Second Massive M2-XFE Battle Breaks EVE Online Servers

Last weekend, EVE Online players set a new record for the most destructive battle in a game during the Massacre at M2-XFE. Two days later, with the hull timer on the Imperium Keepstar due to become vulnerable, things once again escalated in the M2-XFE system in what would have been another record-breaking space battle if the servers hadn’t buckled under the strain.

According to CCP Games, the battle saw over 13,700 pilots join the battle in three separate systems. “To put this in perspective, approximately 35% of all online pilots in the game were situated in just these 3 systems,” said the studio. “[. . .] This fight dwarfed any previous engagement in New Eden. Had every player who was trying to get into M2-XFE successfully done so, it would have nearly doubled the current Guinness World Record for concurrent players in a single fight with approximately 12,000 players.”

“These numbers are unrivaled - and unrivaled numbers in New Eden lead to uncharted territories when it comes to performance. Neither side of the war, or CCP, can, could or will be able to predict the server performance in these kinds of situations.”

The unprecedented numbers caused a number of issues and weird things to happen. “Both during and after the fight, players experienced things that don’t happen under normal circumstances,” CCP explained. “Things like ships disappearing, ships reappearing, ships not appearing in the right systems – even after going through the jump tunnel, ghost killmails, duplicated ships/mods where a wreck with loot was in M2-XFE but the fitted ship was in T5ZI-S, bridging Titans getting moved to the system it was bridging people to, among others.”

Because of these issues, the Imperium Coalition’s forces were able to easily descend on the unfit and undefended Titans as they jumped in to the battle and were able repel the attack in what could only be described as a turkey shoot. CCP Games, however, maintains that they will not be reimbursing players for ships lost due to server issues during the battle.

“As per our usual policy Customer Support won't be reimbursing any losses or moving players between systems. It is our policy to not get involved with fleet fights, and that policy has been upheld during this war – for both sides,” said CCP. “We will be intervening as little as possible in the repercussions of this battle. We will not be taking away any insurance payouts for ships that are still alive, removing looted duplicated modules, or going into hangars to destroy ghost titans that survived. We will only consider moving players who are completely unable to log into the game, if there are any such cases. Players that can log into the game will have to move themselves.”

The players themselves have mixed feelings about CCP’s non-intervention and have been voicing out on the EVE Subreddit. Some players are say that they’re perfectly fine with the decisions, while others say that they should be reimbursed for their losses because it was CCP’s servers that caused the issues in the first place.

Meanwhile, the war between the PAPI and the Imperium Coalitions continues to run its course in New Eden.