Massive EVE Online Superbattle Blocks The Stars

[iseko]

Watching the video, I am pretty impressed with the players coordination. All that Eve lingo being thrown around sounded like something straight out of a science fiction movie when commanders are trying to coordinate an assault of some sort. Very cool. And the light shows were pretty as well. xD

Yea it's pretty cool. It's the organization that goes behind it. Players can form fleets of up to 256 players. 1 fleet commander, 5 wing commanders, 10 squad commanders per wing commander. 10 squad members per squad (including the squad commander). Each one can have skills ingame to boost their squad, wing, fleet. They all use teamspeak offcourse. A great FC can handpick a fleet (create squads with ship different ship types -> dps, support, stealth bomb, etc...) and coordinate it via teamspeak. Give short commands and the fleet obeys without question. Puts a lot of pressure on the FC tho. If shit goes south, he is the one to blame. Try explaining you just got 300 billion isk worth of assets blown to hell xD.

It's the most fun in small fleets imho. As has been stated before, large battles turn out in clusterfucks with 90% time slow down to compensate for lag. Funny thing is that a good FC will also take lag into account to win.

Ohh man I love how it all started because of one guy's mistake.

But this just reinforces why I think beam weapons suck- you see the start and end points- but it's very hard to tell which way the attack is going. That's why Star Wars was so good- everyone just had rapid rire turbolasers. Even colour coded! You could tell what's what at any distance.

Also are those red explosions ships blowing up, jumping in and out of hyperspace, or both? This battle looked great when panning around, but it kind of dropped the ball with explosions. If it's going for realistic depiction I suppose it makes sense though.

Jumping in via a sort of jump gate. Those big ass capital ships (titans) can create a 'bridge' through space jumping several systems at once. Allowing entire fleets to jump through. The red explosion that completely blinds the screen was a dreadnought blowing up if i'm not mistaken. And most ships in eve don't use lasers . Most of those colour effects you saw were tractor beams, armor repair support etc. Most ships are artillery, missiles, gun turrets, etc... The big capital ships are mostly lasers tho yea. Those ships usually fight big battle(=lag) and lasers don't have reload times for switching out crystals. Missiles etc do.

PS: you might not be able to see where the lasers are going. But someone getting hit by the barrage of the revalation (amarr dreadnaught, using lasers) will certainly know what hit him (after the concussion wears off).

 

[SonofaJohannes]

As awesome as those pretty lights are, I can't help but wonder: Who won?

 

[F'Angus]

Don't play EVE...but man that is awesome.

That one dude is gonna have to pay a lot of allies ship bills.

 

[blackrave]

I like that this is pretty much how ww1 started.

Phew! I'm glad I wasn't only one who thought about the similarity.

But it was pretty scary sight if one would imagine that this could happen for real one day

 

[Spectrum_Prez]

How does the game deal with collisions (and clipping, for that matter)?

With so many ships warping into close proximity, you would think this would be a serious practical problem.

 

[elilupe]

Holy crap, I love EVE Online. I'll never play it, but the fact that this can happen, and look so awesome in the process, is magnificent.

 

[Therumancer]

As Awesome as this occurance is, my big problem with EVE is that it's very slow and something cool like this generally only happens once in a blue moon.

I also have to question the reality of this because I seem to remember when I played that EVEs Devs mentioned that if you planned to have large battles to notify them so the game could be configured to handle it. They even had an annoucement for this at one point, and a lot of the more critical EVE players in the game commented a few times about how horrible EVE's coding actually is.

The point is that if this was really spontaneous I'd imagine EVE would have crashed. I'd guess at least a few players on both sides got together and decided "hey, let's have a big battle for fun" and acted the role of setting it up spontaneously, informing CCP ahead of time, which is why the servers didn't pretty much explode and ruin the entire thing.

Of course knowing EVE my immediate guess would be that not only was it set up, but ship manufacturers on both sides of the conflict were the driving force, knowing that with all these decimated ships there would be a drive to replace them, and a lot of ISK to be made. It's sort of like Hulkageddon which seems to largely be fueled by Hulk manufacturers who realized that once someone has a Hulk on a toon they don't generally need another one, they just sit back to make money, and if they take care of it, it lasts a good long while since they aren't the easiest things in the world to gank especially with people creating "Battle Hulks" which can be kind of annoying decoys. Hulkageddon involves destroying a lot of hulks, handing out some "prizes", followed by a rush on replacing them to the ship manufacturers, anyone mining with a Hulk probably having the ISK to buy another one which goes directly into the pockets of the makers.

Just my thoughts. One has to wonder, with the loss of some of these Titans and Super Carriers, how many were ready to be sold to corps that lost them and didn't have to haggle over price? Not to mention that ships like Drakes that seem to get decent amounts of PVP use are lost in bulk with some regularity and there was probably a decent amount of bulk sales for "scrub" ships like that. On the PVP front if people are using decent ships even those fighters and specialty frigates can cost a small fortune (and months of training to fly well), small doesn't nessicarly mean "humble" in EVE.

Those are my thoughts at any rate. If I had to guess I'd say ship manufacturers played everyone whether it's realized or not, and CCP knew this was going to happen ahead of time. If true this can make it more or less awesome depending on your perspective. More awesome if your a big fan of corperate scheming, less awesome if you think it's cool because of the size of the event and how spontaneously it happened.

 

[Pandalisk]

Who won? or were there just survivors?

 

[Slash2x]

NICE! I saw that! I was randomly flying around and I stumbbled past this when it was starting.... I looked at what had to be 1000 ships at the time fighting and said, "hmmm been playing for less than a week....... yeah"



I GTFO so I never saw it get bigger.

 

[vid87]

I like that this is pretty much how ww1 started.

Yes, but WWI at least involved a political assassination - all this (virtual) death and waste was purely by accident. There should be at least ballad or poem or something dedicated to that level of stupid irony.

Challenge issued, internet.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

The Ragnarok of Ragnarok Online, although I'm not sure if that name ever fully caught on or not.

Oh? I used to play RO a lot. What is this "ragnarok of Ragnarok online"? I'm curious.

 

[JSoup]

The Ragnarok of Ragnarok Online, although I'm not sure if that name ever fully caught on or not.

Oh? I used to play RO a lot. What is this "ragnarok of Ragnarok online"? I'm curious.

I think it was 2005 or so, but iRO had a major hacking incident, surprising no one (the game had been hacked to hell and back in other countries, particularly Korea and Gravity Co. was proving themselves to be major fuck ups). The servers went back up...and back down...and back up....and back down...rinse, repeat. I recall making a leveling the same character five times over the course of two weeks before I gave up.

Anyway, it turns out a group of people hacked the servers for some damn reason that was never shared, but it's been noted that a bunch of the early RO private servers came into existence not long after all this crap was over, so it's assumed that some of the hacking was done for the same reason kRO was attacked long before this point (that is, to steal resource files so the full game could be emulated outside of company control, this led to the development of the first RO emulators). Long story short, a bunch of resources were lost, the game kept being brought up when it wasn't ready, a bunch of people had their accounts banned because they asked for a refund for paid time lost (including me), Gravity Co. lied out their security and tried to deny that any hackings took place.*

*To elaborate on those last two points, the exact problem they were having with the servers was leaked by a Gravity Co. employee. It seems that all of the username, passwords and credit card information wasn't encrypted like it should of been. It was literally kept in an unprotected spreadsheet in the main login server. Logging in would make a program check the information you entered against whatever they had in the master spreadsheet and would then allow you access to the game if everything matched up. The hackers just got into the main login server, copied the spreadsheet and did a mountain of other problematic things. This left Gravity Co. with the problem of firstly figuring out what was taken outside of all login information, see if anything was damaged, repair said damage and then get the servers back up. Oh, and, you know, getting around to telling the userbase that all of their credit card numbers were potentially lost. You know, if they have time.

At a convention a few weeks later, a few fans known in the community (a few popular RO sites, like RagnaMart, and then a couple that hung around GFAQs, which is where I first caught this story) questioned GodPoing (the head GM at the time, not sure if she's still with the company) about all this in front of an audience. She first tried to deny that anything happened, they were just having some server issues. The information leaked by the programmers was put in front of her. She cracked and admitted that a hacking took place. Some files were missing or otherwise damaged and the constant resets of the previous month was part of them trying to fix it (I'm under the impression that they couldn't actually fix any of the problems, so they just loaded an older patched version of the game into the servers and that's how they got around the issue...by basically dodging it).

I first saw the title The Ragnarok of Ragnarok on the GFAQs forums and then tossed about here and there on other RO forums for a while. A quick Google search doesn't give me anything, so I guess it either didn't catch on or fell out of use. The title wasn't just cute, it was fairly apropos. Ragnarok is supposed to be the falling of the old gods and the big reset button for the world, from which new, better life will spring. And, well, that's what happened. GodPoing stopped logging in as often as she used to, the moderators backed off on dicking with the players as much as they used to, the support team started actually responding to problem reports and suspending trolls....all the bad shit was washed away and the game became as peaceful and playable as an MMO with little instruction can.

 

[Scytail]

Wow...it doesnt even look like a space battle in those images, just a giant spider's web composed of space ships and lasers...Frakkin' awesome.

This is what all MMOs should strive to become. Don't try to direct the player let the players direct themselves.

The one real downside of EVE is that the major fleet battles aren't actually fun. The game's architecture literally can't handle it.

Basically, when a bunch of players all pile into the same system, a mechanic called "time-dilation" kicks in. It slows the game down so that everyone's individual commands reach the servers in order. In the big battle, the game bogs down to unbearable levels. For example, in this battle, the time-dilation was up to the maximum of 90%. The game was only running at 10% speed the entire time. 1 minute of gameplay took 10 minutes of real-time, for example.

It's better than it used to be, when the server would just lag out or crash completely, and it certainly *is* an interesting story to read about and catch screenshots of. It just isn't fun to actually be in it, attempting to play the game in a situation the hardware just can't support. Which is something CCP always seems to neglect when they advertise EVE's huge, "epic" battles.

I always enjoyed black-ops stuff myself. Sneaking around with a dozen or so guys in stealth-bombers and recon-cruisers, ganking anyone unlucky enough to bumble into our path, before fading back into the shadows as he raged in local chat about what cowards we were >

Really any of the small-gang PVP is a lot of fun. 10-20 dudes rolling around in cruisers, battlecruisers and whatever else, shooting the shit in Teamspeak while you shoot people in EVE. Goodtimes.

But yeah, if EVE's endgame content (sovereignty wars, huge fleet fights, capital/super-capital ship engagements) were actually playable and/or fun, then I really think it would be one of the best MMO's around easily. In its current state though, it is an extremely interesting, if currently flawed, experiment in player-driven content and sandbox gameplay.

Obviously 2800-3000 people found this aspect of EVE fun. Everyone enjoys their own thing. For me, it's big mining ops.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

The Ragnarok of Ragnarok Online, although I'm not sure if that name ever fully caught on or not.

Oh? I used to play RO a lot. What is this "ragnarok of Ragnarok online"? I'm curious.

I think it was 2005 or so, but iRO....

*snip*


...The title wasn't just cute, it was fairly apropos. Ragnarok is supposed to be the falling of the old gods and the big reset button for the world, from which new, better life will spring. And, well, that's what happened. GodPoing stopped logging in as often as she used to, the moderators backed off on dicking with the players as much as they used to, the support team started actually responding to problem reports and suspending trolls....all the bad shit was washed away and the game became as peaceful and playable as an MMO with little instruction can.

AAAAh, so it's the Ragnarok of Ragnarok that I have to thank for the various free servers I joined over the years (Still have a char, a high level sniper, on LuminaRO, actually). Thanks for the story. I'm glad that it led to Gravity starting to treat the players with a more respect too.

 

[Erttheking]

So is this battle going to start a war or something?

 

[Zero=Interrupt]

Does... does anybody else just see a bunch of lights and penises?

 

[tangoprime]

Wow...it doesnt even look like a space battle in those images, just a giant spider's web composed of space ships and lasers...Frakkin' awesome.

This is what all MMOs should strive to become. Don't try to direct the player let the players direct themselves.

The one real downside of EVE is that the major fleet battles aren't actually fun. The game's architecture literally can't handle it.

Basically, when a bunch of players all pile into the same system, a mechanic called "time-dilation" kicks in. It slows the game down so that everyone's individual commands reach the servers in order. In the big battle, the game bogs down to unbearable levels. For example, in this battle, the time-dilation was up to the maximum of 90%. The game was only running at 10% speed the entire time. 1 minute of gameplay took 10 minutes of real-time, for example.

It's better than it used to be, when the server would just lag out or crash completely, and it certainly *is* an interesting story to read about and catch screenshots of. It just isn't fun to actually be in it, attempting to play the game in a situation the hardware just can't support. Which is something CCP always seems to neglect when they advertise EVE's huge, "epic" battles.

I always enjoyed black-ops stuff myself. Sneaking around with a dozen or so guys in stealth-bombers and recon-cruisers, ganking anyone unlucky enough to bumble into our path, before fading back into the shadows as he raged in local chat about what cowards we were >

Really any of the small-gang PVP is a lot of fun. 10-20 dudes rolling around in cruisers, battlecruisers and whatever else, shooting the shit in Teamspeak while you shoot people in EVE. Goodtimes.

But yeah, if EVE's endgame content (sovereignty wars, huge fleet fights, capital/super-capital ship engagements) were actually playable and/or fun, then I really think it would be one of the best MMO's around easily. In its current state though, it is an extremely interesting, if currently flawed, experiment in player-driven content and sandbox gameplay.

You speak the truth. Most fun I ever had in the game was back in the spring/summer 2010 during the big NC war, running with a small recon group. Deep in Red Alliance turf, we ganked a Tempest that apparently belonged to the captain of the team that won 2nd place in that year's alliance tournament. We cloaked and faded, but stayed in local, and the rest of his alliance team showed up a few minutes later, and we got to see them bitching to each other in local (in russian of course) and linking all our character names. That was good stuff. When he showed up again, this time in a hurricane, we pursued, and pushed him right into a second recon team that were bracketing with us and they got his ship and pod
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=10438510

That was a good day, small fleet ops are fun as hell, especially when you can step up your game and start rolling t3 cloakies.

 

[talker]

what I want to know is how many players got out of that intergalactic shitstorm alive!