I heard about it on Twitter but it has been officially confirmed that the recent mega battle in EVE Online, had over 4,000 pilots taking part! This was an 8 hour conquest fought between the CFC Coalition and the TEST alliance. Both sides called in all the support they could, to the very last man, every space ship that was available was brought in to fight. With the scale of this battle it’s amazing to think how far online gaming has come in the last decade.
The battle was fought over the now mineral rich moons in the area; 6VDT-H. It has been held by the TEST alliance since 2011 when they took it from the previous owners, the IT alliance. TEST have enjoyed holding this area since then but CFC had other ideas, after months of fighting and preparation, they attacked. The sheer scale of this assault brought on EVE’s backup system, Time Dilatation (or TiDi). TiDi slows down for the system holding the battle so every command and action from each player can be processed. For parts of the battle time was running at 1/10th it’s normal speed! This system makes sure that gigantic battles don’t crash the server hosting the solar system.
When the fight started both sides had over 1,500 ships with an estimated 2,000+ for CFC, numbers were on their side and the total number of players in the battle quickly escalated to over 4,000. There was so much firepower being put out, many alliances were taking down friendly ships who were unable to get out of the way of the epic carnage, 2591 ships were destroyed in total, including 621 capsules. CFC had cunningly blocked all routes of escape and completely obliterated TEST, pushing them completely out of the system.
For a full breakdown and even more stats go to the official release.
