“An anonymous source close to ATLAS reports that the “K25 battle saw less than 30 losses in a fight which was [heavily affected by spatial anomalies interfering with our fleet operations].”

The story that a world like EVE tells about itself is that it is a coherent, self-contained, and persistent world that a player’s computer gives them a window into. CCP has done a particularly effective job at constructing this fiction in theEVE Chronicles section of the EVE site. Most of the stories there are about setting the tone of the world, characterizing the races of the world to help new players align with a particular racial identity, and portraying parts of the world that aren’t represented in the game. They also include bits of fiction to explain why pilots have the abilities they do. For example, this article justifies the third-person-ness of the game by introducing “camera drones” into the fiction. You’ll never actually see these in the game, but articles like this serve to define a magic circle: a boundary within which all activities can be understood in terms of the fiction of the game.

The moment when this fiction collides with the reality of the worlds’ technical limitations is jarring.

For 0.0 pilots, the boundaries of the magic circle break down most obviously when the node (a part of a server, basically) powering their system crashes. The frequency of these crashes has generally gone down over time as CCP finds and fixes bugs in the node software, but the latest major expansion pack – Dominion – seems to have dramatically increased the rate of node crashes. Crashes are nearly always the result of lots of people being in one system at the same time. These crashes often short-circuit large fleet battles. (Much more on this issue of lots of players being in the same place here.)

This puts CCP’s reporters in an interesting place. They want to write about the major events in the geopolitical world of EVE, but they’re faced with major events in the world that hinge on node crashes. Instead of ignoring it, they’re bringing node crashes into the fiction of the world as “spatial anomalies.” No one in-game adopts this terminology, though, so you get funny stories like the one at the top where the reporter edits away what was almost certainly a complaint about a node crash.

For players, these immersion-breaking events migrate inside the magic circle in a different way. Node instability has developed substantial strategic significance. When a new fleet is entering a system with an enemy fleet in it, it can take minutes for the new fleet to load the system. During that period, the fleet is quite vulnerable; their ships are visible and attackable, they just can’t fight back. As a result, fleet commanders have developed a range of coping techniques. So in strategic terms, being in-system first is a significant advantage until CCP fixes these server problems. Until then, though, most big fleet fights are probably going to involve me staring at the login screen, hoping the node is back up and my ship is still alive.

Logging back in after a node crash.

I put together a video from an operation I was on early last week. No combat this time, but it shows you a bit about how fleet commanders communicate with their fleets. You’ll see a friendly gatecamp, a failed bombing run exercise, a conversation about the strategic objectives of our mission, and a fleet of bombers cloaking up at a gate.

I really recommend clicking through to YouTube to watch this in decent resolution.

I put together a quick video from what little footage I had of my first big battle. It shows what fleets look like, a little of how they’re organized, and you can hear the fleet commander giving orders.

Been learning to fly Stealth Bombers this weekend. Hoping to get my first real combat kills of this war the sneaky way.

I dawdled for a while, not really realizing that I could just fly to P2-TTL on my own. I was in an interceptor, after all — the one thing my ship was exceptionally good at is getting places quickly.

When I arrived on-grid in P2, the battle was well underway. I had literally never seen this many ships before in my life. I hadn’t really been shot at, outside of a few controlled circumstances. I half expected to die as soon as I arrived. Surely someone’s job in this 300 person enemy fleet was to shoot at me, right? I fired up my microwarp drive and ran very high speed circles around the enemy fleet, relieved to discover that, in fact, no one really cared about me at all.

Getting noticed is actually kind of tricky. With this many people, you don’t actually click on your targets in the world. You spend most of your time staring not at the world itself, but at something called the overview. The overview is just a sortable table. Each row tells you how far away the ship is, what kind of ship it is, who’s flying it, and potentially a bunch of other optional information like velocity, alliance, and corporation.

On top of the overview are filters for different combat situations. For battleships — the fleet ships of the line in situations like this — all you need is a Hostile Battleships view. This scopes your world down to just a list of your counterparts in the enemy fleet. The picture on the left is a support-only view of the battle. Unlike the battleship-only view above, this view is much more sparse. Battleships are clearly eh backbone of any fleet. Battles are won or lost by taking out enemy battleships. The rest of the fleet exists to keep friendly battleships alive, make it hard for the other fleet to target our battleships, and keep wounded enemy battleships from retreating to safety.

That last bit was my job. I was was flying an Interceptor. Faster than any other ship on the field, I watched for retreating enemy ships and jumped on them with a warp disrupter. That way when their armor started to wear down, they couldn’t start their warp drives. When our battleship fleet wore them all the way down, I would bounce to the next target. If I attracted enemy attention, I would burn hard away from the enemy fleet until their target locks broke and they shifted their attention elsewhere. When I’m actively tackling someone, it looks like this – my “locked” target is in the upper top part of my screen, with two icons just to the right of it showing that I’m using my missile launchers and warp disrupter on the target. On the bottom, you can also see my micro-warp-drive is on, and my current speed is nearly 5k/s.

The most striking thing about this kind of combat is how abstract and slow it is. There are no formations, just amorphous blobs of purple (my fleet), blue (friendly fleet), and red (enemy). These blobs drift slowly through space, with dots occasionally warping off and warping back, trying to avoid death by breaking enemy target locks on them. There are no football-style plays; no delicate formations, daring gambits, or flanking maneuvers here.

Instead of calling plays, all we get are names of enemy targets. The Fleet Commander calls out the name and ship type of our target, focusing all our battleships’ fire on one enemy ship until it buckles under our attention. The support ships flit around the edges, doing our jobs independently, hoping not to attract any attention while we carry out specific side missions.

It’s all quite lonely. I swap between a list of enemy battleships and enemy support ships fading away all the friendly ships until my screen is just angry red. I haven’t the faintest idea if we’re winning or losing, all I know is that there’s a lot of red and no one’s shooting at me.

Until, all of a sudden, I die. It happened fast and out of nowhere, and I was knocked out of the fight. If I was really dedicated, I would have slow-boated back to Tribute in my pod and jumped in another ship and made my way back to the fight. But it was late, and I’d spent 3 hours in fleet already. This, in the end, is probably what decides fights more than how fancy your ships are: who has work in the morning and needs to get to bed.

Last night, death was a shrapnel bomb.

I wasn’t even worried when it hit. We had just warped out to regroup before going back in, and a stealth bomber that I didn’t even see dropped a bomb on us. That kind of thing isn’t a big problem for larger ships, but I was flying an Interceptor. The bomb one-shotted me, and that was the end of my night. I was able to help tackle a couple battleships and a heavy interdictor, though. I’d had some scarier moments earlier, but escaped mostly unscathed until the bomb hit.

These kill-board read-outs are kind of confusing, but I’ll dissect them in the near future. When you kill someone, you basically get an email with details of the ship you killed, and a list of everyone who dealt damage to the target. There’s a lot to learn from these, but it’s a longer story than I can tell here.

The Alliance forums are already buzzing about this. There were some tricky details about how this fight was organized (this is the 1000AU / safe spot stuff people are talking about) that in reading the post-battle analysis I’m starting to understand. It looks like in the end our side lost and the tower we were defending went down. From the perspective of the poster, I’m part of the Northern Coalition (NC), the nominal bad guys. It’s all relative, though. Since TRI held the field, they went to the forums to gloat and claim good-guy status. There might be a reprise of the fight tonight, though, as the station in the system comes out of reinforced. Not even sure what that means yet, just hearing some chatter about how it’s not over yet and we might be going back in.

Much more to say about this epic engagement in the days to come. I’ve got lots of screenshots and some footage that I can hopefully get processed and posted this weekend.