Update: The fight has ended in a disappointing win for the defenders of the Keepstar Citadel. With massive server lag preventing combatants from participating to their full potential, The Imperium refused to deploy their supercapital fleet of Titans and eventually called off the assault. EVE's $1 million USD battle has been a bust despite a record-breaking number of participants. We'll have more on what happened in the coming days.
Original Story: EVE Online pilots will engage in a battle this afternoon that could dwarf every other major conflict in its history. Across the entirety of New Eden, thousands of pilots are making their final preparations and traveling to the cluster of star systems known as Cloud Ring, which has already become a warzone. In the system of 9-4RP2 sits the primary objective: One of the many Keepstar Citadels that populate New Eden and act as strategic headquarters in player-held territories.
Hostiles towered every moon in 93PI with online, shield-down large POS with. Current war isnt over imperium space. Not even over legacy space, its an. With 50-70+k null-sec players there, I'd love to see anyone in Eve. EVE General Discussion. Instead, you are welcome to join our Section 8 in the north. That would however mean joining the alliance. You can probably imagine there are a lot of people coming and going, and we'd have to keep track of a whole coalitions worth of standings for every single (ex-) renter who doesn't wish to join the alliance.
But this particular Keepstar is of special importance. It's owned by Pandemic Horde, a legion of newer players that belongs to a larger coalition called PanFam led by the terrifyingly powerful Pandemic Legion. At 1:55 PM PST, this Keepstar will enter its final vulnerability window, making it susceptible to complete annihilation by PanFam's enemies, The Imperium. The fight to either save or destroy this Keepstar could see the destruction of an estimated $1 million USD worth of virtual spaceships—but only if both sides decided to commit the full might of their supercapital fleets. This is the latest chapter of a conflict that has been brewing for years between EVE's biggest player-led factions.
The attacking force is made up of a coalition known as The Imperium, chiefly led by the infamous Goonswarm Federation. Assisting them is The Initiative among smaller alliances. The Imperium is notable for being the biggest economic powerhouse in EVE Online, boasting almost 15,000 players.
If you don't play EVE Online, the in-game battles that give rise to these incredible stories aren't nearly as dramatic. With 4,300 players already flying in 9-4RP2 to either attack or defend the Keepstar, CCP Games' servers simply cannot handle the immense network traffic. To compensate, Time Dilation ('TiDi') is used in high-traffic areas to slow time and allow EVE's servers to process the massive amounts of information without crashing. While TiDi is in full effect, an action that would normally take your ship one second to perform now takes ten seconds. That's the main reason why major battles can take dozens of hours to resolve.
That doesn't make the most compelling viewer experience, but the best place to watch this battle will either be The Imperium News stream or Pandemic Horde's stream—both of which will offer a good insight into the battle despite their respective bias. The field of battle will be the 9-4RP2 Keepstar itself, but Imperium forces have also built their own smaller Citadels a hundred kilometers away that they'll use as their trench. Meanwhile, the surrounding star systems will host smaller but still significant battles as each side struggles to control resupply lines.
The defenders are led by two separate coalitions: PanFam and Guardians of the Galaxy. Both of these forces fought together to unseat The Imperium from the North around a year ago in 'World War Bee.' PanFam are the principle defenders, as the Keepstar is owned by their new-player-friendly alliance Pandemic Horde.
The last major battle in EVE history, 2014's Bloodbath of B-R5RB, led to the destruction of nearly 11 trillion ISK (estimated $300,000 USD) worth of ships all because one alliance forgot to pay rent on their starbase, opening it to attack. While almost every player faction in EVE fought in B-R5RB, the two chief combatants were The Imperium and Pandemic Legion. The Imperium won that battle and, for a time, became the unassailable ruler of EVE by building a vast northern empire reinforced by a ring of staunch allies. Then, in 2016, a series of events took place both in- and out-of-game leading many of the Imperium's enemies, including PanFam (Pandemic Legion), to band together as The Moneybadger Coalition to unseat the would-be kings of New Eden from their throne.
Funded by the exorbitant wealth of several casino owners that let players gamble their ISK (EVE's in-game currency) through third-party websites, the Moneybadgers stormed north to wage what many hoped would be the biggest war EVE Online had ever seen. But during the crucial battle of M-OEE8, one of The Imperium's greatest allies, Circle-of-Two, defected from the coalition, leaving it vulnerable to the overwhelming assault of Moneybadger forces. In the months that followed, The Moneybadger Coalition launched a full-scale invasion of the North, taking every single Imperium-controlled system as its pilots began a full-scale evacuation back to the relative safety of low-security space, which isn't controlled by any of EVE's player-led alliances. In the span of weeks, EVE's most powerful faction crumbled to dust.
But The Imperium didn't die. Instead, they colonized a southern region of New Eden and began to rebuild. Meanwhile, their homeland was divided up among two chief factions in the Moneybadger Coalition: PanFam and Guardians of the Galaxy, a smattering of smaller but still formidable alliances. For almost a year, these three factions have been embroiled in an arms race to build up their stockpile of Titans. Equipped with devastating doomsday weapons and unparalleled defenses, these supercapital ships are the nuclear warheads of the EVE universe—and each side has hundreds of them to deploy on the field.
While The Imperium's claim to the throne of New Eden was taken away, it's clear that they're still a force to be reckoned with. In September of 2017, Imperium spies managed to 'flip' the head diplomat of Circle-of-Two, The Judge, over an in-person dinner in Iceland hosted by EVE Online's developer CCP Games. In a stunning act of betrayal, The Judge handed the keys to Circle-of-Two's own Keepstar Citadel over to Goonswarm, leaving 4,000 Circle-of-Two pilots without access to their own ships. In a single night, one of The Imperium's biggest enemies imploded.
The Judge even livestreamed the moment Circle-of-Two's leader, Gigx, found out about this deception knowing that the sudden loss of everything he worked 12 years to build would cause him to lash out. Without realizing he was being livestreamed to an audience of thousands, Gigx made several threats against The Judge's life, forcing CCP to ban him permanently from the game. The Imperium had their revenge against the ally that betrayed them, and now it appears they're looking to settle the score against the enemies that took their homeland.
Weeks ago, The Imperium launched a series of skirmish campaigns against PanFam to test their defenses in what many believed was the precursor to an invasion to retake the north. It was during these conflicts that The Imperium managed to significantly weaken Pandemic Horde's 9-4RP2 Keepstar Citadel, creating the opportunity to destroy it outright and secure a beachhead in the North. At 1:55 PM PST, the 9-4RP2 Keepstar entered its final vulnerability window and each side will have to lay their cards on the table. Whether both sides will commit to the battle remains to be seen, but it's clear the entirety of the EVE community wants bloodshed.
Whether the EVE community gets that bloodshed is another matter, however. When ships are destroyed in EVE Online, they're destroyed for good and must be replaced. For the average player flying average ships, that's usually not a problem. Titans, however, cost around 100 billion ISK and can take weeks to build. Losing one is devastating, but losing several hundred in a single fight is unprecedented and could significantly weaken either faction. It's this reason that has many skeptical that either side will want to risk their supercapital fleets—is one Keepstar Citadel worth it?
Battles of this magnitude in EVE are best thought of like a game of poker. Each side is trying to bluff the other, but if one decides to go all-in and the other doesn't like the hand they're holding they'll simply fold and take their losses and live to fight another day—albeit with bruised egos. But with each side flexing their military muscle so extensively, doing so would appear as a massive act of cowardice.
This issue became even more complicated when, last night, well-known fleetcommander Progodlegend made a post about the battle on Reddit that quickly went viral. Progodlegend isn't participating directly in the conflict, but his post drew a massive amount of attention—raising the stakes to the point where if either side backs down they won't just look like cowards to the EVE community but the wider gaming community too. It was a genius ploy to goad each side to make good on their threats.
It will take some hours before we know if this fight will become the biggest in EVE history, however. When the 9-4RP2 Keepstar enters its final vulnerability phase at 1:55 PM PST, a 15-minute countdown timer will begin. If the timer reaches zero, the Keepstar repairs the damage to its hull, the last of its defensive layers, and will be safe for the time being. PanFam will have won the battle. The Imperium can prevent this by maintaining a steady stream of damage to the Keepstar, which pauses the timer as long as damage-per-second is maintained while simultaneously whittling away its remaining health points.
Earlier in the week, Imperium forces were able to deploy several smaller Fortizar citadels within range of the Keepstar. One relatively unpopular feature of Citadels is that friendly players who stay within a certain range of one cannot take damage from enemies unless they attack first. The predicted strategy for the Imperium will be to park fleets of carriers and supercarriers within the protective bubble of their Fortizars and unleash waves of fighter drones to bridge the several hundred kilometer distance to the Keepstar and attack it indirectly without risking actual ships. Meanwhile, the defenders' own Citadel-protected carriers will unleash their own drones to try and stave off the assault in addition to using ships that specialize in electronic warfare to try and jam the drones' targeting computers and render them ineffective. Fleets of smaller ships from both sides will engage in the space in-between, attempting to tip the scales on one side or the other.
That's just the anticipated strategy, however. Anything could go wrong. Before today, both of EVE's biggest battles were started because of single mistakes. In the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, one player-faction forgot to pay the rent on their station. In the mad rush to secure the starbase, both sides kept escalating the conflict by throwing more and more of their Titans onto the field. In the Battle of Asakai, one pilot accidentally jumped his Titan right into the enemy formation. In the scramble to destroy or protect it, both sides committed their supercapital fleets.
At the outset of this battle, there is no reason why either side would risk a deploying their Titans, but all it takes is one mistake to turn this relatively mundane battle into a full-on slaughter. And both sides will be eagerly trying to get the other to over-extend. With so many pilots itching to participate in the biggest battle of EVE's history, anything could happen.
We won't know for sure until it does, but we'll be reporting the outcome of this tense situation as it unfolds.
EVE Online is infamous for its scammers, pirates, and ne’er-do-wells, but this week all their scams were put to shame. A member of the game’s Council of Stellar Management and head diplomat of the Circle of Two alliance named The Judge stole all of the holdings of the 4,000-person alliance for himself. He took their money, took their ships, and sold their Death Star-esque space citadel to their most hated enemies.
The EVE community has taken to calling it “Judgement Day.”
On September 11, Aryth, a player in the highest echelons of the Goonswarm Federation alliance broadcast a string of short messages to the entirety of The Imperium, a massive player organization. “I want to [be] smug. You are going to love this. I am the best CSM in history.”
“Flipped Judge at Summit. CCP watched me do it live. Keep is in his hands he has robbed them blind.”Typically, discussions between members of the Council of Stellar Management are not made public, thanks to non-disclosure agreements. So this vague message caught the attention of the 30,000 members of The Imperium who saw it.
Advertisement
A few minutes later, it was followed by another cryptic message: “The next 24 hours are going to be glorious.” This itself was quickly followed by the punchline everyone had been eagerly awaiting. “Flipped Judge at Summit. CCP watched me do it live. Keep is in his hands he has robbed them blind.”
In EVE, trusting the wrong person can cost you everything, and players know this. But how does a member that had built up so much trust become a turncoat in such a sudden and brutal fashion?
Advertisement
“Legacy Coalition, the coalition that I had helped build, was imploding due to the leader of Co2 letting his ego take over, sort of giving everyone the middle finger,” said The Judge. “That was the breaking point for me.”
However, The Judge says he didn’t take this path on his own. For over a year before he pulled the trigger on EVE’s largest heist, he says his fellow CSM member Aryth had been attempting to flip his allegiance when the two were together in real life—at Council summits in development studio CCP Games’ hometown of Reykjavik, Iceland.
Advertisement
“From my perspective,” Aryth said, “this story starts when Co2 backstabbed us, during the Casino War.” Here, he referred to the battle of M-OEE8 in March of last year. Shortly after the conclusion of that battle, after hours of The Imperium’s combined forces trying and failing to save the Co2 home system, an announcement was made on the EVE subreddit: The Judge himself posted that Co2 would be severing all ties with its Imperial allies, and forging their own way from that point forward, and they would be doing so inside the next thirty minutes.
Advertisement
“At the time, it was something I was on board with,” Judge said. “How it happened wasn’t great, but the split was something that needed to happen. The cultures didn’t match, and they never had, and everyone knew it.” He went on to say that he regretted blindsiding the Imperium’s players, but that they “felt that it was the safest way for us to exit the coalition.”
This event marked the point of no return for The Imperium during the war. Their players evacuated the majority of the belongings to a safer position, and spent the next few months watching the empire they had built disintegrate before their eyes. The Mittani, leader of the Imperium, swore revenge on everyone prosecuting the war against them. Most of all, he swore that his forces would not rest until they saw the Co2 alliance destroyed.
Advertisement
Aryth would be the primary implement of The Mittani’s revenge, though at the first summit of the 11th CSM, no one knew that. The Imperium’s CSM Candidates, Innominate and Aryth, entered the summit with a purpose, he said. “Our first goal was to establish which personalities fell into which categories: nice but ignorable, hostile and damaging to our game, and a third group, those that we felt we could flip.”
Advertisement
“We quickly identified two CSM members we thought were targetable. Judge was one of those two, obviously.”
During the first summit, the two Imperium delegates and The Judge spoke quite a bit—with Judge introducing himself as “The Traitor”—and they seemed to get along very well. Information was exchanged as both sides tried to feel each other out for any in-game weaknesses, and towards the end of the first summit, Aryth thought that there was a slim chance that The Judge could be turned.
Advertisement
“During the second summit, we knew that Co2 would be in trouble when the moon mining patch finally came along. Our goal was to build up and exploit The Judge during this time where Co2’s lifestyle would be in danger, possible even setting up a coup for The Judge to take over.”
By the end of the second summit of CSM 11, Aryth was convinced that there was a chance he could flip The Judge and cripple Co2 in the process. The Judge wasn’t blind to this, he said: “From the very first time Aryth talked to me, I knew that they saw me as a mark, someone who could be easily targeted, from their point of view. But from my point of view, it was always my decision on what I was going to do. But they could tell I wasn’t happy, and Aryth was actually a sympathetic person to me.”
Advertisement
A year after he had first noticed The Judge as a potential flip, in the weeks leading up to the first summit of the 12th CSM, Aryth could see through his network of spies that a chain of events was beginning that would embroil Circle of Two in a war, potentially shaking their diplomatic ties.
Advertisement
“I saw an opportunity, and I laid out my plan to the other senior leadership, [and] they were horrified. Some wanted a slow burn, but I wanted to set up a ‘Super Prisoner’s Dilemma’. I knew this was the time,“ he said. As the CSM summit began in earnest, with The Judge separated from his alliance, the dominoes Aryth saw began to fall. In a situation eerily reminiscent to the lead-up of World War I, small skirmishes began to trigger mutual defense pacts, which led to favors being called in, which eventually led to Circle of Two looking down the barrels of their guns, and seeing members of fellow members of the Legacy Coalition on the other side of the field.
Aryth looked on as between summit meetings, The Judge tried to get a handle on the situation, but to no avail. The leader of Circle of Two was ruining his relationships with another major alliance, Test Alliance Please Ignore. “Judge sees his hard work disintegrating, and his leader, Gigx, just doesn’t care.”
Advertisement
Aryth said that he and his fellow CSM member Innominate played the situation very casually, allowing the Judge to come to them, to talk about what he wanted to talk about, and to lead the conversations, playing the part of consoling friends. Then it happened: Another alliance called Legacy Coalition was turning on Co2. Judge tried to fix things, but could not persuade Gigx, his leader.
At the final night of each Summit, CCP treats the delegates to dinner at a fine dining establishment in Reykjavik. The high-level players sit down and have a meal with some of the development team as a thank-you for their time and support.
Advertisement
“I knew this was my chance,” Aryth said. “Innominate and I discussed the plan with the rest of the Star Chamber [Goonswarm’s highest leadership channel], and they had some doubts, but I was fully confident.” Knowing that this would be his last chance to isolate The Judge in real life, away from the screen, away from his alliance, Aryth motioned him over to a corner seat.
Aryth describes what happened this way.
“I sat Innominate down next to his left, myself to his right, and a newer CCP developer, CCP Nagual, straight across from him. Nagual is new to the dev team, but very interested in the meta game, so he was the perfect choice. I’m chatting up The Judge, he’s pretty upset, as over the last week he’s watched months of work boil away to nothing. Then the drinks arrive.”
Advertisement
“You know… you could come to Goons.”As everyone begins to drink, Aryth turns away from The Judge, looks directly to CCP Nagual, and asks: “Would you like to see how the metagame is played tonight?” Nagual, he says, agreed. For an hour, Aryth explained every detail of what had been happening, all the backstabbing, the crumbling alliances, the march to war. “I outline The Judge’s position, and how unenviable it is.”
Advertisement
Finally, after a lengthy conversation between Aryth and the CCP developer, with only minor input from The Judge, Aryth turns to him and drops the bomb: “You know… you could come to Goons.”
The Judge, of course, had been expecting this. None of what Aryth had said, or did would have worked if he hadn’t been, he said, The Judge held the keys to the castle and all the power, and he didn’t commit right away. “It was on my way home,” he said. “The dinner was Saturday, Sunday was my birthday, and I didn’t want to spend my entire birthday on a plane, so I stayed in Iceland. I saw a bit more of the country, had some time to think. Monday, on the thirty-one hour plane ride, I had even more time, and I decided that I was going to do it.”
Advertisement
At the dinner, they had come to a tentative agreement: a price tag for the transfer of the Keepstar Citadel, a place to call home inside of The Imperium for The Judge and his friends, and the ability to execute the heist at the Judge’s discretion. Once he was safely home, The Judge bided his time, waiting for the right moment to execute possibly the biggest snatch and grab in video game history.
Advertisement
“Right now, I think the best estimate is at about 1.5 trillion ISK, but there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t even gone through yet, so who know where it will end up, “ Judge said, talking about the equivalent of roughly $20,000 worth of in-game currency—not that he can legally cash it out. “This heist is the first of its kind in the Citadel era of EVE,” he said. “We’ve never seen the repercussions of something like this before.”
On September 11, Aryth made his fateful announcement to The Imperium. He had struck a blow that no one in The Imperium or in Circle of Two had seen coming: he had facilitated the decapitation of The Imperium’s most hated enemy, and secured their super weapon-equipped Keepstar citadel, placed deep in the heart of Co2’s territory, for Goonswarm Federation.
Advertisement
Immediately, every able-bodied and awake pilot was summoned to their ships. Fleets were rapidly deployed across three regions of space. In yet another miracle of diplomacy, Imperial leadership was able to negotiate safe passage and assistance from the cheekily-named alliance Test Alliance Please Ignore, who were currently at war with Circle of Two.
Imperium vessels began encircling their new battlestation, attempting to prevent any member of Co2 from successfully evacuating their belongings. While they began deploying warp disruption fields to make the evacuation attempts more difficult, Co2’s leader Gigx received panicked phone calls from his remaining leadership, informing him of the dire circumstances the alliance now found itself in.
Advertisement
Gigx logged into the game servers and began trying to minimize the damage that The Judge could do, stopping The Judge from stealing the alliance’s ISK reserves, accessing shared hangars full of ships, or transferring more structures to other players. Realizing it was too little, too late, Gigx began to rage in alliance channels, meant to be seen only by friendly players, asking for The Judge’s personal information.
“Whoever know his real name, home address and other details msg me,” he wrote. “The Judge feel free to use your hands by typing here,” he added, “while you can.”
Advertisement
Unfortunately for Gigx, these channels were being broadcast over a Twitch stream, causing a massive amount of players to report the alliance leader’s actions to CCP. As of now, Gigx has received a permanent ban from EVE Online for those statements.
Advertisement
“I don’t think that he’s going to come and try and chop my hands off,” says The Judge of Gigx. “But I feel that people who make threats in game with out of game violence shouldn’t be in the game anymore. If it were any other circumstance, I wouldn’t support it.”
“Judgement Day” will go down in EVE history as one of the biggest watershed moments of modern EVE. It will be remembered alongside the Bloodbath of B-R5BR, the Battle of Asakai, the times Jita was on fire for days on end, and most similarly, the destruction of the Band of Brothers empire, in a similar fashion, years ago. An alliance has been destroyed to its very core, by someone who had been one of its biggest supporters, with no warning.
Advertisement
But what happens to the man who burns the biggest bridge in the universe?
“Well, no one will give [me] keys to a Keepstar ever again,” The Judge said. “In EVE,your reputation is all you have. ISK comes and goes, and your name is what’s there forever. Mine’s shot at this point, which is fine with me. I’m past the point where I want to run things. I’m more than happy to step back, fly around and just shoot people. My plan when the dust settles is to join Goonswarm, and I don’t see why that would change.”
Advertisement
“I’m free to do what I want to do now,” he said. “Not under someone who would threaten others to make themselves feel better.”
“The worst is the relationships that are damaged or lost. And of course the threats to my life, that I did not anticipate, or find acceptable.”
Advertisement
Aryth said the events had reignited his flagging passion for participating in the CSM. “I had been pretty down on it because of the time taken away from my family/career, but this has made me fall in love with it again.”
But the best part, he says? “Payback. Vengeance. Revenge. Real Rains of Castamere type vengeance. It let me participate in a way, in a war that I missed, and let me strike a blow for my friends. Headshotting the great betrayer.”