Largest Space Battle in EVE Online History

The dust is currently settling over the largest battle in EVE Online history, but who was fighting and more importantly, who won?EVE Online witnessed it’s largest ever battle last night as over 4000 pilots took to the skies to fight for their corporation. The warring corps in question were The TEST Alliance and CFC, the two largest corps in the EVE-verse, who battled it out in 6VDT, a system in the Fountain region.

EVE Online’s developers, CCP Games, slowed in game time down to just 10% of normal speed to help it’s servers cope with the mass of calculations it had to perform as the two giants duked it out.

A tweet from Erlendur Thorsteinsson, one of Eve Online’s developers confirmed that this was indeed the largest battle in EVE history, even dwarfing the epic 3000 ship battle back in January this year.

The battle raged on for several hours but in the end CFC gained the upper hand and drove the advantage by bringing in a huge fleet of capital ships, the largest ships available in EVE. These behemoths are extremely expensive and only deployed into battle when their owners are sure of success. Faced with such monstrous vessels, the TEST Alliance began to retreat but struggled to escape due to warp jammers and TEST’s presence at all major planetary bodies in the area.

The final count looks to be around 2,900 ships destroyed and TEST’s foothold in the Fountain region will surely disintegrate after this. Real world losses are estimated to be at least $20,000 for TEST, worked out by calculating the in game worth of ships lost and then converting to the real world cost of buying that much in-game currency. Who knew you could wake up one day, turn on a video game and lose $20,000?

Congratulations to the winners, commiserations to the losers.

What do you think of this epic showdown? Did you take part? Let us know in the comments below.