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. 

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MASS TEST ON SINGULARITY - 26 JANUARY 2021

We will be conducting the first Mass Test of 2021 on the Singularity Test Server on Tuesday, 26 January at 17:00 UTC.

Remember that what you see on Singularity is not final and is subject to change before it lands on Tranquility based on player feedback and final polish from the EVE development team.

WHAT ARE WE TESTING?

Our teams have been hard at work improving the Travel System effects and Jump Tunnel animation and are eager to test its performance with larger number of participants.

Please check the official thread on EVE Online forums for more information about the upcoming test.

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Eve Online is getting crushed by its own success

Alex “The Mittani” Gianturco is usually energetic when I chat with him, but today he sounds downright manic. Eve Online’s most famous warlord has been pressed up against the edge of the in-game map for nearly seven months now, his Imperium faction the target of a massive and well-funded coalition of his enemies, called PAPI. A little more than a week ago, the Imperium won a controversial victory in the spacefaring MMO, one that broke the back of the largest in-game fleet ever assembled. So you can excuse him for still being a little jazzed about that.

There’s just one problem. Turns out that the enemy fleet wasn’t actually destroyed. The reason that Gianturco won the Battle of M2 (as it’s being called) is that so many people showed up for the climax that Eve Online literally broke down.

Had the Battle of M2 gone off without a hitch, it would have been more than twice the size of the largest conflict that has ever been fought in the game’s nearly 18-year history. But there were hitches aplenty, and that’s how Gianturco won.

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EVE Online’s ‘massacre at M2-XFE’ gets an official breakdown from CCP Games, officially tallies losses

The latest great battle in EVE Online appears to have wrapped up, leaving in its wake an absolutely astonishing number of destroyed ships. For those who haven’t been following along, the conflict first began on December 30th with a large number of extremely large ships arriving to M2-XF3, resulting in what was initially reported to be some large losses of hardware on both sides. Now thanks to reporting from the New Eden Post, we have some final tallies.

The full numbers of the losses in terms of ships and ISK for the so-called Massacre at M2-XFE already immediately eclipse the 2014 Bloodbath of B-R5RB: Approximately 5,600 players were in-system at the time, with 251 Titans lost out of a total 1,200 committed to the fight. 23 trillion ISK was lost in the battle, equating to a real-world value of $347,000. For context, the B-R5RB battle saw 11 trillion ISK lost.

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How EVE Online Is Changing Players’ Lives for the Better

20 years ago, people would have scoffed at, perhaps even ridiculed, the idea that a game could have a profound effect on its players. But nowadays, it would be very difficult to find a gamer who disagrees. Since its inception, gaming has been an engrossing hobby that helps build relationships, offers stress relief, and can even serve to impart lasting life skills. As games themselves have evolved and pursued more ambitious endeavors, this has only become more true. 

One game that exemplifies this is EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that is nominally about spaceships and exploring the stars. Although it might seem at first like a straightforward game about blasting away your enemies, hoarding valuable resources, and exploring the star cluster of New Eden, once you peer beneath its surface, it’s also about building relationships between players and learning skills you can take with you to the real world. It could even be argued that without delving into the metagame around EVE, it is difficult to get a real picture of why the game has survived – and thrived – for as long as it has.

EVE’s infamous depth as a role-playing sandbox has allowed its players to become warlords who rally thousands of players and form massive fleets, aggressive capitalists with the wealth to buy and sell empires, and industrial tycoons whose virtual shipyards provide arms for the largest player vs player battles in gaming history. These players often become so immersed in the game that their lives can begin to shift and change around it — often for the better. 

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THE SECOND TIMER IN M2-XFE

On Saturday 2 January, both sides of the months-long nullsec war in New Eden gathered for another showdown in the system of M2-XFE. The fight was supposed to be a follow up to the biggest Titan clash in EVE’s history, which occurred just two days prior. This battle did not unfold the way anyone expected it to. A large proportion of the attacking side experienced in-game issues, which resulted in devastating losses for them.

UNPRECEDENTED WAR, UNPRECEDENTED BATTLES

The ongoing war in New Eden has seen some of the largest and bloodiest battles in EVE’s history. The war has already claimed two official Guinness World Records, whilst also breaking many other EVE records, including a record number of battleships killed in one battle, and a record number of Titans destroyed in another.

These numbers are unrivaled - and unrivaled numbers in New Eden lead to uncharted territories when it comes to performance. Neither side of the war, or CCP, can, could or will be able to predict the server performance in these kinds of situations.

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Both Sides Claim Victory In Massive EVE Online Battle

Ragnarök, the death of the Norse gods, played out in EVE Online in the wee hours of New Year’s eve. Hundreds of the game’s mightiest vessels gathered together in the M2-XFE system, and Titans from the game’s two largest factions spent over 12 hours exchanging fire and unleashing their incredibly devastating doomsday weapon systems. In the end, around 250 of these god-like war machines were nothing more than smoldering wreckage, including my own.

The fight was ostensibly over a Keepstar space station, one of the many Death Star equivalent installations that have been besieged during the war of extermination between The Imperium and the PAPI Coalition, with PAPI seeking to permanently remove The Imperium from their seat of power in the game. The station wasn’t of any particular strategic import, but, like many of the biggest Titan clashes in EVE’s history, the objective wasn’t the important part. Over the course of the 12-hour brawl, both sides continually escalated, bringing in more and more Titans, as well as other ships in small windows when measures to prevent large ships from using their jump drives to enter the system faltered. Part of the siege of M2 included a “cynosural jamming field” being erected in the system, removing the ability for jump drives to find a navigation beacon. Over the course of the night, this jamming field was either taken down voluntarily, or sabotaged several times. Though The Imperium came out the victor by number of Titans destroyed, both sides are claiming victory.

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