The battle for B-R5RB

I enjoyed this breathless retelling of the giant Eve Online space battle: Inside the Epic Online Space Battle That Cost Gamers $300,000

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.

I'm rather a fan of time dilation, myself. If I were playing Europa Universalis at normal speed, it would be overwhelming; there's no way I could manage all the details and respond to all the activity. But at its very slowest speed, pausing nearly constantly to fine tune and adjust, I can (sort of) comprehend all that is going on.

And that's just one planet!