Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Eve Online at War

As long-time readers will know (and by "long time" I mean able to remember when I used to post regularly) I play an MMO (a Massively Multiplayer Online game) called Eve-Online.  Now that game has exploded in the largest player-vs-player conflict in gaming history.  There are a lot of words, here, but to fully explain why this happened would take many more.

For a variety of reasons, it's a bit different from other MMOs: it has no elves and no swords, no magic and you don't really see your character (although this in the post).  The advancement system is different, too, from most MMOs: you set a skill to train and needn't even log in until it comes time to set the next one.  our character simply improves over time, and it is up to you to shape that improvement.  The game started like a kinda multiplayer Elite but is now something far, far more complex.

Most of the thousands of star systems in the game ar insecure, meaning that anyone can kill anyone with no artificial consequences.  Systems can have sovereignty claimed by player corporations and alliances, one of which - Goonfleet - has more than 3000 members.The total game population is somewhere well over a hundred thousand, and over thirty thousand of those are logged in at one time during peak hours.  There are no shards or otherwise divided servers: everyone (well, everyone outside China) uses the Tranquility server farm and exists in the same game-world.

The effect of this is that conflicts have grown more and more massive.  When fleets clash, there may be seven or eight hundred ships in the opposing fleets, and unlike RTS games each ship is controlled by a real person.  These ships vary massively in scale, from a few metres to many kilometres in size, and there are a multiplicity of roles: capitals and supercapitals conduct strategic level operations (and involve thousands of real-world dollars' worth of work for their alliances to create), battleships deal long-range damage, cruisers and frigates fill various interception, interdiction, mobility-denial, recon, electronic-warfare and other tasks.  Fleet commanders capable of reliably and effectively controlling the numerous wings and squadrons of a 400-ship fleet are rare beasts, and some become infamous (one FC was famous for his English accent, his drunkenness, and his eager willingness to blow up the ships of those who acted stupidly).

Further, some alliances - mainly Bob and Goonfleet - conduct massive intelligence operations, inserting dozens of agents into opposing corporations to feed back intelligence on fleet movements, the locations of strategic assets and more.  The head of the Goonfleet Intelligence Agency - known only as the Mittani - is laughably bad at Eve Online: it is joked that he barely knows how to undock his ship.  But he is able to release the text or recordings of conversations occurring at the highest levels in opposing alliances.

Anyhow, one old alliance - Band of Brothers - was widely disliked for an arrogant attitude and a tendency to win battles and tournaments with suspicious alacrity.  At the beginning of the year, a hacker called Kugutsumen (whose site I won't link to, in case your computers are not securely configured) started releasing information on high-ranking members of BoB who were also employees of CCP, the Icelandic company that develops Eve.  One of the company's key developers was shown to be BoB's capital fleet commander, something which explained their knowledge of various exploits that allowed easy fleet battle victories.  He was also shown to have cheated in spawning valuable resources for himself: the advanced blueprints which are some of the game's most valuable items.  Further, CCP were shown to have known about this behaviour, and to have failed to punish it.

The result was that two coalitions were formed: one, headed by the German alliance Dusk to Dawn, was based in the northern reaches of the star cluster; the other, headed by the Anglo-American Goons of Something Awful and the Russians of Red Alliance, was based in the south-east.  You can see a map here.  Each attacked the cheating corporation of Bob and its vassals and allies, starting with the massive and established Lotka Volterra. LV took 47 days to defeat: you can see the vast changes to the map in a pair of territorial charts, where you can see the initial situation, and the latest status.

The strategy employed is interesting.  Like 1944 Germany, Bob has enemies on two main fronts.  While they could probably force a stalemate on either front, they cannot cover both.  Their allies have been shown to be like Italy (LV), or largely inneffectual junior partners like Romania or Hungary (Xelas, Axiom, Fix, YW), the defense of whose territory places extra strain on the core members.  The exception seems to be Mercenary Coalition, a nominally independent mercenary organisation that is, effectively, a feudal subject of BoB, who give them their territory by way of a retainer.

D2 in the north is having a hard time, and has suffered many capital losses.  But they know that by doing so they gave the southern coalition time to remove BoB's most valuable ally from the game (LV).  There have followed several weeks of jousting and manuevre, during which Goonfleet has gone about building the logistical infrastructure necessary to exploit their new territories and provide support to the substantially larger fleet that will be required.  What they have up their sleeve is not known, but it may involve a Dreadswarm: unusually large numbers of capital ships (dreadnoughts).  Surprisingly, BoB has been unable or unwilling substantially to interrupt this logistical phase of the southern coalition's operations.

Anyway, there is something of a phony war going on at the moment.  What will happen when the invasion of Bob space itself begins is anyone's guess.  BoB have large advantages: excellent organisation, some of the most concentrated combat expertise in the game, extremely sympathetic devs, and a number of the game-breakingly badly designed Titans (which CCP recently improved further, making them virtually unkillable, and which can wipe out entire support fleets in a few seconds).  It is exciting to watch.  This is conflict on the huge scale that Cornered Rat Studios planned for World War II Online, but which poor design and implementation prevented occuring there.