So both sides are stuck here in what’s known as a “hellcamp,” and it sounds about as grueling as it does petty.īut hellcamps are not against the rules in Eve Online, and so the strange sort of siege goes on. But, if Gianturco’s forces in the sector fall below a certain number, those enemy players can log in and tear his own fleet to shreds. If the players controlling them log back in, they’ll quickly be obliterated. More than 330 titan-class enemy ships - some of the most powerful and expensive weapons in the game - are floating, invisible in space but intermingled with Gianturco’s own fleet. The players who control those ships are forced to stay logged out of the game. In fact, they’re all still there, present but invisible. Meanwhile, the smaller half got stuck on the battlefield. The larger half was left lingering outside the battlefield, waiting for its leadership to give the next order. When Eve broke down during the Battle of M2, it effectively split the massive enemy fleet in half.

But there were hitches aplenty, and that’s how Gianturco won.Īnd see, that’s the real problem. Had the Battle of M2 gone off without a hitch, it would have been more than twice the size of the largest conflict that has ever been fought in the game’s nearly 18-year history. The reason that Gianturco won the Battle of M2 (as it’s being called) is that so many people showed up for the climax that Eve Online literally broke down. Turns out that the enemy fleet wasn’t actually destroyed. So you can excuse him for still being a little jazzed about that. A little more than a week ago, the Imperium won a controversial victory in the spacefaring MMO, one that broke the back of the largest in-game fleet ever assembled. Eve Online’s most famous warlord has been pressed up against the edge of the in-game map for nearly seven months now, his Imperium faction the target of a massive and well-funded coalition of his enemies, called PAPI. Alex “The Mittani” Gianturco is usually energetic when I chat with him, but today he sounds downright manic.

Eve online the imperium