Eve Online is the most complex and immersive game I have ever played.

It is said that you are always playing EVE, if you are posting, if you are at a meetup, if you are being interviewed by a gaming website, the bottom line is that you are still playing Eve. It invades all things, good and bad. In the Nullsec game, even at the grunt level, most of us know each other, or know of them, have broken bread with each other, have drank together, laughed and cried together. When this fight happened people on the gaming subreddit were just amazed that we were still talking in Eve terms all over the place. They couldn't believe the immersion that seeped in to the player population. We speak a different language. We have seen things. I wasn't Lying to Patrick, Drew, or You when I had seen Attack Ships on the shoulder of Orion.

I'm now going copypasta the most I made on the Moron Blog. I'll try and get the links done right, but I'm not gonna spend 3 hrs writing up this fucker.

So the most Expensive fight in online gaming history happened a few days back. It's been everywhere. So...I tried for a while to send links to our awesome sidebar mods and I have decided that They don't really have enough context to post or side bar this fucking thing. Instead of sending this post to Ace, I figured I'd just write this puppy myself.

I will try to keep this a No Smug zone, because It could have gone either way, and props to both sides for getting it on and brawling like heroes.

In Eve, people usually sort themselves by Timezone and language. The main blocks in this war are an ethnic russian side (RusRus) and their friends Black Legion (DTF or RUSRUS). The Cluster Fuck Coalition (CFC) which is headed up by Goonswarm. Mostly European and USTZ Players some Russians. Generally English Speaking. They have teamed up to fight Pandemic Legion, and the N3 Coalition (N3PL). N3PL is English speaking and mostly European, although there is a heavy USTZ contingent.

This War has been going on Since October. N3PL evicted the Russians out of their Space and they are pretty mad about it. So CFC came down to join them to fight because N3 came at us in Fountain while Test was being kicked out of the region (Shout out to any Testbros here. Oh, if you are in EMP, thanks for those dread kills).

Time Dilation (TiDi). In order to facilitate these large fleet battles CCP created TiDi. It slows down the Node the fight is on depending on how many commands it is receiving. Basic Translation, if it's 10% Tidi, for one second of real time on the server 10 seconds pass. So it draws out these fights where the happen. This is important, as everywhere else in game, moves at real speed. Tidi is terrible, but as opposed to the kind of lag that used to happen in Eve, it actually can work. Certain things make this worse, things like Drones and Missiles.

So Due to a Sov Drop in PL's staging system a battle occurred. The Fleet Commander(FC) of the CFC Lazarus Telraven Looked at N3PL numbers, and looked at his numbers and decided to go All In. Supers, Titans, Dreads, all of it. This was to be the largest SuperCapital fight that Eve has ever seen. And then it was on. For the next 22 hours battles raged all across the Region and Eve to support this fight. Other Staging Systems were camped to prevent Reinforcements from coming into the fight. It turned into a Bloodbath. Every Enemy Titan, Supercarrier, Carrier, and Dread that was unable to get out of the heavily bubbled field, died on the field with 15 min left until downtime. It was a Route. An unlikely Victor emerged. The Sheer amount of ISK (In-game currency) destroyed in this fight dwarfs every other by a factor of 10. The Previous Record for dead Titans was 12. The previous record for a single Battle was around a Trillion isk. This one? 11 Trillion.

Due to Tidi, 22 hours of Real time happened, but only a little over Two hours of simulation occurred.

The Destruction was incredible. 59 N3PL Titans Lost. 16 CFC/RUS Titans Lost.

That is how our Hero of this story, Lazarus Motherfucking Telraven took possession of his Throne.

Those Avatars (Titans) are all Dead Avatars. Literally a throne of Dead Titans.

The Hammer Drops (All of these videos you are going to want to 1080 and Fullscreen)

Notice how N3PL Start Doomsdaying(DD) Dreads at first while the CFC chooses to primary the Titans. After the fight two weeks ago in the disaster at HED, it was learned that in Heavy TiDi like this, the DD is what matters in these Supercapital fights. This coupled with the Choice of N3PL to try and Kill Sort Dragon's heavily tanked Avatar early in the fight (They thought he had crashed so his modules would be off and therefore easy to kill), I believe turned the battle from a fight where Titans losses were traded into the one sided route that we ended up with. In Heavy Tidi and with slow fighterbomber travel times under those circumstances, it takes 45 min to switch targets.The CFC saw that in Uemon and Asakai. Moving Drones around means that they are not doing DPS

Every titan that is primaried is killed from this point forward on both sides until downtime.

Like Every good FC, Laz kept notes during the fight. This was his After Action Report (It's linked in the Devblog, but I think this one is more readable)

What it was like to be there

All of those bubbles you see are what are called Warp Disruption Fields. Anything in them cannot warp or jump out. They are only available to use in Nullsec. The fact that N3PL again ceded the subcapital field to CFC/DTF as they have done before really burned them IMO. If you need to extract, you absofuckinglutely need subcaps to extract the Supers/Titans. This was why it turned from a brawl where Titan kills were traded, to a fight where N3PL lost their most active Titans. The CFC side was able to extract Titans after soaking up some Doomsdays. This was also the reason why it was thought that upwards of 100 Titans were lost in the fight. Initial numbers were 70+N3PL to 23 CFC/DTF.

The Aftermath and the TITANOMACHY.

Now is a Great time to jump into Eve. There are tons of :shobon: newbros around.

I'm just glad as hell that EVE exists, and that I get to witness, as a bystander at least, stuff like this.

Game of Thrones is about the arbitrary whims of the author. EVE is about numbers.

Moved to EVE Online. Please try to keep new threads and blogs (if the blogs are posted to the forums) to relevant areas. Thanks.

I will never dive into EVE, but stories like this are endlessly compelling. Just hearing about this was hard to comprehend, but reading about it and actually seeing some footage of it is bonkers.

When you play the game of space thrones, you space win or you space die.

Updated and fixed some broken shit. Thanks for all the positives, and sorry it got put in the wrong place. I am bad at the GiantBomb

@benluke: I'm in space.

Haha wow, are the titan wrecks just going to stay there, or do they despawn after a set amount of time? Either way, that is freaking awesome.

Usually they despawn, but some of them are permanent now as a memorial to the battle.

Wrecks usually despawn after 2 hours. Due to the size of the fight, CCP stated they were going to create an in-game monument of sorts littered with Titan wrecks.

It's also worth noting this fight happened just a day before Titan wreckage models were being completely redone.

Also, the interesting tidbit that everyone outside the game loves to latch onto: Converting the isk value of the ships lost to USD via the value of PLEX (an item that can be bought from CCP with real money that is used to extend an account subscription and can be sold on the market) at $20.00 per PLEX and then using the in game isk market value of said PLEX to equate the loss of these ships .... will bring a total $300,000 - $330,000.

I didn't really get into that because people that play Eve don't think like that. The Dollar conversion only really comes around when we need to explain it to people that don't play. Help Drive that headline that yes this fight was important and had real significance to the players.

The outcome of this fight determined the loss of 3 Regions of space from N3.

What exactly is the gameplay during these fights anyways? Are you clicking on ships and then clicking on abilities on an action bar? I've heard all these crazy stories about battles and politics and how the game's all math and you need spreadsheets and it's so sick and dope and blah blah blah, but never what the game plays like.

@theht: under heavy TiDi this fight was not fun at all for anyone there. You have to split your guns and manually cycle them because the game becomes non functional at times. People don't go ape shit crazy about it because it's much better than what used to be there. You used to Blackscreen and wait for 6 hours to wake up in a station minus your ship. Once those Supers start dropping their fighter-bombers, Tidi kicks in and it becomes quite the affair.

Non-TiDi fights can be quite fun especially with doctrines that require you to fly your ship well.

Things like CCP doing these sort of things of their own free will and not as part of some larger planned DLC package or weekend event is exactly why more games should strive to be like EVE at least in that regard.

I'll never play EVE but it's undeniable that they've created something extraordinary with that game that can't be found in even the best of MMO's. Emergent player run events like these are a spectacular show of how organic EVE is. If they somehow manage to figure out this Time Dilation business through better servers or code or something I think it will be truly amazing.

Eve Travel made it over to B-R for his blog

I would not advise travel to and fro on tranquility, as people are ganking tourists who don't have nullified ships (T3s and Interceptors). It's in a back end system and the pipe is easily camped. If you want to go but don't want to risk it, go on Sisi (Test Server)