EVE Online - Fleet Battles Article @ Eurogamer

Jim Rossignal's second article on EVE Online at Eurogamer. This one is regarding fleet battles.

The flipside to the small gang battles that characterise much of EVE's PVP is fleet warfare. The number of people participating in EVE Online's fleet battles at any one time regularly sits in the neighbourhood of hundreds. Fleet commanders have even adapted their tactics to take into account the lag pauses that such large numbers of players entail - pauses that might last up to twenty minutes. They generally move their ships into position long before the expect to engage, and way before they even expect be able to see what is happening.

To many gamers, even many EVE players, this kind of brokenness in a game seems ludicrous. Why would anyone want to play a game where the fundamental mechanisms don't work as they should? Why would anyone put up with twenty-minute lag? The answer is that there's a much, much bigger picture. It's one that dominates everything in EVE Online.

The reason why so many EVE players want to sink thousands of man hours into laggy, drawn-out fleet combat involving hundreds of ships has less to do with the indulgence of Star Wars fantasies of mass space combat, and far more to do with EVE Online's socio-economic metagame. But what do those big words mean? Well, it's all down to money. EVE players want their virtual currency, and the best way to get a lot of it is to stake out some territory in 0.0 space. To do this, you need friends. Lots of friends.