The Battle of B-R5RB was the largest and bloodiest in the history of warfare. More than 20 million soldiers were killed and more than 600 warships—some of them kilometers long and capable of destroying lesser vessels with a single shot—destroyed in a battle that raged for 22 hours.
At issue was a distant space station, a small but vital staging area that may be a turning point in a war that has since October pitted two massive alliances in a fight for galactic supremacy.
This battle occurred within the virtual world of the popular roleplaying game Eve Online, yet it required the careful planning, ruthless determination and good fortune of, say, the invasion of Normandy.
That so epic a fight could happen in a digital realm underscores how engaging online gaming can be. Players find the virtual realm of a game like Eve no less fascinating than real life, and they often forge lasting friendships in a gaming experience unlike any other. Though it was just a game, the 7,548 people who fought the Battle of B-R could not have taken it any more seriously—and not simply because they lost virtual ships worth more than $300,000 in real-world money fighting it.
And it all started when someone forgot to pay the rent on a space station.
Align or Die
Bryan Murph couldn’t sleep. It was 4 in the morning on January 27, and food poisoning was kicking his ass. With little else to do between frequent sprints to the bathroom, Murph logged into Eve Online, which is a bit like World of Warcraft in space.
The game, released in 2003, puts you in a spacecraft and leaves you to find your place among the stars. Some players choose the life of an asteroid miner, infusing the economy with vital shipbuilding materials. Others become smugglers. Still others master the game's complex economy. Politicians and military strategists advance through cunning or force. Whatever your interest, there’s a place for you in Eve Online.
Eve differs from other roleplaying games in that players don’t advance by completing missions to amass experience and skills. Any player can, with training (which comes slowly, in real time) pilot any ship, from the smallest frigate to the mightiest warship. They are limited only by what they can attain through work, force, diplomacy or subterfuge.
__Monetary Matters__Eve players pay a monthly fee, but unlike most online games, that 30 days of game time can be converted into an in-game item called a pilot's license extension, or PLEX. These can be redeemed for playing time, used to buy in-game services, or, say, finance construction of a Titan.
As with any in-game item, PLEX can be bought, sold, lost or destroyed. You can’t exchange PLEX for cash, but because they can be purchased with cash, a rough exchange rate exists.
Currently, $15 to $20 buys one PLEX, which can be sold for about 625 million ISK, making $1 worth about 35 million ISK. That’s how it’s possible to lose digital assets worth more than $300,000 in the real world.
Murph, a 24-year-old network engineer from Savannah, Georgia, has been playing Eve since 2006. Known within the game as Lazarus Telraven, he is among three fleet commanders for Clusterfuck Coalition, the largest organization in Eve.
A fleet commander controls up to 255 ships—that is, players. He decides where they are deployed, what armaments they carry and which objectives they fulfill. Murph and his colleagues—known in-game as Mister Vee and Vily—comprise the military command of Clusterfuck Coalition. They assess and respond to threats, plan and execute campaigns and generally kick ass.
It’s a big job. Eve Online is notorious for its player-driven, laissez-faire approach to economics, politics, and warfare. The universe of New Eden is divided into three security classifications. In core “high-sec” areas, unauthorized or unprovoked hostility brings swift retribution. In the surrounding “low-sec” systems, hostile actions like an unprovoked attack carry some penalty, but you’re less likely to find yourself staring down a starship intent on making an example of you.
Everything else is "null-sec.” Anything goes. Blatant aggression, piracy, theft—you name it, and someone’s trying to get away with it. Of New Eden's 5,431 known galaxies, 3,524 are null-sec zones. Add in some 2,498 uncharted wormhole systems and there’s a lot of room for making trouble. The only way to survive is to band together in corporations—what most MMO players would recognize as a guild. There is no end goal to Eve—no way to "win"—and each of the game’s half-million or so players is left to choose their own objective. No matter the path they follow, they can’t go it alone.
This requires political savvy. Corporations form alliances, and alliances align in coalitions, which control most null-sec areas. There are six major coalitions; Clusterfuck Coalition is the largest at 36,432 members. It’s followed by N3, with 23,298 members. These coalitions control vast swaths of New Eden, but their grasp on any one system is always tenuous as coalitions shift.
Such a shift occurred about a year ago, when a coalition known as Pandemic Legion joined N3 in a bid to force an alliance of mostly Russian players called SOLAR from its territory. This new super-coalition, dubbed N3/PL, wanted a remote stretch of New Eden called the Dronelands because it's a great place to carry out the long and arduous process of building New Eden's most fearsome warships.
Most battles in Eve take place at the sub-capital level, using Battleships roughly akin in size and power to the Battlestar Galactica. But when hostilities escalate, Capital and Super Capital ships enter the fray. These massive war machines (think Executor-class Super Star Destroyer) can take weeks or even months to build, and carry enough firepower—namely the Titan's Doomsday cannon—to obliterate lesser vessels in a single blast.
Clusterfuck Coalition watched this unfold from the sidelines until N3/PL joined TEST Alliance Please Ignore (never let it be said Eve players lack a sense of humor) in a minor war against Clusterfuck. This was a hassle Clusterfuck did not need, so when SOLAR rallied its Russian allies to war over the Dronelands in October, it gladly seized the opportunity for payback.
The Halloween War had begun.
Locking the Enemy Out of Its Own Space Station
It soon became a war of attrition. N3/PL was a vastly smaller force, but dominated many battles by bringing bigger guns to each fight. Clusterfuck Coalition couldn’t match the firepower and was running out of options.
Until January 27.
Each star system in Eve is given a random alphanumeric identifier. B-R5RB contains a space station in which Pandemic Legion stored warships, munitions and equipment worth hundreds of billions of Interstellar Kredits, the currency of New Eden. Alliances can claim unoccupied corners of the universe simply by planting the flag, as long as they pay a monthly fee of around one billion ISK. With "sovereignty" over this part of space, they can be reasonably assured that their assets are safe.
Between sprints to the bathroom, Murph learned Pandemic Legion had somehow lost its sovereignty status in B-R5RB. Capturing a sovereign part of space is akin to attacking a well-defended castle. But if the guy holding the station loses sovereignty, it becomes a relatively simple matter of moving in because the owner is on the curb, the drawbridge is down and the gate is open. It was unthinkable that this could happen. But it had.
Murph had eight hours to act, because that’s how long it takes for Territorial Claim Units—the drones that grant control of a system—to come online. Even if Pandemic Legion realized B-R was vulnerable, it couldn’t retake the station until its TCUs were online. If Murph destroyed the drones before then, Clusterfuck Coalition could seize the station.
His Russian allies planned to muster at 1400 Eve time (equivalent to GMT). But that would leave just 45 minutes before Pandemic Legion’s TCUs came online, giving it control of the station. Murph made the call to attack earlier. At 1300 hours, he and his allies hit B-R5RB with nearly 300 sub-capital ships and 45 Capital-class Dreadnoughts—a formidable force that quickly gave him the upper hand.
"We took the station, killed their TCUs, put down our own, and settled in," Murph said.
By now, N3/PL was frantically gathering its navy to take back B-R. Murph knew they were coming, and he knew they weren’t sure what they’d find when they arrived. Clusterfuck Coalition has a reputation for avoiding fights between huge ships. This time would be different. Murph made the call: all hands on deck.
N3/PL finally arrived at around 1530 Eve time. The fight was on.
'I Knew It Was Going to Be Bad'
Murph had nearly 1,000 players at his command—three full fleets of 255 ships. His orders were being translated into Russian, French, and other languages. He had sole command, because Mister Vee and Vily were at work.
__The Ships of B-R5RB__The differences between the various classifications of warships in Eve Online are whole orders of magnitude. Here's a few examples:
Sub-Capital
Class: Battleship
Effective Hit Points: ~140,000
Size: ~900 meters
Damage Output: ~350 per second
Production Time: ~3.5 Hours
Cost: ~180 million ISK
Capital
Class: Dreadnought
Effective Hit Points: ~1.4 million
Size: ~3 kilometers
Damage Output: ~3000 per second
Production Time: ~2 weeks
Cost: ~3 billion ISK
Super Capital
Class: Titan
Effective Hit Points: ~45 million
Size: ~18 kilometers
Damage Output: ~5000 per second
Doomsday Cannon Damage: 3 million
Production Time: ~8 weeks
Cost: ~100 billion ISK
He still had the chance to back down. Most of the 400 or so players involved at that point were piloting sub-capital Battleships. His largest ships—some 80 Dreadnoughts, 40 Supercarriers and 30 Titans—were a safe distance away, awaiting the call to battle.
Murph had reason to be wary. Although he was fighting a virtual battle, he was limited by real-world technology. Highly trafficked systems in the Eve universe use servers built to handle vast numbers of players, but remote areas aren't equipped for such a load. Thrusting so many ships into B-R5RB could cause debilitating lag or even crash the node, an annoying problem that cost Murph a devastating loss just a week before.
Murph needed a gut-check. He sent a text message to Mister Vee, calling him to battle. Sorry, Vee replied, you’re on your own. Murph sent one last text.
“I’m going all in,” it read. “Get here.”
He summoned his ships in waves—first the Carriers, then the Dreadnoughts, then the Supercarriers. Once he knew they’d loaded safely, he called for the Titans, praying the servers wouldn’t buckle. They didn’t. N3/PL faced the full might of the largest coalition in all of New Eden.
“As soon as they dropped Titans, I knew it was going to be bad,” N3/PL’s fleet commander, known as Manfred Sideous, said in a podcast after the battle.
Sideous ordered his Titans to hit Murph’s Dreadnoughts. Typically, a Titan’s Doomsday cannon destroys lesser ships with one blast, but Murph’s Dreadnoughts had been sufficiently armored to require two. This allowed him to bring in replacements faster than Sideous could take them out, buying him time to have his Titans target a single Pandemic Legion Titan. They pulverized the behemoth ship just 30 minutes after the battle started, giving CFC an early advantage.
By now, time dilation—which allows Eve’s servers to cope with huge loads—was slowing the game to 10 percent of normal speed. This has tactical implications, because it determines how often Doomsday cannons are used. The massive weapons require 10 minutes in real time to cool between blasts; time dilation expands that to nearly two hours.
“It becomes a game of managing Doomsdays,” Murph said. “Each individual fleet commander is relaying to me who has available Doomsdays, and I coordinate who should shoot at what target."
Murph chose targets based upon intel from spies within N3/PL and ordered his lesser starships—useless in a battle between Titans—to patrol nearby star systems, bolstering his supply line while limiting the enemy’s ability to bring in reinforcements.
Clusterfuck Coalition slowly gained the upper hand, losing five Titans to the eight it took from N3/PL. Six hours in, N3/PL aimed its Doomsday cannons at one of the most powerful ships on the field, the Avatar-class Titan owned by Sort Dragon, a high-level Eve player and a Russian fleet commander. Sort Dragon responded by overheating his defenses, briefly bolstering the ship’s armor. Murph summoned supply ships to make repairs as the gargantuan ship took damage. Meanwhile, Murph's fleet—almost 1,400 ships in all—destroyed five more enemy Titans. N3/PL eventually brought down Sort Dragon, but it was too late. They’d taken too much damage.
“I didn’t think they would escalate with Supercarriers and Titans and everything was going to be OK for me like it had been 100 times before,” Sideous said of the battle. “But it wasn’t.”
N3/PL fought for several more hours before retreating. Murph's forces mopped up until Eve Online’s servers went down for routine maintenance.
Twenty-two hours after it began, the Battle of B-R5RB was over.
The Enemy Vows Revenge
It was the biggest in Eve's history, involving 7,548 players belonging to 717 corporations and 55 alliances. More than 20 million soldiers were killed aboard the 600 or so Capital-class ships that were destroyed. Of those, 75 were Titans—16 from Murph's forces and 59 from N3/PL. The previous record for most Titans lost in a single battle was 12.
It proved to be costly in both the digital world and the real world. More than 11 trillion Interstellar Kredits worth of ships, munitions and equipment were lost. Converted to real-world cash, that's about $300,000. Much of that went down with the Titans, which cost around 100 billion ISK to build, putting them at about $3,500 apiece.
The Halloween War goes on, and Sideous vows to seek revenge. As thousands of players tally their losses and prepare for the next fight, many wonder how Pandemic lost sovereignty in B-R5RB to begin with.
The answer couldn't have been any more mundane.
It appears someone forgot to check "Automatic Bill Pay" in his game settings. Pandemic Legion insists the box was checked, raising the possibility an inattentive player, a spy or even a bug in the game was to blame. Whatever the case, the rent didn’t get paid. The biggest battle in the history of forever started with a clerical error.
"One pilot’s action (or inaction) had repercussions for the entire universe," CCP Games, the game’s publisher, wrote in its official report on the battle, "a butterfly wing causing a massive typhoon of destruction."
