“And to downtime the battle went. The CFC/RUS capital fleet continued to kill capital ships right up until the black screen. Predictably, N3/PL gave their members orders not to log back in after the fight and the most expensive battle that EVE has ever seen abruptly ended.”
–Alizabeth, TheMittani.com
DURING THE FINAL TWELVE hours of battle, N3/PL had managed to kill 5 additional CFC/RUS Titans, nearly as many as any side had ever killed in a previous confrontation. But it came at devastating cost: an unheard of 59 of its own. Having lost a Titan in B-R is today a point of great pride for some pilots.
Taken together, one quarter of all Titans lost in EVE Online history were destroyed in B-R5RB on January 27, 2014, and the vast majority were destroyed by the combined CFC/RUS fleet. Even as the victors, CFC/RUS absorbed more damage than had ever been taken by both sides in any battle. The cost of its losses alone topped 2 trillion ISK. But you should see the other guy. Total losses for N3/PL: 8.5 trillion ISK. The brunt of the losses were absorbed by Pandemic Legion: 4.5 trillion. NCdot was next at over 3 trillion. The historic destruction at B-R5RB eclipsed that of the massacre at Uemon by 8 times.
Nothing close to this had ever happened before, and both winners and losers were caught in the afterglow of a gaming event that captured the world’s attention. Both side’s fleet commanders hosted Reddit AMAs and made media appearances. But Sort Dragon largely didn’t, because he became…busy IRL.
“Two weeks after B-R I went to prison,” Sort Dragon told me. “And I came out three months later to find out that Laz was ‘The Butcher of B-R5RB.’ TMC [TheMittani.com] controlled the narrative at the time, and they told everybody that he was the Butcher of B-R and everything, except he was throwing up in the toilet most of the day because he had food poisoning.”
EVE reporters went into action trying to get the story straight about what had happened here. And as he so often did in this era, Elise Randolph of Pandemic Legion commemorated the event with an in-depth battle report.
“For the last few years we’ve been using the money we get from renting/[technetium]/contracts into building a capital armada of Dreads and carriers for a huge capital slugfest with the intentions of losing a full capital fleet and replacing it as the fight goes down. Just like with subcaps, the ability to reship in a capital fight is hugely important. The B-R fight, though, wasn’t meant to be the site of a huge capital brawl. A week earlier in HED-GP we were prepared to lose everything, reship, and go back at it. Luckily those cynos and caches were still prepped and in place for the B-R fight so we were able to reship for the biggest capital/supercapital fight EVE has ever seen. From that end, the capital loss we incurred has been totally replaced as fast as people can accept [construction] contracts.
What we did lose, however, was a huge amount of active Titans. Titans have very few uses from a combat perspective except when it comes to capital fights. In these cap fights Titans are king and essential; as we saw in HED-GP they are very daunting and tend to win fights by intimidation. Jumping into 50 Titans means you risk losing huge assets every Doomsday cycle.
The cost to replace these suckers in the amount that we lost is certainly not trivial—a few trillion ISK—though certainly replaceable. In the short term it will limit our ability to create these capital fights (which I’m sure everyone is thankful for) and it changes how we approach fights.
Perhaps five years ago a loss of this scale would send an alliance into a tailspin, though the cold truth is that the top tier of alliances in EVE these days can incur a multi-trillion ISK loss and keep on chugging. A week ago CFC/RUS lost 350 dreads and fielded the same exact fleet on Monday [at B-R5RB.] The ISK lost from the B-R fight is a much greater scale, of course, but the ISK is still there for everyone. The lost momentum in the Southern conflict due to the B-R fight is a far greater loss than the ISK assets. Because try as you might, you cannot buy swagger.”
–Elise Randolph, Pandemic Legion
January 28, 2014
Pandemic Legion Fleet Commander Grath Telkin posted a reply of his own to show what was next for Pandemic Legion, explaining that he didn’t blame his allies for the loss, but that he needed to pull back and get his alliance back on its feet.
“I don’t throw allies under a bus, Vince [Draken, leader of NCdot] is someone I consider an e-friend, and despite how things go with him and other people we have dealings with, Vince has always been there and always had our back.
That said, my corp, my fucking corp, took a hit of around 1.5 trillion ISK. My alliance as a whole took a shot to the nuts somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 trillion ISK. Those numbers are beyond staggering in nature and dwarf the amount of money more than half the alliances in EVE will ever see, much less recover from. And right now that’s what needs to happen. I need my people to get a chance to recover.
I’ve been in PL for a really long time, and all the welps we’ve had have been chump change to the actual members in comparison to the losses we’re facing here, and coupled with Black Legion knocking on the door in [the Drone Regions] near constantly I made a judgement call to get my people whole.
I eat a shit sandwich, I pull back, I get my people right, I get my house right, and I get my cap fleet back in order, and then we see where life is and how things are going.
I don’t expect people to like my call, and personally your opinions on my call mean less than fuck all, what matters to me is how my people are doing and dealing with things and how the future of the alliance looks, and the best way for me to do that is to back our shit up to our house and have some Legion on Legion combat up north.
Anything outside of how the alliance recovers is irrelevant to me.”
–Grath Telkin, Pandemic Legion
January 28, 2014
The morning after the brawl at B-R5RB reports began to spread worldwide about the incredible spectacle that had unfolded within EVE Online. The great clash of plasma and tritanium was boiled down to one fact: if you were to convert the total sum of ISK lost in the Battle of B-R5RB to United States Dollars at the going exchange rate then the battle bore a staggering cost of more than $300,000.
It was the most destructive day in the history of virtual spaces. Finding information about the year following B-R5RB in EVE Online is far more difficult than other eras simply because the search results are coated in a thick layer of news pieces about B-R5RB. The media fawned over the event for months as CCP Games wisely co-opted it for its marketing endeavors.
The narrative that emerged in the press cast B-R5RB as the latest battle in an ongoing war with unknown consequences for the future of the conflict. But within EVE Online the story was different. Inside EVE, the impact of the battle was felt immediately as the N3/PL coalition recoiled from an apocalyptic welp. The worst welp, in fact, in the history of welps. The star cluster now had to grapple with two facts: 1) The Wrecking Ball was not a suitable counter to being massively outnumbered by supercapitals, and 2) the CFC super fleet which was already far larger than N3/PL’s before the battle was now even larger and the advantage was growing.
On top of the massive losses of ships, N3/PL had also lost B-R5RB itself and with it its forward staging base. After the battle the coalition was falling back, and the CFC was in hot pursuit. N3/PL retreated to a new station but were swiftly caught. The imposing CFC supercapital fleet—now unquestioned in its dominance of the star cluster—moved in and set up a great camp that kept N3/PL trapped within its station.
For a week following the disaster of the battle, the ClusterFuck Coalition maintained an overwhelming presence over the station, bottling up the only other legitimate opposition in New Eden.
But then, abruptly, The Mittani declared that the Halloween War had been won, and his fleets would be returning to Deklein in victory. The situation spiralled as both of the warmachines that emerged to fight B-R5RB started to cool. Not only was N3/PL reeling, but the CFC’s arrangement with Black Legion had now deteriorated beyond repair, and the RUS coalition was going through myriad internal difficulties as well, not in least part because Sort Dragon was now serving a prison sentence. Even the core of the CFC was showing increasing strain.
With the coalition frayed there was no way to officially extinguish N3/PL, and the badly fractured superpowers instead eased into a new cold war. The CFC could not officially wipe out N3/PL, but after a cataclysmic loss of Titans and the sundering of the Wrecking Ball, N3/PL could not even threaten the ClusterFuck Coalition in any meaningful way.
“As the month came to a close, with the consequences of the battle of B-R5RB beginning to make themselves known, an uneasy Cold War began to settle in the factions of the CFC and N3/PL,” wrote a writer named Markonius Porkbutte. “Much of the galaxy set about finding room to manoeuvre around two very large power blocs as space for grabs was seeming more and more doubtful.”
Immediately after B-R5RB, N3 and Pandemic Legion began a process of consolidating the sovereignty in the south in every territoriy beyond the CFC’s reach. The two allies formed huge blocs of renter space as large as the empires of old but entirely for sale. Pandemic Legion’s renter alliance Brothers of Tangra and Nulli Secunda’s “Northern Associates.” turned the entire south and west of EVE—historically the less desirable territories—into a renter farm.
The evolution of the EVE Online social system had all been leading up to this point. The most important factor for geopolitical dominance was the number of pilots that could be brought to a battle and the number of Titans a coalition could field. Now that there was no viable supercapital contender, faith in the game’s ability to produce conflict began to erode. The two predominant power blocs had treaties promising not to invade the other. The B0TLRD Accords were still in effect. They couldn’t outright destroy one another and there was huge amounts of ISK to be made in stalemate. So why fight? Fleets were still formed, and gudfites were still staged to keep the members entertained, but sources say the organic game of nullsec ground to a halt.
I’ve chosen to conclude the story of Volume II in this series here because it’s clear that after the Battle of B-R5RB a new era had come about. The history of the next two years reflects that as the ClusterFuck Coalition became undisputed as the dominant superpower in nullsec.
There was a counter-invasion attempt by N3 in early 2015, but sources don’t indicate it amounted to much. The game slowed down drastically, and the outer reaches of nullsec became largely static. For nearly a year afterward, the sovereignty maps from this era stay virtually identical, dominated by the huge renter empires of each coalition.
The problem was supercapitals. Their proliferation had tipped the balance of power, and huge networks of Titan jump bridges allowed them to leap around the star cluster practically at-will. Previously it could take hours for pilots to travel from one end of New Eden to the other. The Battle of B-R5RB was able to escalate so wildly because over the years the players had developed simple means of moving Titans to any corner of New Eden within about 15 minutes.
Many were relieved when CCP at last announced a new sovereignty system would be coming to EVE Online to shake things up, and the chief focus was new mechanics for supercapital force projection. In the “Phoebe” expansion, CCP introduced a “jump fatigue” mechanic that limited how far a single ship could travel in a given time period which drastically altered nullsec gameplay. But until that time, even small groups of friends often reported being surprised by Pandemic Legion’s entire supercapital fleet, because there was simply nothing else to do.
“Too many killers will quite successfully chase away everyone else,” Ultima Online designer Raph Koster wrote in 1998. “And after feeding on themselves for a little while, they will move on too. Leaving an empty world.”
THE IMPERIUM
In April 2015, after 15 months of complete dominance over nullsec, The Mittani made an announcement. The ClusterFuck Coalition was being restructured. Unfaithful allies were culled, and the coalition would be getting an official rebrand to something more befitting a galactic superpower of its stature. Henceforth, he announced, the organization would be known as “The Imperium.”
“The CFC began as a rag-tag group of allies of convenience, thrown together by circumstance and geography in the aftermath of a power vacuum,” The Mittani wrote in the announcement. “Who deserves the credit for transforming these disparate groups into the coalition which repeatedly won EVE Online? Vile Rat and his brainchild, Corps Diplomatique—and then after our friend’s senseless murder, the tireless efforts of his protege, Sion Kumitomo. Under the guidance of Corps Diplomatique we have solved the problems of ego and byzantine politics which repeatedly have crippled our foes. […] We have created a modern state in internet space- with highways, borders, a loose federated system of government, networked communication systems, and innumerable social programs. The ragtag clusterfuck of 2011 has grown into a true space empire—an Imperium.”
Many in EVE Online were left to consider the journey that had unfolded on the Tranquility server over the past twelve years.
“The sad truth is that no one can contest the Imperium,” reads a CrossingZebras.com editorial dated November 23, 2015 by author Tubrug. “The evolution of Goonswarm and the Imperium over the past decade is truly fascinating. GoonFleet originally established itself as being a carefree group of players fighting ‘elite PVP’ types and those who took the game too seriously. Truthfully, what is the difference between alliances in the Imperium in the present day and the very people they swore to destroy?”
It would not be until 2016 that the whispers of revolution were once again heard throughout New Eden. By that point, The Imperium’s advantage was so drastic that many wondered who even had the cash to mount an attempt to break The Imperium’s iron grasp on this game?
The answer, as usual, would emerge from EVE’s seedy underworld: a grey market casino called IWANTISK.com and an amateur spy named LennyKravitz2.
