly $1,500), but players on the EVE Online subreddit think the actual value is closer to 500 billion ISK.

Word of Lactose Intolerant's death spread yesterday morning as players struggled to comprehend what had happened—or, more specifically, why someone would haul 500 billion ISK worth of goods in a ship that isn't designed for high-value hauling. Speculation was running rampant, with many players assuming Lactose was a "credit card warrior" who had bought an enormous sum of goods using EVE Online's premium currency (which can be sold to other players for ISK) without properly understanding the risks of playing the game.

That's why a director named Tharvoil in Among Shadows, the corporation that Lactose Intolerant belonged to, created a thread to help shed some light on what happened. "We all agree that how those [blueprints] were hauled were not done safely," Tharvoil wrote. "Looking through Reddit though, I’m seeing multiple people accuse this pilot of being a credit card warrior, calling the pilot flat out dumb among other things. It’s because of that that I’m writing this."

Tharvoil goes on to explain that Lactose Intolerant has been an EVE player for 16 years and is "an older gentleman who can be stubborn and likes to stick to his guns." Lactose's stash of blueprints weren't bought through microtransactions, Tharvoil said, but slowly accrued over his 16 years of playing.

I reached out to Lactose, but he declined to speak about the incident. I'm not sure I'd want to relive that moment, either. But it also makes it hard to understand exactly why he'd taken so much risk. If I had to guess, I'd say that he'd made similarly dangerous trips in the past and made it out alive and wrongly assumed that no one would notice him.

But it's also hard to overstate just how careless this was. As if transporting a lifetime's worth of work in a mining freighter wasn't bad enough, I reached out to Tharvoil directly who explained that Lactose was using autopilot to haul his blueprint stash to its destination. Autopilot slows down certain maneuvers, making your ship much more vulnerable than it would be under direct control. Even more baffling, Lactose was autopiloting through one of the most notoriously dangerous systems in high-sec space—a system that players will happily take long detours just to avoid even while manually flying their ships.

Orcas are big, but that doesn't mean they're safe. (Image credit: CCP Games)
What's tragic, though, is that Tharvoil said the whole reason Lactose was moving his blueprints was to take them to Jita, a major trade hub, so he could make and sell copies to financially support other players in Among Shadows. He was just trying to do something nice.

Tharvoil said that after his loss became public, Lactose resigned from the corporation and quit EVE Online. "At this point, what’s done is done, and there’s no use in complaining over spilled [blueprints]," Tharvoil wrote on Reddit. "We did not punish the pilot for this, as the loss alone is punishment enough. As a result of this though, he has decided to leave the corporation, and most likely EVE as well. We wish him the best of luck in whatever future endeavors he pursues."

If there's one twist of cruel irony in all of this, it's that of the 500 billion ISK that Lactose was hauling, only a paltry 2 billion ISK worth of items weren't destroyed—most of them being the Orca's equipped modules and some random junk. Every single one of those nearly 800 blueprints was destroyed, except for one. Just like that, 16 years of work is gone.

 

[Meat Grinder]

Damn.

I never played EVE, but I had heard it could be brutal.

 

[A Canadian Cat]

Wow. I do love hearing some of the stories from EVE online. Perhaps that player would like to come play Combat Mission instead.

 

[Stafford]

I played EvE Online from 2011-2017, had some amazing times in the game but yeah, you couldn't be careless.

Here's a couple of clips from one of the best battles I fought in, 600ish people so not huge but fortunately it kept the lag down. This is from 2014 if I remember correctly.

Battle of 77S Part 1
Battle of 77S Part 2

This is raw footage, there is no commentary or anything, unfortunately the loud ambient noise is my mic being picked up so you'll hear me comment from time to time.
In this battle there are two sides, but multiple fleets on each side, and those fleets are cooperating with each other - so there is a LOT of communication going on behind the scenes.
The guy you hear calling targets was our GM and FC, Mister Toucher, one thing I always liked about his fleets was that we had amazing comms discipline, when battle was joined apart from the FC speaking you could hear a pin drop, people shut up and did their jobs, only speaking when absolutely necessary. Once the battle was done and we were flying home it was open comms but when it was killing time, people got their game faces on.

Sadly the game changed and not for the better, and has (IMHO) been going downhill steadily for a while - too much 'pay to win' creeping in over the years. The vast majority of the people who I played with back then have quit as well, but we are still a community on discord and I play with them from time to time.

 

[HOA_KSOP]

Man, 16 years invested in a game and you accumulate all this stuff and "poof"! gone. That would suck big time. Be like MG losing all his sexy armor and weaponry in Battle Brothers.

 

[Nathangun]

A follow on article.

The victim of EVE Online's $5,000 gank says he's struggling with the aftermath

A few days ago the EVE Online community witnessed a baffling event. A player by the name of Lactose Intolerant was killed in an Orca mining freighter while transporting a ridiculous number of blueprints to one of EVE Online's trade hubs. Almost everything was destroyed. Though no exact estimate of their value can be made, players I've spoken to guess Lactose Intolerant's total loss to be around 500 billion ISK. When converted to EVE Online subscription time it equals nearly $5,000 USD, making it one of the biggest kills in EVE history. In the last seven days alone, the most expensive single kill in EVE was only around 240 billion ISK—and that was for an entire Keepstar, the Death Stars of EVE Online.

What perplexed most players, though, was the situation in which Lactose Intolerant was killed. Transporting nearly 800 blueprints of that value is beyond risky and requires extremely specialized ships that can slip through undetected or are so slippery they're impossible for gankers to pin down. But Lactose was flying a sluggish, 150 million kg Orca, and he was doing it through a star system infamous for being a ganker's paradise.

In my initial report, actual details on what happened were scarce. But since publishing that story both Lactose Intolerant and one of his killers contacted me to help shed some light on a weird, tragic moment of EVE Online.

A man of industry

There is no amount of tank you can place on a target that will make you invulnerable. Groups like us will always find more people.
Lactose Intolerant's anonymous killer

Contrary to what some players assumed, Lactose Intolerant didn't use his credit card to buy into his obscene wealth. One of the unique aspects to EVE is the ability to buy subscription time as an in-game item and then trade it to other players for ISK, EVE's currency. But Lactose says that's not how he plays: "Those comments come mostly from younger players that have no idea how or what it takes to gather such a [massive number] of blueprints in the first place. I had been building and selling capital ships at the rate of 28 to 32 a month for a good while, and [I was] always reinvesting profits into more blueprints."


Blueprints are the backbone of industry in EVE Online. In order to craft anything, you first need a 'blueprint original' (or BPO) that specifies the type and volume of resources you need. BPOs can be researched to improve their efficiency and can also be used to make limited-use copies that are sold to other players. That's why his actual loss is way more expensive than what kill reports estimate. That kill report doesn't account for the fact that most (if not all) of Lactose's blueprints were fully researched, vastly increasing their value.

Any self-respecting industrialist in EVE has a treasure trove of blueprints they hoard like a dragon—and Lactose Intolerant's stash was easily one of the biggest. Gradually collected over his 16 years of playing, his little industry empire required three private starbases and four separate accounts to manage.

During the height of his industrial enterprise, Lactose Intolerant says he had around 120 different research jobs running across his three factories. The result was a near-complete set of maxed out blueprints for EVE's biggest and most-used ships, like capital-class carriers and dreadnoughts. Most of those blueprints can be replaced, but Lactose was also in possession of two extremely rare blueprints which are no longer available anywhere in the game. His Eos and Retribution blueprint are so rare that their value is more determined by what collectors are willing to pay, with similar blueprints typically fetching a hundred billion ISK each.

It's hard to imagine what it's like watching all of that disappear in an instant, but, according to one of Lactose's killers, he had it coming.

Third time's a charm
Lactose Intolerant's reputation for flying carelessly is well known, says one of the pilots who helped kill him. He requested to remain anonymous, so as not to upset anyone in his fleet for potentially giving out sensitive information. "Lactose Intolerant was stubborn and did not care," this anonymous player says. "On at least two other occasions we stopped him in game and would have destroyed him with extremely high-value hauls, but as a practice I often will let someone go to see if they will continue to haul higher amounts."

(Image credit: CCP Games)
But Lactose Intolerant wouldn't stop. Eventually, Aggressively Average, the alliance that orchestrated the kill, decided enough was enough. Once, while hauling 5 billion worth of goods, members from Aggressively Average had set up a gank but called it off when a larger target showed up. "We stopped him another time and were in the process of grouping to destroy him when one of the group disconnected and we had to abort," the anonymous pilot says.

But this third time, however, Aggressively Average were prepared. As I explained in my previous report, ganking in high-security space is a risky endeavour. An NPC police force will show up within seconds to destroy players who attack others, so high-sec gankers field large numbers of ships fitted to deal obscene damage, hoping to destroy their target in one salvo before being destroyed themselves by the cops. Then, a second group of players will swoop in to salvage the wreckage of the kill and take any loot that might've dropped.

What makes a gank successful, then, is very precise math. In my email with Lactose Intolerant, he fired back at players who criticized him for being careless by flying a ship not suited for the job of transporting a lifetime's worth of blueprints. "[My Orca] was fitted for aligning as quickly as possible while still having a tank that lasted long enough to withstand an attack from 17 Tornadoes [the most common ship used for ganking], causing the destruction of most if not all of them by security forces," he says.


But my source within Aggressively Average disagrees: "Making a capital ship align fast isn't something that's feasible," he explains. "And there is no amount of tank you can place on a target that will make you invulnerable. Groups like us will always find more people. It will just take us longer."

To illustrate this, my source used one of EVE Online's third-party tools to run the math, taking into account the defensive modules fitted to Lactose Intolerant's Orca and his own crew's ability to dish out damage. It's complicated stuff, but what he showed me was that with just two pilots, Aggressively Average would've eventually killed the Orca (though likely not before the cops showed up). They had 17.

Third-party programs like this one let players do complex calculations on a ship's performance. (Image credit: CCP Games)
Ultimately, the anonymous pilot from Aggressively Average believes that Lactose was merely being careless. Contrary to initial reports, Lactose wasn't using his Orca's extremely slow autopilot to move between systems but was actually driving the ship, but the anonymous killer points out weird oddities in the Orca's fitting, like the choice to use two stasis webifiers that merely slow enemies down, as areas where Lactose could've vastly increased his chances of survival.

"In this case," the anonymous pilot says, "the only smart thing to do would have been to be patient, break up the BPO's into smaller packages, place them in unscannable, instant warping ships and fly the route when you knew the pirates were offline."


Lactose himself admits it wasn't the smartest move. "It was a late Monday night and I had some ships I also wanted to move and made the bad decision to use the Orca [which can also haul entire ships] instead of other ships I had available to me," he says.


The silver lining in all of this is that Lactose was moving the blueprints to get rid of them anyway. He says that after being an industrial powerhouse for so long, he was burnt out on it and wanted to move onto something else. He was hauling everything to EVE Online's main trade hub, Jita, to sell it all off and distribute the wealth to his friends in his corporation. But not even Aggressively Average got to benefit from the once-in-a-lifetime kill. All but a few of the Orca's modules were destroyed—500 billion ISK evaporating in the resounding thud of a neutron blaster cannon.

"I would have preferred liquidating the BPOs in another fashion, but look at all the ISK I saved on contract fees," Lactose Intolerant jokes.

Uedama, where Lactose Intolerant was flying, is a notoriously dangerous system that most players avoid. (Image credit: CCP Games)Life after loss

I now find myself viewed as an undesirable recruitment prospect by short sighted recruiters who only look at my recent losses and not any of my past achievements.
Lactose Intolerant

In the days since Lactose was ganked, he's become the laughing stock of EVE Online. Multiple threads on the EVE subreddit turned his loss into memes, with players debating how someone could play for so long without adhering to such basic safety protocols. Lactose doesn't have a good answer to that. As someone that has also been destroyed in EVE while doing very stupid things, I can sympathize. But when you've been playing for 16 years ISK starts to become meaningless, Lactose says. "I don’t play to earn ISK anymore," he explains. "I value the social interactions above all."

That's what's hurt the most since his extremely public screw up. Though he wouldn't go into specifics, Lactose indicated he left his corp due to a "lack of support" from one of its directors, making him a pariah in EVE Online. "I now find myself viewed as an undesirable recruitment prospect by short sighted recruiters who only look at my recent losses and not any of my past achievements," he says. "This is the reason why I am now considering if I even want to continue playing anymore."

Though Lactose says some players have reached out to offer financial support or condolences, he's been struggling with the community's reaction to his loss. "I must admit, the next two nights [after the attack] I had a hard time getting any sleep," he says. "I want to continue playing and not give my attacker the satisfaction of running me off. It’s just that the backlash I’ve been getting is hard to take and I hope it subsides soon."

If there's a sliver of hope, it's that there's always some new drama in EVE Online for players to get wrapped up in, and soon most will probably forget and move on.

 

[Nathangun]

Another EVE story.

Outnumbered in Eve Online: surviving the biggest battle in MMO history​

Goonswarm has pushed the invaders back into the sea, but for how long?


A Naglfar-class dreadnaught allied with Goonswarm explodes over the keepstar at FWST-8. Image: CCP Games via Razorien.

A massive war began in Eve Online in early July, pitting some of the game’s most powerful groups against one another. So far it’s been a slow burn, with multiple medium-sized engagements all over the spacefaring game’s southwestern sectors. On Sunday, the stakes rose considerably when a total of 8,825 players showed up for the single largest battle in the massively multiplayer game’s nearly 18-year history. When the smoke cleared, the faction known as Goonswarm was triumphant. But players tell Polygon that the war is far from over.

World War Bee 2 is an all-out assault against Goonswarm, a powerful player-led faction that has been a major part of the game’s culture for at least a decade. Leading that faction is one of Eve’s most notorious personalities — Alex “The Mittani” Gianturco. On the other side of the battle lines is a massive coalition, referred to as PAPI, led by a player known only as Vily. Speaking with Polygon last month, Vily said his goal is nothing less than the “extermination” of Gianturco’s forces, and the dissolution of his beloved Goonswarm.

Simply judging by sheer player count, PAPI has a significant advantage. Most estimates have them outmanning Goonswarm and its allies by roughly three-to-one — 50,000 characters holding out against 150,000, according to some reports. But, after 10 years of dominance, Goonswarm won’t be going down without a fight. It all adds up to the makings of a spectacular confrontation.



A 160-kilometer tall keepstar deployed by PAPI in Goonswarm’s region of Delve. More than 8,825 players would fight over it. Image: CCP Games via Razorien.


After working at Goonswarm’s flanks for two months, over the weekend PAPI’s forces finally crossed the line into the enemy’s home territory of Delve. They brought with them two massive structures called keepstars — Eve’s equivalent of Star Wars’ Death Star. These huge defensive structures stand 160 kilometers high and allow other massive ships to be ferried into the star systems where they are located. If these keepstars had been left in place to establish themselves, it would have opened up not one but two beachheads for PAPI’s fleets to flood ships into Goonswarm territory.

The enemy was at the gates, and it was up to Goonswarm fleet commander (FC) Asher to destroy those keepstars before they could anchor in place.

Polygon spoke with Asher on Discord on Wednesday, and he helped put the scale of the war and the significance of this battle into perspective.

Since July 5, Asher said, the ranks of Goonswarm’s allies have swelled. Players in Eve are allowed to use multiple accounts, but even still that represents a force of tens of thousands of real-life human beings. Of course, since the entire world (excluding some players in China) play on the same server, not everyone is awake or even available when big battles occur. Asher estimates that there were roughly 2,250 players fighting with Goonswarm over the weekend. Papi brought at least twice as many — more than 5,000.

One of Goonswarm’s Megathron-class battleships, which was pulled in too close by PAPI forces and destroyed Image: CCP Games via Razorien

“When they have those kinds of numbers — when you have that kind of disadvantage,” Asher told Polygon, “there’s no such thing as a straight-up fight. [...] We had to be creative, and we had to commit a lot.”
The strategy, as Asher explained it, was fairly complex. When PAPI deployed its first keepstar, Goonswarm scouts pinged it almost immediately and destroyed it in relatively short order. But, while that battle was still going on, PAPI deployed a second keepstar nearby. It was Goonswarm’s turn to go on the offensive. Asher’s challenge was to continually do damage to the starbase over an extended period of time, which was the only way to prevent PAPI from repairing it and establishing their beachhead.

To keep landing blows against the keepstar, Asher deployed a number of unusual new strategies. The main thrust came from massive wings of stealth bombers, with nearly 500 ships in all. Well ahead of the engagement, Asher plotted out multiple waypoints to create complex bombing runs. With those runs locked in, it was just a matter of individual pilots doing the work — often for hours and hours on end. The strategy paid off: After roughly 10% of the first wave of bombers were destroyed in the initial assault, the remaining pilots fell into a groove. Unable to target the small, invisible ships themselves, PAPI’s only recourse was to try to pluck their payloads out of the sky before they landed.

“They had surrounded the keepstar with ships called a Jackdaws,” Asher explained. “It’s a destroyer, and it has a unique property. It can carry a thing called a ‘defender launcher’ [...] which homes in on the nearest bomb.”

Hundreds of Jackdaw-class destroyers were deployed to protect the keepstar. Image: CCP Games via Razorien

He compared these hundreds of Jackdaws to a battery of automated close-in weapon systems (CIWS) — modern point-defense cannons that protect seaborn warships from incoming missile fire. Except, instead of a sophisticated radar-controlled robot, PAPI had to shoot down all of Goonswarm’s bombs more or less by hand.
To supplement the steady pounding of the bombers, Asher says that Goonswarm committed larger capital ships called dreadnaughts. They would warp into the battle from a nearby staging area, and acted as mid-range snipers who tried to do as much damage as possible before getting blown up.

“By the end of the fight,” Asher said, “we were flinging them at a pace of one every 30 seconds.”

Of course, when big battles like this kick off in Eve, the developers slow things down by a factor of 10. It’s a well-known feature of the MMO, called “time dilation.” In the fiction of the game world, Goonswarm’s four- and five-kilometer long dreadnaughts were warping in every three seconds.

The massive capital ships would also drop at different ranges, some as far as 300 kilometers away and others much closer. One dreadnaught even dropped in “at zero,” Asher said — nearly on top of the keepstar itself. One imagines a scene reminiscent of the D-Day landings, with massive U.S. Navy destroyers moving back and forth along the shoreline and pummeling German defenses to support the troops on the beach, only to eventually run aground.

A Naglfar-class dreadnaught warps “at zero” — on top of the keepstar itself — and is destroyed.

Developer CCP Games confirmed the details of the historic battle for Polygon on Thursday, which was fought in a star system named FWST-8. In total, 8,825 players (representing 11,258 player-owned accounts) were involved in the fight, with a peak concurrent total of 6,557 players at one time. That makes it the biggest fight in Eve history.

The battle raged for 14 hours, and the destruction was catastrophic. At least 3,765 warships were destroyed — including 362 capital ships — worth thousands of real-world dollars.

But Asher’s plan paid off. PAPI’s second keepstar was brought down, and Goonswarm’s home system of Delve remains safe — for now.

Even in victory, Asher knows that the war isn’t over. He said that PAPI is still positioned in neighboring systems, ready to launch its next attack. Another pair of keepstars could drop inside Delve at virtually any moment. Can Goonswarm keep sending ships to the front lines in these kinds of numbers? Asher remains confident.

“It won’t come down to [in-game] resources,” Asher said. “It never does, even at this scale. It’s not going to be resources; it’s going to be manpower.”

The battle at FWST-8 might make headlines for its size, but to Asher there’s much more significance to the engagement. In the early hours of Monday morning, around 3 a.m. ET, the fleet commander was left to bask in the cheers of hundreds of allied players in chat. Fighting the biggest battle of all time and winning has sent morale through the roof.

“When a guy flies in my fleet,” Asher said, “he’s paid $15 — or, whatever, 1,000 rubles — for the pleasure of doing so. So that’s why I tell all my [subordinate commanders] that every fleet is an audition. You’re auditioning so that they come to your next fleet. And so, if they aren’t enjoying it, they’re not going to come — because they’re paying money to do it.”

“So, these fights are about morale.” he continued. “They’re about human resources.”

If you’re interested in joining the next big battle, now is a great time to jump into Eve Online. If you want to join on with PAPI as an attacker, the best place to get started is by heading to the Pandemic Horde’s official website or their Reddit page. If you’d rather join the defenders in Goonswarm and The Imperium, head to the recruitment page for an allied organization known as Karmafleet.

 

[Nathangun]

How EVE Online's Players Started a War That's Cost $700K​

EVE Online is (once again) at war with itself.​

It may not receive the mainstream attention of massively-hyped games like Cyberpunk 2077 or annual franchises like Call of Duty, but EVE Online has been a pillar of the gaming community for almost two decades. Books have been written about the rise and fall of major factions, of the different eras of its 17 years of history.
Now, it’s likely another book will be needed just for what EVE has experienced in 2020. For the past five months, its community of more than 300,000 players finds themselves embroiled in a war that’s sent its entire galaxy into disarray and has (so far) caused nearly $700,000USD in digital property damage.
We’ve included a brief primer on the EVE experience, but if you’re familiar with it already and just want to skip to the main event click here.

The Basics of EVE​

For the uninitiated. EVE Online is an MMORPG set in the galaxy of New Eden, where alliances – comprised of thousands of real-life players – use spaceships to battle for supremacy. Or just build and sell spaceships. Or just mine asteroids for materials to sell to the players who just build ships and sell them to the players who like to battle for supremacy. EVE is unlike many other MMOs for a couple of reasons, the first and most important being that it truly is a role-playing game.

EVE’s economy is almost entirely player-driven. Nearly every item in the game must be built from scratch by actual human players – so, for example, if you don’t want to mine the minerals needed to build key components of your spaceship, you have to pay someone ISK (InterStellar Kredits, EVE’s in-game currency) for their time. It creates jobs, hierarchies, an uncanny mirror to our normal routine – some players set alarms to get to their “shifts” on time. This not only provides new or casual players with a means of earning ISK, but it also incentivizes groups of like-minded players to band together to form what’s known as Corporations (similar to Guilds in a fantasy game) to secure the supplies and manpower to mine, build, and – most importantly – defend their assets en masse.
Over time, Corporations who operate with similar in-game philosophies will often band together to form political Alliances. Eventually, these Alliances tend to form even bigger groups - known as Coalitions - usually due to sharing a territorial border with each other in the game. Forming these groups is not always a straightforward process, and the major Alliances and Coalitions will have players who specialize in diplomacy, whose job is to try to keep things running as smoothly as possible for the group which they represent.
The major Coalitions live in what’s known as Nullsec, an area of space with no security status (i.e. no CONCORD, the in-game police), where groups of players can occupy and effectively own regions. The ISK rewards for mining asteroids and running combat sites (the equivalent of dungeons in other games) in this area of EVE are bigger than in the safer, higher security regions They are, therefore, very desirable to live in and to exert control over who comes in and out.
And this is where the next most important part of the EVE puzzle comes into play: all of the players in Eve are on the same server, and that server never wipes or refreshes. This means that the actions and battles in the game have lasting consequences. And, like any red-blooded capitalist society, disputes – no matter how trivially they may begin – are often settled with violence, and in EVE’s case that currently means war on a galactic scale.

The (New) Great War​

This most recent interstellar dust-up may not be the first time the entire galaxy has taken up arms against one another, but it’s certainly the largest. The major players are the Goonswarm Federation, who – along with a handful of friendly alliances – make up a coalition known as The Imperium. Goonswarm is an immensely powerful alliance with a penchant for impudence (and has been for many years), and find themselves defending their considerable wealth and territory against... well, basically everyone else – specifically, a group of coalitions from across the galaxy known collectively as PAPI.

Okay, maybe “everybody” was a bit of an overstatement, but the PAPI superblock is represented on the map above in blue and purple, and represents the three massive coalitions teaming up against The GSF Imperium, which should give you an idea of how strong their numbers have become.
The conflict started in July, when a collective known as the Test Alliance (Please Ignore), part of the coalition known as Legacy, announced it would cease participating in a non-invasion pact (NiP) with the bordering Goonswarm territory – effectively declaring war on The Imperium.
The fleet commander for the Test Alliance portion of the PAPI group, who prefers to be referenced by his in-game name Vily, said that his decision to leave the NiP was strictly a strategic one, not personal – despite being a former Goonswarm commander himself. “As the smallest of the three major blocks, [Legacy was] being eroded from both sides,” he explained in a recent interview with IGN. Legacy Coalition’s borders with both The Imperium and their northern neighbor PanFam, according to Vily, were under constant threat of encroachment – “we were forced to make a decision of which one to group with,” he says.

“The reality is, to a degree, that it IS a war to the death."

Given The Imperium’s reputation throughout EVE – veteran players still remember one of their older slogans, “We are not here to ruin the game, we are here to ruin your game” – one might be surprised that TEST had initially offered an olive branch to the GSF. “We offered to go with The Imperium against PanFam first,” Vily said. “They were only willing to half commit to it – if at all – and we decided to go the other way.”
The Imperium, of course, sees things differently. “Their narrative method is to cover over the fact they were planning to backstab us,” says Alex Gianturco, better known by his in-game alias: The Mittani – the charismatic leader and face (at least for those who tune into his weekly Imperial propaganda broadcasts on Twitch) of Goonswarm Federation. “We caught them, and the war started before they had a real plan,” he says.“They were not prepared, we know they did not have a plan.”
IGN's UK team interviewed Gianturco in 2013
Of course, one might say the fact that Vily and TEST Alliance gave Goonswarm a full two weeks notice that they were about to abandon the NiP indicates they did have a plan, but – arguments over preparedness aside – the real question now is: where does it go from here? One of this war’s major battles was massive - consisting of more than 8,000 players, enough to earn EVE two Guinness World Records – and the conflict will almost certainly continue for a very long time – with the online propaganda posted in places like Reddit likely to become increasingly bitter. As Vily puts it “The reality is, to a degree, that it IS a war to the death.”

Breaking the Enemy​

Even EVE’s developers, Crowd Control Productions (better known as CCP games), are following the war with bated breath. “Internally we regularly give war updates,” says CCP’s Community Manager Jessica Kenyon, “cheering for mayhem and destruction as it happens.”
Kenyon – who used to be a fleet commander before joining the development side of EVE – explains that both sides of the conflict have more than enough ISK to let the fighting continue for several months, and that this conflict – like so many others – will ultimately be an issue of how effective each side’s propaganda is, and how many players choose to keep supporting each faction.
“Almost every war that I’ve seen in EVE,” she says, “never comes down to running out of ships or money, or anything like that. It’s always a social victory, in a sense, because the morale of one group eventually breaks.”
This might sound like an exaggeration, but player fatigue is real. You can only ask someone to set an alarm for a 3am fight, or to phone into work sick, or miss an evening with their partner to fly strafing runs so many times. If your members are happy and logging in when you need them to, then you will be in a great position to capitalize on the key moments of the war.

"It has very little to do about me," says The Mittani"

Both sides realize this, as well. “You’re not trying to break sov [capture territory],” Vily says, “you’re trying to break people, unfortunately.” PAPI has, so far, been mainly fighting a war of attrition, making slow but steady progress into Imperium territory. “By no means are we on a clock,” he says. “A slow strangle them approach, it really means we do have to take our time. As we complete each successive victory we are in a position where we can really make the enemy feel it by creating the oppression that follows.”
Gianturco, meanwhile, does not believe that these minor victories will matter to his Alliance members. He sees the very fact that maintaining morale is such an important issue as the Goonswarm Federation’s secret weapon. “The way you keep your guys motivated,” The Mittani says, “is to make sure they love each other at a certain level. The difference between The Imperium and these other organisations is that it has very little to do about me.”
GSF’s members certainly have had more than their fair share of bonding experiences over the years – this isn’t even their first galactic war. In 2015, the Federation – whose curmudgeonly bee logo earned the conflict (and the current one) the nicknames "World War Bee" and "WWB2" – found themselves backed into a corner by EVE’s other major factions, eventually retreating from a war started when a player was scammed by another (now ex-) faction in The Imperium. To this day Gianturco maintains that it was stacked unfairly against The Imperium by what he calls “dark ISK” - financing provided by online casinos that have since been banned by CCP.
An IGN News report on the 2018 conflict.
“I am a competent administrator, I’m very good at scheming… but I am not the person who makes our guys love each other and keep logging on,” says Gianturco. “Throughout our history we have always known that there would come a time like this again, where all of the game bands together against us [...] and it would require all of us and everything we had to be able stand against it.”
This involved The Imperium contacting roughly the 63,000 people on their forums to get anyone who had ever been involved with them – in any capacity – to come back and help out. Gianturco called it “sounding the Horn of Goondor”, and as ridiculous as that may sound, it worked – hundreds of GSF players returned in some form or another. “As part of that we have people who can’t play turning up and saying look here are trillions of ISK worth of assets, here are my Titans because I have kids now, because our society means so much to our people – plus they’re still pissed about The Casino War.”

Endgame​

Currently, however, there is no indication that morale on either side is cracking, with players on both sides are still logging in to join daily fleets. PAPI’s progress through Delve – the region of nullsec The Imperium calls home – is consistent and deliberate, while The Imperium have had a couple of political victories in getting a couple of midsized alliances to switch sides. The war is currently in what might be considered the calm before the next storm - which will likely be another record-breaker when it finally hits.
PAPI’s “constant grind” strategy involves capturing and keeping control of Infrastructure Hubs (iHubs) in target systems for 35 days so they can limit The Imperium’s defenses. These are easier to capture than they are to defend, and despite establishing a significant presence in Delve, PAPI has failed to successfully hold an iHub there. Once they do, they will be able to hinder Goonswarm’s deployment of Titans (the biggest ships in the game), allowing the next big push into Delve territory. There is also the possibility that one of the members of the PAPI Superblock betrays another, though Vily doubts that will be the case. “It’s been a line of propaganda and wishful thinking from our enemies that any day now we will turn on each other and the knives will come out,” he says. “We’ve got – quite literally – decades of deep-seated hatred, grudges, and contempt [for Goonswarm] that is really coming out here, where all of these groups – whether they’re big fans of each other or not – are all committed to the purpose.”

"People will be telling stories about this war for decades to come."

If Vily is correct and his soldiers keep logging on, and the Coalitions in the superblock put aside their past conflicts and stick together, it seems likely that PAPI will eventually prevail – at the very least evicting Goonswarm from their home region, which in EVE is a huge nuisance. For The Mittani though, he’s been here before. Where there’s an “if,” there’s a way; if political cracks begin to form in the opposing groups. he’ll do his best to find a way to exploit them.
Ultimately, and as with everything else in EVE Online, it’s up to its players. "This is where we lose control,” says EVE’s Creative Director Bergur Finnbogason – almost giddily. “I have no idea how this will play out and who is going to survive the mental pressure of keeping the war up. The beauty is that we won’t find out until the war is over – and possibly way later – because people will be telling stories about this war for decades to come.”

 

[mTk]

0300: "mTk?
mTk: (yawn) "Yeah. Whoozit?" (yawn)
0300: "Get your fighter bomber warmed up. We have a run in 10 minutes."
mTk: "WTF!?'

 

[Nathangun]

A PC GAMER REPORT FROM Steven Messner​

How EVE Online commandos pulled off a suicide mission to save 170 elite pilots​

After a server crash trapped hundreds of its biggest ships, PAPI Coalition staged a costly but vital jailbreak to get them back.

​

On Monday evening a pilot in EVE Online's PAPI coalition got a top-secret message that made his stomach drop. For nearly a month, Tony Rocca and around 300 of his comrades-in-arms had been trapped in one of the most dangerous sieges in EVE Online history. And in just 24 hours, PAPI was going to stage a daring rescue operation costing trillions of ISK, EVE's currency, to get them out alive.

It might seem silly to risk so much for so little, but Tony Rocca isn't your average EVE Online player. He's a Titan pilot. Commandeering 18-kilometer-long supercapital ships equipped with devastating Doomsday weapons, Tony is a part of an elite brigade that forms the military backbone of EVE Online's player-made empires. These massive ships cost over 100 billion ISK, take years of training to fly, and are the deciding factor in major battles between EVE's different factions. When one side's fleet commander calls in the Titans, the other side has two options: Call in their own or die.

If we had lost everything on that field, we would've been finished. The Imperium would've hounded us until we broke.
Tony Rocca

That's exactly what happened in the early morning hours of December 31, 2020. Nearly 7,000 pilots formed to brawl over a Keepstar Citadel in the M2-XFE star system. When one side escalated the conflict by calling in its Titan fleet, the other called in theirs. Around 700 Titans (and several thousand smaller ships ranging from interdictors to supercarriers) fought for 12 hours until EVE Online's servers shut down for 15 minutes to initiate its daily reset. As the dust settled, almost 250 Titan wrecks were smoldering on the battlefield. It was the deadliest fight in EVE history.

But for Tony and three hundred PAPI Titan pilots, that fight never ended. They've been trapped on that battlefield for close to a month, unable to log into EVE without being turned into flaming wreckage by hundreds of enemies that have been camping their spawn zone 24 hours a day. "This Titan is very special to me," Tony tells me over Discord. "It took 10 years of playing to get the character, the training, and the money for it. I was not keen to sit and watch it explode."

ACT 1: THE GREATEST BATTLE IN EVE HISTORY​

War is coming​

TONY ROCCA

(Image credit: CCP Games)
Titan Pilot in TEST Alliance (PAPI Coalition).
For six months, EVE Online has been engulfed in the biggest, most devastating war in its 18-year-history. Nearly 700,000 ships have been destroyed—worth about $1.8 million when converted to EVE subscription game time—in a fight to exterminate EVE Online's most notorious coalition, The Imperium.

The Imperium have been the kings of EVE Online for years. With an army of 50,000 players and a corporate infrastructure that could rival a Fortune 500 company, it's turned winning at EVE into a science. And though many have tried, no one has successfully dethroned it. During the 2016 Casino War, for example, almost the entire galaxy of New Eden rallied to take on The Imperium using funds provided by a cartel of third-party ISK gambling websites. After that cartel was banished for breaking EVE Online's terms of service, the war quickly fizzled out.

Things were peaceful for a time. Then, in July of 2020, an unprecedented coalition of some 150,000 players formed with one objective: eradicate The Imperium once and for all. Led by an ex-Imperium fleet commander named Vily who has a bone to pick with his old boss, the newly formed PAPI coalition consisted of over half of EVE's biggest and baddest power blocs. At the center is the TEST Alliance, where Vily serves as a military commander and Tony as a Titan pilot.

For the past seven months, those 150,000 PAPI pilots have worked tirelessly to smash down the gates of Delve, the region home to The Imperium's principal alliance called Goonswarm. But with everything at stake, The Imperium has put up a vicious defense. "These people want us to stop doing our hobby," Asher Elias, one of Goonswarm's most venerated fleet commanders, tells me. "They hate us so much they want us to quit the game that we enjoy. It's pretty good motivation."

Laser fire cleaves through Titan supercapitals at the battle of M2-XFE. Photo taken by: Maximus Brutalior (Image credit: CCP Games)
ASHER ELIAS

(Image credit: CCP Games)
Fleet commander in Goonswarm (The Imperium).
Despite PAPI's larger forces, however, it has failed to secure a sizable advantage in the war. Delve is still hotly contested, with star systems and constellations changing hands on a weekly basis. Keepstar Citadels are erected, then blown up, then replaced. And even though PAPI has managed secure a foothold and deploy a Keepstar one system away from Goonswarm's headquarters, the system of 1DQ1-A, the war is likely months from being over. But on New Year's Eve, PAPI's leadership council saw an opportunity to change that.

While fighting to destroy an Imperium Keepstar in the otherwise unimportant M2-XFE star system, PAPI had managed to build a Cyno Jammer. These devices prevent certain ships from activating their Cynosural Fields, the warp gates EVE armies use to jump entire fleets into battle. Cyno Jammers are a double-edged sword—they also prevent you from activating your own Cynosural Field—but this meant PAPI could effectively control the flow of battle. If the fight started leaning in PAPI's favor, they could flip the Cyno Jammer switch and cut off further Imperium reinforcements.

"It takes five minutes to turn on, however," Asher says. "If someone shoots it, there's a 15-minute repair cycle first. We were having this long, rolling battle and a new player—two months into the game—manages to fly over to the jammer, shoots it, and then dies immediately. We know we have 20 minutes until they can turn it on, so we're like, let's go. We just started piling every Titan and supercapital we have into the system. We're sending pings out with all capital letters like 'This is it boys. We said we'd fight on the Keepstar, here's the Keepstar. Let's go!'"

A window of opportunity​

DRAN ARCANA

(Image credit: CCP Games)
Head diplomat and acting commander in TEST Alliance (PAPI Coalition).
Dran Arcana is TEST Alliance's head diplomat and acting leader. He was in that battle, alongside thousands of PAPI pilots like Tony, when The Imperium's Titan fleets began warping in. "Whenever you go into a big fight like that, you always wonder 'is this going to be the big Titan fight?'" Dran tells me. "If it is the big Titan fight, you throw away every objective and you try to win the Titan fight. If you can rout an entire enemy Titan fleet, you win a war. If you have that supercapital superiority, as long as you don't do anything egregiously dumb, you can't lose. The moment that we saw Imperium Titans drop we said, 'This is the fight, let's do it.'"

For the first few minutes of the fight, both sides stared at each other across a gulf of empty space. Though PAPI had superior numbers and the Cyno Jammer, The Imperium had several advantages of its own. Keepstars aren't just giant space stations, they're the EVE equivalent of a goddamn Death Star. Like Titans, they have their own Doomsday weapons that can obliterate capital ships in a single volley. Even better, friendly players within range of a Keepstar are "tethered" to it, granting them invulnerability until they choose to fire their weapons. That means it was up to Asher to make the first move.

To a silent audience of over 3,000 Imperium pilots, he gave the order: "I know you've been waiting a long time to hear this. Lock up your targets and Doomsdays are free."

The first battle for the M2-XFE Keepstar​

If you can rout an entire enemy Titan fleet, you win a war.
Dran Arcana

That initial fight for the M2-XFE Keepstar lasted 12 hours until, at 3 am PDT, EVE Online's servers went offline for quick, routine maintenance. By that point, each side had destroyed over 120 enemy Titans and countless smaller ships. The Keepstar's armor plating, PAPI's initial objective, had been destroyed. But the station was still operational. As downtime approached, PAPI made the call for pilots to start pulling out to prepare for the next phase.

"We started moving to extract, and many of us did." Tony tells me. His own Titan, an 18-kilometer-long Leviathan, began pulling back from the fight. Just as he prepared to warp out of the system, though, an Imperium interdictor pilot spotted his retreat and fired a warp disruption bubble at him. Tony was stuck on the battlefield as the final seconds ticked down and the servers went offline. Dran, too, was unable to escape in his Ragnarok-class Titan. If either were to escape, they'd need to wait for EVE Online to come back online so they could log in and make a run for it.

An Avatar-class Titan amid a hail of laser fire during the first battle for M2-XFE. Photo taken by: Razorien (Image credit: CCP Games)
PAPI had 15 minutes before the servers came online to make a decision: Log back in and continue the fight and hopefully get out, or leave it for another day?

Sieging space stations in EVE Online is complicated. Like ships, Keepstars have three different types of health: shields, armor, and structure. In order to make it fair for the defenders, CCP Games created special systems to spread out battles and give defenders an opportunity to rally—this is still a game played by people with kids, jobs, and loved ones, after all.

When a Keepstar's armor or shields are depleted, it enters a state of invulnerability that lasts anywhere from 24 hours to 4.5 days depending on different factors. The defenders also get to choose a window when that invulnerability ends so they can ensure it happens during a reasonable time for their pilots based on their timezone.

During the initial battle for the M2-XFE Keepstar, PAPI had successfully destroyed its remaining armor hitpoints. The Keepstar would survive at least until January 2, when PAPI would have the chance to destroy it once and for all. "Even if we had logged in after downtime, the only thing we could do was shoot more Titans," Dran explains. "There was nothing we could do to continue the objective that we were initially there for."

Because the battle escalated so suddenly, PAPI had Titan fleets in nearby regions that were out of position and unable to fight. And though Dran and Vily had overcome multiple disadvantages in the battle, they knew prolonging the conflict could be disastrous. The enemy Keepstar, though damaged, was still a threat, and pilots had been fighting non-stop for over 12 hours straight. Everyone was exhausted.

Imperium Titans dwarfed by the enormity of the M2-XFE Keepstar. Photo taken by: Maximus Brutalior (Image credit: CCP Games)
The decision was made to end the fight and not log in after the server maintenance was over. Because ships disappear when pilots log out, PAPI's armada would simply disappear from the field of battle until those characters logged back in. Instead of having to spend hours slowly extracting that fleet following the first battle for the M2-XFE Keepstar only to have to spend hours getting it back on the battlefield days later, the Titans could just stay where they were but logged off.

Even in hindsight, Dran stands by the decision. In a few days, The Imperium Keepstar would exit its reinforced state and be vulnerable to total destruction. Meanwhile, even more PAPI reinforcements would arrive to reinforce the army that was already at the Keepstar's front door—logged off and effectively invisible. When that happened, PAPI would muster the single largest army ever seen in EVE Online, destroy the M2-XFE Keepstar, and wipe out The Imperium's remaining Titans. Goonswarm would be defanged, and the war would end soon after.

But PAPI forgot one important thing: In EVE Online, your biggest enemy is the server itself.

ACT 2: THE FINAL BATTLE FOR M2-XFE​

PAPI makes a risky decision​

Despite being an 18-year-old MMO, EVE Online continues to push technical boundaries. Instead of breaking players up into separate but identical servers like World of Warcraft, everyone shares one universe together. "Server region" isn't a separation in EVE Online.

It's EVE Online's greatest strength and biggest weakness. When thousands of players pile into one place, the servers struggle to keep up with all that data streaming to PCs located all over the world. Years ago, CCP Games slapped a Band-Aid on the issue by introducing Time Dilation (TiDi). When pilots gather in large numbers in a single star system, TiDi slows everything down so that the servers can keep up and process everything accurately. Under normal conditions, Tony tells me, firing a Titan Doomsday takes around five minutes. Under full TiDi that same action takes up to 50 minutes. It's why EVE Online battles like the fight for the M2-XFE Keepstar can take up to 12 hours. A dogfight can become a ponderous chess match.

Above: This video shows what EVE Online actually looks like when played under full TiDi.

That's not even the worst of it, though. During these enormous battles, players will often disconnect from EVE entirely or spend hours staring at loading screens as their ship tries to warp onto the battlefield. In the worst cases, your ship will arrive on the battlefield long before you do and the enemy will destroy it before you even have a chance to turn on your shield modules. If this sounds like a nightmare, that's because it is. But EVE Online's pilots aren't cowed so easily. Both Dran and Asher tell me these server issues are accounted for in their battle plans.

Five hours before the Keepstar became vulnerable, The Imperium called a "State of the Goonion" where its leader, The Mittani, roused the troops with a speech. DJs played music over voice comms while players began the laborious process of warping into M2-XFE. Asher says that it was imperative that every capable Imperium pilot was logged in and ready before the fight even began. They couldn't afford to have anyone stuck in loading screens.

PAPI meanwhile, had another tough decision to make: "The two options on the table were jump in safely and spend half the night positioning ourselves and maybe lose the objective, or jump straight in at a good position, acknowledge that you're going to spend an hour or two stuck at loading screens and [losing ships], but then win the objective, rout the Titan fleet, and win the war," Dran says.

If PAPI jumped in from a safe distance, they'd have to slowly maneuver within range. It would be safer because their ships would be well outside the range of Imperium guns while pilots waited in long loading screens under heavy TiDi. PAPI's leadership council decided to go straight in. PAPI fleets would jump right on top of the M2-XFE Keepstar but pilots would have to spend a few hours fully loading into the battle. Many ships would be lost, but Vily was counting on PAPI's overwhelming numbers to win the day. Tony, Dran, and the rest of the logged off Titans from the first battle for M2-XFE would also log back in at the same time. The Imperium would be sandwiched between the biggest armada ever assembled in EVE.

The call was made and PAPI stealth ships fitted with Cyno Beacons raced to designate the landing zone for the incoming armada. Once those beacons were lit, PAPI Titans would initiate their jump bridges and warp the entire fleet just in range of The Imperium Keepstar and the biggest battle in EVE Online history would begin. A total of 13,770 players had logged in—twice as many as EVE's Guinness World Record battle from just a few months prior. Everything was on the line.

The Imperium's Titan fleet waiting below the M2-XFE Keepstar. Photo taken by: Maximus Brutalior (Image credit: CCP Games)

I don't know any game where you can stick 5,000 people into the same arena. We're already pushing the limits of what can be done here.
Asher Elias

Then the servers did something unexpected. "Instead of jumping everyone in, dying for two hours while everyone loaded to the grid and then having a fight," Dran says, "Everyone jumped in, half of our Titan fleet got duplicated, and nobody loaded grid."

What Dran, Asher, and Tony saw that night was an unprecedented mess of bugs and glitches. The servers were so overwhelmed that when players initiated the warp to the location marked by the Cyno Beacons most stayed exactly where they were. What they didn't realize, though, was that a duplicate of their ship was appearing at the drop zone—only they didn't have control of it. The Imperium opened fire on a fleet of ghost ships that should never have existed.

That wasn't the worst of it. Some pilots warped to systems they never intended to go, others had their ships or their modules disappear entirely. Players were even receiving killmails (a record of your ship's destruction) even though that ship was perfectly fine.

After over two hours of glitches, crashes, and server issues stopping PAPI fleets from getting onto the battlefield, the PAPI called off the fight.

The aftermath of the final M2-XFE fight​

In a blog post following the failed battle, CCP Games admitted it had no way to control what happened in fights of this size. "These numbers are unrivaled—and unrivaled numbers in New Eden lead to uncharted territories when it comes to performance," CCP wrote. "Neither side of the war, or CCP, can, could or will be able to predict the server performance in these kinds of situations."

Though the battle was a whiff, PAPI were the undeniable losers. The Imperium thought it had killed 165 PAPI Titans, but 90 of them were actually duplicates that never should have existed. But the losses were still extreme considering The Imperium didn't lose a single Titan and managed to fully repair the Keepstar's armor at the same time. PAPI was back to square one.

PAPI capital ships shatter under the onslaught of Imperium Titans. Photo taken by: Razorien (Image credit: CCP Games)
When I ask Asher about it, he has no pity. "It's 100 percent their [PAPI's] fault," he laughs. "Some of them say CCP should know better, but I don't know any game where you can stick 5,000 people into the same arena. We're already pushing the limits of what can be done here. And all the people on the other side have been playing this game, most of them longer than me, and they've all seen this happen before."

In the span of a few hours, PAPI had squandered every advantage it had earned from the first battle over the Keepstar, and its one remaining advantage—overwhelming numbers—was now a wildcard that could break the servers. None of that compared to the fact that 300 Titans, including Tony's, were now stranded with no way to get out. These Titans, the backbone of PAPI's military, were now completely trapped underneath a fully operational Keepstar, surrounded by thousands of Imperium pilots on a battlefield littered with warp disruption bubbles. Troy, Dran, and 300 of PAPI's most valuable ships were caught in what EVE players call a Hell Camp.

ACT 3: THE HELL CAMP​

Trapped in the M2-XFE Hell Camp​

It was utterly terrifying.
Tony Rocca

When I first spoke to Dran and Asher for this story, it was on the 23rd day of the M2-XFE Hell Camp. For 24 hours during each of those days, a rotating shift of hundreds of Imperium pilots sat on the now fully repaired Keepstar. Most were at work, watching Netflix, or spending time with their families. But when the one fleet commander in charge saw a PAPI Titan log in, they'd raise the alarm and everyone would rush to their computers to destroy it. Hell Camps are a common tactic in EVE Online, and players have learned to adapt their lives so that they be ready to hop online at a moment's notice.

On his blog, player Wilhelm Arcturus documented daily life in the Hell Camp. "We’ve been at it for two weeks now and the camp shows no sign of slackening," he writes. "There is always a full fleet worth of ships on when I join, and an overflow fleet with 50 [to] 150 more hanging about, putting a sizable force on call around the clock. It is helpful that being on the camp doesn’t demand much attention."

"The fact that PAPI forces keep logging on trapped ships is probably the biggest thing keeping people active in the camp. At this point I am sure PAPI knows the situation and has communicated it as far and wide as they are able, but people make mistakes … Every kill revitalizes those in the camp."

A screenshot outlining The Imperium's enormous bubble traps at the M2-XFE Keepstar. Each one is hundreds of kilometers in diamater. Photo taken by: Wilhelm Arcturus (Image credit: CCP Games)
The war wasn't at a standstill, however. Though 300 trappedTitans represented a sizable chunk of PAPI's total supercapital forces, the coalition had more than enough forces to continue fighting for objectives all over Delve.

During the long weeks of the M2-XFE Hell Camp, trapped Titan pilots would occasionally try and make a break for it and die, but a few made it out with the help of small PAPI reinforcement fleets that provided cover fire while they evacuated. These attempts were haphazard. Meanwhile, another war was raging on public forums like the EVE Online subreddit to whittle morale and position each side as the dominant force.

This ceaseless propaganda machine is always churning in EVE Online, but the ongoing battle for M2-XFE presented a rare opportunity for both sides to declare victory. While interviewing Asher and Dran, both rattled off very good reasons why the events at M2-XFE were either disastrous or not that big of a deal. And because battle reports that tally the total number of ships lost aren't always accurate (especially when those ships were duplicated by server bugs), it all boils down to a matter of perspective.

That struggle to control the narrative doesn't help trapped pilots like Tony, though. He tells me his Leviathan Titan is the first he's ever owned. It was his dream ship when he first started playing 12 years ago, and he wasn't about to let it go easily. Pilots have to spend years training the required skills in order to fly one, and their 100 billion ISK price tag means most can't even afford one, nevermind replacements.

When logging into EVE, ships don't just pop into existence where you left them but warp to that spot from an unreachable safespot. It gives pilots a few precious seconds to do some basic tasks before their ship appears on the battlefield and can be targeted and destroyed. If you do this right before the servers go offline for their daily reset, the game will go offline before that can happen. But your timing has to be perfect. "For a few weeks, every night just before the server shut down, I'd login and slowly get my ship back in a place where it could jump out at a moment's notice," Tony says.

The Leviathan is one of EVE's biggest ships, measuring 18 kilometers. (Image credit: CCP Games)
"It was utterly terrifying," he adds. "If I logged in too soon, or the server took a little longer to shut down, there were hundreds and hundreds of Imperium ships there waiting to instantly volley my beloved Titan off the field."

In order to actually warp out, Tony's Leviathan needed to have at least 72 percent of its capacitor, the slowly regenerating energy used to power ship modules. During the initial fight, Tony had spent most of it to fire off his Doomsday weapon, but he needed to be ready to warp out at a second's notice in case an opportunity presented itself. So, every night he would log on less than a minute before 3am PDT and consume an item known as a cap booster during the few seconds before the servers shut down.

But The Imperium are the kings of EVE Online for a reason. Its pilots are exceptionally clever, and they noticed him and other trapped Titans logging in each night right before the servers went down. They couldn't target him directly, but they could still attack his ship with weapons that damage anything within a specific area. "At the last moment every night, they began to use their own Titans to fire powerful area-of-effect attacks—called lances—directly where I would be landing. The first night they started doing this, I got lucky and survived. But it meant I could no longer log in every night to get my ship's capacitor up to 72 percent."

Logging in was too risky, now. All Tony could do now was wait.

Remember the Titans​

When I spoke to Dran and Asher initially, both said they were in it for the long haul and felt good about the position they were in. While PAPI didn't have the bulk of its Titans, it still had enough power to take fights elsewhere in Delve. Meanwhile, The Imperium had to commit a few hundred of its pilots to the M2-XFE Hell Camp, spreading thin its already inferior numbers. Despite that, The Imperium had continued its trend of killing more ships than it lost in every fight. It was becoming a war of attrition and both sides were eager to make it seem like their pockets were deeper than the other.

Below: Goonswarm is famous for their song parodies, like this cover of We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel.

When I asked Dran what the next step would be, he gave a vague answer about continuing the fight elsewhere until the right moment presented itself to stage a jailbreak. What I didn't know was that moment had already come. The day before, Tony and other pilots received a personal message from Vily, PAPI's military commander. "Good afternoon [or] evening," it read. "Your Titan/Super has been noted to be in bubbles. Please be available to be online starting between 0430 and 0600 Wednesday EVE time (Tuesday night USTZ). Do not share this message with anyone."

"I messaged my boss via slack," Tony says, "and told him I might be late to work the next day."

FINALE: THE GREAT ESCAPE​

The great escape begins​

That Tuesday, while Dran was playing coy with me about PAPI's plan, Tony was trying to keep himself distracted. "Most of the day I spent just being anxious," he tells me. "I used alternate characters to scout the exact spot my Titan would reappear at, and marked which of the warp disruption bubbles The Imperium had planted that would need to be destroyed before I could escape."

Due to the operation happening on such short notice, only 176 of the trapped Titan pilots could be online. It would have to do. At around 9 pm PDT on Tuesday, the operation began. And like so many of EVE's best battles, it began with a ruse.

Tony explains that PAPI figured The Imperium would expect a breakout to happen just before downtime so there was an "emergency stop button" if something were to go wrong. Instead, PAPI began the rescue mission much earlier. When the call went out to alert everyone to login and begin the fight, Vily didn't say it was a rescue mission. Instead, the ping told PAPI pilots that an Imperium supercapital had been ambushed in M2-XFE and everyone needed to login and destroy it.

"The Imperium's spies can see our pings that go out to all members," Tony explains. "We needed to catch them off guard. The combination of that confusion and everyone instantly logging on our side to kill a hypothetical big ship led to us having so many ships on field we were able to kill most of the anchored warp disruptors before The Imperium had meaningfully responded in force."

Propaganda about the warp disruptor bubble traps at the M2-XFE Keepstar. Created by: WeylandNZ (Image credit: WeylandNZ)
On Reddit, Goonswarm pilot 'lastmanaliveithink' recalled his side of the story: "I was sitting in M2 chillin' in my carrier. All was quiet at the gate camp and I had deafened comms to focus on some spreadsheets."

Just then, a ping came through Goonswarm comms channels: "Wake up." Before lastmanaliveithink could even respond, he was hit with another. "WAKE UP."

"I thought, 'what's going o-EVERYONE WAKE THE FUCK UP RIGHT NOW,'" he wrote. "In the next minute, about 10 pings came through that were equally as concerning, summoning battleships, carriers, faxes, and then finally, supers. I was just looking around at an empty grid [at the] M2 Keepstar, wondering what the fuck was going on."

Then they started to hear the sound of thousands of ships warping onto the battlefield. "My overview exploded with red," they wrote. "Carriers and supers on-grid... fighters already deployed and moving... then I looked at [my directional scanner]... fuck."

Hundreds of PAPI pilots hit the grid, including a fleet of TEST Alliance Nightmare battleships that began attacking The Imperium's Hell Camp. In their wake came 150 "Goku" torpedo bombers that unleashed hell on the minefield of warp disruption bubbles covering the area. As they poked holes in the Hell Camp, PAPI fleet commanders cross referenced the locations of its trapped Titans to make sure they'd be landing in a safe area.

Because the game moves so slowly under TiDi, EVE players often log in with multiple different characters and control them all simultaneously. Tony had six other EVE windows open at the same time, piloting everything from a battleship to a Hel-class supercarrier positioned thousands of kilometers away using heavy fighter drones to destroy Imperium capital ships. Before long, Tony heard Vily give the call. It was now or never.

Tony and the 170 trapped Titan pilots logged in.

And so did 347 of The Imperium's own Titans.

The jailbreak of M2-XFE begins. Photo taken by: Maximus Brutalior (Image credit: CCP Games)

The Imperium Titans arrive​

"I had to at least make something explode before I die."
Tony Rocca

The Imperium might've been caught off guard initially, but now the full force of its Titan armada was poised to strike at the fleeing PAPI Titans. It was going to be a slaughter.

"My heart was pounding the whole time," Tony says. "It was very chaotic. Once The Imperium Titans had landed, they would split into squads of 30 and use targeted Doomsday weapons to instantly delete four or five of our Titans every five minutes.

When Tony finally hit the grid in his Leviathan and saw The Imperium Titan fleet, he said his blood pressure spiked. But there was an even bigger problem: EVE Online's servers were beginning to buckle again and Tony's Doomsday module randomly switched to being offline. He was a sitting duck.

When ship modules are offline there are only three ways to turn them back on, Tony tells me. Players either have to dock up and do it in a station, get close enough to a friendly capital ship which they can use like a mobile docking bay, or get their ship's capacitor up to 95 percent and then spend 70 percent of it onlining the module.

Tony's Leviathan landed just inside the edge of a warp disruption bubble but outside the range of other friendly Titans. He only had to move about four kilometers to get free so he could warp out if he needed to, but Titans are big and painfully slow—even without TiDi they only move at 50 meters per second. There was a good chance he'd need to shoot something in that time. He had to make a call: Spend all his capacitor and online his Doomsday so he could fight, or save it and pray he made it to the edge of the warp disruption bubble before The Imperium Titans targeted him. The choice was obvious.

"I had to at least make something explode before I die," he tells me. Tony switched on his Doomsday and prepared to fire. His Titan's capacitor depleted to 20 percent. It would recharge over time, but chances are Tony wouldn't be alive that long anyway.

Then Vily called in the cavalry.

Dreadnought wrecks adrift amid the fight. Photo by: Maximus Brutalior (Image credit: CCP Games)

Send in the dreadnoughts​

As soon as Imperium Titans warped onto their Keepstar, Vily gave his secret force of 414 dreadnoughts—smaller capital ships that specialize in killing Titans—the green light. PAPI pilots fitted with stealth cloaks had silently infiltrated the blob of Imperium Titans and lit their Cyno Beacons. Moments later, those 414 dreadnoughts dropped in at point blank range and opened fire.

Though Dran wasn't present for the rescue attempt due to real life commitments, he helped plan the operation. He says PAPI's senior command knew The Imperium would do everything it could to destroy its trapped Titans. The Blood God demanded a sacrifice, and Vily was going to ram one right down its throat.

"It forced The Imperium to choose," Tony says. "Continue shooting our extracting Titans—who weren't shooting back—and take extreme losses in their own Titans, or only shoot our Titans with Doomsdays but use their guns to save themselves from the onslaught of dreadnought fire. They chose the latter."

With the dreadnoughts distracting The Imperium Titans, Tony's own Leviathan had finally crawled outside of the warp disruption bubble. Most of his trapped comrades had already escaped, but his capacitor had yet to recharge to 72 percent. He couldn't jump. All eyes turned to Tony. "I was counting the readout of my capacitor over voice comms to the rest of my fleet—50 percent. 55 percent. 60 percent."

It was then that Tony got an unexpected boost. A friendly Minokawa-class Force Auxiliary capital ship—what Tony calls a "space priest"—locked onto him and began transferring some of its own capacitor, pushing him past 72 percent. He punched his warp drive. "The game took a long time to respond," Tony says. "It was the longest five minutes of my life because no one knows exactly how things will work under heavy TiDi. I was announcing each step over comms: 'I'm spamming jump! The capacitor for the jump has been taken! I'm showing jump fatigue! I'm in the jump tunnel!'"

PAPI propaganda following the great escape of M2-XFE. Made by: Noble-2-Kat (Image credit: Noble-2-Kat)

I've been in equally dangerous situations—even with the same ship—in small gang fights, but there was never a moment where my entire team's existence was on the line quite like that.
Tony Rocca

"When I finally said 'Titan is out!' my Discord exploded as close friends on my team gave me a digital pat on the back," Tony says. It wasn't until later that he found out that the Minokawa that saved his life was destroyed soon after. It died so that Tony could get out. "I gave the pilot of that Force Auxiliary a lot of money."

Bittersweet retreat​

By the time the fight was over it was just after 2 am for Tony. Of the 300 (depending on who you ask) PAPI Titans, around 170 had been safely extracted. Only six had died, but The Imperium also lost six of its own Titans. For the dreadnoughts, though, there was no escape. All 414 of them were sacrificed. In the end, PAPI burned over 2 trillion ISK—an unfathomable fortune—to save just over half of its trapped Titans. It's a bittersweet victory.

"I think it was a smart play but it was great for us too," Asher says. He says adding 2 trillion ISK to the butchers block is a win. And he can't imagine PAPI is going to sacrifice another 400 dreadnoughts to extract the other 130 Titans left behind. To him, this feels like a turning point where the last of PAPI's momentum fizzles.

Dran, naturally, feels differently. "We're exactly where I said we were when all of our Titans were trapped—still having fun and still winning the war."

With both sides so bloodied, it's hard to tell who's sincere and who is bluffing. We won't know for sure until PAPI gives up the assault or The Imperium is ousted from Delve. Given the record-setting intensity of the war so far, the only guarantee is that whatever the outcome is it will be a bloody one. That's exactly what pilots like Tony are hoping for.

He tells me that his escape is "the closest" he's ever felt with his fellow pilots. "We worked really hard together to make that happen, and all hundreds of us were laser-focused on getting the Titans to safety," he says. "I've been in equally dangerous situations—even with the same ship—in small gang fights, but there was never a moment where my entire team's existence was on the line quite like that. If we had lost everything on that field, we would've been finished. The Imperium would've hounded us until we broke."