commission done by zaezar
Original can be found: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13194996/

In the picture you see me standing next to a ship that I flew during a particularly significant fight in EVE Online. (It was a Chimera Carrier, for anyone who might be interested.) I know it’s hard to tell what ship, but the thing’s supposed to be a bit over three kilometers long, so it’s tough to get it all in a picture. So, I’m just touching a damaged bit of the hull here in the ship. Keeping true to form on these uploads, there’s going to be a massive wall of text with the full story behind what happened. It’s a gamer thing, so I won’t be offended if you just skip the story.

NON-GAMER SYNOPSIS:
It’s an EVE-Online story about a battle that I fought in about three years back. It was a defining moment for myself and a number of people that I was close with at the time. The short version of the story is that, at the time we were living in a part of the game-universe that allowed unrestricted PvP. At the time we were bored of not having many good fights, so we decided to do a weekly event to go find fights. Also, our group’s leader Fournone and myself had both spent at least six months training for some massively powerful ships and wanted an opportunity to use them, so those got worked into the event. The event, called “Friday Night Lights”, lasted about six weeks. The story here is about the second week’s happenings. There was a group that was trying to push us out of our home system. We caught them half way through moving in. A 20vs20 fight ensued and lasted about fifteen minutes. Because of the way we escalated the fight with really late-game gear and took overkill to such an extreme the group we fought gave up. We had successfully retaken our home system of I0AB-R. In the days following, the 1,000-person alliance we were part of treated those of us who fought in this battle like celebrities. That was kind of a cool experience. Also a few people told their friends about that battle and those friends started playing EVE because they thought this was cool. It was fun being “that awesome guy from the story” for a few weeks.

Full Story:
A long time ago in a backwater system that nobody really cared about, a couple of nerds prepared to fight a pitched battle over nothing of any particular importance. That is, the short version of the story. The long version, as many long versions are, happens to be a bit more interesting.

For anyone interested in reading this story any further, I should probably put a bit of a preface on this. This is going to be a “nerdy gamer” post, so I will take no offense if 98% of you skip the read behind this image. EVE Online’s a fun game that relies a lot on a concept called “emergent game-play”. What this means is that the game itself is designed to be as much of a sandbox as possible, which in turn allows players to generate a lot of content that would otherwise not be possible in other games. Some years ago, the game’s developers, CCP, decided to ask players to share their stories as part of an advertising campaign known as the “I Was There” campaign. While it’s been a long time sense that advertising campaign ended, it’s still a common thing for EVE players to share stories. (In most MMORPGs, after a few weeks everybody’s experienced the latest quest-line. In EVE, most of the content consists of unscripted events between different groups of players.) Anyways, bringing this rambling preface to a close, some of you might remember that a while back I posted this http://www.furaffinity.net/view/12630749/ and shared a story about an attempted repossession that turned into an assassination with a hint of corporate espionage. The story behind the image you’re seeing today takes place about a year later. The corporation that I was with, Gallente Trade Union, (corps are this game’s version of guilds) had developed and joined an alliance named “Moon Warriors Alliance”. That is to say, we had united with a few other corporations under a single banner. The alliance we joined lived in a part of the game-universe where PvP was unrestricted and a daily occurrence for everyone. After a month or so of settling in, things got to a point where our alliance was a fairly dominant force in the area. While hostile raiding parties would come along every now and then, we were at the point where nobody that we were fighting against would make any serious attempts at evicting us from the area. Believe it or not, this became a problem. A lot of people that had joined us had begun to play EVE because they saw youtube videos of huge battles between hundreds of people. When the biggest thing that you come across is a 10-man raiding party, it’s fairly easy to be disappointed. So, we had decided to do something about this. More specifically, I grabbed initiative and decided that if nobody was going come to us for a fight, then we would go them and beat the snot out of their stuff until they showed up and fought us. Also, the Corp leader and I both started playing because we saw this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXWf-l71MY4 and wanted to fly the carrier shown in it. We’d both trained for six months and gotten the ship, but lacked a good excuse to use it. (They tend to be a little over-powered for anything shy of a 25vs25 fight, so, we really needed an excuse.)

Eventually the campaign got approval from the people in charge of the alliance and was named “Friday Night Lights”. The thing that had really sold leadership was the fact that everyone I wanted to take a shot at happened to be pressuring our home system pretty hard. A fair number of our members had actually changed to a new home-base by the end of the first week of this campaign. The first week was really quiet. We had formed up a fleet of about 20 people and made the mistake of picking a quiet part of the universe to hunt in. The second week’s events, now those were something special. The second week is what inspired this picture by the way. Our home system had all but been abandoned because raiding parties had started stepping up their harassment. We got really lucky with our timing as well. One of the groups that were pushing us out were in the middle of trying to move in. To force a fight, we couldn’t show the ships that Fournone (The corp leader) and myself were flying. At least night right at the outset we couldn’t. Luckily we were able to enter the fight in a rather peculiar way. EVE does a good job of balancing powerful ships. Most ships can move between systems on their own with stargates. (They’re functionally identical to the stargates in Mass Effect if you’re wondering how that works.) For the ships we were flying to move between systems, another player had to equip a specific item and then activate it, creating a beacon that the ship Fournone and myself were using could jump to. So having said that, we were able to hide the big guns and let the main body of our fleet go in to draw our enemy into a fight that would be very difficult to run away from. About two minutes into the fight, the call went out for us to jump in. At this point, the battle was a 20vs20 comprised, for the most part, of mid-sized battlecruiser-class ships. But, sense we had Carriers on the field, things became a little one-sided. (Carriers are capable of three things. The first is an impressive ability to heal other players. Second, they have around ten times the health as ships which are one step down in size, meaning they have a fairly impressive tank. Third, the damage output isn’t bad.) The fight itself was about five or ten minutes long following that. A precise blow-by-blow has been lost to my memory. This battle did happen a little over three years ago mind you. Following this battle a lot of things happened in quick succession. While we did have one other good fight that night, it was this battle that was important. You see, the group we fought was trying to move in and, well, we ended up scaring them off in a big way. Honestly, it lead to a number of us being kind of heroes within our alliance. I know that’s not really saying much until you think about it. We had a 1,000-person alliance. When that many people are familiar with your work and respect you for it, that’s kind of an awesome feeling.

Following this battle, there were a few unexpected impacts on myself as a person. First and foremost, this battle served to satisfy the wishes of a lot of people. Primarily, the people who I had been friends with for some time were happy that they got a good fight on a scale that they had really been looking forward to. Aside from that, the fact that we re-secured our home system with that battle propelled me a bit higher within our alliance’s leadership structure. The most meaningful thing though, was that it set a tone for a lot of things that came after. On a personal level, I actually gained a lot of confidence from that. Not only could I plan something for, and lead, twenty people, but also I could lead them to success. On a less personal level, it affected everyone else who participated in much the same way. It was almost a watershed moment for us. We learned that we could succeed and hold our own against more than we thought ourselves capable of. This battle, in many ways, paved the way for a lot of things that followed. Because of our success here, we ended up perusing a laundry list of other objectives later down the line. But those are other stories for another time. And that’s the story of how I lead a fleet to retake I0AB-R.