EVE Online - The story of the biggest battle in the gaming industry

 At the beginning of October 2020, something happened that many had been waiting for a very long time. MMORPG EVE Online players staged the largest battle, which was able to set 2 world records at once and forever go down in the history of the entire gaming industry. A few months later, the developers are ready to tell the details of this truly grandiose and incredible event.

The CCP Games team has put together all the information about how the conflict originated, what exactly happened on October 6 in the FWST-8 system and other interesting things. The largest coalitions in the game went to this battle for 3 months. On July 5, 2020, the non-aggression pact between Imperium and the Legacy Coalition ended. The Legacy leadership teamed up with the Pandemic Horde, Pandemic Legion, Northern Coalition, Winter Coalition and other alliances (dubbed the PAPI) to launch a full-scale invasion westward into the Imperium-controlled regions of Delve, Querious, Period Basis and Fountain.

Over the next several months, PAPIs actively approached the main territory of the enemy, which was considered his home - Delve. This region is a real fortress. Since 2016, Imperium has been actively building defensive infrastructure, which consists of a huge number of strongholds, industrial and processing complexes, a network of jump bridges, and other space structures. The warehouses and hangars of the stations store colossal stocks of ships, modules and other equipment. 

Therefore, further promotion of PAPI was significantly difficult and required appropriate preparation. The combined forces needed a foothold where the Supercapital fleets could be based. But due to the peculiarities of the game mechanics, the construction of the citadel in the enemy territory took too long. So the choice fell on the FWST-8 system. She belonged to the part of Delve that was controlled by the pirate NPC faction. This made it possible to reduce the deployment process of the facility to 24 hours. In addition, the location of the system opened up the possibility of forwarding the Titans, the largest and deadliest ships in EVE Online, in 71% of the region. Such a threat was to be prevented by Imperium at all costs.

The Imperium forces reacted very quickly and after a 5-hour battle, the potential key to the gate in Delve lay in ruins. However, while the smoke had not cleared yet, PAPI deployed a second Keepstar elsewhere and began the construction process. The biggest battle was 24 hours away.

On October 6, an hour before the final timer, numerous fleets of the PAPI coalition began to be pulled into the system. The number of players increased rapidly and after half an hour the local system of the system exceeded the mark of 4 thousand pilots. By 20:36, more than 6,000 people were in FWST-8, and the structure moved to the last stage before construction was completed and became available for attack.

The battle lasted all night. It is difficult to imagine the titanic work that was done by the leadership of the coalitions, the commanders of the fleets and ordinary pilots. At 08:27, 11 hours and 44 minutes after the citadel repair timer stopped, the Keepstar was destroyed. Imperium was victorious and was able to stop the enemy's advance, albeit temporarily. After several more attempts, PAPI still managed to build a Keepstar in the Delve region.

Thus, on the night of October 6-7, 2020, the inhabitants of the universe of New Eden set 2 new absolute records, which got into the Guinness Book of Records:

- The maximum online in the system was 6,557 players. It was reached at 21:16 UTC.

- 8,825 unique characters took part in the battle.

According to official statistics, they belong to 114 alliances and 1,022 corporations. The most numerous on the battlefield were the Goonswarm Federation (Imperium) - 2,898 players. About 5 thousand ships were destroyed, of which: 1,308 Battleships, 1,268 Frigates, 836 Cruisers, 574 Battlecruisers, 414 Destroyers and 356 Dreadnoughts. All this cost the players 705 billion lawsuits (according to unofficial data, the losses amounted to 1.6 trillion). Despite such massive destruction, the battle in FWST-8 did not become the most expensive, this title still belongs to the siege of the 9-4RP2 system in 2018.

Of course, such a large number of participants in the battle led to an enormous load on the servers. Even though the FWST-8 system was ported to one of the most powerful nodes, it quickly became overloaded, which led to the activation of time dilation. But to give credit to the CCP Games team, the Tranquility cluster, though with difficulty, was able to withstand the largest battle.

This is how, 17 years after its release, EVE Online continues to set new records. And the players are unlikely to plan to stop there, because the history of the universe of New Eden is not yet complete.