From tiny acorns do mighty oaks…

A little over one month ago, an RvB member by the name of Torve Starduster made a forum post suggesting a “Free for all” fight, with a twist.

The FFA, would consist of 10,000 rifters.

At first I was not sure what to make of it, and many others seemed somewhat sceptical too, however as the thread went on, the original idea got fleshed out by other posters; Logistics of fitting and movement were sorted out, donations of hulls & modules were arranged, and then suddenly it was looking like it would become a reality. During the following month a POS was set-up by an RvB members alt, several SMA’s were anchored around it, and the long task of fitting and moving 10,000 T1 frigate hulls – the 10,000 Rifters tag was still kept as it has a better ring to it than 10,000 rifters and other assorted T1 hulls with random fits – began.

And on November 3rd 2012, all the planning came together, and RvB gathered to start the biggest continuous FFA fight in our – and probably the servers – history.

A juddering halt

While I said above RvB had got together for a very explodey party, and had confirmed with Mummy & Daddy CCP that we could have that this party, it turns out that jettisoning 6,000 of anything onto the same grid as a POS, is a VERY BAD THING, for anyone trying to warp onto that same grid. So come 19.00 EVE on the 3rd November, we could not actually start the party with a huge bang, more of a whimper before it came to a sudden & juddering halt. Didn’t stop Professor Clio from being the first kill though.

Basically no matter what we tried, the grid would not load for people – and even logging off & on, e-warping back & logging mid e-warp would not help solve this – we kept ending up trying to load that grid again. Everyone who could bail did so to a noobship race, & to take part in this killmail, while the rest of us kept hoping beyond hope the grid would either load or we could get off it. It got so bad for me, that I resorted to petitioning to be moved because I was “stuck”.

To say that the petition did not go quite how I expected would be understatement. This is how it went:

I petition to be moved due to being stuck on a grid; Senior GM responds & says “nope” “system is fine” “unfair to others if we move you”; I reply “have you seen the actual grid I am on?” Senior GM is like “what grid, where?” So I tell him and mention the 6.000 ships on said grid; Senior GM appears in the local list; Senior GM then asks me “who did this, why did they?” I explain – and drop Torve deep in the brown stuff at his request; Following the above the GM is all “We’ll fix it” CCP Dev appears in local and makes 2500 rifters disappear [ 2012.11.03 21:07:49 ] CCP DeNormalized > almost 2500 empty rifters were moved; System then gets reset and remapped; CCP let us carry on [ 2012.11.03 21:09:52 ] CCP DeNormalized > i’d say do your worst… but well… we’ve seen how that goes :)

And within 20 minutes the rabid killers of RvB were pouring into the system & grabbing hulls from those on the pos grid and racing out into the wilds of Abagawa to explode and be exploded by each other. No matter how many exploded, and in that first “proper” hour we had exploded loads of hulls, the grid just wasn’t clearing:

So a fleet went up, an advert was spammed around RvB, and away we went. As more and more pilots poured into system, more & more ships exploded, the belts started to become clogged with wrecks & the locals could not get a word in edgewise in local chat. I checked the star map a couple of hours later and we were at 900+ ships destroyed in just the last hour, which roughly extrapolated to close to 1200 since 21.25 or thereabouts.

We apologise for any inconvenience

The carnage in Abagawa was short lived however as TQ fell over and needed a restart, which turned into an emergency multiple hour downtime. We were all so very sad.

Not really.

We decided to take the blame – and we will forever take said blame – for the server falling over. We just think that it wasn’t quite ready for the sheer volume of kills, or kills of “shit-fits” that were happening in an otherwise peaceful high sec system. Whatever actually happened we really do not care about.

And the beat goes on

Fast forward a few hours later and I am rested enough to log back into EVE and see how the FFA was going. To my pleasure it was as explosive as it had been since the emergency downtime had ended, with around 3000 recorded kills already, and more of the euro-shift logging on and joining in with the madness in Abagawa. And for the next 10 hours, I just kept exploding ships and being exploded. At peak we had 70+ members in the FFA fleet with around another 20 in local doing their own thing, and we were averaging 5-700 kills an hour as the time ticked past downtime and deep into the afternoon. The ships to help us on our way being jettisoned from the SMA’s every time the pos grid was too easy to warp into.

10,000 ships, surely they were not all well fit?

The nicest thing to say about the fits is that they worked. Not necessarily at helping you live, but you could at least whore things if you could not be as offensive as you liked. The fits themselves ran the gamut from no tank all gank rifters, to neutron blaster merlins to mining magnates to rail fit incursus and right on to multiple logi inquisitors. In fact excepting the merlins and incursus I used, I rarely found exactly the same fit twice. Fit-roulette really helped with the adventure of this event, what with no one knowing exactly what they would get or even how to use them half the time. I did get a few fits that worked well however especially the light missile condors with ewar mid slots – sitting at 35km or so and damping/tding/tping as many targets as I could while lobbing missiles into the fray just felt so good! A few of the incursus fits performed well too – rep/blasters/mwd/point&web for example, in one of these I had a really good fight tearing up several ships alone until 5 or 6 guys who were chatting with me on comms headed my way as my ammo gave out.

Who needs enemies with friends like that eh?!

This is the end

Beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end

The FFA finally came to an end at 02.36am on November 5th due to there being no hulls people wanted to explode, except 1000+ bantams, of which barely any had seen use over the weekend. The last kill was this one. In total 8096 ships had been killed in around 27 hours of activity. A brief summary of how this breaks down follows this link to the killboard campaign:

To top this all off, the top 20 pilots (for november) on EVE-Kill are all RvB members.

In over 6 years of EVE, I cannot think of any organised event that has seen such a level of carnage, and in my opinion it was easily the single largest number of explosions seen in highsec ever. Not bad for t1 rifter alts. Crashing a node, getting it restarted and just keeping the carnage going for as long as it did without any drama – internally or externally – just adds to the epic of this event.

I’d like to thank the members of the Academy

The following individuals need to be pointed out for both my gratitude and that of RvB as a whole:

Torve Starduster – the man with the plan. He who started it all and was heard to exclaim “lets block out the sun” from his bathtub.

Zakhs – Logistical HERO! Set up the POS & moved 11888 fitted frigates to its SMA’s ALONE. He also seemed to ALWAYS be online when more ships were needed on grid. Did you even sleep?

Del Delvechio – for a huge donation of 2500 rifter hulls to kick off this whole thing. Without such largesse, would this event have really happened?

Random McNally, Mandelbrot Fracture, Rashino Zea and many many more – For fitting the ships with lol fits, troll fits and srs fits. You guys certainly kept us entertained during our 27 hour game of fit-roulette.

CCP – for not screwing us and removing all the initial wave of ships and for ensuring that node reinforcement actually happened. Without their assistance, we would have been “proper fucked”.

Everyone who attended the event and helped put us on the path to 8000+ explosions. I hope you all enjoy your time in RvB and treasure your memories of this event for as long as you play this game.

“If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”

Here are a few images I took over the course of the hours I spent at the event. There is a mix of ui-less and ui-filled images. As I get more from other people I will add them to this post.

Also check out this stream by Sard Caid who was in attendance on his RvB alt. Forward to around 3 hours 20 minutes for footage of the FFA. Enjoy!



Watch live video from SardCaid’s Channel on TwitchTV