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Massive EVE online battle, 10 hours, 2000 players, 57 dead titans.

I have no idea what is going on here, but I love it. I have tried EVE Online several times, but just cant get into it.

Please say Star Citizen is like this... Please say Star Citizen is like this...
 

Valnen

Member
I have no idea what is going on here, but I love it. I have tried EVE Online several times, but just cant get into it.

My main problem with the game is flying around doesn't feel good, at least in combat. I wish you were forced to manually control your ship with like a flight stick or something for combat and use your weapons the same way.
 

Brick

Member
Oh god! Please no! Keep your spreadsheets! I want the Freelancer style pew pew!

I think he means this kind of epic battles, not how the game plays. I don't care for the spreadsheeting of EVE either, but this kind of craziness in Star Citizen would be incredible.
 
My main problem with the game is flying around doesn't feel good, at least in combat. I wish you were forced to manually control your ship with like a flight stick or something for combat and use your weapons the same way.

That's what they are doing with EVE Valkyrie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzOFSSvKfqU

Right now it's planned to be just a solo experience with a small multiplayer component, so not tied into the MMO the same way Dust 514 is, but that could always change.
 

nubbe

Member

Man, I wish I was a teen and had all the time in the world to play this
Ae2q94x.gif
 
I really hope Star Citizen becomes a great game someday, but people need to manage their expectations. At no point was Star Citizen ever promising to be something like this. They have instanced PVP capped at around 100 players. At no point was Chris Roberts promising anything close to the scale of EVE.

Just keep that in mind. Hopefully Star Citizen is a fun and unique experience. It's not EVE and it's not trying to be!
 

methane47

Member
Same album, can't see dates.

Admittedly, I might be blind.

if you delete the ".jpg" from the hyperlink.. it will take you to the imgur host page for the image. Then you can see when it was uploaded. For example the Pic you posted was from 2 months ago... while the pic i posted was from 13 hours ago.

As of now from that 4k album.. it appears as if only the first 9 are from the battle last night.
 
I just lost 2 damn ships because I'm an idiot.

I trust people too much in this game.

Anyone in or around Dodi that would be willing to go on a low-sec roam with me ?

EVE mail Kaempe Kaskoofi.
 

ari

Banned
Is this game a real-time war mmo? Like every decision or battle affects the world around you?

I remember waaaaay back when my guild in Star Wars Galaxies pretended to think the game went that way. lol
 

Valnen

Member
Is this game a real-time war mmo? Like every decision or battle affects the world around you?

It's a space sandbox. From what I understood, what you do in the universe is essentially up to you. So if lots of players want to fight like this, yeah it becomes a war game. Other times it's an espionage game, or a market game. It's all on the players.
 
That's exactly what EVE online should have been all along. It's the only thing that would earn my subscription.

If that's what EVE was from the beginning then all the stuff you read about would of never happened. There is much more to EVE than just space dog fighting. Valkyrie looks great, though.
 
Does the "time dilation" apply to everyone on the server? It would be a pain in the ass to have your gameplay move at a snail's pace just because some other people are having a fight.
 

SummitAve

Banned
So for people not in the fight, can they take advantage of harvesting resources/trading/building faster than other players?

All of that follows EVE time (I cant remember what time zone it lines up with but it's a 24 hour clock), which doesn't change. You can take advantage of these massive battles by other means though.
 
There are a few great AMAs on Reddit right now to give a little bit better perspective on the different aspects of EVE:

Lazarus Telraven - CFC Fleet Commander during the fight
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1wdtzq/cfc_fc_lazarus_telraven_copying_manny_ama/

Manfred Sideous - Pandemc Legion Fleet Commander during the fight
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1wcxbr/hi_im_manfred_sideous_pandemic_legion_fc_who/

-

Rob3r - former Second-in-Command of TEST
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1weo82/i_used_to_run_the_largest_alliance_in_eve_online/
 
This excites me and scares me at the same time. I'd love to be a part of something like this but all other games probably wouldn't my matter anymore.
 

SnakeEyes

Banned
I've never played EVE before but this whole war has interested me greatly.

I only have one question though: Is the person who didn't pay the rent that started this all still alive...?
 
This excites me and scares me at the same time. I'd love to be a part of something like this but all other games probably wouldn't my matter anymore.

There is a large time investment needed. Best thing though is that skill training is time based, so you can in reality put up 14 days worth of skill training and not even log in again until you are skill trained up enough to fly that next tier ship or whatever it is you are trainign for.

Eventually, training begins to take a month+ of real time to finish though lol. I believe to fly a titan, if you trained nothing else, it is like 260 days or so to train up and costs tens of millions in ISK to buy the Skill Books required to even try to train the skill.

I tried to play a character that would require as little time investment as possible, but even then it was impossible to get anything done within an hours time or something. Like all MMO's, they are essentially for people who have many hours on hand each day to work with.
 

pulsemyne

Member
So for people not in the fight, can they take advantage of harvesting resources/trading/building faster than other players?

Blocks of solar systems are run from various nodes on the EVE server. When a big fight is happening the CPU running the node is ramped up in speed to try and cope with whats going on. The way CCP came up with of making sure the node doesn't crash is to implement time dilation. The more stuff going on the greater the TiDi in and around the system which the battle is taking place in. So for example a couple of next door solar systems to where the fight took place may get some tidi but it shouldn't be as bad what is going on in the system where the fight is taking place.
Last nights fight took place in 10 percent tidi which is basically as bad as it gets, everything is slowed to just 10 percent of normal speed. Last night's 20 hour fight was really just 2 hours long at normal speed. It's much better than just having what we used to have, heavy lag and the node dying a death.
Everywhere else in eve just carries on as normal, they never notice the battle taking place.
As for the other question above. Everyone's actions in EVE mean something. Everything you do can have a consequence to someone else playing the game. The whole thing is completely player driven. Last night is a perfect example of this, it all started because someone in N3 alliance didn't pay their sovereignty bills. Because the bill wasn't paid the station and the solar system became vulnerable to attack, hey presto my lot decide to pile into the system and try and take it. PL and N3 don't want it happen and thus a fight starts and carnage ensues.
This is why the meta game element is so big in EVE. It blurs the line between in game life and real life. We have spies in enemy corporations and they have spies in ours, we spy on their communications and they spy on ours. We find a spy and we deal with them. There are many, very heated, personal rivalries in the game.
Yet it rarely crosses the line. The EVE player base can also be amazingly brilliant when it wants to be. If someone dies in real life then we often change a space stations name in honour of them and even if that station is conquered by others the name will often stay. When vile rat was killed in the Benghazi attack there was a huge outpouring of remembrance across the eve universe. Hundreds of stations names were changed as a mark of respect and whole player driven events organized (If it's blue then shot it was one such event were we decided to shot not our enemies but our friends. It was a big in game joke).
The eve community often donate large sums of money for charities and disaster relief programs. Hundreds of thousands of dollars was raised for the victims of the Philippines super typhoon.
We are an odd, but often good, bunch brought together for our love of seeing spaceships go pop and knowing that we have just made someones day that little bit worse.
Oh and I have 106 million skillpoints. Then again it could be a bit higher if I wasn't eternally poor and bought some implants. And yes I can fly a titan.
 
Here's by far the best explanation of the fight from a layman's perspective:

Lots of other blogs are writing about B-R today. After chatting with CCP Manifest and CSM8 member Ali Aras last night, I thought it would be interesting to write a piece looking at the battle from a completely "outside EVE" perspective. In short, if you were trying to explain what happened in B-R to your uncle who has never played a computer game in his life, how would you do it?

So here's what I came up with. National magazines usually run 1000 word human interest stories on this sort of thing, with a 150 word side-bar attached (a side-bar is an article within an article that clarifies some critical point). So here it is: 1000 words about B-R for a general audience with a 150 word side-bar. EVE players will note I have deliberately simplified critical points here and there while trying to retain overall accuracy. What do you think?

---snip---

EVE Online is a game about spaceships. As Star Wars and Star Trek have taught us, sometimes spaceships get blown up. And sometimes it happens in large numbers. This is a story about how $300,000 in spaceships were blown up in EVE Online.

Developed more than ten years ago by the Icelandic company CCP, EVE Online is an MMO somewhat like World of Warcraft. But while WoW is focused on a fantasy world of swordsmen and sorcerers, in EVE Online players take the role as private owners of spacecraft. But while Han Solo was content owning a single spacecraft, EVE players have the options of owning dozens or more. Only one can be flown at any given time, but each must be purchased and outfitted and each serves a specific role within the game. Some are good for trading, others for exploration, and others... others are good for shooting at other EVE Online players.

And that -- finding other EVE players and blowing up their spaceships... and then telling the story afterward -- has been the engine that has driven the game's success for the last ten years.

SIDEBAR
Within the game, each player may purchase ships ranging in size from sub-capitals -- frigates, cruisers, battleships -- to capital ships to the so-called "super-capitals." These ships have an escalating cost measured in the game's currency, called ISK. A frigate will cost a player between one million and 50 million ISK depending on the specific type of frigate. Cruisers range from 50 million to 250 million. Money is earned in game through gathering resources, running in-game missions, or through building in-game items for other players. Typically, an income source in-game is considered "good" if it is worth 100 million ISK per hour, meaning that a single cruiser will represent anything from a half-hour to two hours worth of work to acquire.

As a player's time in-game increases, that player can afford to purchase a larger fleet of ever-larger, more capable ships. Battleships range from a half-billion to a full billion ISK or more, capital ships are multi-billion ISK investments, and a super-capital ship can cost up to 100 billion ISK or more, representing months or years of effort on the part of the player that acquires one.
END SIDEBAR

EVE is also an on-line social experience: players usually join "corporations", groups of players led by another EVE player. A corporation is typically a few dozen or perhaps a few hundred individuals, the size limited by the charisma and organizational skills of the single leader. These corporations can then join alliances of like-minded corporations to form organizations hundreds of players strong. The game of EVE Online takes place in a galaxy called New Eden, and the structure is set such that alliances can conquer parts of New Eden, taking them away from other players and exploiting the resources there for the benefit of that alliance's players.

Think of it like any naval battle you've ever read about or seen in a movie, just with more nerds. Once an area of space is conquered, the resources of that area can be exploited but there are also in-game costs associated with owning that are of space that must be paid monthly.

Sometimes alliances themselves can themselves ally with each other in surprisingly complex dances of diplomacy; one of the diplomats killed in Benghazi in 2012, Sean Smith, spent some of his off-time as an EVE Online diplomat. These new organizations -- called coalitions in game -- are made up of thousands of EVE players and have the ability to form fleets of hundreds or thousands of EVE players.

Players, corporations, or alliances who do not wish to spend time gathering their money in-game may purchase ISK in the form of an in-game item called a "PLEX" from CCP for about $18 U.S. At the moment, this amount of money is worth about 600 million ISK. This also establishes a "real world" value for every object in the game. A battleship worth 600 million ISK is therefore worth about $18, though CCP prohibits selling in-game assets for real-world currency. As a result, once an asset is created and purchased in the game, it's only good for getting blown up... which is where this story started.

Since Halloween of last year, two EVE Online coalitions have been at war for control of the "southeastern" portion of New Eden. The coalition owning the area, known as "N3", has for several months been under attack by a coalition of Russian player alliances. N3 has been assisted by an alliance called Pandemic Legion; the Russians have been assisted by a coalition known colorfully as the Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC). And for months these four large groups have been going at each other for control of this area of space in ever-larger space battles. Each of these battles has been relatively large in scope. In a recent large fight, for instance, 500 billion ISK worth of spaceships were destroyed by N3 in the process of capturing a strategic CFC objective.

N3 had been providing an area of space that included a space station for their Pandemic Legion allies to dock and repair their ships after each battle, and to use as a staging area for bringing more ships into the fight. Maintaining this area and its space station was something that had a continuing cost in-game that had to be paid. And yesterday, N3 failed to pay that bill. That left that area of space and its station open to anyone who could bring the muscle to take over, and the Russian coalition moved in strongly. N3 and PL, unwilling to cede the important staging area to their enemies, brought in a larger fleet. The Russians called in their CFC allies and at each stage, both sides escalated the size and scope of the fight until hundreds of the largest ships in EVE were engaged. At its peak, some 2500 EVE players were directly involved in the main battle, while hundreds more fought in side actions in nearby areas. The battle raged for about 18 continuous hours.

And by the time it was over, nearly 100 "super-capital" ships worth about 100 billion ISK each had been destroyed, as well as nearly 500 capital ships worth anywhere from two to five billion ISK each. Total cost of the ships destroyed in this battle? 10 trillion (with a T!) ISK.

With a "good" in-game income source, you could pay that cost in something over 11 years of continuous EVE play, assuming you were able to play the game 24 hours per day for that 11 years. Or if you tried to pay that cost buying CCP's in-game currency, that would set you back some $300,000 U.S. It will take EVE's ship-builders months or years to build replacements.

Though not the largest battle in EVE's history, it now holds the record -- by far! -- as its costliest. If you're curious, the Russian coalition and their CFC allies won this round by a large margin. Whether this is the battle that ends that war still remains to be seen: there are still plenty of other spaceships in EVE Online to blow up.

Courtesy of:
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2014/01/explaining-b-r-to-your-uncle.html
 

Mindlog

Member
There are a few great AMAs on Reddit right now to give a little bit better perspective on the different aspects of EVE:

Lazarus Telraven - CFC Fleet Commander during the fight
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1wdtzq/cfc_fc_lazarus_telraven_copying_manny_ama/

Manfred Sideous - Pandemc Legion Fleet Commander during the fight
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1wcxbr/hi_im_manfred_sideous_pandemic_legion_fc_who/

-

Rob3r - former Second-in-Command of TEST
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1weo82/i_used_to_run_the_largest_alliance_in_eve_online/
FC for nineteen hours.
Good lord.
That is absurd.
 

undersakura

Neo Member
I've been reading a bit about this game. The politics are fascinating. I really hope that there's some slick intrigue in the future that causes the major blocs to fall apart.
 

Barmaley

Neo Member
From a warfare perspective, what exactly did go wrong for pln3? How come they lost so many titans? Aren't they supposed to be the sturdiest, most hard-hitting ships in the game? Or did the other side just have more of them?

I have so many questions, almost makes me want to go a third 2-weeks trial demo in eve.
 
From a warfare perspective, what exactly did go wrong for pln3? How come they lost so many titans? Aren't they supposed to be the sturdiest, most hard-hitting ships in the game? Or did the other side just have more of them?

I have so many questions, almost makes me want to go a third 2-weeks trial demo in eve.

There are a lot of things you could point to during the fight, but there was one pretty big call early on that swayed the fight. Going in, PL slightly overestimated the effectiveness of the dreadnought DPS so the first wave of Doomsdays were used to clear off some dreadnoughts. This gave the CFC time to use their Doomsdays on other titans. Following this, PL focused their damage on killing Sort Dragon, a very controversial former PL member. His titan tanked a lot longer than anyone was anticipating, further sinking PL in the hole.

Again, this is wildly simplified and there are thousands of factors and decisions happening during the 12+ hours of this fight.
 

Barmaley

Neo Member
There are a lot of things you could point to during the fight, but there was one pretty big call early on that swayed the fight. Going in, PL slightly overestimated the effectiveness of the dreadnought DPS so the first wave of Doomsdays were used to clear off some dreadnoughts. This gave the CFC time to use their Doomsdays on other titans. Following this, PL focused their damage on killing Sort Dragon, a very controversial former PL member. His titan tanked a lot longer than anyone was anticipating, further sinking PL in the hole.

Again, this is wildly simplified and there are thousands of factors and decisions happening during the 12+ hours of this fight.

Thanks for the rough summary. I'm surprised there are no documentaries on these events. With all the ongoing behind the scenes, the drama, preludes to war, logistics and what not, I'm sure you could fill whole series of books with interesting stuff......and probably have it more detailed and accurate than any other previous history book since none of the actors died.
 

pulsemyne

Member
There are a lot of things you could point to during the fight, but there was one pretty big call early on that swayed the fight. Going in, PL slightly overestimated the effectiveness of the dreadnought DPS so the first wave of Doomsdays were used to clear off some dreadnoughts. This gave the CFC time to use their Doomsdays on other titans. Following this, PL focused their damage on killing Sort Dragon, a very controversial former PL member. His titan tanked a lot longer than anyone was anticipating, further sinking PL in the hole.

Again, this is wildly simplified and there are thousands of factors and decisions happening during the 12+ hours of this fight.
Sort's Titan tanked so well that we killed 6 titans while he was being shot at. TBH though we were already ahead before they engaged him and we already had more titans on the field than they did. CFC and Rus have a better presence in euro timezones than PL/NC. PL thought they would take over during the US timezone when they thought they would be stronger with super numbers. Sadly, for them not for us, they underestimated just how much people wanted to see their super fleet die.
 
Thanks for the rough summary. I'm surprised there are no documentaries on these events. With all the ongoing behind the scenes, the drama, preludes to war, logistics and what not, I'm sure you could fill whole series of books with interesting stuff......and probably have it more detailed and accurate than any other previous history book since none of the actors died.

CCP has been partnering with an Icelandic director to make a TV series about player stories in EVE. It's nowhere close to preplanning yet, but I'm sure we can all see how awesome that might be.

In terms of stuff that's "actually happening," CCP partnered with Dark Horse (I think?) to make a comic series also about player stories. That should be coming out later this year. I can't wait!
 

Kimawolf

Member
Yeah dedication like this is amazing. I love playing EVE every so often when I need a real kick in the ass, Great game and ya mining corps are def putting in overtime I bet.
 
I don't even understand what I'm looking at. Half the battle seems to be frozen in the background, lasers and all.

Each titan is about 16-20KM long. A battleship might run 1KM long and anything below that is smaller. At the zoom level of these shots and video it's impossible to see anything but the largest ships. The smaller ships in the pictures are supercapitals and dreadnoughts. Carriers aren't even especially easy to spot.
 
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