Words words words warning

Tldr: nerds mad

So, since July 5th, when Test Alliance broke its Non Invasion Pact with Goonswarm, and allied itself with the coalition living in the north known as Pandafam to form Papi, there has been a huge war going on in Eve between Papi and Goons, with Papi trying to destroy as much of Goonswarm's stuff as they can.

Up until a couple days ago, Goonswarm held their supercapital fleet in reserve. Supercapitals are very expensive, very powerful ships that, when deployed in force, can only realistically be contested by other supercapitals. The fleets of them that exist now are also nearly irreplaceable, and losing one of them would basically render an alliance incapable of undertaking an offensive war. So goons have fought without them, using their subcapitals and home field advantage to try to hold their systems using cyno jammers, which keep enemy capitals and supercapitals from being able to enter systems owned by defenders. However, they have been slowly losing space, going from controlling 4 regions at the start of the war to controlling maybe a third of Delve, their core region, right now.

So, a few days ago, when Papi was using its supercapital ships to attack a Goonswarm structure in a contested area of Delve, Goonswarm changed tactics and jumped in their entire supercapital fleet to defend it. The battle was inconclusive, the structure was damaged but couldn't be destroyed until a time of 2 days had passed and it entered it final vulnurable state, both sides took heavy but nearly equal losses, and planned for how to take on the next battle, when the keepstar would be vulnurable.

The leadup to this battle was immense. Goonswarm formed 800 Titans, and over 5000 characters total, in preparation to defend the battle. Papi also formed over 800 Titans, not including a few hundred they had logged off in system from the first battle, and over 6500 characters total. About an hour before the Keepstar would be vulnurable, Papi began jumping all of its Titans into system in order to be ready to attack the keepstar. Everyone was ready for the biggest battle ever to happen in Eve. With no way for the losing side to easily extract all of their Titans, this would also decide the war, since once all the Titans were committed there would be no backing out.

But that isn't what happened. The Papi Titans that jumped in failed to land in the system where the battle was happening, M2-, and instead landed right where they had jumped from, back in T5Z. Most didn't land anywhere at all and got stuck in the jump loading screen. Logs on the characters loading it referenced a unknown 'populationCap' warning. The call was made from the Papi forces to tell everyone to log off, since the people who had done this already had ended up safely in T5Z, and it was assumed that the battle would be forfeited but there wouldn't be any significant losses.

And then, Papi superfleet did start to land. Not really, the pilots who were flying the ships were either logged off or just stuck on a loading screen. But the ships themselves started appearing. And naturally, a few hundred unpiloted Titans make for a great target, and Imperium forces started destroying them. I'm not sure exactly how many died, and even if I had a number it wouldn't tell you anything because there are plenty of people who, despite dying in M2- in their Titan, respawned, still in their Titan, in T5Z, which is definitely not supposed to happen. So its completely unclear how many Titans actually died, how many Papi Titans are stuck logged off in M2-, and how many are still in their staging system in complete safety. What is clear is this was a huge victory for the Imperium, they saved the keepstar, and even if half the Titans that were killed come back to life that's still I think in the neighborhood of 80-90 Titans that are going to stay dead.

And of course, earlier in the war, a Imperium Fleet Commander tried a tactic to attack some Papi supercarriers that failed completely because of server issues. Papi fleet commanders on reddit said the strategy was dumb because he should have known it wouldn't work under the server conditions. So now everyone in Goons or neutral is making fun of the Papi commanders for thinking that the jump button would work properly in 10% Tidi, with 5500 in local and hundreds of supercarriers worth of fighters flying around causing even more lag.

So far CCP (the devs for Eve, not the Chinese government) hasn't said anything on the matter, and if they stick with their usual policy they won't change anything that happened or move any stuck Titans, and will instead just let things play out. Which means dead Titans are staying dead, stuck Titans are staying stuck, and revived Titans are probably staying revived. The one thing this does mean, however, is that its unlikely a big supercapital fight is going to happen again in this war. With how this one went, its obvious the server cannot handle it. So that means that Papi will probably stick to their old strategy of trying to hold systems long enough to put up cyno jammers before they use their Titans, preventing the Imperium from contesting.

tl;dr, two groups tried to fight each other, looked like it was going to be by far the biggest battle the game had seen and one that would decide the war, and the servers lost.

And if you want to look at any of the drama yourself, just go to r\eve, plenty of it happening