“Here lie the wrecks of monstrous ships, commemorating a battle that blotted out the sky on Jan 27-28 [2014]. Two coalitions of capsuleers clashed in vessels numbering in the thousands, causing destruction on a scale of war never before seen by human eyes.”
–Monument erected in B-R5RB
AT 11:00AM IN LONDON on January 27, 2014, the EVE Online Tranquility cluster entered its scheduled daily downtime. As it did every day, it ran a series of checks to determine whether the state of the game had to be changed before the next cycle began.
There are thousands of star systems with hundreds of starbases and outposts, and the Tranquility server has to keep track of all of it. It also has to serve as the banker that collects regular fees from the players for thousands of types of daily interactions.
One of those split-second jobs is to determine the rightful owner of every nullsec star system. If a player group wants to control a star system they also have to pay a small price in ISK that’s collected by the server. It’s not a heavy cost to a major nullsec alliance, but it’s a token acknowledgement that in the lore of the game world the player alliances are paying tithe to the in-game NPC factions. (In reality it’s what game designers call a “gold sink,” flushing a regular supply of currency out of the game to keep inflation under control.)
The Tranquility server has to collect those payments and make sure everyone has paid their bill for every star system. Since the cost is not terribly burdensome, most everyone just clicks the little box that says “autopay” on the sovereignty management interface. The server collects the money every month, and the alliance gets to maintain sovereignty and continue to conduct their business.
It was a completely normal day in a star cluster that seemed like it might grow stagnant following the disaster the CFC experienced in HED-GP. As downtime continued, nobody would’ve guessed that today—just a week after the most legendary defeat in years, and the one year anniversary of the impromptu Battle of Asakai—was the day of EVE’s reckoning.
Today was the day of the battle which would define EVE in the minds of the public for a half decade (and counting); the only digital event which has truly eclipsed the disbanding of Band of Brothers in its shaping of the EVE global reputation.
It may prove to be the most climactic and important single battle that ever occurs in EVE Online, past or future. If so, that would also make it the most consequential battle in the history of online gaming so far. The battle lasted nearly 21 hours, and involved more than 7000 players from hundreds of corporations all across EVE. Ever since, players have referred to the events of January 27, 2014 as The Bloodbath at B-R5RB.
DOWNTIME
After thirty minutes down for its scheduled daily maintenance, the Tranquility server came back online at 11:30am and began accepting connections.
It was an unusually quiet cycle by nullsec standards. On any given day there are often as many as twenty or thirty changes to the enormous, star cluster-sized game board that is New Eden. Today there were only two. A small alliance called The Unthinkables gained a star system in the region of Scalding Pass, and Nulli Secunda dropped its sovereignty claim in B-R5RB, the forward staging base for both N3 and Pandemic Legion.
Manfred Sideous claims he is certain he checked and double-checked the autopay box, and that the event is eerily reminiscent of a bug he’d previously encountered in the sovereignty payment system a year prior. To be fair, EVE’s user interface is notoriously buggy.
Though this was a disastrous turn of events, there were no red flashing lights or alarm signals. It simply happened. Server downtime happens at 11:00am GMT for a reason, it’s the time when the population is at its daily low, pre-dawn hours in North America, morning in Europe, but Russian prime after school/work hours. Thus, it was a few hours before the community really grasped what had happened.
Nobody at this time knew anything about what was about to occur. Manfred Sideous only noticed the dropped sovereignty claim when he logged in shortly after downtime to defend a Drone Region outpost that was scheduled to come out of reinforced mode. He immediately dispatched a new Territorial Control Unit to be anchored in B-R5RB to renew the sovereignty claim. However, TCUs take eight hours to come online. With the TCU anchoring, Sideous waited to find out whether this bizarre mishap might go unnoticed by his enemies.
It, of course, did not. Within the hour, a CFC scout was sent out to figure out what was going on in B-R5RB, and returned with word of an onlining Territorial Claim Unit being guarded by a small defense force.
THE BOWELS OF TELRAVEN
The highest-ranking CFC officer online at the time was Lazarus Telraven. Telraven was an American Fleet Commander, and he had only logged on because he couldn’t sleep due to a bad case of stomach flu. Telraven was conferring with the other leadership that were online, including Sort Dragon (whose geoposition in the Australian timezone made him an ideal link between the English and Russian factions of the RUS coalition) trying to understand how to interpret this turn of events. The Russians thought it was an elaborate trap, but Sort Dragon wanted to go in as quick as possible and exploit this unlikely gift. Nobody was yet aware that the sovereignty had dropped because of a simple clerical error—or a bug, depending on who you believe.
“I woke up that night pretty sick,” Lazarus Telraven told Crossing Zebras interviewer Xander Phoena. “I think I went to bed at like 1, I woke up at like 3:30, 4 o’ clock and that’s when I found out about it. I actually took the day off work for illness, but I ended up being stuck on EVE Online for like 20 hours or whatever.”
He was trying to wake up The Mittani with a call to his cellphone, and fleet commanders Vily and Mister Vee were at work and couldn’t get home. While he waited for permission for a full supercapital escalation he sent in a contingent of siege dreadnoughts and a subcapital support fleet to make the CFC’s presence known. Sort Dragon, whose alliance was now working with the Russians, was already there.
“B-R happened because of me,” Sort Dragon told me in the defiant, heavily slanted way he often did when defending his legacy in EVE. “I had the Russians. I was the Russian leader at the time. Mactep and [another Russian leader named Union] said, ‘Sort speaks for us.’ I was given the option to engage. Manny fucked up the TCU, everyone knows that. But the decision to enter the field was mine. Because Laz didn’t have the balls to do it. And Laz, I basically said to him, ‘I’m going in, let’s go for it.’ And Laz is like, ‘Oooh I’m not sure, I need to talk to The Mittani, Oooh I’m not sure.” And I said, ‘Well I’m already in, you need to get here.”
A WIRED.com article written in the days afterward indicated Lazarus Telraven arrived in B-R5RB at about 13:00 GMT at the head of 300 sub-capitals and 45 Dreadnoughts.
With a small but dominant force in the system, Telraven and Sort Dragon dispersed the defense force, destroyed Nulli Secunda’s Territorial Claim Unit, and began anchoring another. To make matters worse, with no official sovereign owner of the system, the station within that system could be conquered by anybody who shot it. While the TCU was being destroyed, a contingent from RAZOR Alliance claimed the station in B-R for the CFC, preventing any N3/PL ships from docking or leaving the station.
Manfred Sideous began to panic, and rushed back home from the Drone Regions to take personal command over the home defense. He later said that he wanted to quickly rally the biggest possible Titan force he could, to try to scare the CFC back out of B-R5RB. Sideous quietly rallied everyone he could find who owned a capital or supercapital ship and told them to make their way to the staging position in B-R5RB, and begin assembling the Wrecking Ball.
Lazarus Telraven finally roused The Mittani, who advocated caution.
“I called his phone and woke him up when things looked like it was going to escalate because when you need someone to bang drums to get [lots of pilots to a battle] you get mittani,” Telraven wrote in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) the next day. “He was [skittish] and hesitant and I think came close to trying to get me to not go in but had he told me not [to] jump I would have jumped anyways.”
With Mister Vee still not responding to Telraven’s text message, Laz wrote one last text,
“I’m going all-in. Get here.”
ALL-IN
The Mittani began the mustering of the Goons. Telraven got everyone into line, and organized three fleets to take down the most feared fleet commander in 2014 New Eden: Manfred Sideous, the architect of N3/PL’s “superweapon.”
For years, the two great machines called N3/PL and the ClusterFuck Coalition had been building their ability to summon, coordinate, and transport thousands of individuals to a single location in a virtual world under a coherent command structure. Their industrial teams had been building ships with the expressed purpose of one day winning a huge Ragnarok-style nullsec confrontation with the opposing bloc. And it all came to a head here at B-R5RB, a system which was tranquil just a couple hours ago and yet would soon become synonymous with the mother of all battles.
Time Dilation kicked in as the hundreds of players in B-R5RB surged into thousands. Both sides called up every ally and searched their contacts for anyone else with a Titan who could help push this battle in their favor. Lazarus Telraven ordered the CFC’s Titan fleet into the battle, and from then on they were committed.
For Manfred Sideous, a sickening realization set in quickly when he saw the first CFC Titans appear on-grid.
“I didn’t think they would escalate with supercarriers and Titans and everything was going to be OK for me like it had been 100 times before,” Sideous said. “But it wasn’t.”
“As soon as they dropped Titans, I knew it was going to be bad from there on,” Manfred Sideous said in his post-battle interview. “Because the thing about [Time Dilation] is while the rest of the server is going along plugging away at normal time, in that system only seconds or minutes of [real] time [pass.] So pretty much it allows everybody to keep throwing things into the fight if they so choose. I knew that since they had committed Titans already, that they would be willing to commit everything that they could possibly bring to bear. At that point I was simply trying to do the best with the situation that we could and take it from there.”
Both fleets were stuck in a wide cloud of anti-warp bubbles, and the two sides would try to hold their ground until some sort of tipping point was reached.
“Unlike nearly every other large scale supercapital engagement up till this point, both sides thought they could win,” reads a development update published by CCP Games after the battle. “They continued trying to get every single pilot into system with the most powerful warships they could bring to bear. After a few hours, the field was being lit up by Doomsdays and the glittering hulls of hundreds of Titans and supercarriers and thousands of Dreadnaughts and Carriers and smaller ships.”
The main issue at this point was the time. Many of the biggest EVE Online battles prior to this only stopped because the server went down for daily maintenance, and whichever side was losing usually opted not to log back in after the server came back up. Because the events in B-R5RB had occurred right after downtime, there was still some 20 hours to go before the next downtime arrived. It was an unprecedented amount of time for these two coalitions to escalate the fight.
The sky in one direction was stained by the red starlight of B-R5RB, and in the other by the pale blue-green skybox of the Immensea nebula. Between them, a densely-clustered foam of ships and warp bubbles to fill the field of view as approximately 7,548 EVE characters became clustered and tangled in a singular melee to define the future of the game. The two fleets clashed together in a brilliant cloud of ships, drones, missiles, repair lasers, and every other particle effect Tranquility knew how to generate. If ever there was a moment that could capture EVE in a single screenshot, this was it.
Though the battle had been spontaneous and escalated wildly within hours the stakes were now utterly dire. The opportunity for the CFC/RUS Coalition was to capture the headquarters of the only real nullsec resistance to its dominance. And for N3/PL this was now a battle to avoid complete oblivion, and yet, a slim chance remained. The CFC’s super fleet was out in the open. If the Wrecking Ball held strong, the tables could be turned entirely.
This whole game—every haul of ore, laser blast, or military invasion—had been building for eleven years to this one moment on January 27, 2014. This moment, nearly frozen in time by Time Dilation and lag, is the perfect distillation of the story of EVE. The screenshots of this moment—the peak of the great 11-year contest—look less like images of a video game, and more like mournful renaissance paintings, if only the masters had painted starships.
After four hours, CFC/RUS had claimed eight of N3/PL’s Titans while losing seven of its own. The cost already topped two trillion ISK, nearly twice as much as any battle in EVE Online history. Fifteen Titans down. Sixteen hours to downtime.
DOOMSDAY CLOCK
After four hours of this slugfest the two sides stood roughly even, but Manfred Sidious knew that things were about to get much worse. After hours and hours of exchanging Doomsday blasts, American prime time was coming up, which would mean an influx of pilots for both sides, but moreso for the CFC.
“It becomes a game of managing Doomsdays,” Lazarus Telraven wrote in his AMA after the battle. “Each individual fleet commander is relaying to me who has available Doomsdays, and I coordinate who should shoot at what target.”
As the CFC’s American pilots logged in, Lazarus Telraven had to figure out how to use the hundreds of fresh pilots to tighten his grip on the Wrecking Ball. He noted that the system was already full of more than 4000 pilots and could potentially be reaching a breaking point soon. He didn’t want to bring so many people here that their numbers crashed the server and allowed N3/PL to escape. Instead he dispatched most of his subcapital forces to surrounding systems to intercept N3/PL pilots when they re-shipped and made their way back to the battle. By doing this, Laz was able to spread some of the server load out to surrounding systems, while also accomplishing a crucial strategic task.
With every hour that passed, the CFC’s advantage grew, and N3/PL could see the tipping point fast approaching. With the influx of pilots now coming online for CFC/RUS there would soon be no way to turn the tide. Manfred Sideous decided that the only way to turn things around would be to disrupt communications between CFC and RUS and hopefully split their damage. That meant blasting Sort Dragon’s Avatar flagship off the field. Taking him out of the fight was a low-percentage hail mary, but it was the only plan Manfred Sideous could see that might plunge CFC/RUS into disorganization.
More than half a dozen Titans from within the Wrecking Ball began to glow and shimmer in slow motion before sending lances of laserfire across the battlefield at a light speed crawl, converging in slow motion on the hull of Sort Dragon’s Avatar.
However, Sort Dragon had the foresight to overheat his ship’s shield hardeners about 20 minutes ago in the blinding lag in preparation for theoretical incoming damage—meaning he could tank far more damage than usual. He pushed the button twenty minutes before anybody fired at him, but in full Time Dilation that was bizarrely perfect reflexes. When the blinding beams fizzled, Sort Dragon’s Avatar was badly damaged but still standing. More damage rained down upon Sort Dragon to try to tip his hull past the point of no return, but by now the CFC could see he was being primaried and diverted their triage ships to prop him up.
While the full artillery of the Wrecking Ball rained down upon Sort Dragon, Lazarus Telraven continued organizing CFC Doomsday volleys, making sure 3-5 Doomsdays hit each N3/PL Titan to ensure it would be killed in one volley. By the time Manfred Sideous managed to finally down Sort Dragon’s Titan, Lazarus Telraven had taken down five Pandemic Legion Titans in return.
The number of Doomsday weapons was the all-important factor, and 11 hours into the battle N3/PL had lost 18 of them and taken down just 8 in return. A battle of attrition was being waged. Not only was N3/PL’s fleet dwindling, but the CFC’s was still getting stronger as more Americans continued to log on.
RETREAT
Around 23:00 GMT—twelve hours to downtime—N3/PL lost the critical mass of Doomsdays to be able to reliably one-shot CFC Titans at a reasonable pace, and hope for the battle slipped beneath the horizon. Manfred Sidious handed off command after a long night on duty. The situation in B-R5RB turned from a battle into an evacuation. But the scale at which Sideous had committed to this battle meant that was a tremendous undertaking that would take the rest of the night.
The Wrecking Ball was broken, and there were still twelve hours left until downtime. Even in the slow motion of Time Dilation, that was an eternity in which to absorb volley after volley from what had now become unquestionably the most powerful supercapital fleet in New Eden. Just a week ago N3/PL saw the battle at HED-GP as a sign that its star was rising. Now it was hoping merely to survive. The cost of the battle had now surged past 4.5 trillion ISK, worth more than $100,000 USD in January 2014. The loss was already nearly four times greater than any battle that had ever occurred in EVE before.
“N3/PL fleet commanders sounded the retreat. The objective was now to save the expensive and difficult to replace supercapitals, sacrificing the regular capital ships if needed. […] They switched their fire to dreadnoughts, determined to take anything they could with them in death. The last Titan loss on the RUS/CFC side would be Chango Atacama from the CFC alliance Circle-Of-Two.”
N3/PL began trying to extract their ships as methodically as possible from B-R5RB, but once they started doing so the CFC was free to open fire without restraint. CFC sky command switched many pilots into Heavy Interdictor ships. They wanted as many N3/PL ships stuck here as possible until the clock reached 11:00 GMT again and the server went down.
Throughout the night the battle spiralled into a chaotic mess. N3/PL attempted to keep calm and methodically extract as many ships as possible from the system now that the battle was lost, but the extraction was slow, and the night was long.
The server struggled to calculate and display the thousands of wrecks which flickered in and out of existence in the crushing lag. The space near the outpost was clouded with anti-warp bubbles and crisscrossed by thick red and green Doomsday beams—as the remnants of the N3/PL fleet attempted to organize the extraction.
Slowly, brutally, EVE Online stuttered and lagged its way through the night toward the Bloodbath’s grim final resolution.
