[Eve Online] A Timelapse and Breakdown of The Battle of M2-XFE 

I was actually in that one. Not flying a titan, though. Carrier and something else...you know, normal stuff, 3-4 toons at the same time :)

What explanation? There's no explanation here. Why are these factions fighting. Why are people putting their 1500US$ ship at risk of destruction? We don't even see who are the factions involved. Why are the ships all neatly squaring off like a firing squads?

@@captainLoknar Because that's the way the game works!

@@captainLoknar you say that like most people spend 1500

Can a video with no narration and text descriptions make more people play EVE? Let's find out.

And the info bursts toward the top, one set at least, are mine. Proud to have been there with you.

@@delangmachine to bad we couldn't have made it bigger and badder on round 2. i think people on both sides where looking forward to an absolute slaughter, and we where denied that.

@@delangmachine well you guys werent... but we where

@@cmcmillan22 Yeah, I'm not sure that would have worked out as you were hoping even if the servers had held. I'm of the opinion that failing to extract your main fleet after the armor timer (and thus forcing them to enter the hull timer low on fuel and fighters) put you at a significant strategic disadvantage, something that leadership understood, resulting in the attention paid to racing across the map with the backup fleet and arriving late as a result of that priority. But doing that meant going in both late and directly on the KS (as opposed to on a a safe structure and then warping in) to have any hope of the hull timer and the slaughter you wanted to see. Y'all were expecting to lose at least a dozen Titans as a result, but the toll ended up being higher than anticipated. But I agree it would have been preferable to see how it played out!

@@delangmachine yeah I don’t know enough about tactics. I know we had really good numbers ready to go in, in fact we had more caps on standby than the armour timer. Just sucked we couldn’t get more than a trickle of ships in at a time. Either way. War is faaaaar from over and there will be more opportunities to blow up space pixels. SUAD is itching for another titan engagement

There was about 4 people who thought that jumping into 4.5k players setup on the keepstar would be a good idea. Too bad they were all upper leadership of PAPI. It will go down as the worst Welp in gaming history. For 2 days, everyone was saying there is no way the server is going to allow it. Even if it did, I still believe it would have been a massive turkey shoot. Just dumb dumb dumb. But thanks for the entertainment on a quiet Saturday.

It wasn't the servers, how can you expect a server with already 5k players in there to operate just fine when jumping an additional 5k players in there. It was PAPI, not the servers, not us that made this grave mistake.

Yeah, but it's pretty amazing that Eve can handle what it can. I think I read that there was no time dilation.

53,76°C

you're in for a ride. but i would suggest doing a bit of research on scamming and never do direct trades with those you do not know.

what's your ign lol or did you quit

im considering starting but i just dont have the free time to justify playing because in my eyes whats the point in only doing something partway and the vast majority of content requires joining a faction also known as interacting with real people

I had an interceptor orbiting the Keepstar at 500 km, then I used the Track command (Very useful if you want to do cinematic looking things) on a ship roughly in between the two groups to get the effect. The original video actually wasn't as a big as I was expecting it to be, only 65 GB.

@@1adog1 Only 65 gb... okay.

@@1adog1 I don't play Eve very often, but its a miracle you didn't get targeted during the entire battle.

@@joelswanson7826 a litle interceptor isnt the most important target in battles like this. and maybe he showed the press ID during the flight. awesome footage anyway!

Fascinating stuff​. Are one of the New Eden Correspondents@@1adog1? Do you guys get a special interceptor to allow you to cover stuff like this?

Idk with number this big I imagine its just a couple guys actually saying stuff like check your timers and such and the rest just doing what is asked of them.

Yeah, and it's still going on. 3 Different systems seem to be getting hammered. I would go there, but the only way I would make it off the gate, is if it sent me into a different system, rather than m2-xfe, like I hear has been happening occasionally.

NOTHING gets in the way of an eve player and the potential for loot.

@@lewisvargrson With chaos also comes profit. :)

@@OHIOspikey Indeed, I remember watching somewhere around a 10 on 10 brawl in lowsec, while I was sharking around in my stealth bomber. Out of nowhere a dude in a heron just swoops in on a battleship wreck, empties it and bolts out of there. Another time I was in Inaya during the Triglavian event, there was a guy solo clearing the site, and a person that was clearly neutral with the Trigs looting all the wrecks. With that guy in the trig system, I unstealthed and bumped him which caused him to freak and warp out. EvE is hilarious when nobody knows you're there.

@@lewisvargrson you are a good person!

@@TheTolleBiene To be fair that was more because it was in high sec. if it was low or null they would have received a few volleys of Caldari Torpedoes and the loss of a few hundred million isk destroyer.

I had an interceptor orbiting at 500 km going about 4.5 km/s for the duration of the fight. The track command used on a ship roughly between the two sides is what produces that cool camera effect.

Yep just had a ceptor orbiting the Keepstar at 500km. To get the cinematic effect I used the Track command on a ship roughly in between the two fleets, which keeps the camera location on my ship but directs it towards the target ship.

@@1adog1 Awesome , you got great footage from that

Yep most fleets bring dedicated healing ships, we call them 'logistics' or 'logi' for short, and the act of healing 'repairing' or 'repping'. To your point though there definitely can be a benefit to attacking from multiple angles, and in the past the same people defending this keepstar actually used this tactic to destroy some of the attackers' anchoring keepstars; but they did so at the cost of thousands of capitals which usually resulted in them heavily losing the 'ISK War' (the comparison of how much money worth of ships/structures each side lost) for the battle.

There is no benefit to fancy formations in titan/supercapital groups, "death blob" formations have no downside and require no coordination to maintain. Additionally, a majority of the capital ships basically have to stay still to get the most from their ships. Titans are forced to stay still after firing their doomsdays, Dreadnoughts need to use their Siege Modules to get a massive DPS boost, which forces them to stay still while it cycles and Force Auxiliaries (capital sized logi) need to be using their Triage Modules to get good reps going, which, you guessed it, forces them to stay still. All other capitals dont necessarily have to stay still, but moving away from the main group will isolate them from reps from FAXs and invite the enemy to single them out. Also capital ships are VERY slow, especially in 10% tidi like here where absolutely everything happens 10x slower than normal speed, so its not worth it for titans to engage in manuever warfare. Additionally, for the defenders specifically they would stay nice and snug to the Keepstar because it allows them to "tether" to it if they need to (tethering makes your ship untargetable as long as you dont aggress and repairs you without needing to dock), if the attackers were to move off the keepstar they would loose that advantage. Stuff like that is better left to subcaps like battleships and cruisers, which are there, but with how far they are zoomed out its almost impossible to see them, but they are there, they are moving around a lot, ducking and weaving between friendly capital fleets to drop bubbles and HICpoint escaping titans/supers, so movement is happening, but the perspective of the video means you just dont see it.

@@radelert_007 Thanks for the details. I'm a total outsider and i don't get what's tima dilatation and why it would be useful ? Any imput on that ? :D

@@pedrobulby7639 Time dilation is essentially how CCP is able to have large fights without the server crashing when theres 6000 real players all doing stuff at once. If theres enough load on a node due to player activity then the node will automatically start to slow down the passage of time in the game so the server has more available time to process all the commands and requests by players to the server and the players wont send requests as quickly. Time dilation adjusts on the fly depending on how much load, so if its only a little bit of load then it may end up at 80% time dilation, meaning that time is slowed to 80% of normal time, but in massive fights with more more than 6000 players like this fight, then EVE slows time all the way to 10% time dilation, so every 1 second that passes in game is equal to 10 seconds of real life time. If CCP didnt do time dilation, theres no way the servers would be able to remain online under this much load and its why EVE is able to handle battles of this size and scale in the first place, something which other MMOs cant. Time dilation is why this fight went on for several real life hours.

@@radelert_007 Wow that's some smart engineering ! Thanks for the perfect answer

you guys think that with quantum pc's this server time delay will be history? I guess these fights will be really more intence since not only good calls but quick thinking and targeting will be the decisive factor to win.

Albert, currently in game there are two very large groups fighting each other. Thousands of players on each side. Many people in the game loathe the Imperium (aka Goonswarm Federation, or Goons for short). I am a Goon and I will try to be as neutral as possible. Most of those people got together and formed a large coalition to wipe Goons off the map, and hopefully, out of the game. I am not great with the political landscape of Eve or even the history of many of the corporations (these are similar to guilds in other games, but NOT IN EVE), so I don't know what to call the anti-Goon coalition except for PAPI, although there are several iterations of this. PAPI comes from Pandemic Legion (or horde, I dont know), and TAPI (Test Alliance). There is a Legacy coalition in there too, but like I said I am all but ignorant when it comes to politics. For Goons they have several allies, such as The Initiative, , The Bastion, and Tactical Narcotics Team. I am in the US and cant remember the names of the Asian alliances. PAPI had been steam-rolling much of Goon space for several months and just about had Goons cornered. Goon leadership had been waiting for a fight on one of these keepstars where Goons could finally bring their capital ships to a fight. These capital ships (dreadnaughts, carriers, super-carriers and titans) are the primary ships used in the footage above. Goons got their wish and this fight happened. The Keepstar had three timers that PAPI had to battle through, Shield, Armor and Hull. The mechanic in the game forces the attacker to essentially blow up the Keepstar three times and a 24-60 hour (roughly) delay occurs between each of them based on various factors. PAPI blew up the Keepstars' shields, which started a reinforcement timer (a period where the keep cannot be attacked). During this time, plans are made, reinforcements are staged, and players get more excited. The video above starts when the Armor timer expired. This was the part of the battle that was actually quite even, and from most reports the most fun had by all (tidi not-withstanding). Once the armor was destroyed, the Hull timer began and when that expired, things changed dramatically. The facts about the subsequent Hull Timer are constantly being spun by both sides. If the hull was destroyed it would have been a potentially huge blow to Goon morale. If the timer was successfully defended, it could have been a huge blow to PAPI morale and the Keepstar would be fully repaired with full shields, armor and hull. According to the video, if one titan can be valued at roughly $1200, and its in game value is 100 billion isk, then a Keepstar can easily be valued at 2-3x that, based on armament, defenses, fuel, etc. (Much of what comes next is gathered from reading many different reddit (/r/eve posts and trash talking in game) So Goons logged several hours before the timer to prepare. Closer to the timer expiring, PAPI started to come into the solar system, which put the servers under extreme stress. This is where the anger from PAPI (some now call them TRAPI) really started to swell. Their ships were coming into system very slowly (due to tidi and server stress). Because of this, PAPI could not put together a coordinated attack on the keepstar hull. Their ships were being obliterated. With no attack, the keepstar repaired and is now at the center of a huge camp. The PAPI fleet of titans and many other capital ships were trapped (hence TRAPI) within warp prevention bubbles which wont allow those ships to escape. If the PAPI pilots log in, those ships are sitting ducks and will be destroyed as well. So Goons are manning the battlefield around the clock with unmatched enthusiasm at the prospect of destroying enemy capital ships. Other PAPI pilots have been trying to destroy these bubbles to allow a window of opportunity for their capital ships to jump out. Whatever happens next is anyone's guess. Join the fight, the last six months have been exciting, exhausting, fun, hellish, and just about any other emotion you can think of.

@@williamblurby4458 broo i am a considerebly new player and when i heard of this i was like WTF, i also dont know a lot about politics anyway, but just questining where is the battle actually??

@@williamblurby4458 that's one hell of an explanation. I've played it many years ago so I am not at all in the loop but this was fun to read. Thanks!

@@williamblurby4458 Amazing read, thank you

@@williamblurby4458 Great write up and very interesting. I'm not aligned to either side, for what it's worth, I'm just a lowly miner but it's fascinating stuff to read about.

Was about to comment the same, although I do know that there is quite a bit of activity on the fringes, it's just out of that system.

No offence, but would you rather see flashbangs every second?

If the camera was closer, it'd be impossible to tell what was going on. Playing the game you can view it much closer than this. The amount of distance that's actually being displayed here is hard to scale

Yea sorry man they either titan bridged or lit a cyno to get there and that always brings you to one specific spot and because collision pushes ships away if they’re clipping and with the fact that 1600 players were pretty much at the same spot at the same time it’ll pretty much look like a bumpy rock with how many ships were getting flinged everywhere

Isn’t there insurance in the game so you can get your ship back for a small fee?

@@Fatality2013 yes there is

@@dexterjettster3683 So is this just a bunch of embellishment basically? Because when I play the game I can get most of my ships back for basically nothing. Is the same go for Titans? Or can Titans not be insured?

@@Fatality2013 I think insurance pays you money if your ship is destroyed, so yes you can insure titans

@@Fatality2013 You're thinking of Eve Echoes where you can actually get your ship back, in Eve Online you get a cash payout. Some ships also insure better than others. Tech 1 Hulls and Standard Capitals you might only lose 20-30% of the ship's value on for example (assuming you had the foresight to purchase insurance for the ship), but with a titan you only get a net of 3.8 bil from the best level of insurance.

My system's a few years old now but still going strong. It's got an i5-4460 (just got a i7-4790k that I'm installing soon though), GTX 970, and 16 GB of DDR3 RAM.

It just looks laggfree because of fast forwarding

In extremely large fights like this one the servers slow most in-game events in the area through a mechanic called Time Dilation (TiDi). Modules, animations, warping, and most timers all get slowed down to as low as 10% of normal speed. During this fight TiDi was locked at 10% for its duration, so the fight lasted about 12 real-life hours (this video is sped up 3000%), but from the game's perspective only about an hour and change worth of events were processed.

My corp mates vanquisher is in valhalla.

Have an up vote you funny bastard

Get in EvE and join our war )

in fights like this they are VERY boring. The fights you want to listen to comms these days are the sub 600 person fights. Normally low amounts of TiDi which speeds things up and makes for pandemonium.

@@masterofS200 Comms are boring only to regular pilot. If u are on commanding or coordination place comms are very intense and sometimes fun

when goons jumped in, there comms went crazy, they knew a fight was coming, maybe not one they were hoping for

In the goon subcap fleets it was basically fc reminding us to haze tackle and fighters every 15 mins.. Very anticlimactic

They actually used to back in the day, but because its strategic impact was minimal and its impact on server performance was significant it was removed in the last year or two.

Their computers probably would commit death at a higher resolution.

This was just 1 of many battles over the past 6 months. This was several thousand players in one battle... already more battles have happened since this one (although this was the largest). These two factions are at war over in game territory/resources.

PAPI will win the short game.. But Gewns have been around for 16 years and know how to play the long game, don't underestimate them.

@@nobodyimportant8695 This comment aged well.

I've got a 10x speed (synced up with game time) version with just the title text and no music that I'll post tomorrow. If you're specifically looking for this version (with or without music) without the annotations I can post that as well, though it'll take some time to render.

Unfortunately a side effect of this wide view is that we can only see the largest classes of ships (Supercapitals) as they battle it out. Capital and Supercapital combat is much less dynamic than Subcapital combat, as their enormous size and general unwieldiness means there's not a ton of benefit to maneuvering them around once they're on field. It's difficult to easily explain, but with all the differences these larger ships play almost an entirely different game to Subcapitals when they're in combat. What we can see only encompasses about 1/4 of the total ships on grid, most of the rest being Subcapitals that from this distance are only a pixel or two in size, if not completely invisible. The combat these ships experience is far more dynamic, warping around the grid at-will to where they're needed, maneuvering around the field to get to specific targets, etc. This type of combat is far more action-intensive though, and this combined with the fact that each subcapital fleet may not be in the area for the full 12 hours means that we can't easily overview the battle as a whole from their perspective.

Freaking dak nalar... every time

That was killed the entire test short range dread fleet with lances

Likely lag related. Sometimes your screen is a bit behind the server

Yes it was, i was there at the keep dd's all night long.

I had the same problem, my tablets were fine in the beta, phones are simply too small. Now after the release phones are too small and my tablets don't have any support. The main thing I noticed though is that other than being out in space which looks great, the UI was terrible, naturally I was looking for things I know from Eve itself, but the differences were a bit much, and so much was missing it wasn't worth the time needed to learn. Amusingly the very first thing I did after losing the tutorial and not being able to get back in it was to accidentally shoot Concord. I don't even know how I targeted them, but they didn't like it one bit.

hopefully not (out of season) :D

There are 2 class of pilots in Eve - Alpha and Omega. An Alpha player can play completely for free, but there are certain skills they won't be able to learn, and ships they won't be able to fly. An Omega pilot has no such restrictions, but to be an Omega pilot you need to pay a monthly subscription. That subscription buys you PLEX (or Pilot Licence EXtension) which allows you to train unlimited skills, and unlocks all the ships and modules that are not available to Alpha pilots. PLEX can be purchased in one of 2 ways - either with real world money, or with in game currency. This gives gives a direct correlation between what in game currency is worth in real world terms. Using that correlation, it is possible to determine the cost of ships lost in battle in real world money.

@dota vinkz why? (:

@@emwaggers864 People joke that EVE is "spreadsheets in space" because of the amount of maths involved and the number of calculations needed if you want to succeed financially. Because things get blown up, a source of income is required to literally stay in the game.... and so it begins. Note: I've played for 5 years with a half decent memory and a pad and pencil, just for the record.

Id recommend being caldari and living close to the jita system

you mean the CCP SERVER underrated :)

@@MrDaishee yeah, like 30k players online on one server

They broke through the armor. A few days later the 2nd fight started and the defenders formed absolutely massive numbers of players and were waiting on the structure. The attackers had like 1k or 2k more people but when they entered the battle field the server was so constrained they couldnt play. They gave up the attack with a large number of their titans having jumped.. As of now the attackers have a lot of titans above and below that are logged off.. Defenders are waiting there 24/7 and killing any titan that logs in.

What ship did you use, and what side did you fight on

@@dexterjettster3683 I was in a rokh fighting with the imperium.

The daily downtime is a consistent game mechanic that is always accounted for in large battles like this. Once it occurs the sides can always make a choice to continue fighting after it's done, but often it's used as an unofficial time limit so that a fight doesn't turn into a question of "how many days can your pilots stay up for?" Back in 2019 CCP did for the first time in the game's history prevent the daily downtime happening for one day, as an experiment to see if removing it would be viable. Such an event hasn't happened since, but it's possible they're still working on removing it altogether. www.eveonline.com/news/view/no-downtime-on-wednesday-december-4th

The objective was won by the attackers (though lost during the final timer a few days later). The attackers destroyed more value worth of ships while the defenders destroyed a few more titan hulls, so on the casualty side of things this battle was roughly even.

The conversion rate is somewhat misleading. It's the amount of money you had to pay to restock those ships by selling premium time on the in game market. Most (if not all) players will have earned their ships through in game money making methods. You also can't sell in game currency for real world money without breaking the EULA and the exchange rate on this route is lower than the official one.

@@Kenionatus So as a new player how can I compete, any tips or corps that I can join to grow? Players that are recently starting the game have it tough to move around.

E-Uni is always a good place to start.

@@ixilduur3435 I'm a 12 year old player, I know guys that started playing 3 years ago and own more ships/titans than I own, it depends what you do in the game friend, there's no such thing as the best player/ship in the game, as it's a case of "best tool for the job"

It was part of a much larger war - the attackers (the temporary PAPI coalition) were attempting to completely wipe out the defenders (The Imperium aka Goonswarm Federation) from the game. Long story short: PAPI surrounded the Goons, who were left with only a handful of systems, and sieged their capital. But then the offensive lost steam, unable to sustain the war economically anymore. The attackers retreated, giving up right at the finish line. The PAPI coalition fell apart, while Goons retook their lands and went back to dominating nullsec politics.

hahaha :D

2:10

It seems sadly (a lot) players prefer those 10% tidi deathblobs, otherwise we would've agreed somehow on max 500vs500, 80% tidi or something decent. !! We like to visit those battles, yes it's epic - but actually taking part is not always just fun. :( Also nobody can tell me honestly that one keepstar is worth this effort and loss XDD Best wishes to all you out there!

What we're looking at here is a fairly rare occurrence; before this war large-scale Supercapital battles usually came only once every 2 or 3 years. To echo what I said in another response, most people in Eve fly Subcapitals which experience battles in a far more dynamic way than what we can see from such a wide angle. Outside of large-scale fleet combat you've also got solo and small-gang combat which can be incredibly fun for those with the skill to participate in them.

I appreciate your reply and the additional insight into the video.

These types of battles are pretty boring to be in for me anyways. They last very long. They are more objective focused than fun focused. Just like how some tasks at work are very boring the same is true for Eve. Some things are more fun but these types of battles are very boring to a lot of players. Smaller scale fights are more enjoyable.

too long :D

No, to be clear they don’t spend that much money on their virtual ship and its armoury but the relative price of the ship based off in-game purchasable items using real life money is what they would be priced at.

Everything in game have some market value and then there is PLEX, which is ingame item with some market value and is possible to buy for real money. Thats used to calculate real money equivalent for ingame items. In reality minimum of those lost assets (if any) were bought using real money, but with ingame work (asteroid mining, planetary interactions, moon mining, industry, PvE,...) and even if someone used PLEX bought with real money, someone else still must have created it and sold it. also they tend to survive much longer than 10 hours :)

Also I might add that PLEX has uses in game cosmetics, game services related to your character and works in a similar to the WoW token.

Go be an embarrassment somewhere else lol

"A Timelapse and Breakdown of The Battle of M2-XFE" If you could read and comprehend the title of this video, you wouldn't have to post stupid stuff in the comments.