Also. Is this what it would look like if you were actually involved in the battle or has this been rendered after the fact on some super-computer?
Also would eves servers not be under a crazy amount of load in these conditions? Would there be a lot of server lag in the actual battle?

1080p recommended! Since we support neither of the coalitions, a late night trip to B-R with a scout provided a chance to sit back and enjoy the view. Besides, one of my missions is always to remind people that Eve is not only one of the most tactically deep games ever created but also boasts some of the grandest scenes in MMO gaming. A 4K gallery of the battle is available here: http://imgur.com/a/ikc3o#0

The battle is between the coalitions of CFC/RUS/BL and N3/PL. A new record of 75 titans died in the fight, with 59 kills for the former against 16 kills for the latter. More information at: http://community.eveonline.com/news/d...

The footage here mostly varies between real-time and 200% to compensate for fluctuations in Time Dilation, i.e. not very sped up or altered and a fairly close approximation of the feel of the battle. Music is Arcana's 'Chant of the Awakening'.

If anyone unfamiliar with Eve is viewing this and is curious about the mechanics, a video like CC3 or Anatomy of a Fight will show more about the nature of the game's campaigns and battles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYe_4...

Purple, the answer is "no".

Battles are looking at a spreadsheet on the right side of the screen. Ships are just a bunch of white boxes and basically the whole battle you're just looking at those waiting for the group leader to call out a primary target. You wait until the target's bars go down to zero then another target is called out. It's fairly boring.

Even more boring is that over 99% of the game is sitting around waiting or grinding. Waiting while alts of alts of alts scout out stuff to kill, more waiting as everyone gets into position based off the intel of alt scouts, then the enemy runs away because their alts of alts scouted out your trap and left. There's no point getting into a fight unless you can blob (engage with overwhelming numbers) the enemy, and big blob fights are boring.

They really try to sell the idea that large fleet fights are like the climax of Return of the Jedi, but they're really more like listening to air traffic controller channels.

it looks like a big ball of forcefield ships getting ground down by the attackers.

Remember that some of us are human. Alts?

As in alternate characters/accounts (I'm fairly certain).

Jesus that looks about exciting as watching paint dry.

Today I befriended a hummingbird. The little lady has been feeding at the trough for some time now so I decided to get in there and see what's what. After a little back and forth, she let me get within a few inches. She buzzed around my head like an enormous mosquito, looking at it from every angle. The bird flashed neon pink and scarlet against jade green and black, it's long tongue licking at the wind and the sugar water. All lightning and quicksilver, a mind sped up several times faster than ours. Such a strange and beautiful consciousness and being, so curious and fearless.

But this does not last: another hummer quckly comes and the fight is on. Birds corkscrewing thru the creamy spring air, trying to push one another out of the sky with their tremendously fast wings, whipping each other with the tips. Much high pitched chirping and whistling, like shouts in the street sped up triple time. Fierce displays of color and sound and whipping wings and arial acrobatics that would humble a fighter pilot. All set to the great hum of their wings and the thousands of honey bees come to feed on the holly tree, the frozen sunshine falling through raw bursts of pea sized hail and great peals of thunder. Spring time in Arcady.

Are you there?

Fleet warfare like this is hours of flying around and more hours of waiting for the best time to strike and yet more hours of suffering armchair generals only to be rewarded with 5 minutes of clicking boxes and next to nothing in loot.

EVE delivers on a lot of promises but it's still boring as fuck.

That's not even counting the days and weeks of spying, counter-spying, reporting and planning times when everyone is online. I've done a bit of spying before and while it can be fun it becomes exactly like the rest of EVE, waiting for something interesting to happen.

On top of that bullshit a select group compose fleet doctrines which are like blueprints that you must follow, often to the letter, for the handful of ships you are allowed to bring along. Have fun flying something you don't like, configured in a way you don't really have the skills for.

to be fair, the spreadsheet/ air traffic control analogy is probably much closer to what real space combat would be like than anything in star wars/ wing commander. That doesn't make it fun though

It helps to comprehend the scale. The big buttplug-shaped ships are Titans, and they are several miles long. Battleships, which are the size of skyscrapers, are tiny dots. Most of the ships involved are too small to be seen.

It's more like an actualized libertarian paradise. People are suckered in by the promised of unlimited wealth, but it quickly breaks down into blocks of warlords exploiting or stealing everyone else's shit, and the people who do honest work for honest pay are all suckers.

To be fair, you also have the Goonfleet, which I guess are like another megacorp run by a group of boardmembers who are okay with Ayn Rand so long as she's cosplaying as Harley Quinn.

Ayn Rand had a thing for psychotic serial killers, so she wasn't that far off.

Pretty much. An autopayment on what was basically rent for a major star system was missed, a system where one massive faction held a good part of their fleet. The rival faction caught word of this and quickly set up a full-scale invasion in full-force to capture the system and everything inside. The result was the most massive clusterfuck in PvP history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodbath_of_B-R5RB

You mean, like, deaf people?

Why? Just turn off your speakers if it bothers you that much. Anyway EVE has a perfectly good reason why you hear sounds from stuff in space.

The view you see on the screen is actually what your little guy (capsuleer) sees when connected to his space pod (think The Matrix) which is inside the ship you/him are piloting. Anyway all ships have some microscopic cameras that float around it and beam the video to your capsuleer's brain which allows you to see what he is seeing, which is what the cameras are seeing and thus you can see the outside of the ship, just as your capsuleer can.

The sound is produced by the computer and is artificial. It's fed into the capsuleer's brain in order to provide a point of reference and prevent insanity or something. That's why you can hear it, because the computer makes the capsuleer hear it and thus you can hear what the capsuleer is hearing which is what the computer makes the capsuleer hear.

So fuck off.

I think terraria is what he meant to say.

Fucking EVE online?! To someone who played dwarf fortress?

That's like saying "Hey I heard you like puzzles!"

::smashes your computer::

"Have fun!"

Based on titan kills alone the losses total at least 0k, if the latest titan prices I've seen are to be believed. They are like ~00 each.

Got to count the other bajillion ships that probably died too.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if CCP doesn't influence massive coalition conflicts like this in order to drive up PLEX sales.

NEVER BE SORRY FOR TELLING THE TRUTH!!!!

Looks boring as hell and costs a fuckton of money. I used to hang out with a kid who would be like "sorry I'm busy" because he was building his avatar in Ultima Online, just going in and out of the house, chopping stuff.. kind of like that South Park parody of WoW but just to level up his guy so he could sell them on ebay. Usually it'd be like per avatar, which seems fair. But it also looked like fun. I'd just get stoned and watch a movie while he chopped away, but I kind of wanted to play it because YOU CAN KILL STUFF WITH SWORDS AND MAGIC. Seems more fun than spending 4000 dollars on one of these big death star things.

honestly I don't think many nerds play EVE. Lots of bros and libert-randians though.

Oh no, tons and tons of nerds.

Or maybe day traders. A huge chunk of corp chat was always logistics in manufacturing and POS (player owned station) crap.

If you MUST play this game, find a corp that has zero to do with POSs. You will never find a more boring video game activity.

I always try to feel empathy for people who devote a good portion of their lives to something even if I think it's kind of stupid, and then it's taken away, like the woman who committed suicide after her avatar was killed in Everquest or my friend whose big old minecraft something-or-other was destroyed because his "friend" was drunk one night got on the server and blew it up.

I play pinball and participate in tournaments, and people don't really get that either. To me, it's a sport. To them it's just a waste of time and money: I'm eventually going to lose (the longest game I ever played was over 3 hours, about a half hour per ball and the extra balls)

For me I get satisfaction from others seeing me do it, or taking videos, etc (I'm really not that good at pinball if you check twin galaxies) but it's probably the same for Eve Online, even thought it just looks like a bunch of expensive rectangles destroying a really expensive circle to an outsider like myself.