Above: EVE Online's Brisc Rubal, known in real life as Brian Schoeneman, a maritime law lobbyist. Source: YouTube.

Update, 4:40 pm PDT: Brian Schoeneman has now made a lengthy public statement denying any wrongdoing. Schoeneman says CCP Games is not responding to his requests for more information about what, specifically, he was banned for and asserts that he did not break any non-disclosure agreements or share confidential information. "As a licensed attorney for nearly a decade, I have never had a complaint filed against me," Schoeneman writes. "I have served in positions of public trust in the United States Government and have never had a complaint filed against me. The claims that I would risk my reputation by providing proprietary or otherwise confidential information to members of my own alliance for personal gain are false."

"There is no reason why I would jeopardize all of that by violating my word, putting my reputation on the line, and risking all of this to provide a fellow player with an unfair advantage in the game," he adds.

"I will fight these false allegations, restore my reputation and seek all avenues for recourse available to me for these reckless actions," Schoeneman concludes. You can read the statement in full on the EVE subreddit.

Original story: EVE Online is usually known for bitter betrayals and catastrophic battles, but that's all guided by the politics of its massive player-driven alliances. And today, EVE Online is having one hell of a political scandal involving a player who is not only an elected politician in EVE Online, but is also a political lobbyist in real life too.

His name is Brian Schoeneman, known in EVE as Brisc Rubal, and he serves on EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management (CSM). Or, he did serve until today when developer CCP Games announced that Brian Schoeneman was now permanently banned for "sharing confidential information with a member of his alliance that was later used by another alliance member to conduct illicit in-game transactions."

In EVE Online,  the CSM is a body of elected players who serve as lobbyists for various player factions and work closely with developer CCP Games to provide feedback about the game and weigh in on the design of new features. Just like real politicians, each member of the CSM has to campaign for votes, which Brian Schoeneman started doing back in May of 2018. But unlike most CSM members, Schoeneman has real-life experience to draw from, on which he leaned heavily in his video announcing his election campaign.

Outside of EVE, Schoeneman is a maritime law lobbyist in Virginia, USA. In an interview with Kotaku, Schoeneman said, "I think the largest single thing I can bring to the CSM is that I have been doing what is effectively the CSM’s role for my entire political career. I am constantly going out and lobbying the government and trying to educate them on what my members think is important, and how what the government does affects my industry, all while making sure what we do is good for the country."

But maybe tying his real-life political identity to his in-game one wasn't the smartest idea. Earlier today, CCP Games announced that, effective immediately, Schoeneman was removed from his role in the CSM and permanently banned from the game. Two other players named Dark Shines and Pandoralica also received year-long bans (both also contend they are innocent), and all the ISK and goods associated with scheme, which sounds a lot like the EVE Online version of insider trading, has been confiscated.

"This misconduct was brought to us by the CSM themselves as an immediate threat to the integrity of the CSM as an institution," reads CCP Games' statement. "CCP’s stance on this is clear: regardless of the type of information shared, acts like this go against everything that the Council of Stellar Management stands for and will not be tolerated under any circumstances."

Naturally, this has created quite the stir in the EVE community. Schoeneman, Dark Shines, and Pandoralica are all high-profile members of The Initiative, a massive and reputable alliance that was first founded in 2008 and boasts over 5,000 players. Not even a month ago, we spoke to Schoeneman and Pandoralica as part of a story that involved a top secret plan to destroy a space station widely considered unassailable. Over on the EVE subreddit, the thread about Schoeneman's ban has already reached over 500 comments.

Schoeneman seems confused about that too. Over on his personal Twitter, he issued a statement claiming to "not know" why he was banned from EVE and removed from the CSM. Apparently, CCP Games has not responded to his request for more clarification over the decision and Schoeneman denies any wrong doing.

Schoeneman has since released a full statement on Reddit which you can read, in full, here.

Without any evidence to look at, it's Schoeneman's word against CCP Games'. But, knowing the ingenious nature of EVE's players, I wouldn't necessarily rule out that this could all be a part of some elaborate plot by a rival faction. After all, EVE Online is known for devastating schemes that ruin the in-game lives of famous players. Or Schoeneman could simply be trying to save face. I will update this story with more details when (and if) they are revealed. 

Update, 4:40 pm PDT: Included Brian Schoeneman's statement, which was provided to us personally but can also be found on Reddit here.

Update, 1:23 pm PDT: Added the identities of the two other banned players and clarified their positions in The Initiative.

Above: EVE Online's Brisc Rubal, known in real life as Brian Schoeneman, a maritime law lobbyist. Source: YouTube.

EVE Online is usually known for bitter betrayals and catastrophic battles, but that's all guided by the politics of its massive player-driven alliances. And today, EVE Online is having one hell of a political scandal involving a player who is not only an elected politician in EVE Online, but is also a career politician in real life too.

His name is Brian Schoeneman, known in EVE as Brisc Rubal, and he serves on EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management (CSM). Or, he did serve until today when developer CCP Games announced that Brian Schoeneman was now permanently banned for "sharing confidential information with a member of his alliance that was later used by another alliance member to conduct illicit in-game transactions."

In EVE Online,  the CSM is a body of elected players who serve as lobbyists for various player factions and work closely with developer CCP Games to provide feedback about the game and weigh in on the design of new features. Just like real politicians, each member of the CSM has to campaign for votes, which Brian Schoeneman started doing back in May of 2018. But unlike most CSM members, Schoeneman has real-life experience to draw from, on which he leaned heavily in his video announcing his election campaign.

Outside of EVE, Schoeneman is a maritime law lobbyist in Virginia, USA. In an interview with Kotaku, Schoeneman said, "I think the largest single thing I can bring to the CSM is that I have been doing what is effectively the CSM’s role for my entire political career. I am constantly going out and lobbying the government and trying to educate them on what my members think is important, and how what the government does affects my industry, all while making sure what we do is good for the country."

But maybe tying his real-life political identity to his in-game one wasn't the smartest idea. Earlier today, CCP Games announced that, effective immediately, Schoeneman was removed from his role in the CSM and permanently banned from the game. Two other unnamed players also received year-long bans, and all the ISK and goods associated with Schoeneman's scheme, which sounds a lot like the EVE Online version of insider trading, has been confiscated.

"This misconduct was brought to us by the CSM themselves as an immediate threat to the integrity of the CSM as an institution," reads CCP Games' statement. "CCP’s stance on this is clear: regardless of the type of information shared, acts like this go against everything that the Council of Stellar Management stands for and will not be tolerated under any circumstances."

Naturally, this has created quite the stir in the EVE community. Schoeneman is a member of The Initiative, a massive and reputable alliance that was first founded in 2008 and boasts over 5,000 players. Not even a month ago, we spoke to Schoeneman as part of a story that involved a top secret plan to destroy a space station widely considered unassailable. Over on the EVE subreddit, the thread about Schoeneman's ban has already reached over 500 comments.

Schoeneman seems confused about that too. Over on his personal Twitter, he issued a statement claiming to "not know" why he was banned from EVE and removed from the CSM. Apparently, CCP Games has not responded to his request for more clarification over the decision and Schoeneman denies any wrong doing.

I reached out to Schoeneman who declined to comment "until such time as I am apprised of what the actual allegations are."

Without any evidence to look at, it's Schoeneman's word against CCP Games'. But, knowing the ingenious nature of EVE's players, I wouldn't necessarily rule out that this could all be a part of some elaborate plot by a rival faction. After all, EVE Online is known for devastating schemes that ruin the in-game lives of famous players. Or Schoeneman could simply be trying to save face. I will update this story with more details when (and if) they are revealed.  

Last year, 6,142 EVE Online pilots flooded into the solar system of 9-4RP2 and participated in its biggest single battle ever—setting a Guinness World Record for most participants in a multiplayer battle in the process. But that record-breaking fight also illustrated how parts of EVE Online are aging much worse than others. The crippling lag created by 6,000 players smashing as many ships together was devastating to both sides. Everything slowed to a crawl, and the biggest threat became the random disconnects that pulled players from the fight.

This May, EVE will turn 16 years old. To keep its promise to make EVE Online live forever, developer CCP Games is experimenting with ambitious networking and simulation technology that could radically change (and improve) its aging infrastructure, unlocking all sorts of new possibilities.

During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, EVE Online partnered with Hadean, the makers of an innovative game engine called Aether, for a grand experiment: Could they run a 10,000-player multiplayer tech demo that didn't immediately slow to a crawl?

And, more importantly, how could that technology be used to keep EVE Online relevant?

Death to latency 

On March 20, 3,852 human players and 10,422 AI pilots participated in the first public tech demo of Aether Wars—a barebones space combat sim using EVE Online's art assets. The idea wasn't to perfectly recreate EVE Online's fleet combat, but to see if Hadean's Aether engine could handle ten thousand ships and hundreds of thousands of torpedoes in one area without crippling lag. As you can see from the various livestreams of the event (like the one below), it was far from perfect. But it did work. Players could fly around and fire weapons with hiccups of lag that were much more tolerable than the crawl EVE Online's real battles turn into. 

It worked better than both CCP and Hadean had hoped for. A day before the tech demo, I caught up with CCP Games CEO Hilmar Pétursson to talk about the project and what it could mean for the future of EVE Online. 

"There are pretty good odds of it just crashing and burning," he told me. "EVE players are known for tearing apart whatever we throw at them. Either outcome is a good one, though, because this is such cutting edge technology we just have to learn the boundaries and the opportunities through these kinds of experiments."

The gist of what Hadean's tech does differently is in how it seamlessly scales to match the complexity of a game world without tons of bloat or middleware. Using cloud technology (not to be confused with the cloud tech powering Google's Stadia streaming service) and its proprietary operating system, Hadean's Aether engine will supposedly be able to handle complex simulations—like 10,000 ships launching missiles at each other—without skipping a beat. That could change a great deal about how EVE Online's battles play out.

"The [infrastructure] of EVE was largely set in place about 17 or 18 years ago," Pétursson said. "Just for perspective, we had dual-CPU pentium 3 servers. Since then the world has moved on many cycles and computing architectures are vastly different, especially when it comes to the number of CPUs and cores in a machine. And EVE cannot properly take advantage of that change because it was architected for a very different environment. It's held up nicely, but there are limits to where we can take it because of this initial condition."

That's why CCP is experimenting with Hadean's Aether engine. "The main difference is that Hadean allows the simulation to scale across multiple cores, multiple CPUs and multiple machines, and they have a very elegant way of managing that scale as it happens. And that is something that is hard to do with the architecture that we have for EVE," Pétursson explained.

A new kind of war 

Though Pétursson said it was impossible to predict when EVE players could benefit from this technology ("It's just so much speculation on so little data, it's just not productive"), the implications are game changing.

For one, it would mean no more Time Dilation (TiDi). Introduced back in 2011, TiDi is CCP's only way to combat the massive lag of its player battles. Since its servers struggled to keep up with the millions of processes happening at once as players fired weapons, launched fleets of attack drones, or repositioned ships, TiDi slows everything down so the servers can catch up. It's like bullet-time from The Matrix, which sounds cool until you're stuck in a battle that has been going on for eight hours because everything is moving so slowly. Under full TiDi, any action that should only take one second actually takes ten, stretching EVE battles into gruelling 14-hour-long conflicts.

But using technology like the Aether engine could also expand EVE Online's physics simulation, allowing for more diverse ship designs and more realistic battles. "There are limits to the variables that are managed by the physics engine," Pétursson told me. "One of them, particularly, has to do with rotation."

One of the corners CCP Games had to cut to get EVE Online running smoothly back in 2003 has profoundly shaped its fleet tactics: The EVE servers have no idea which direction any ship is facing at a given time. That little detail has big consequences on EVE's fleet tactics and ship design. "Not knowing the orientation of the ship means you cannot build a ship with guns on one side and not the other side," Pétursson said. "That's why all the weapon systems of EVE are mirrored."

"One thing that the Hadean solution will enable is that once [the server] knows a ship's orientation, we can start to make asymmetrical ships for real. You can imagine a fleet fight under those conditions would be very different. We can start to make ships that are shield ships that protect ships that are behind them."

Another big change would be proper simulation of line of sight. Right now, there's no such thing as "taking cover" in EVE Online. If an enemy ship can lock onto you, they can shoot you no matter what might be in the way. But if EVE Online's servers had the processing power to calculate line of sight at a massive scale, EVE's fleet battles would look completely different. 

"When you look at a typical fleet fight, often the tactic is to make a big ball of spaceships which is what you'd do if there was no line of sight occlusion," Pétursson said. "When you have line of sight then you have formations because it's important that everyone has a clear line of sight to the target. You go from being a giant ball to having a shape to the battlefield. This will massively change tactics of engaging in fleet fights." 

But change is scary. Assuming that the Aether engine does one day power EVE Online, it's likely that major changes to EVE's combat would be gradually rolled out in a contained way. Much like its Abyssal Deadspace expansion, which added dungeon-like encounters instanced from the open universe of New Eden, this new form of ship combat would be localized to a small portion of EVE instead of just rolled out to the entire universe all at once. "Obviously we don't want to overly disrupt the current gameplay, which people engage with on a daily basis," Pétursson said.

None of this is guaranteed to happen, either. Though the Aether Wars tech demo was a success, it could be years before EVE players see tangible changes to their game. Pétursson told me it's one of CCP Games' few long-term projects that are being offset by more immediate changes, like the upcoming 64-bit client and DirectX 12 support. "The Hadean thing is more like a leap into the extreme future of what could be done. But these incremental and revolutionary initiatives inform each other."

It's exciting stuff that could see EVE Online keep pace with the new wave of combat space sims like Elite: Dangerous and the upcoming Star Citizen—but with EVE's massive, player-driven universe behind it all. But at what point is CCP just developing an entirely different kind of space game?

"At some point we are developing a different space game," Pétursson laughed. "But if we're going to stay true to EVE Online going on forever, then at some point the current gameplay of EVE is just not going to be as relevant as it was. As we have more space games coming online, the gameplay and the simulation dynamics also need to evolve. But we have to be very careful about doing that." 

EVE Online is famous for its titanic battles, and it's during those battles that even people who've never played the stellar MMO pay attention. But EVE is 15 years old and struggles when thousands of players are all duking it out in one gargantuan brawl. CCP reckons it has a solution, however, which it tested out at GDC with a 10,000-ship battle. 

The developer has partnered with a cloud-based computing company, Hadean, resulting in the EVE: Aether Wars tech demo. The Aether Engine uses Microsoft Azure and is built on top of HadeanOS, the company's 'cloud-first operation system'. 

GDC might be a great place to show off new tech, but live events and technology frequently clash. As Hadean's Ryan King notes in a recent blog post, there wasn't a safety net. But it worked. 

3,850 human players participated, fighting each other and against AI connected clients. The total number of ships involved in the battle was an astronomical 14,274, with 10,412 ships fighting concurrently. A whopping 88,988 ships were apparently destroyed when all was said and done. Check out one of the player streams here. 

Expect more details about how Hadean managed to support such a huge battle soon, as well as a panel at EGX Rezzed that will cover what was shown off at GDC. More tests, which will obviously require more players, are coming in the future, so keep an eye out for the chance to sign up. 

Hard Knocks Inc. are the boogeymen of EVE Online. For the past seven years, they’ve haunted the virtual galaxy of New Eden from an impenetrable solar system known as Rage located deep within the transient pathways of wormhole space. Each day, new wormholes connect Rage to one of EVE Online's thousands of star systems—for the inhabitants of one of those systems, it’s like waking up to find Genghis Khan in your bedroom. 

Two years ago, Hard Knocks also made history when it built Fort Knocks, the first-ever Keepstar-class citadel. Standing 200 km tall, Fort Knocks is the largest space station in New Eden, and the closest thing EVE Online has to a Death Star.

With a vast armada of capital ships and some of the most skilled pilots in the galaxy—not to mention the apocalyptic arsenal of the Keepstar itself—it was widely believed that directly attacking Rage was suicide. But three months ago, one group used Hard Knock's own clever tactics against them.

If Hard Knocks is a small but elite group specializing in guerrilla warfare, then The Initiative is the polar opposite. As of March 2019, The Initiative holds sovereignty over almost 100 solar systems across a vast region of space more than 20 light-years across. They have over 5,000 pilots at their disposal, and for good reason—they’ve been around for over a decade at this point.

This power bloc, however, is only one of many vying for control of space in New Eden. Most of the time The Initiative is tied up in the politics and wars of the null-security space that it inhabits. So you can imagine that the members of Hard Knocks were more than a little shocked to log in on Saturday, December 8, 2018, to find a few hundred Initiative players on their doorstep. The Initiative’s pilots pulled off what most of EVE thought was impossible, and they did it without anyone even knowing. 

Taking the initiative 

It was already too late when members of Hard Knocks discovered they'd been tricked. A fleet of over 300 members of The Initiative had—seemingly out of nowhere—appeared on Fort Knocks' doorstep, ready to burn the entire system and everything Hard Knocks owned to the ground. Brisc Rubal was one of those invaders. As an elected member of EVE’s Council of Stellar Management, he's part of a group of players working with developer CCP Games to improve the game experience, but he's also a frontline soldier in The Initiative. On December 8, Brisc wasn't playing politician.

When I asked Brisc about the motives behind this operation, he told me one of the reasons was something anyone could appreciate: money. Over the years, Hard Knocks had built several citadels, including another Keepstar beside Fort Knocks, to act as vaults for all their ships, weapons, and treasure. "These two Keepstars were loot piñatas," Brisc said. The citadels would be worth billions if not trillions of ISK, EVE’s currency.

Unlike many other MMOs, your ship and your equipment are put at risk each time you undock in EVE. This risk is exacerbated in wormhole space where all citadels’ asset safety systems are permanently disabled. Upon the destruction of a citadel, every item stored inside is jettisoned into space. "Everything contained in those two [Keepstars] that couldn’t get out was going to drop, and that was a big draw," Brisc explained.

Truly, though, it was "the desire to do something that folks thought couldn’t be done that drove the move," Brisc said. The Initiative wanted "to do something that the EVE universe had decided was impossible."

Sowing the seeds 

As far back as 2017, a plan began to form, one that would require massive amounts of ships, ammo, and supplies. Rage is found deep within the shifting systems of wormhole space—a place where unstable connections to neighbouring star systems change multiple times a day. Though there are some clues as to where wormholes lead, there's no way to guarantee which of the 2,600 wormhole systems you might end up in until you jump through. 

And even if you do find Rage, you have to deal with Hard Knocks' defensive fleet of carriers and dreadnoughts. Those who survive still need to tackle the multiple doomsday weapons and turret defenses of the Keepstar itself, capable of shredding entire portions of a fleet in a single attack. Even I thought it was impossible. Back in 2017, I said that it was "never going to happen, but feel free to call me out if it does 5 years down the line." Consider me called out.

Since the wormholes leading to Rage were constantly collapsing, The Initiative couldn't rely on traditional supply lines to stay in the fight. If they wanted to survive the battle against Hard Knocks, they'd have to stockpile an arsenal inside of Rage—all without Hard Knocks even knowing.

Pando, an Initiative fleet commander, told me that "the very first freighter served more as a proof of concept than actual seeding." They stealthily moved it into Rage just to prove that it could be done. Once it was safely inside, the operation began in earnest. Over the next year, a team of pilots scouted entrances to Rage and maneuvered freighters full of supplies, hiding them carefully without Hard Knocks' knowledge. When you log out of EVE Online, the ship you're in also disappears after a short amount of time. The Initiative used this to their advantage, having alternate characters pilot freighters into Rage and then log off until the actual siege began.

One of those pilots, Arisene, told me about the immense pressure she was under. Compared to the high-profile transport of Hard Knock’s original Keepstar to Rage in 2016, this entire operation was much more akin to something from Metal Gear Solid but without the trusty cardboard box. "The secrecy of the whole thing was crazy," Arisene said. "I couldn't even tell some of my closest friends about the op before it happened."

She described the most stressful part as "finding routes and getting a lot of freighters through low-security space to the connections into Rage." If at any point someone had discovered them and their precious cargo en route, then the entire operation could have been compromised. They had some particularly close calls with their cumbersome Charon freighters, including when two hostile scouts zipped past the freighter as its temporary cloaking ran out. Another time saw her tackled and held by a hostile cruiser, only to have an ally rescue at the last moment before more hostiles arrived. "It was amazing they didn't kill us then, and we were definitely afraid of someone figuring out where we were going and what we were carrying," she said.

Out of the entire original invasion force of over 300, you could count on your fingers the number of people who actually knew what was going on beforehand. After all, every new person who learned of the operation could have potentially leaked that intel to Hard Knocks. Loose lips sink ships. 

Knocking on the door 

After a year of planning, it was finally time to launch the full invasion. "Everybody was excited and a little scared. Pando had been hyping this as the ‘Mother of all Calls-to-Arms,’" Brisc said. The Initiative partnered with Goonswarm Federation and fielded nearly 700 ships. This was a massive event and everyone knew it, they just didn’t know who they were hitting or where. It wasn’t until the combined Initiative and Goonswarm forces were staring down at Fort Knocks that it became apparent what was actually going on. 

While Hard Knocks refused to speak to me about the event, we do have various sound clips and a recorded leak of their communications channels during the initial infiltration. To their credit, they handled it well. Past the initial shock, they immediately got to work on bringing more pilots home and scouting out the invasion. Despite their quick response, however, there was little that Hard Knocks could have done on such short notice with the combined forces of two of EVE Online's biggest empires armed and ready for a siege.

Brisc told me that their first task was to "destroy a number of [smaller star bases] that were in the system" to replace with their own. Fielding fleets of bombers, The Initiative was able to demolish each of them in seconds and create a beachhead. In conjunction with those freighters that seeded the system so many months ago, the invasion team started setting up in earnest. Some 200 or so stealth bomber pilots discarded their vessels in space and transferred into much larger Raven battleships, each almost a kilometer long and outfitted with cruise missiles capable of hitting a target 300km away. "[It was] a laborious process that we had to do because we didn’t have a citadel to stage out of in Rage," said Brisc. 

With the system in almost complete lock down, it was time to focus their efforts on Fort Knocks itself. Against such overwhelming odds, Hard Knocks decided not to sacrifice ships in order to mount a proper defense, leaving their Keepstars to hold their own. Even so, the Keepstars destroyed more than 60 ships during the first attack. But it wasn't enough.

Above: EVE alliances like The Initiative make amazing propaganda videos.

Rendezvous with death 

With its home overrun by, at this point, over a thousand hostiles, Hard Knocks had a major problem. It did the only thing it could have done and blew the proverbial Horn of Gondor for aid. Despite the anarchy that is wormhole space, the people who live there do tend to stick together and defend each other (usually).

Elly Artrald is a director and fleet commander of the alliance Of Sound Mind. As one of the first groups that Hard Knocks reached out to, she helped coordinate a rescue fleet. She said that the "overall reaction was a mix of ‘uh oh, this isn’t good’ and cautious optimism." Even by combining their numbers with the likes of Lazerhawks, No Vacancies, Hole Control, POS Party, and other wormhole alliances, the outlook was bleak, but defying the odds is what wormholers do for a living. "[It] was a lot to deal with and we didn’t expect Initiative to be by themselves."

Hard Knocks allies formed around 300 pilots and were determined to give it a shot. If they could just find an entrance to Rage they stood a small chance at defending the wormhole and its precious Keepstars. The rescue fleet was on its way.

The first step was to begin "rage rolling." In EVE Online, this is the process of continually collapsing wormholes, which opens new ones until you get a lucky connection to where you want to go. It’s a tedious process that uses very heavy ships to destabilize wormhole connections until they suddenly collapse. Do the math wrong and you’ll end up deep on the wrong side of nowhere, probably without a route home. Since The Initiative held control over the current entrance to Rage, the rescue fleet had a 1/500 chance to find an alternate route. Elly mentioned Michael1995 of Lazerhawks in particular: "They’re astonishingly fast rollers and seem to have infinite stamina. I don’t know what keeps M1995 awake but I want some."

Some 35 hours later, well into the invasion, the rescue fleet breached through and made its connection to Rage. Friendly ships poured in, rushing to rendezvous at Fort Knocks with Hard Knocks. They all knew that facing The Initiative head-on was never going to work. Instead, they had outfitted hundreds of Muninn heavy-assault cruisers. These ships boast extremely long range artillery capable of harassing The Initiative's fleet. As a much smaller and more nimble ship than The Initiative’s Ravens, they were consistently able to warp away before being hit back. Given the relatively light armor plating on the The Initiative's Raven battleships, it was a good choice. But, as happens all too often in EVE, one tiny mistake ruined everything.

The combined defense fleet was triangulating enemy positions using scanning probes in order to pin down and warp to specific distances from the attacking fleet. But when you’re wrestling with 1,500 ship signatures, the information overload can force errors. "The [fleet commander] tried warping to a few Ravens, couldn’t, and warped to a [different ship] instead," explained Elly.

When the other cruisers followed their commander, they warped into perfect range for The Initiative to perform a short-range bombing run on them, annihilating almost all of them in an instant. It was a mistake that led to the demise of the one and only major defensive effort. "This was basically like 50 percent UI glitch and 50 percent the kind of mistake that happens when people are tired and under a lot of pressure—it happens, but it sucks that it happened at this time and in this way," Elly said.

By the time the dust had settled, there was little left for Hard Knocks to do but escape with all the valuables that would fit in its ships and destroy what couldn't. The final hours saw the defeated corporation self-destructing its own capital ships and consolidating what else it could before The Initiative rolled over Fort Knocks and the surrounding structures. It might've taken a full year, but The Initiative pulled off what most thought impossible. All that was left was to sell the spoils.

The final bill stood at 150 ships lost to battle on each side, with hundreds more found in the Keepstar debris. The carnage brought with it about 2 trillion ISK worth of damage—mostly to Hard Knocks and their allies. Considering that 1.9 billion ISK will buy you a month of game-time (valued at $20), a rough conversion gets us to over $20,000 estimated losses. That's more than some of EVE's biggest heists ever.

"In a game that's been around as long as EVE, it's rare to do things that have never been done before," Brisc said. "It was probably one of the most fun experiences that I've had in EVE."

It's easy to sympathize with Hard Knocks' loss, but then again, they asked for it. When Fort Knocks was first built in 2016, senior director Jerzii Devil told us as much. "Nobody was invading us anyway," he said at the time. "Maybe this will make them try harder. People say we've painted a huge target on our backs, and that's exactly what we want."

And that's exactly what they got.