In the wake of the almost-war that didn't happen between the Clusterfuck Coalition and Honeybadger coalition (post about it is here), there was an unbelievable level of complaining from the community, especially by neutral 3rd parties hoping to either watch the mayhem or see a long-time enemy go down in flames. People mourned the death of PvP and the fact that the two organizations wanted to safeguard their assets rather than generate content. Less than a week later Eve Online experienced a supercapital conflict so large that it would deadlock the node the fight took place on and crash the servers for Eve's sister game, Dust514.

During a Goonswarm capital ship operation to drop on an ongoing lowsec fight, the bridging Titan accidentally jumped instead of bridging to a cyno beacon, and was promptly hot dropped by a Pandemic Legion supercap fleet. In an attempt to overwhelm the enemy fleet and save the Titan, the rest of Goonswarm's supercap fleet jumped in and started fighting. News of the fight spread like wildfire, and alliances from all over New Eden scrambled to get in on the action, especially enemies of the CFC. At the battle's peak, the system of Asakai had over 2900 pilots in local.


A snapshot of the fighting at it's peak

Forming up multiple subcapital fleets to evac the capitals which were now in over their heads, Goonswarm lit evacuation cynos all across Tribute, and the supercapitals, which can't be tackled by standard warp disrupters, jumped to safety, but not before losing two Titans and a handful of Supercarriers in the fray. With only standard capital ships still on field, the fleets fought a losing battle as they tried to clear tackling ships from the field, allowing the Carriers and Dreadnaughts to jump out.

Time Dialation (a system implemented by CCP that "stretches" time in nodes with heavy activity so that the server can process all of the information it's being fed) maxed out at 10%, meaning that for every second that passed in Asakai, 10 seconds passed in the rest of New Eden. Despite slowing the game to such a crawling pace, the action was so intense that game clients began crashing and the server started dropping commands, leaving players stranded in space, unable to move their ship or see what was happening around them. About halfway through the fight, reports began coming in that Dust514's servers had crashed, rendering the game unplayable, in sequence with the fight unfolding in Eve. Many players thought it to be a fitting welcome for Dust plyers to the world of New Eden, where the unexpected can and will happen.



Eventually only a few Goonswarm capital ships remained, permenantly tackled by the opposing fleets, and were left to go out in a blaze of spartan glory. With the system's time still dialated, it was a slow death, and all the pilots could do was try to make the enemy work for their kills.

In the end, over 300 billion ISK in ships were destroyed, and at roughly $18/550m ISK, the butcher's bill for this fight comes to nearly $10,000 USD. Just because there isn't a war, doesn't mean that there isn't any fighting. Even in peacetime the battles rage on.

Edit: As killmails continue to stream in and the dust from this fight settles, the confirmed overall ISK loss from this fight is now over 830 billion ISK, nearly three times my initial estimate.

Ketsui is a vertical arcade shoot em' up developed by Cave with an interesting story behind it. Released in early 2003, it's one of three games (three and a half if you hate whole numbers) released in 2002 and 2003 for Cave's custom IGS PGM hardware. All three games, Dodonpachi: Dai Ou Jou, Espgaluda, and Ketsui, are considered to be of excellent quality and are extremely popular even today. A japanese developer named Arika made plans to port all three games to the Playstation 2. Dodonpachi:DOJ and Espgaluda were released and praised by the community for being extremely accurate and faithful ports for their time, but the Ketsui port was scrapped. According to Arika, there were problems emulating a certain part of the game. A section in Stage 5 involves flying down a mine shaft. The illusion of the player descending was achieved by swapping the image in the background plane and scrolling the new image in reverse, and then swapping to yet another background plane at the bottom of the shaft and reversing the scroll direction a second time.


The aforementioned problematic segment is at 3:20

Apparently the PS2's hardware was incapable of managing this at an arcade perfect framerate and the section suffered from terrible slowdown. Unsatisfied with the port's single imperfection, Arika opted to cancel the title entirely rather than release what they viewed as a flawed product. Apparently the port was otherwise perfect, and Cave gave them the go-ahead to ship the title with the slowdown intact, but Arika refused, and so Ketsui went without a port, and remained out of the reach of western fans unwilling or able to spend thousands purchasing the game's arcade PCB for the better part of a decade.

In 2008 japanese developer 5pb announced plans to port Ketsui to Xbox Live Arcade, but Microsoft rejected the title, claiming to want to cut down on the number of arcade ports on XBLA. Ketsui was finally announced to have a full on-disc release in 2009 but was pushed back another year, being released in 2010 instead.

After seven years of elusive existence, the game was finally available to anyone with a 360 capable of playing NTSC-J games. During those seven years, Ketsui garnered status as one of the best games of it's type, strongly praised by the few who had played it, and remaining one of Cave's most highly rated titles after it's console release. It's also properly emulated in MAME now, further increasing it's availability to western audiences.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this story. One is that Microsoft sucks because they hate arcade games despite having a service called "Xbox Live Arcade". Another is that apparently the PS2 is kind of a shitty console, because it was incapable of emulating a game that was developed for and ran perfectly well on a printed circuit board with only 20Mhz of processing power. The third and final lesson is that they don't make game developers the way they used to. It's hard to imagine any studio these days working as hard as Arika did back then to perfectly emulate Ketsui on new hardware, and even harder to imagine that studio having the balls to dump the entire project because they were unable to accurately recreate a single tiny section of the game. That is a testament to perfection, my friends, and one that you are unlikely to see in an age with humongous zero-day patches and Silent Hill ports without any fog.

Eve is famous for it's stories of large sweeping nullsec conflicts and constant backstabbing and subterfuge, but outside of those headline grabbing activities are entire playstyles that are often left ignored. Many people read about the goings on in Eve and tell themselves that there is no way they are able to dedicate that much of their life to playing the game when right behind that curtain of news headlines are any number of engaging activities that take infinitely less commitment to enjoy to the fullest.


If you want to experience the excitement of player versus player combat in Eve without dedicating your life to a nullsec alliance, Red vs Blue is where you want to be. Two player owned corporations, the Red Federation and the Blue Republic, locked in a mutual war with each other in highsec. The focus is on affordable PvP in small, cheap ships with little necessary commitment. Just pick a side and join a fleet. There are self-imposed rules in order to keep the fights simple, fast and fun. Occasionally the two sides will have themed fights using specific ships or modules, or team up in a "purple fleet" and go roaming around lowsec looking for fights. This is the ground-level when it comes to PvP and the organization is fun and successful enough that it runs off of donations from players.


Often considered and intended to be a lite edition of nullsec sov wars, faction warfare takes place in nullsec between the game's four races: the Minmatar, Gallente, Amarr, and Caldari. Players run complexes in deep space and fight with another faction to increase their control in various solar systems in order to capture them from the other faction for theirs. Faction Warfare recently got a huge revamp, with two expansions dedicated to developing and balancing it. The barrier for entry is extremely low and is a good way to familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and get used to flying in more dangerous solar systems.


The barrier of entry for incursions is higher than either Red vs Blue or faction warfare, but it's a strong comunity of players and a great way to enjoy the game as a team activity. Constellations across the galaxy are occasionally invaded by an NPC force known as Sansha's Nation. These NPCs are tough and smart, using what CCP referrs to as "sleeper AI" to mimic the behavior a real human might have in a fight. They switch targets, use warp scramblers and ECM and generaly are much tougher to kill than regular NPC pirates. Fleets of players come in and clear systems out until a control meter hits 0%, and then a final boss spawns for the players to kill. When this is complete then the incursions ends and participating players are rewarded. There are two groups that run incursions in empire space, and they differ in how they tank their ships. High SP characters are generally needed to do incursions, but the requirements other than that are fairly low.


Another activity that isn't for brand new players is wormholes. If nullsec politics or highsec PvE is too dull for you than wormholes are a great way to inject excitement into your game while also making fistfulls of money. Wormholes spawn all over New Eden which lead to systems far outside the known galaxy (k-space) known as wormhole space (w-space). There are no stations or NPC factions in these systems, and gameplay is very different here. All NPC pirates have sleeper AI similar to Incursion NPCs, the local chat window is delayed, so it's harder to know if there is anyone else nearby, and you need to probe out the wormholes to exit and enter the area. There are a lot of corporations and alliances dedicated to exploring these wormholes and exploiting them for money. Occasionally these groups run into each other in w-space and duke it out. Because of w-space's massive profitability, battles in w-space between wormhole corps can involve only a couple dozen players, but result in as much ISK lost as a huge 400 player fight in nullsec. It's a different life, and one that very few players ever experience.

Nullsec politics and fights grab all of the gaming headlines because they are bold in-your-face events frequently involving thousands of players, large personalities, and thousands of dollars worth of in-game assets, but Eve Online is more than just the big battles and masterminded plots. If the game fascinates you and you want to try it but are worried about minimum level of dedication it requires, then know that you don't have to go all-in if you don't want to. Eve is the most complex game on the market today. There are hundreds of game systems available and an uncountable number of playstyles to try out. There's definitely one for you to enjoy.

(Note: A universe map can be found [here] to help unfamiliar readers with locations and general movement in the story)

Read Part One: [x]

Spoiling for a fight after an unexciting recent campaign and hoping to settle some bad blood with Against All Authorities, the CFC was all too happy to help fight a war in Delve for their best friends. They had been there four times previously, so they had particular knowledge about the region and how to attack and defend it. In a single weekend the entire coalition migrated it's war machine south and in an overwhelming show of power even dropped 60 billion ISK to construct their own outpost station in F2OY-X to base out of, rather than using the station in a next door system.



The arrival of the CFC shattered the Southern Coalition's morale, and the next few weeks were an orgy of destruction as supercapital fleets rampaged across the region unabated while SoCo fleets sat camped in a station, unable to do anything. Delve and Querious fell with next to zero resistance. The CFC decided that their obligation was complete and began to withdraw and let Test and PL finish mopping up what was left and sort the spoils amongst themselves.



Part of the agreement for CFC assistance was that Goonswarm would maintain a handful of embassy systems in the area. The reason for this was to show the CFC's determination to keep SoCo out of Delve and act as a deterrant. If SoCo got rebellious and tried pushing any boundaries, the CFC would bring down the hammer. Unfortunately there was miscommunication about this to the line members in Test, and fueled by enemy propoganda, the average member took this as Goonswarm trying to keep Test on a short leash.

Eventually Goonswarm gave in to Test requests for independence and left the region completely to stand or fall on it's own. Both leadership and line members were left feeling unappreciated after being asked to leave mere weeks after help was requested of them.

In the following months, Test and PL began forming their own coalition, called the Honey Badger Coalition, with their own allies and with their own goals. They continued the fight against SoCo, pushing through Querious to Catch, Against All Authorities' long-time home region. Goonswarm and the CFC had their own business of clearing out the north and making room for allies who had spent years living in some of the poorest regions in the game. With the new separation of interests, and wanting to respect Test's request for independance, many alliances in the CFC mutually reset their standings with Test, however Goonswarm and Test remained blue to each other.

Throughout January 2013, tensions started simmering between Test and an alliance in the CFC called Fatal Ascension. They accused each other of breaking Non-Infrastructure-Pacts by attacking jump bridges and camping station undocks. The two organizations had previous spats at various intervals and it had become a running joke within the CFC. Hardly anyone remembers or cares how the bad blood started, at this point it's simply a matter of he said/she said over which alliance is more terrible, but this time was different.



Test's CFC diplomat mentioned in a CFC diplomat chat channel that Test's CEO, Montolio, was planning to trick FA into attacking Test sovereignty so that Test could go to war with FA while still remaining blue to Goonswarm. Naturally this didn't sit well with Goonswarm, so they quietly removed Test's access privileges to the diplo channel in order to cut off any further discussion of the subject and hopefully diffuse the situation. Over the next few days Montolio removed all CFC access to Test's chat network and made several public announcements and broadcasts related to the incident, even going as far as to imply that he was opening lines of communication with alliances opposed to Goonswarm in preperation for a potential conflict.

As of January 22nd Goonswarm hasn't taken any further action, but The Mittani, Goonswarm's CEO, released an alliance update candidly informing everyone of the situation. Goonswarm leadership's official stance on the situation is that the entire problem stems from Montolio being an impetulent child and whether or not the situation escelates is up to his ego. He stated that Goonswarm has no problem with Test's line members or a majority of Test leadership.

A notional war between the CFC and the HBC could potentially be the single largest conflict in the history of Eve Online. Goonswarm and Test alone have over 20,000 characters between them, and estimations for the size of either coalition range anywhere from 15,000-30,000 apiece. Both coalitions command massive supercapital fleets and scores of titans, along with trillions of ISK worth of ships and war material. If both sides fully commited to a war, then the levels of destruction would be unheard of. Unrelated parties would likely try to get in on the action since both coalitions have plenty of enemies that would leap at the opportunity to get revenge.

So where does that leave the two alliances? Both are staring each other down with a hand resting on their gun while the two respective coalition's stand by, watch, and wait. How will the story end? Will the whole situation blow over as egos cool and reason prevails, or will it be galaxy-altering conclusion to a three-year friendship?

(Note: A universe map can be found [here] to help unfamiliar readers with locations and general movement in the story)

Goonswarm Federation and Test Alliance Please Ignore have a history together. It's a somewhat unique history in the context of EVE Online, and one that has had a big hand in shaping the game's narrative for the past three years.

In the early months of 2010, Goonswarm was recovering from a massive setback that had left their alliance shattered, without any sovereignty and most of their assets trapped or destroyed. They had retreated to their ancestral home region of Syndicate in NPC-owned nullsec as a shell of their former strength, regrouping and trying to decide what to do or where to go when a corporation called Dreddit was founded.



Dreddit was founded by players who were members of Reddit, the popular news and humor website, as a place to play together with other people from the community. Dreddit's leaders knew about the negative stigma attatched to Goonswarm. They were an alliace of scamming backstabbers and rouges who loved ruining the game for other players. While choosing a system to base out of dreddit tried to locate as far away from them as possible, but their CEO had the universe map turned upside-down while viewing it, and accidentally picked a system only 9 jumps from Goonswarm's current home.

Goonswarm saw this new group of players trying blindly to find their way in the game.It raised intense feelings and old memories in the veteran players of their own days as a small corporation trying to make it on their own. Determined to help them weather the harsh realities of New Eden, Goonswarm promptly hotdropped a Dreddit mining operation, killing every ship in the asteroid belt, before setting them as allies and giving them access to Goonswarm's ship cache and private wiki.

Goonswarm made good on their intentions to help the new corp get itself up and running. When they got an offer to 'crash on their couch' by Tau Ceti Federation, one of Goonswarm's oldest and most trusted allies, they brought Dreddit along with them. When TCF decided to peacefully retire their alliance and transfer the entire region of Deklein to Goonswarm sovereignty, they gave Dreddit's newly formed Test alliance the constellation they had been staying in previously. They helped set Test up with ship caches, sovereignty structures, fleet composition and ship fitting tips, logistical infrastructure, and raw liquid cash. Test were like their little brothers, and Goonswarm was more than happy to give them anything they needed or wanted.



Eventually Test outgrew the small constellation they were currnetly living in, and so in late 2010, Goonswarm and their allies (at the time referred to as the Deklein Coalition, or 'DekCo'), flew south and purged a region named Fountain of it's current residents, and gave the entire region to Test to use as their new home.

For a little over a year, Test enjoys an unrivaled level of prosperity for an alliance of their age. Fast tracked to success with the help of Goonswarm, Test is the owner of a wealthy region, a series of valuable money moons, and one of the top two largest alliances in the game (Goonswarm Federation being the other), with a list of campaigns under their belt. All of this comes at the cost of the rest of the playerbase despising and mocking them for their success. Called 'Goon pets' and accused of being born with a silver spoon in their mouth, the general opinion is that Test is a large alliance full of bumbling, unskilled players backed by one of the most militarily, politically, and economically powerful entities in the history of the game.

Longing to step out from Goonswarm's shadow and make it on their own, they strike out on a campaign south into the region of Delve and the surrounding regions of Querious and Period Basis with their newfound friends in Pandemic Legion.

The alliances living in the southern regions to the east of Delve worried that this marked the beginning of a large-scale conquest of the south, and that without swift retaliation large swaths of the south would be taken. A patchwork collection calling itself The Southern Coalition (or 'SoCo' for short), made up of nearly every southern-dwelling alliance and lead by Against All Authorities, one of the oldest standing alliances in the game, dogpiled into Delve to aid it's defense.



After seeing what they had triggered and fearing the potential geopolitical ramifications of a fully-realized southern coalition, Test decided to ask Goonswarm and the Clusterfuck Coalition for assistence, since if Test failed and SoCo resecured Delve/Querious/Period Basis and decided to keep pushing up through Test owned-space, they would find themselves on Goonswarm's southern doorstep.

Read Part Two: [x]

Note: Read the first part of this article here

It’s been said that most serious wars in EVE aren’t won by the strategic superiority or cunning, but by capitalizing on one grievous mistake made by the enemy. Whether it’s a mistake made due to the strains of war or simply due to ineptitude, if an opponent reaches this point the war can often be one with a single decisive action.



A little over a week ago, some chat logs were leaked implying that after an argument Vince Draken, the leader of Northern Coalition. (NCdot) had removed 800 billion ISK from the alliance wallet and revoked co-leader Wicked Princess’ roles to access said wallet.

Another chat log leak revealed that the incident started over an issue with a Black Legion. pilot shooting a neutral Falcon that belonged to Vince. When it comes to shooting other ships in-game, most nullsec entities live by NBSI rules: not blue, shoot it. According to this rule, shooting the Falcon was an appropriate action. Vince (speaking as his neutral character) demanded compensation from the pilot, who promptly told him no. Vince, still speaking as his neutral character, threatened to reset the standings with his alliance. By saying this through his neutral character, it lacked sincerity and the pilot didn’t believe him. The argument with Wicked Princess occured after this happened.

The drama that followed is a little muddled at this point, but Wicked Princess left NCdot, either by choice or by force, joining up with Black Legion, the alliance Elo Knight, her internet romantic interest was a leader and fleet commander of. Black Legion pulled out of the coalition’s shared staging system back to their own. Nulli Secunda also pulled their assets out of the shared staging system as a security measure. [note: If an alliance loses docking rights to a station owned by another alliance, then any assets in that station are ‘locked down’ and inaccessible until docking rights have been returned.] Around this time one of NCdot’s primary fleet commanders also left the alliance, although apparently for unrelated reasons.

NCdot’s primary tactic in the war up until this point had been to time all of their structures to come out of reinforced mode in Australian time zone (the block of time people living in Australia of asia are most likely to be playing), one of the CFC’s weakest timezones, and run harassment fleets the rest of the day. This meant that structures became vulnerable to attack at this time and required the CFC to form fleets at inopportune hours to destroy them.



Elo Knight spearheaded the harassment effort, often running fleets around the clock. This earned him some measure of respect among the CFC, who appreciate anyone who is so willing to fight an enemy as large and formidable as them. The overall result was that while the CFC was steadily taking Tribute from NCdot, it was slow, and it was grinding, and it was a chore, which doesn’t sound like an accomplishment, but the CFC hadn’t faced opposition this stiff in almost a year. They even revamped their fleet doctrines to compensate for the increased resistance.

With Elo not running fleets anymore, fights began to dry up. Structures were still timed for the CFC’s weak timezone, but US and EU timezones suffered from lack of activity.

As the story now goes, Mister Vee, one of the CFC’s strategic fleet commanders and generally considered one of the most successful FCs in the history of the game, got upset at NCdot and Black Legion for not giving him any good fights, and in a whirlwind of anger, sieged what was left of the enemy’s structures in Tribute in a single night, totalling over 11 stations and various other sovereignty structures. This accomplishment was played up by CFC leadership and used as a propaganda tool, raising morale high enough to attempt a killing blow. Tonight, the CFC (a coalition exceeding an estimated 9000 individual members) is going to form up for a major operation with the objective of capturing every one of the reinforced stations and effectively conquering the remaining half of Tribute in a single night.



Actions of this nature; massive strategic upheavals intended to cripple and destroy an enemy in one swift movement have gone by a lot of names over the course of EVE’s lifetime. The phrase commonly used in the game’s current lexicon is ‘going in for the dick-chop’. The story has yet to be finished, but it can’t be argued that the war came to this point because one side made a mistake that the other side exploited for massive strategic benefits.