Is a titan about to fall?
[Update #2: All fighting is complete, and the remaining CFC/Goonswarm players are leaving the system now as well.]
[Update: Test Alliance has started to back off from the system. A small amount of fighting still remains, but system 6VDT-H is now under Goonswarm Federation control — The main alliance in the Clusterfuck Coalition.]
EVE Online is one of those things. It’s huge, and a lot of stories and news come out of it, but there’s just so much to get through to be able to get there yourself. One of the bigger stories was a massive battle that happened in the past year, largest in the game’s history. That is until today where a battle is currently taking place that is almost three times the size of it, and threatens to become even twice as large as it currently is when the reserves and reinforcements show up.
This might very well be the last battle in a long standing war that has been going on between two of the largest null security space alliances, Test Alliance Please Ignore and Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC). The war has been over control of the region known as “Fountain”, which contains many tech moons that are massive sources of Isk, the EVE in game currency.
It’s unknown how long the fighting will last. At it’s peak word from the battle indicated there were over 8,000 players in combat. That is almost three times as many than were in the 3,000 player battle back in January. To press the finality of this battle even further, it’s been said that both sides have over 10,000 more players, combined, waiting to be bridged in to aid in the conflict.
The numbers have dropped to below 4,000 on grid players as of this writing, with many ships from TEST dropping like flies. CFC was not without their own losses, and currently there are two confirmed battleships destroyed on their side.
To give you just an idea of how strenuous a battle of this size is, EVE Online has a technology called “Time Dilation” which slows down everything in a system to allow the servers to be able to process all the calculations. The level of dilation in the area the battle is in had the game running at 10% of the normal speed, while also being on a reinforced node. That’s pretty much the upper limit of what the game can handle, and it’s unknown just how rough things will get once the reinforcements start pouring in.
The conflict is currently being streamed live on Twitch.TV. We will keep things updated as more developments arise.
