The Battle of Asakai
For those of you who follow the MMO news sites, the events I'm relating might not be anything new... in fact, they probably won't be... for the others...
Sunday Night, January 27th 2013, at approximately 9pm Eastern Time, the largest battle in modern MMO history erupted spontaneously due to the three factors that always foment the initiation of massive hostilities:
• Political tensions between large, powerful blocs that have grown accustomed to a certain degree of hegemony in their immediate spheres of influence.
• Bold and aggressive force commanders ready to respond at a moment’s notice to hostile action.
• Human Error.
All of which is a very nice and prosaic way to say ‘some guy pushed the wrong button in a video game, and three thousand nerds spent the next five hours paying for it’.
But first, a quick overview of EVE...
EVE Online from CCP is a unique creature in the MMO ecosystem - the entire game takes place on a single iteration of the universe (as opposed to the multiple shard/server/dimension model used by most MMOs). In addition, while the game has significant PvE activity and structure, the longer you play EVE, the more you come to realize that the entire game is driven by PvP. Powerful NPC empires may control the space at the heart of the map, but their reach ends at their borders - and even within those borders, peace is a fragile illusion at best.
The space controlled by the great empires (colloquially known as ‘Empire’) is much like the territory controlled by any Earthbound political entity - some areas are safer than others. Each star system in EVE has a Security Rating, from 1.0 to 0.1, that measures the response speed of CONCORD, the galactic peacekeepers. In systems rated 0.6 or higher, CONCORD will respond to hostile action (outside of formally declared wars between corporations), though it may not be prompt. Below 0.6 however, in the Low Security regions of Empire, the victim of sudden violence is very much on their own. If you’re going to fly in Lowsec, you’ll want to fly with friends - the best defense against a gang is, after all, a bigger gang. And once you venture out of Empire space, into the realms of 0.0 Security Rating systems, the picture changes again.
Out there, in what players refer to as ‘Nullsec’, factions other than the great empires hold sway. In some cases, these are NPC pirate kings and cult leaders, amassing fleets of loyal cutthroats to carry out their nefarious will. (In other words, to provide players with NPCs to shoot at! So considerate, those NPC pirate kings and cult leaders.) In others, though, the power structure is completely in the hands of the people playing the game. Sovereignty in those systems rests with player-run and organized Corporations (the EVE equivalent of other games’ Guilds), Alliances (of Corporations), and Coalitions (of Alliances). The resources of these areas are completely in the hands of the players, as well, and control of these resources is the biggest motivator behind the Great Wars of nullsec.
It is to those players, as well, that security in those parts of space falls. If there is an enemy pilot harassing miners or pirate-hunters (PvE activities) in Branch, the region of space controlled by Get Off My LAWN!, the Alliance to which I belong, there are no NPC guards, no CONCORD, no Sgt. Slate, to bail them out. The only force that will show up to run that enemy off will be comprised of LAWN members, and/or allies of ours from the Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC) who are bored and looking to shoot someone.
Here, of course, I insert the obligatory ‘Beware the Gnomes of LAWN’ notice.
So, you know, beware ‘em.
And now, with that in mind, back to how 15,000 hours of life evaporated into less than 20 minutes of game-time. Seriously, 15,000 hours. At a full-time job, you work approximately 2,000 hours a year. So take all the time you’ve been at work in the last five years, and imagine that vanishing into the ether because one guy clicked on the wrong thing. Fortunately, it was spread out over multiple people.
9:00pm Eastern Time: LAWN is forming up for a small gang pvp action - basically, we’re going to take cheap, disposable ships out and look for trouble. Among the nullsec inhabitants of EVE, this is nothing unusual. It’s the internet spaceship equivalent of going out drinking and getting into a fight with the same guys you got into a fight with last time you went out drinking. They know you’re coming - or they’ll drop by your place - and you have a lot of fun beating the crap out of one another.
Half the game away, in a lowsec system not very far from space controlled by the CFC, normal life continues for a couple of small players in the great drama of nullsec sovereignty warfare. This is Asakai, off in the ass-end of nowhere. Unbeknownst to them, Dabigredboat (DBRB, or ‘Boat’), one of the CFC’s most active Fleet Commanders (FC), is giggling into his mic about how he is about to drop some of the most expensive, most powerful ships directly onto a space station owned by Liandri Covenant that is about to become vulnerable to attack.
This is not the first time in the past week that he has done this - only a few days earlier, DBRB had ‘hotdropped’ as it’s called, a capital fleet of carriers and dreadnaughts onto another Liandri Covenant fleet. At that time, his attack was completely successful - but without his knowledge, his activites have come to the attention of Pandemic Legion (PL), owners of the single largest fleet of supercapitals (supercarriers and titans) in EVE.
Time ticks down. The station comes out of it's invulnerable 'Reinforced' mode. DBRB tells everyone to get ready for him to open the jump bridge...
... and instead of clicking 'bridge', Boat clicks 'jump', sending his Titan into the middle of hostile ships, in a lowsec system where the Titan's primary weapon system, the Doomsday Device, can't be used.
Drunk n' Disorderly (DnD), the other lowsec militia corporation in Asakai, immediately lets Pandemic Legion know that there's a CFC Titan on field, in lowsec, and offers to bring multiple Heavy Interdictors (HICs) to keep it trapped. HICs are the only ship capable of preventing a supercapital from warping away, or jumping to safety once it's rebuilt enough power in its jump system.
Meanwhile, Boat has called for the fleet to jump a group of Archon-class carriers into the system to begin giving him energy transfers, so his titan can jump back out more quickly. With the Archons on the field, the group is now engaging in what amounts to manage equalization.
DnD batphones PL. "Of course, Commissioner!" responds PL. HICs begin tackling the vulnerable capital ships.
Boat calls for more reinforcements from his fleet, and from the CFC in general, sending out a general distress call of 'Friendly Supers Tackled'.
At that point, the wheels are starting to come off.
Half of our fleet leaves fleet to jump-clone from UB-U, our staging system, to VFK, the central staging point of the CFC, and Goonswarm's capital station of Mittaningrad. The rest of us begin burning full speed through jump bridges and stargates for the same destination.
First one subcapital rescue fleet, then a second, and a third, and a fourth fill up to 252 people each, and start screaming across the breadth of known space toward Akashai.
At the same time, PL has informed their allies, like TEST Alliance, centerpiece of the Honey Badger Coalition (HBC) of the situation... and their enemies, as well. One thing the CFC is very good at is making enemies, and in this instance, PL is willing to play nice: Everyone can come jump on Boat's boat, and PL will promise that everyone who comes in to attack the CFC will leave in peace, without any threat from PL's supers, or one another.
A planned fleet operation that largely should have consisted of a 10th-grader kicking a kindergartener in the head when they fall over has become EVE vs the CFC.
More and more pilots, in ships ranging from solo scouts to massive supercapitals, stream into Asakai. Time Dilation (TiDi), CCP's software system for stretching out events over time in order to reduce hardware workloads, kicks in, and continues to rise as the groups converge. Soon the systems surrounding Asakai are experiencing TiDi as the servers try to compensate for the traffic.
When Secondfleet reaches the battle... we are not moving. At all. Attempting to target friendly ships in order to deliver remote shield regeneration takes minutes instead of moments. Maneuvering to attempt to keep the friendly fleet in range becomes almost impossible as server lag creates skips that send my ship - and all of the other Scimitar-class logistics cruisers flying in formation behind me - suddenly lurching in unpredictable directions.
It is, in fact, a Clusterfuck. We feel right at home.
CFC supercapitals are working hard to extract themselves from the situation. The subcapital fleets are working just as hard to kill enemy HICs. As the HICs fall, the supers flee. Then the capitals begin to withdraw as well.
The final tally of losses for the CFC is three titans, five supercarriers, twenty-two carriers, and forty-five dreadnaughts. A butcher's bill indeed. Our total kills among the numerous enemy fleets? One Pandemic Legion supercarrier and a handful of capital ships. The total financial bloodletting is 834 billion ISK. For comparison, in EVE you can buy game-time with in-game currency - right now a 30 Day Pilot's License EXtension (PLEX) runs about 553 million ISK, and is equivalent to $15 US. Which means the losses amount to approximately $22,622 American, without taking into account the value of the almost 2 years (15,000 hours) lost between the 3000+ pilots involved.
And that's what this is really about, this composition of my thoughts: EVE, these days, has three unofficial slogans:
"Internet Spaceships are SRS BSNS"
"EVE is REAL"
"I was there..."
Well... I was there, and that loss of investment, which all has to be recovered now? That's what makes EVE real, and makes internet spaceships SRS BSNS. EVE is the only game out there where all of that stuff that got destroyed... is just gone. And now every activity in the game is involved replacing that materiel - mining, industry, scouting, missioning (for isk and loot and rep items) all feed into the process.
EVE is real - one small mistake has consequences that extend out a long, long way. The CFC has been the 800 lb gorilla in the room for months, if not years, and now we've had our noses bloodied by everyone all at once. Our enemies have demonstrated they can come together to jump on us. That could represent a serious change in the balance of power.
Will it? It's too soon to say... but one person misclicked, and the entire political climate in the galaxy may have changed. And that's why I play this game. That's why I fly with the people I fly with. I love flying with the CFC. I love flying with Vily and Vee and especially Suas. I even enjoy flying with Boat. There's blood in the water, and the sharks might well be closing in.
I hope they are. I hope the feeding frenzy begins. And I hope we can demonstrate that bloodied, and outnumbered in a way the CFC has never been outnumbered... we'll just fight that much harder.
I fucking love this game.
Sunday Night, January 27th 2013, at approximately 9pm Eastern Time, the largest battle in modern MMO history erupted spontaneously due to the three factors that always foment the initiation of massive hostilities:
• Political tensions between large, powerful blocs that have grown accustomed to a certain degree of hegemony in their immediate spheres of influence.
• Bold and aggressive force commanders ready to respond at a moment’s notice to hostile action.
• Human Error.
All of which is a very nice and prosaic way to say ‘some guy pushed the wrong button in a video game, and three thousand nerds spent the next five hours paying for it’.
But first, a quick overview of EVE...
EVE Online from CCP is a unique creature in the MMO ecosystem - the entire game takes place on a single iteration of the universe (as opposed to the multiple shard/server/dimension model used by most MMOs). In addition, while the game has significant PvE activity and structure, the longer you play EVE, the more you come to realize that the entire game is driven by PvP. Powerful NPC empires may control the space at the heart of the map, but their reach ends at their borders - and even within those borders, peace is a fragile illusion at best.
The space controlled by the great empires (colloquially known as ‘Empire’) is much like the territory controlled by any Earthbound political entity - some areas are safer than others. Each star system in EVE has a Security Rating, from 1.0 to 0.1, that measures the response speed of CONCORD, the galactic peacekeepers. In systems rated 0.6 or higher, CONCORD will respond to hostile action (outside of formally declared wars between corporations), though it may not be prompt. Below 0.6 however, in the Low Security regions of Empire, the victim of sudden violence is very much on their own. If you’re going to fly in Lowsec, you’ll want to fly with friends - the best defense against a gang is, after all, a bigger gang. And once you venture out of Empire space, into the realms of 0.0 Security Rating systems, the picture changes again.
Out there, in what players refer to as ‘Nullsec’, factions other than the great empires hold sway. In some cases, these are NPC pirate kings and cult leaders, amassing fleets of loyal cutthroats to carry out their nefarious will. (In other words, to provide players with NPCs to shoot at! So considerate, those NPC pirate kings and cult leaders.) In others, though, the power structure is completely in the hands of the people playing the game. Sovereignty in those systems rests with player-run and organized Corporations (the EVE equivalent of other games’ Guilds), Alliances (of Corporations), and Coalitions (of Alliances). The resources of these areas are completely in the hands of the players, as well, and control of these resources is the biggest motivator behind the Great Wars of nullsec.
It is to those players, as well, that security in those parts of space falls. If there is an enemy pilot harassing miners or pirate-hunters (PvE activities) in Branch, the region of space controlled by Get Off My LAWN!, the Alliance to which I belong, there are no NPC guards, no CONCORD, no Sgt. Slate, to bail them out. The only force that will show up to run that enemy off will be comprised of LAWN members, and/or allies of ours from the Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC) who are bored and looking to shoot someone.
Here, of course, I insert the obligatory ‘Beware the Gnomes of LAWN’ notice.
So, you know, beware ‘em.
And now, with that in mind, back to how 15,000 hours of life evaporated into less than 20 minutes of game-time. Seriously, 15,000 hours. At a full-time job, you work approximately 2,000 hours a year. So take all the time you’ve been at work in the last five years, and imagine that vanishing into the ether because one guy clicked on the wrong thing. Fortunately, it was spread out over multiple people.
9:00pm Eastern Time: LAWN is forming up for a small gang pvp action - basically, we’re going to take cheap, disposable ships out and look for trouble. Among the nullsec inhabitants of EVE, this is nothing unusual. It’s the internet spaceship equivalent of going out drinking and getting into a fight with the same guys you got into a fight with last time you went out drinking. They know you’re coming - or they’ll drop by your place - and you have a lot of fun beating the crap out of one another.
Half the game away, in a lowsec system not very far from space controlled by the CFC, normal life continues for a couple of small players in the great drama of nullsec sovereignty warfare. This is Asakai, off in the ass-end of nowhere. Unbeknownst to them, Dabigredboat (DBRB, or ‘Boat’), one of the CFC’s most active Fleet Commanders (FC), is giggling into his mic about how he is about to drop some of the most expensive, most powerful ships directly onto a space station owned by Liandri Covenant that is about to become vulnerable to attack.
This is not the first time in the past week that he has done this - only a few days earlier, DBRB had ‘hotdropped’ as it’s called, a capital fleet of carriers and dreadnaughts onto another Liandri Covenant fleet. At that time, his attack was completely successful - but without his knowledge, his activites have come to the attention of Pandemic Legion (PL), owners of the single largest fleet of supercapitals (supercarriers and titans) in EVE.
Time ticks down. The station comes out of it's invulnerable 'Reinforced' mode. DBRB tells everyone to get ready for him to open the jump bridge...
... and instead of clicking 'bridge', Boat clicks 'jump', sending his Titan into the middle of hostile ships, in a lowsec system where the Titan's primary weapon system, the Doomsday Device, can't be used.
Drunk n' Disorderly (DnD), the other lowsec militia corporation in Asakai, immediately lets Pandemic Legion know that there's a CFC Titan on field, in lowsec, and offers to bring multiple Heavy Interdictors (HICs) to keep it trapped. HICs are the only ship capable of preventing a supercapital from warping away, or jumping to safety once it's rebuilt enough power in its jump system.
Meanwhile, Boat has called for the fleet to jump a group of Archon-class carriers into the system to begin giving him energy transfers, so his titan can jump back out more quickly. With the Archons on the field, the group is now engaging in what amounts to manage equalization.
DnD batphones PL. "Of course, Commissioner!" responds PL. HICs begin tackling the vulnerable capital ships.
Boat calls for more reinforcements from his fleet, and from the CFC in general, sending out a general distress call of 'Friendly Supers Tackled'.
At that point, the wheels are starting to come off.
Half of our fleet leaves fleet to jump-clone from UB-U, our staging system, to VFK, the central staging point of the CFC, and Goonswarm's capital station of Mittaningrad. The rest of us begin burning full speed through jump bridges and stargates for the same destination.
First one subcapital rescue fleet, then a second, and a third, and a fourth fill up to 252 people each, and start screaming across the breadth of known space toward Akashai.
At the same time, PL has informed their allies, like TEST Alliance, centerpiece of the Honey Badger Coalition (HBC) of the situation... and their enemies, as well. One thing the CFC is very good at is making enemies, and in this instance, PL is willing to play nice: Everyone can come jump on Boat's boat, and PL will promise that everyone who comes in to attack the CFC will leave in peace, without any threat from PL's supers, or one another.
A planned fleet operation that largely should have consisted of a 10th-grader kicking a kindergartener in the head when they fall over has become EVE vs the CFC.
More and more pilots, in ships ranging from solo scouts to massive supercapitals, stream into Asakai. Time Dilation (TiDi), CCP's software system for stretching out events over time in order to reduce hardware workloads, kicks in, and continues to rise as the groups converge. Soon the systems surrounding Asakai are experiencing TiDi as the servers try to compensate for the traffic.
When Secondfleet reaches the battle... we are not moving. At all. Attempting to target friendly ships in order to deliver remote shield regeneration takes minutes instead of moments. Maneuvering to attempt to keep the friendly fleet in range becomes almost impossible as server lag creates skips that send my ship - and all of the other Scimitar-class logistics cruisers flying in formation behind me - suddenly lurching in unpredictable directions.
It is, in fact, a Clusterfuck. We feel right at home.
CFC supercapitals are working hard to extract themselves from the situation. The subcapital fleets are working just as hard to kill enemy HICs. As the HICs fall, the supers flee. Then the capitals begin to withdraw as well.
The final tally of losses for the CFC is three titans, five supercarriers, twenty-two carriers, and forty-five dreadnaughts. A butcher's bill indeed. Our total kills among the numerous enemy fleets? One Pandemic Legion supercarrier and a handful of capital ships. The total financial bloodletting is 834 billion ISK. For comparison, in EVE you can buy game-time with in-game currency - right now a 30 Day Pilot's License EXtension (PLEX) runs about 553 million ISK, and is equivalent to $15 US. Which means the losses amount to approximately $22,622 American, without taking into account the value of the almost 2 years (15,000 hours) lost between the 3000+ pilots involved.
And that's what this is really about, this composition of my thoughts: EVE, these days, has three unofficial slogans:
"Internet Spaceships are SRS BSNS"
"EVE is REAL"
"I was there..."
Well... I was there, and that loss of investment, which all has to be recovered now? That's what makes EVE real, and makes internet spaceships SRS BSNS. EVE is the only game out there where all of that stuff that got destroyed... is just gone. And now every activity in the game is involved replacing that materiel - mining, industry, scouting, missioning (for isk and loot and rep items) all feed into the process.
EVE is real - one small mistake has consequences that extend out a long, long way. The CFC has been the 800 lb gorilla in the room for months, if not years, and now we've had our noses bloodied by everyone all at once. Our enemies have demonstrated they can come together to jump on us. That could represent a serious change in the balance of power.
Will it? It's too soon to say... but one person misclicked, and the entire political climate in the galaxy may have changed. And that's why I play this game. That's why I fly with the people I fly with. I love flying with the CFC. I love flying with Vily and Vee and especially Suas. I even enjoy flying with Boat. There's blood in the water, and the sharks might well be closing in.
I hope they are. I hope the feeding frenzy begins. And I hope we can demonstrate that bloodied, and outnumbered in a way the CFC has never been outnumbered... we'll just fight that much harder.
I fucking love this game.