EVE Online 'Death Star' Destroyed In An Epic Seven Hour Battle Involving Over 5,000 Players
It involved 5,700 players and was the end result of a month long siege. Earlier this month players of EVE Online destroyed a vast player-built Death Star-style battle station in an epic seven hour long battle.
The campaign against the M-OEE8 Keepstar battle station involved two factions, Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition, fighting against the owners of the Death Star, TEST and Circle-of-Two. The whole battle was streamed live to Twitch as the two sides duked it out.
As a mark of what an achievement it was, the destroyed Keepstar was hugely expensive to build, costing billions of ISK the game's virtual currency. Much like the Death Star from Star Wars the Keepstar is also massive, around 100 miles tall, and contains a super-powerful weapon that can take out whole groups of ships with one shot.
Website evenews24.com reported that "At approximately 20:25 the Keepstars super weapon fired for the first time during the battle aimed at the Pandemic Legion Typhoon fleet that was skirmishing with the Test Nightmares and CO2 Machariels destroying a number of ships. For reasons that have not been verified, DARKNESS. along with ChaosTheory. Blades of Grass, Solyaris Chtonium, proceeded to jump in a fleet of 28 dreadnoughts right on top of the CO2 Keepstar and in range of its primary weapons. Of out those 28 dreadnoughts 20 were destroyed in rapid succession and 8 managed to extract safely." So taking it down was not without massive causalities.
The battle has also made history in the MMORPG as it was the first fully operational Keepstar to be annihilated in the game—and with the huge number of players involved it has officially been named the largest battle in EVE Online's history.
According to Fraghero this is how the battle went down:
The battle played out in typical Star Wars fashion- the attackers thought they had the upper hand, almost lost, then pulled through in the end. Rumors on Reddit said that there was a spy inside the ranks of TEST and Circle-of-Two who shut down the battlestation. The attackers, thinking they were safe from the Keepstar’s main weapon, rushed into battle with gusto. However, as soon as the fight for M-OEE8 began, those rumors were proven to be false, as the Keepstar station annihilated a decent size of the attacking force.
The timing of its destruction is perfect, coming just a week before the new Star Wars spin-off film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story comes out. The movie tells the tale of a ragtag group of rebels who steal the plans to the Death Star, sewing the seeds for its eventual destruction at the end of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.
