In less than an hour, a battle of interstellar proportions will break out in the MMORPG Eve Online, a spacefaring simulation with its own politics, economies, and wars — all controlled exclusively by players. Between three and four thousand pilots are set to do battle in one of the largest fights ever on Eve, which you can watch live below or on Twitch.tv.

The battle is expected to rival the legendary Battle of Asakai as one of the most epic battles in Eve history — which totalled equivalent to $20,000 in losses for the losing team. Today's battle doesn't yet have its own name, but is taking place in a system known as 6VDT between two of the largest player alliances in the game, TEST Alliance and the CFC. In order to keep lag to a minimum, since the battle takes place on just one server, Eve's developers will likely slow down time more than 90 percent so its server can process all player actions. This means today's battle could take several hours to reach its explosive conclusion.

The Verge: One of the largest space battles in human history is now unfolding (updating live)

I guess The Verge has live coverage. Paul.

GOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSSSS

Look at all those ships! :D

This brave man destroyed his comp to get this picture.

I understand that this is cool, but I have no idea what I'm looking at. can you give some context? I imagine the orange dots and red dots are ships?

Orange is one side, red is the other, the guy is way zoomed out because his comp would crash if he tried to zoom in.

@blu3v3nom07: Have you linked this to Drew and Patrick?, they may be interested.

-edit- Patrick had retweeted this about two hours ago.

This is amazing haha. Wow. Looks pretty epic.

This stream has a better visual

http://www.twitch.tv/daopa

@rhombus_of_terror: I spose you're right.

@drewbert@patrickklepek Hey youzits. There's a big giant-o EVE Online battle is going on right now.

Which one is the Goon fleet?

Red one/orange one/one that is winning.

New TEST fleet just warped in, probably wont help the cause.

Were TEST woefully outnumbered like this from the start? If so, this seems like it was an assisted suicide rather than a battle.

Huh, this even made the BBC. But if you want real details on the battle, check out The Mittani.