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Pompilio Intindola
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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