EVE Online’s players have been busy the last few months, with war ramping up in the null sec regions of known space. The recent clashes in New Eden are part of a larger struggle that has been going on since March of this year, culminating in the recent battle over the Keepstar on Easter Weekend in the nullsec region of X47L-Q.
EVE Online’s players have a long history of warring over their turf in space, with battles going back to the MMOs inception in 2003. Clashes have shaken the foundations of the player hierarchy in EVE, from the destruction of Band of Brothers in the MMOs first decade to the most recent major galaxy-spanning war dubbed World War Bee 2.
While these recent clashes between the Imperium and their B2 allies against Winter Coalition made up mostly of their Fraternity allies feel smaller compared to the year-long struggle in World War Bee 2, the stage feels seemingly set for the galaxy to spiral into all-out war again, should the various alliances choose to continue.
However, according to CCP Games’ Community Developer Peter “CCP Swift” Farrell, the type of warfare we’ve seen explode in EVE Online the last few months feels different - all thanks to timezones.
“So this type of warfare hasn’t ever really happened before in EVE,” CCP Swift told me in an interview last week. “The defenders, their strongest timezone is the Chinese timezone when we’re talking about the alliance Fraternity who you know, make up the lion’s share of the defenders.”
Combat over structures in EVE Online can be a complicated dance of attack and defense timers, giving both sides time to prepare their forces and show up to fight over some of EVE’s most valuable assets - both strategically and financially in terms of ISK.
Attackers can bring down the shields of a structure, but when that happens they become invulnerable before the next layer of that structure is able to be attacked. This gives the defenders of the structure time to coordinate a response, and the time the reinforced structure will be vulnerable again is based on a timer set by the structure’s owners.
As a result of the timezone of Fraternity typically being set for those peak hours in China, it meant that the timers in the Keepstar involved in the fight that took place at X47L-Q flipped to vulnerable when many of the attackers in Imperium and B2 - whose pilots hail from Europe and North America mostly - would be asleep.
Couple this with the fact that Fraternity used this timing convention strategically as well, setting their timers for about when EVE’s servers are brought down for downtime on a daily basis.
“So what [Fraternity] ended up doing was they ended up setting their timers for just about when downtime is because that happens to be when they’re most active in the game. And that’s when they have an advantage because almost no one else is active, or as active as them during that period of time.”
As a result, not only did these fights rage at odd hours, but had the complication of the server downtime disrupting everything. And in a game whose servers have been known to experience the occasional node death, everyone trying to log onto the same node right after downtime could pose some issues - something I’m sure Fraternity here was counting on.
But why did these players fight? What was the causus belli that forced Imperium and B2 to go on the offensive, especially in space where B2 - an alliance of medium-sized groups such as the Brave Collective and We Form V0LTA - typically live within themselves?
The War On The Renters
Every nation, every alliance no matter whether it’s real-world politics or space politics needs a cause to go to war - a causus belli as it’s known.
Earlier this year, the Winter Coalition moved against their neighbors - B2 - in an aggressive manner, dropping four Keepstars into B2 space. B2 saw this as it was - an aggressive move on their turf and battle between the Winter Coalition and their PanFam allies ensued. However, another major power bloc in EVE Online was stirred - The Imperium.
The Imperium is one EVE Online’s major alliances led by a name uttered in EVE Online since the Great War when Band of Brothers was at the top of the game, The Goonswarm Federation. In this instance, The Imperium took the side of the “little guy.” In this case, B2’s member alliances. The reason? According to The Imperium’s leader Asher Elias during the State of the Goonium earlier this year, the war aims were to defend EVE players from the landlords of space, or the “slumlords” as Asher puts it in the speech.
Effectively, New Eden is a large space, and despite having thousands of capsuleers at their beck and call, the major power blocs cannot simply inhibit it all. So in turn they “rent” the space to smaller alliances, extracting ISK from their tenants in a landlord-renter relationship many of us are all too familiar with in the real world.
Basically, as EVE Online developer CCP Games put it to me in our interview, the corporations and alliances practice a form of “Space Feudalism,” but without the requirement that the peasants rise up to defend the landlords should the need arise.
This has been the main model for large alliances like Fraternity, Pandemic Horde, Northern Coalition and Pandemic Legion because of just the sheer amount of space they live in. Reading the tea leaves when Fraternity started dropping Keepstars in B2 space, though, the Imperium (who has in the past had some renters in their alliance until 2018) mobilized.
Every war, real or otherwise, needs a motivating factor to get their troops mobilized. Here Asher has his, and though it’s a refrain that has been used before, it worked. Speaking with Asher, though, it’s a cause it seems he genuinely believes in as well.
“There’s been a lot of debate like, ‘Oh, Asher was just trying to give meat to his guys and justification,” Imperium leader Asher Elias told me in an interview over the weekend. “I just think renting is really bad for the game. I think it’s corrosive for nullsec, I don’t like it.”
Asher admits that the other side in this fight is much more wealthy and occupies much more space than the Imperium in part because they draw in a ton of income from space feudalism. But at the end of the day, it’s a good rallying cry, despite Imperium and B2’s own history with renting, whether directly or being involved with other corporations and alliances who did.
While the Keepstar fight at X47L-Q has received most of the headlines - it was effectively a six-week siege of the system - the Imperium and B2 had to fight through three other Keepstars as well since this entire affair began. Keepstars in the systems of F-MNX6, ROIR-Y, and 5ZXX-K all fell in the course of the campaign, with the three buildings crumbling after a thirteen-hour fight that saw the Winter Coalition lose almost a Trillion ISK themselves while The Imperium didn’t even crack the 100billion ISK mark in ship loss. And those losses included a whole lot of battleships.
Shifting the Meta
The two sides have changed strategies a bit since the last major player war, this time with Battleships becoming a mainstay once again in EVE warfare. As a battleship fan myself, (my favorite ship in all of EVE Online is the Angel Cartel’s Machariel), this is pretty exciting to see these massive war machines go at it.
“The meta has shifted so drastically, it is night and day, compared to the last war,” Farrell explained. “I don’t know if you remember, but the last war there were all these very nimble, fast cruisers that would hit at range. So whenever one side would start to lose, they’d be like, ‘Well, that’s it,’ and they’d just run away. That’s what those ships were capable of.
“Because we made a few changes to those, what’s very strong in the meta happens to be battleships. And this harkens back to the glory days of EVE where you just had battleship fleets slugging it with one another, and that’s what we’re seeing quite a bit of.”
As a result of this meta shift, there really is no running away for many of these EVE pilots. In the six-week siege that saw fighting occur in X47L-Q, about 3500 were battleships committed to the fight, and around 1000 of them were destroyed. It’s an insane number for some expensive ships to be committed to the fray, but this is the type of content pilots on all sides are yearning for: massive battles and brawls.
It’s not just the meta itself that has shifted, but also the strategies and engagement styles of the power blocs. As CCP Swift describes it, the attackers in World War Bee 2 were “very composed,” whereas now it seems to have shifted to where both sides have been a bit more aggressive this time around.
“It’s been really interesting just to see how aggressive both these sides are in the fight. Like, when we were talking about the last war, the attackers would be very composed, they’re not going to overexert themselves. They’re just going to take a system, they fight the [sovereignty], control the jammer which is kind of like the logistics of the system. They wait for their own and then they begin the assault.”
Swift describes a very methodical approach by both sides in the previous war here, but the War in the North going on right now seems to be taking on the flavor of the personality of the leaders calling the shots this time around.
“But now we see the Imperium led by Asher Elias who is known to be a pretty aggressive [Fleet Commander],” Swift said in our interview. Referring to the Logistics in the X47L-Q system during the fight, Swift said it seemed like Asher just “doesn’t care” about those logistics and instead forced his fleet through the gate system.
Despite staging his fleets for the attack before the timers started, Imperium’s decision to just force the issue rather than go through that plodding, somewhat scripted affair of how an EVE battle has been fought lately seemed to take the defenders by surprise.
“And the defenders were just like, ‘That’s maniacal, why would you do that?’ They kind of didn’t expect it in a way. They saw it coming as it was coming.
While Asher is just one leader in a war full of big names in the EVE world, the way he led the Imperium-B2 alliance has been generating a lot of buzz since the conclusion of the recent northern campaign.
The Northern War brewing right now also feels like a holdover from the days of World War Bee 2, especially since many of the combatants took part in that war, and the wars leading up to it.
While both sides are adopting new tactics and the new battleship meta, when speaking with Asher it feels like the way both this group of battles as well as the whole of World War Bee 2 was a sticking point. While Asher didn’t take over the Imperium until after the end of hostilities, it definitely left an impression on the FC.
“So their strategy was slow,” Asher explained in our interview. “And it in the end it stalled out, by the barest of measures. I mean, they started the war outnumbering us three-to-one. In EVE terms, except in the smallest of circumstances, it is a death sentence. You can win five to fifteen, but you can’t win 500 to 1500. The way it scales just doesn’t work that way.
“So the way they conducted the war almost offended me.”
In our conversation it was pretty clear Asher took umbrage with the way World War Bee 2 was conducted by PAPI despite the numerical advantage the latter had. Asher described the battle plans of his enemy in WWB2 as “incredibly plodding” and “boring,” He lamented the fact that even though PAPI had the numerical advantage, they just didn’t press it as they should have - calling it “disappointing” for the pilots on the other side staring down the barrel of Goonswarm spaceships.
Fast forward to now as leader of one of, if not the largest alliance in EVE Online, the approach to these fights, to creating meaningful engagements for Goonswarm and their Imperium allies, seems to come from a desire to ensure the pilots under his care get, effectively, their money’s worth.
“The way I view being a leader or an FC in EVE is that you’re serving your members,” Asher explained. “Everyone here is paying money, paying their own money to play with you. So if people are paying $20 a month now of their hard-earned money, taking time away from other interests, their family? Why would you insult them by going any way but the maximum way?”
Asher explained that while fighting isn’t always the best idea since fighting every fight there is to be had is a good way to lose your alliance, when you had overwhelming odds as we saw in World War Bee 2, not to do so feels like a disappointment, especially for those pilots on the losing side.
“When you have an advantage, you press it. So, the way they fought World War Bee [2] was kind of offensive to me. And disappointing because I just thought of all their members who gave up their time - three times more than us, right? [They] didn’t get to see the result that they were promised by their leadership.”
Two Fleets Tied Behind Their Back
So while we know the War in the North kicked off with B2 fighting Fraternity and their allies over Winter Coalition’s encroachment in B2 space, Asher says there was another motivating factor for Imperium getting involved: proving a point.
Ignoring the Logistics and the Jammer in the system, Asher made the call to leave it be this time. He mentions that for two years Imperium has been told that attackers cannot take down a Keepstar defended by a Jammer. That the only way was through the slow, plodding, meticulously organized engagement.
This time, he led his fleet with a different mindset:
“I want to shove it down these guys’ throats.”
What kicked off was elaborate planning and strategizing from Imperium leadership, devising ways to get through to paydirt: destroying the Keepstar. Part of this was down to the timing of the attack as well: the Easter holiday.
As mentioned at the top of this piece, the timezone difference between the combatants is a huge factor. Fraternity, being a mostly Chinese timezone alliance, typically plays around downtime - something that occurs early morning in Europe or in the middle of the night on the West Coast where I’m based. This means that the Keepstar’s reinforcement timers would also be set for the Chinese timezone - giving Fraternity an advantage of not just odd hours to fleet up and fight, but also the downtime as a hard clock to fight around.
“So while Fraternity was leveraging that 11 o’clock timer, the Imperium and B2 knew they had a bit of an advantage because they had time off work,” CCP Swift mentioned. The timing was fortuitous for an Alliance made up of many Europeans and Americans who would have Good Friday, Easter and the following Monday off of work.
This played right into the battle plans from Asher and the Imperium leadership and lined everything up perfectly to take out the Keepstar on Easter weekend.
“So when Frat took that system, X47, they took it on a Chinese holiday,” he explained. “They alarm clocked into EU timezone - or stayed up I suppose - and they took it on a Chinese holiday because they knew they couldn’t take it in the EU on a regular day. So it seemed only appropriate and right that we do the same thing to try to blow up that Keepstar.
“And it just so happened that [for] the Easter holiday, most of Europe - which is the people who would mostly be getting up for this because European time it was like, eight in the morning, US time it was like three AM. But most of Europe gets Good Friday, Easter, [and] the Monday after Easter off. So because of the way the timer worked, we could attack it on Friday, and then the final timer would be on the following Monday.”
Asher mentions that when the Imperium and B2 locked in that weekend date with the X47 Keepstar, they started to run other operations to act as a feint against Fraternity to try to affect their numbers. However, when the fateful day arrived, Fraternity showed up to fight, culminating in a thirteen-hour-long brawl that saw Battleships, Capitals, and more fall.
What makes the brawl more impressive is the sheer orchestration of fleet tactics, especially when dealing with the massive time dilation that occurs in one of these large battles. Staging their fleets in a way that allowed Imperium to just throw as much damage onto the Keepstar as possible, they still had to counter what Fraternity and their allies threw at them.
But the goal was simple: blow up the Keepstar.
“When you’re trying to blow up the Keepstar, it’s a very binary thing: did the Keepstar blow up, yes or no?”
When the battle in X47 first started, Fraternity and their allies were killing Imperium forces to the tune of 80% of the killmails to 20%. Yet as the fight in the system progressed and as the Imperium solidified their beachhead in the system, those numbers started to even out.
“Once we took control of the gate it removed a lot of their advantages,” Asher explained. “We were able to bring in as many reinforcements as we wanted. And then we evened out the numbers.”
The general battle plan courtesy of Asher Elias
Because of TiDi, the Imperium had to throw even more damage than needed to effectively destroy the Keepstar, or in the case of the Friday morning clash kick it into its Hull Timer phase for the coup de grâce on Monday. Central to all of this were two Typhoon fleets staged about 220 kilometers away from the Keepstar, Typhoons whose pilots had orders to ignore everything else but the Keepstar itself.
Asher praised the calm of those Typhoon pilots, knowing it’s a tough job to get shot at knowing your orders are to ignore it and take down the structure.
“It was a tough job for those pilots. Imagine you’re taking all this fire and you can’t shoot back because your only job is to shoot this Keepstar - don’t do anything else. Just shoot the Keepstar.”
However, much of what was going on was anticipated. While the Typhoons were being hammered by enemy pilots, they were moving around, forcing Fraternity to deploy something referred to as “bubble wrap,” a protective barrier around the Keepstar that anchors warp disruption bubbles around the entirety of the Keepstar.
This was done as Fraternity expected Imperium to warp their forces right on top of the Keepstar. But because of the way Imperium and B2 staged, putting the Typhoons 200km away, with fleets staged even farther back, this bubble wrap worked against Fraternity.
“They did something to their own Keepstar called bubble wrap where they anchored the warp disruption bubbles around the entire Keepstar. And the reason they did that was because they expected us to use the same strategies we had used in previous ones where we came in right on top of their ships and tried to brawl with them. And so they expected us to warp right on top of them.
Instead, we put the Typhoon fleets 220km away from the Keepstar and said ‘Come stop us.’ And at that point, the bubble wrap is a huge hindrance to them to the point where about halfway through the fight they started shooting all their own bubbles to destroy them.”
Because these bubbles restricted the movement of Fraternity’s defenses, Imperium was able to use this to their advantage. While their ships warped around the Keepstar keeping pressure on the timer, Fraternity would have to spend time - time that was exaggerated and stretched out thanks to the system’s TiDi - to destroy their own defenses. That took some pressure off of more tactical targets like the combined Imperium and B2 forces.
The tactics and strategy at play at all levels have seen members of both sides praise, and even CCP Games start to talk about the FC with a ton of respect (and memes). From choosing the timing of the battle as well as anticipating moves and having the right counter in play - Asher described the final mini-fight behind the Keepstar that saw the timely launch of anti-fighter fleets dismantle the enemy fighters, and then eventually dismantle expensive Paladin and Battleship fleets- the battle was the culmination of a war well fought to this point.
But Asher notes that the destruction of the Keepstar itself isn’t that symbolic. Winter Coalition can just drop a new one - and they probably will. Instead, it’s proving a point: you can take out a Keepstar despite jammers and other traditional defense - and you can do it on an even playing field.
“For two years they’ve said you can’t take a defended Keepstar under a Jammer, that the only way we could do it was that slow, plodding, lame method. So there’s nothing better than a concrete example, right? And it was hard to do. [...] But we did it. And it was possible.
“In the end, that Keepstar was not particularly momentous. You know, they’re going to drop a replacement eventually. So the symbol wasn’t the value of the structure, the value was in saying it can be done. We did it against even numbers. We didn’t need two or three times the numbers.”
Asher goes on to explain that even with the numbers even (something that came up multiple times in our chat especially because the World War Bee 2 numbers were skewed so heavily in favor of PAPI), those two Typhoon fleets were the difference. Because they were so singularly focused on the Keepstar, you had 500 pilots effectively not engaging with the rest of the fleet battle except through the occasional drone fight.
“So the battle report is very close. But when you consider that about 500 people of our side were devoted strictly to shooting the Keepstar and couldn’t participate in the fight as far as shooting enemy sips, then it becomes even more of an impressive win [for] our side because we were doing it with two fleets tied behind our backs.”
So what’s next?
The question on my mind now is will this war continue? Is there a viable strategy to see it push into Fraternity space, or will we see a general war spark in nullsec between PAPI and The Imperium - this time joined by B2 perhaps - as a result of the engagements here?
CCP Swift predicts that anything could happen at this point simply because of the nature of EVE players. He says in our chat that both sides could simply pack it in and build back up the war chests - back-to-back trillion ISK fights are costly even for the richest of alliances.
However, he could also easily see players pushing further, using an example of some Imperium and B2 members shooting a few more Keepstars deep in Fraternity space after the X47 structure fell.
When I asked Asher if the next steps would be to carry on the crusade of keeping nullsec safe from renters, he pushed the brakes a little, instead stating that Imperium doesn’t have an advantage that would make pushing into the Chinese timezone. Instead, Imperium is setting up to better defend B2 space from the larger alliances that would take advantage of them, going to a Jump clone deployment that would see Imperium forces able to mobilize in B2 space within a day, ready to defend, mirroring what their enemies in Pandemic Horde and PanFam are doing as well.
As EVE Online nears its twentieth birthday this year, it’s amazing to me that these types of stories don’t just still exist, but thrive in New Eden. The rally cry of declaring a war on renters and taking a stand against it has a ton of motivation for many a player - and it’s drawn a battleline that could tip New Eden into a much larger, broader conflict over the space pixels we all have grown to love these last two decades.
“Maybe it’s a quixotic quest. But I don’t care,” Asher said. “It’s space pixels. If we lose some fight or some war because we stood up for something in the smallest of areas, then okay - no one’s real life will be affected by that. So if that’s the downside, then what’s the upside to taking a stand?”
Images via Razorien/CCP Aperture
