On April 29, close to 3,000 players gathered in Elite: Dangerous for the single largest player-versus-player engagement in that game’s short history.

I was there, embedded within an armada of more than 1,000 ships known as the Premonition Allied Coalition, or the PAC. They were there to defend a fictional character named Salomé, the invention of a science fiction author. Arrayed against them were the most deadly player-controlled fleets in the entire Milky Way galaxy.

And a wizard named Harry Potter.

This is the story of one of the most elaborate engagements ever fought online, as told firsthand by those who were there.

The face that launched 1,000 ships

Author Drew Wagar started out as a fan of the original Elite, a spacefaring game designed by David Braben and Ian Bell, first released in 1984.

When a reboot of the game came to Kickstarter in late 2012, Wagar launched his own crowdfunding campaign for a novella set in that universe. The result was Elite: Reclamation, the story of Lady Kahina Tijani Loren, a rebellious aristocrat who would later go on to become Salomé, the leader of a faction known as the Children of Raxxla, or the CoR.

The CoR exist in Wagar’s novels, of course, but they also exist in-game as an allied group of players who append the tag to their player names to identify themselves. Their focus is primarily on exploration which, given that the game contains more than 400 billion star systems, is no small task.

Earlier this April, the CoR hit the exploration jackpot. Members stumbled onto the first of several so-called “generation ships,” massive colony ships that had been launched 1,000 years before the events going on today in Elite.

That discovery was the signal for Wagar to kick off a small war.

His upcoming novel is called Elite: Premonition. In the lead up to its publication, Wagar has been working with the game’s developer, Frontier, to fold his epic story into the MMO’s world. So while the discovery of the first generation ship released a stream of new lore into Elite, it also set up Salomé as the most wanted woman in the galaxy. She alone held data that could unravel many of the game’s persistent mysteries, including the arrival of a powerful alien threat.

Several of the biggest factions in the game world put a bounty on her head, and on April 29 she and her fictional conspirators were scheduled to escape into hiding. They would drop into the game world at a star system called 46 Eridani and make a run for it. Their objective was to head as fast as they could toward human occupied space around our sun Sol, a region known as “the bubble.”

It was to be a high-stakes game of cat and mouse among the stars, played out live with characters in control of Wagar himself and members of the Elite community. The results would be dramatized in Wagar’s book.

The stage was set for the largest PvP engagement in Elite’s history. There was only one problem: The game simply wasn’t made for this.

Hosting a war

Elite: Dangerous’ multiplayer mode relies on a peer-to-peer infrastructure. When players arrive at a star system, say the Sol system that contains Earth, they’re not actually playing on dedicated servers. They’re connecting with other players in a singular session called an “instance,” and an instance can only hold so many people.

Previous community events, like the Distant Worlds expedition to the edge of the Milky Way, have shown the flaws in Frontier’s design. Too many players in one place can bring the whole game crashing down. But both Frontier and Wagar were confident they could make the massive multiplayer event work by stringing players out in many instances all along the route, rather than concentrating them in one place.

Those in control of Salomé and her conspirators — Raan Corsen, Tsu Singh and Yuri Nakamura — would communicate with allied players in-game to form wings. Together, they would hop from system to system on their way from 46 Eridani into the bubble. As they traveled, they would naturally bounce between multiple instances. The game could, theoretically at least, remain stable while as many players as possible could get a piece of the action, even those playing on Xbox One.

Salomé, who was played by Wagar himself, would be protected by the players in CoR. It would be the job of players on Xbox to protect Nakamura, while Corsen and Singh would be given over to the protection of the Premonition Allied Coalition, or the PAC.

Wagar explained it all as simply as he could on his blog, and directed players to join the appropriate communications channel hosted by Discord.

Shortly after the announcement was made, I joined the Discord chat for PC as a press observer. More than 2,600 people followed in after me.

Strategy versus tactics

A week before the event, battle plans were drawn up thanks to a small group of self-appointed admirals in Discord. Four fleets, each with as many ships as an admiral could muster, would be divided into wings of roughly three players. Command and control would be established using voice communications on Discord, with wing leaders calling in reports directly to the admirals in open chat.

Wings were divided into three different roles. Scout wings would be composed of fast ships that would move out ahead of Salomé and her conspirators trying to plot a safe path to the bubble. Interdictors would position themselves in advance around stars, waiting for enemy ships to show up and attack. PvP wings would be the smallest group of players, and would serve as a quick reaction force if VIPs bogged down or were engaged in combat.

The admirals agreed on one thing early on: Only PvP wings would be armed.

Everyone else would leave their guns at home.

With thousands of players in-game the biggest risk during battle, the admirals reasoned, would be friendly fire. The easiest way for scouts and interdictors to tell friend from foe would be by scanning incoming ships on a pass or fail basis. If they carried weapons onboard they failed. Their pilot’s callsigns would be announced on Discord, checked manually against a white-list and if they weren’t part of the PAC, the armed aggressors were cleared to be intercepted by the waiting wings of unarmed ships.

If the plan seems like madness, you need to understand something about the lore of Elite’s game world, and how that lore feeds into gameplay.

In Elite, interstellar travel is accomplished thanks to something called a “frame shift drive,” or FSD. They’re not rocket engines, but complex devices that do some very hand-wavey, science-fictiony things. The official wiki says that “rather than accelerate a ship through space, the FSD moves space around a ship to allow it to travel faster than light without using extreme amounts of energy or experiencing time distortion.”

In game terms, that means that players in Elite essentially play the game in three different modes. There’s “real-space,” where pilots use their engines and thrusters to maneuver to and from landing platforms and to do actual combat. Then there’s “supercruise,” an incredibly fast form of travel that allows players to move between planets in a system in mere minutes. Finally, there’s “hyperspace,” which players use to move from one star to another in an instant.

When Salomé and her conspirators entered the game for the first time at 46 Eridani, they would start their journey in real-space. For the first part of their escape they’d need to spool up their ships’ FSD, enter hyperspace and jump to the next closest star. Once there, they’d drop out of hyperspace into supercruise to plot the jump to the next star.

It would take dozens of jumps to reach safety, and it was while sailing along in supercruise plotting their next jump that the conspirators would be at their most vulnerable.

Special devices can be mounted on ships in Elite called “FSD interdictors.” They allow players to pull each other out of supercruise against their will, causing them to rapidly lose control of their ships and tumble back into real-space. Enemy ships would need to arrive in the same instance as Salomé or the other conspirators’ and then quickly maneuver behind them, trying to tug them out of supercruise and into real-space.

If the combat interdiction was successful, enemy ships could easily maneuver their guns to bear and destroy the VIP ships.

It would be up to wings of PAC scouts to search for pockets of enemy resistance ahead of Salomé and the other conspirators. Admirals in the Discord chat would use that information to plot a safe course as best they could. Wings of PAC interdictors would be pre-positioned along that route at likely choke points, flooding multiple instances of the same star with friendly ships ready to pull enemies out of supercruise in order to clear a path.

When and if the Salomé and the other conspirators were interdicted by enemy ships, PvP wings would try and rush to the scene and screen them from attack.

The entire enterprise was complicated by Elite’s peer-versus-peer architecture. One wing of scouts or interdictors could report that their instance of a particular star was clear, while another could simultaneously be overrun with enemies.

But, in talking with the admirals before the battle, they told me that there simply wasn’t any other way to organize their forces. This wasn’t just the best plan that they could think of.

It was the only one.

Contact

An hour before the event was supposed to kick off I undocked my ship from where I’d stashed it — inside an asteroid at a system called T Tauri, half-way between the starting point at 46 Eridani and the bubble. On my PC I was running Elite, but on my Mac I was monitoring the PAC fleet communications channels, effectively making my work computer the nerdiest police scanner of all time.

Before launching, I removed all of my offensive weapons. I also changed my ship’s name from Evelynne Christine to Press Observer and painting its hull bright orange for visibility. I was quickly assigned to the PAC’s 4th Fleet, under the control of Admiral Jubei Himura. It was on his verbal order that I jumped to our first waypoint.

More than 260 members of the 4th Fleet, and more than 1,000 allied players in total, jumped with me.

Our first stop was a staging area around a system named Chock, just inside the bubble. The 4th Fleet would be responsible for the last leg of the VIP’s journey, and would essentially be tasked with guarding the wall. On one side, the lawless expanse of open space. On the other, populated star systems and safe harbor for Salomé and the other conspirators.

Thirty minutes later, the 4th Fleet received its orders: Move to a nearby star called F Eridani and hold the line.

As soon as I jumped in, I was able to pull up a half dozen other players on my ship’s communications scanner. Each of them was organized into wings of three or more ships. As a rough estimate, I’d guess that there were at least 30 players in my instance of F Eridani, including members of the 4th Fleet’s 18th and the 42nd interdictor wings.

For the next hour and a half, those 30-some players spread out around the blue-white star at the center of the system and waited for hostile ships to jump in. They were all, like me, completely unarmed and following a strategy that at best would only slow their enemies down.

At worst, it could cost them their in-game lives.

Inside the Discord communications channels, it was like listening to barely controlled chaos. Wing leaders were calling in their status with contact reports from systems all along the nearby edge of populated space. Ships were being taken down on both sides, and as the battle raged fewer and fewer voices could be heard on Discord.

In-game, the action was subdued. When combat began, it was like watching fireflies dance in the sky.

When you’re in supercruise, you can’t really make out another player’s ship at all. They’re simply represented by a single bright orange spark with rainbow trails spiraling out behind them. When a hostile ship jumped into F Eridani, players would call out the target through the in-game comms via text message. Wing leaders typed out urgent, ad hoc orders and then joined the furball, maneuvering behind the wings of enemy ships to try and pull the hostile ships out of supercruise.

When they were successful, the yellow sparks involved in the scrum would wink out of my instance, leaving behind a tiny signal representing their departure called a “wake.” They shifted from my instance to another and, once there, the deadly first-person dogfights that took place there were invisible to me.

From the chatter on the fleet’s Discord, they sounded like brutal affairs.

As the first hour of battle passed into the second, the 4th Fleet’s interdictor wings were slowly whittled away. All the while, one of Admiral Jubei’s Lieutenants, a player by the name of Commander Relick, was giving orders to the 4th Fleet’s PvP wings. You can hear a sample of Relick ordering his wings in pursuit of Salomé’s attackers from an enemy group known as the 13th Legion.

“Right at the beginning of that clip,” Relick told me afterward, “I mentioned Commander StarfireIX. He was dropping into whichever system it was that Salomé was in at the time. There were current reports of her being caught by the 13th, and we were pretty frantically trying to catch up.

“I had previously told wings 6-9 to move ahead from F Eridani to try to help clear another system in anticipation of the VIPs arrival. Wings 3-5 were still in F Eridani, reporting hostiles in system and calling for help. That’s when I sent the other wings back to F Eridani, as waypoint three was looking handled.”

After nearly two hours of combat, word spread through the 4th Fleet that three of the four VIPs had managed to make it all the way back into the bubble. There were muted cheers because even one of them making it out alive meant that there was a chance that Salomé’s message, the data so vital to continuing author Drew Wagar’s storyline, had survived.

But where was Salomé?

The chamber of secrets

Early on in that day, the story goes that Salomé was interdicted by hostile forces and heavily damaged. Salomé fought on for the duration of the battle, making it within six jumps of her final objective at a star system called Tionisla. Wagar’s post on the Elite forums says that she put up one hell of a fight.

“Her ship was badly wounded after almost two hours of evading interdiction by hardened PvP players,” Wagar wrote. “Her hull was intact, but despite exhausting an [automatic repair system that was refilled twice by allied ships en-route] ... when she was interdicted that [last] time she suffered fatal damage.”

Her death, which came in orbit around a star called Anumclaw, was almost inevitable. Wagar admitted as much at various places around the internet both before and after the battle. She was the leader, and the highest profile target.

The bigger surprise was who killed her.

The man who pulled the trigger was ... Harry Potter.

Salome has been confirmed dead in allied fleet comms. This may be the kill video. #EliteDangerous https://t.co/NisqovBqJ4 — Charlie Hall (@Charlie_L_Hall) April 29, 2017

Josh “Harry Potter” Chamberlain is, as Ars Technica reports, one of the most notorious players in all of Elite: Dangerous. He’s a member of the Smiling Dog Crew (SDC), a clan of Elite players known for their griefing exploits.

“By all accounts, unscrupulous SDC members appear to have talked their way into the PAC meta-group by employing the age-old tactic of “promising to be good this time, we pinky swear for reals.” Among the SDC members allowed into PAC was the aforementioned Harry Potter, who can properly be called the most reviled player in the Elite: Dangerous galaxy. Potter ... has blown up traders on the last leg of a 20,000 light year string of jumps out to a new colony location; he’s killed people in the middle of charity Twitch streams; he’s murdered new players and old players alike in paroxysms of violence intended to disrupt the game for no other reason than that he could.”

Chamberlain had flown alongside the PAC in the week before the event, participated in combat training of green recruits and earned the respect of the admirals in all four fleets. Still, no one really trusted him or the other members of the SDC completely.

Just before the event began, when the fleets had been formed and moved to their staging areas, Wagar and CoR shared the waypoints that Salomé and her conspirators would travel. The admirals in the PAC were stingy with that information. Individual wings in the PAC only knew their own objectives, not the details of the entire plan. In that way they hoped to keep information on the VIP’s location from leaking to the enemy.

None of that mattered.

Days before, Chamberlain says he managed to get Salomé added to his in-game friends list. For the duration of the battle she had a target on her back that only he could see. When the fleets formed up, he never showed up to his post. He wasn’t even assigned one. He spent all his time chasing Salomé.

Once enemy ships had damaged hers, Chamberlain claims that offered to join her wing. He says his contact within CoR was desperate, and he was able to convince them to slow her wing down long enough that he could catch up.

[It’s a narrative that CoR disputes, as indicated in our update below.]

When he finally got there, he betrayed them. I wanted to know why.

“I personally didn't need a reason to kill,” Chamberlain wrote in an email. “It was more because ... there was a bounty of one billion credits. Credits are not something most PvPers care about, but I pilot big ships. Any death can amount to over 30 million to buy a new one. One billion will be of great help.”

But Frontier Developments, the studio behind the game itself, only offered up a five million credit bounty in-fiction. The one billion credit purse comes from another player in-game, a high-roller by the name of Commander Runis Oo.

“I think I could call Salomé collateral damage,” Oo wrote in an email. “I guess that’s what she was from my point of view.

“I usually like to do some sparring with the bad guys in Elite, because they put up more of a fight and provide more entertainment than the good ones. When I heard that SDC was siding with PAC for Salomé's protection I thought, ‘Hell, if even they and their friends moved to the righteous side, who is there left to fight? Traders and miners?’ So my bounty was partially aimed at the SDC, since they were part of her guard detail. I thought that if they chose to play it that way, I could make things a bit more interesting by throwing a billion into the ring.”

Aftermath

So where does that leave our characters, both in-game and out?

Over the last few weeks the Children of Raxxla learned how to fight. An impassioned Reddit post tells one side of that story.

“CoR proved something to themselves that no one would have expected,” wrote Commander Baroness Galaxy, “that Salomé actually had a realistic chance of survival. The first trainings were chaotic and messy. ‘She is to die instantly!" many said. And then something unbelievable happened a good two or three weeks or so in. During a simulation training, with 35-plus commanders from CoR we actually kept her alive.

“We found a way to believe. Despite instancing. Despite all the odds against us. And I'll never forget that day.”

Some of Salomé’s wingmates and the Baroness have been interviewed for a lengthy podcast explaining their perspective of the conflict.

The Premonition Allied Coalition, a weeks-old group of more than 2,600 players who came together over Discord, is no more. The day after the event, exactly 24 hours before it began, the channel winked out of existence — literally while I was trying to pull down information for this story. Rumor has it that the group turned toxic after Salomé’s death. Many pointed fingers at the leadership, at admirals like Jubei Himura, and called them negligent. Some on Reddit have called for he and others like him to be hunted down. Most of the PAC’s leadership have made their Discord accounts private.

Commander Harry Potter lives on to fight another day, from the bridge of his personal fleet of deadly warships. You can watch Chamberlain’s exploits on his Twitch channel. He and the rest of the SDC have become the most hunted players in the Milky Way.

As far as the game itself, Elite itself managed to hold together for the most part during the event. Anecdotally, it seems like the many thousands of players that were in-game before the event started managed to stay online with minimal disconnections. Those who arrived late met with mixed results.

As for Elite’s storyline, when the event was over the good guys thought they had won. Even though Salomé died, it was assumed that her message made it through. But Wager went to the Elite message board over the weekend to post a few cryptic sentences.

“Salomé's message was not delivered due to the outcome of the event,” he wrote. “Players changed the story once again.”

The whole tale will be told in detail, dramatized through Wagar’s next book. And this time, rather than having to depend on a Kickstarter, it’s being published by Frontier itself.

“I would like to thank everyone who contributed, in any way,” Wagar wrote on his blog over the weekend. “The sheer hard work and dedication of my team of conspirators in planning the event, the military precision of the private Discord channel attempting to plot a path through the madness. The wider community Discords attempting to bring some organisation to the chaos, those who did what the hell they liked. The streamers, the viewers, the forum and Reddit denizens, the tinfoilers. For Frontier in creating this amazing game and working with me to build this story. Even Harry Potter. You all played a part.”

He signed his post with the Elite community’s traditional salute — o7.

Update: After what was a long weekend for pretty much the entire Elite: Dangerous community, I’ve been able to connect with author Drew Wagar and a representative from the Children of Raxxla. What follows are a few notes, comments and updates on the original story.

The event’s co-organizer, a member of the CoR who goes by the name Erimus Kamzel in-game, reached out to say that the 13th Legion had “zero contact” with his group during the event. Furthermore, he says the CoR didn’t trust Josh “Harry Potter” Chamberlain for a second, even after he joined the Premonition Allied Coalition (PAC).

He also denies that anyone from his group slowed down to let Chamberlain catch up.

“He caught up to Salomé purely because the Seven Veils [Salomé’s ship] was heavily damaged previously by other players,” Kamzel wrote, “and began suffering constant frame shift drive malfunctions.”

Wagar, who was indeed piloting Salomé during the event, isn’t sure who did the damaging along the way. He was busy fighting for his virtual life for the duration and is only now going back to review the video for details to put into his next book.

“Whilst I had a lot of strategy input and training from the CoR on tactics and evasive moves,” Wagar wrote in an email, “the experience of actually being hunted for almost two hours was probably the most intense gaming experience I’ve ever had.”

Wagar says that Chamberlain got the kill “fair and square.” The wing of protectors wasn’t broken up by attackers, a fact that I’ve adjusted in the story above. In the end, he says it was bugs in Elite’s code that left Salomé all alone when Chamberlain finally pulled her out of supercruise.

“One wingmate’s client crashed,” Wagar wrote. “The other was locked in a ‘blue tunnel’ as the netcode attempted to instance the player. By the time the wing got back into the correct instance the game was over. Salomé’s ship was engineered to run, not to fight. We had prioritised repairs to the drives, FSD and shields. We had already lost our chaff defences and weapons. Alone against an experienced PvP pilot, unable to jump out due to the failing FSD drive, the result at that point, was inevitable.”