Awesome / EVE Online

Official Media

• This is EVE trailer, created with real player-submitted voice comms.
• The EVE Online: Citadel Trailer. It starts with a spokesman talking about how Citadel technology is the future while a sci-fi hipster looks on heroically. Blah, blah, boring... and then a Rokh slams through the announcement board, obliterating it while a fleet of players blows the Citadel to pieces amid wild cheers. CCP sure knows its audience.
  • CAN'T STOP THE ROKH!
• This Trailer for the Lifeblood Expansion. Never has Moon Mining looked so badass.

Storyline

• Old Man's Star: After a jump drive malfunction and subsequent freak asteroid impact killed the rest of his ship's crew and stranded it light-years away from its destination with no functional thrusters and limited life support, Ceul Darieux - aka "Old Man Darieux" - spent the next fifty years navigating to the Ouperia system and successfully constructing a stargate there in order to return home. What makes it even better is how the entire story feels just like the recounting of a disaster that happened to astronauts in real life and was successfully overcome by their ingenuity and skill.
• In YC 107, V. Salvador Sarpati, head of the Serpentis drug cartel, accomplished the impossible. He personally led the Serpentis' private army in an attack on a Gallente Federation naval base with the goal of hijacking the FNS Molyneux, a Soltueur-class Iapetan titan.^Details Just to make sure you understand the magnitude of this feat, the titans players can build and fly are second-generation "Promethean" titans, whereas Soltueurs are first-generation "Iapetan" titans. Second-generation titans designed to be smaller and more economical than first-generation titans, and the size difference is so great that comparing them is akin to comparing a guppy and a shark. Keep in mind that modern titans range from 13-18 kilometers long (scale provided here), and some fan-made examples of what true-scale Iapetan titans might look like: [1] [2] [3]. Against all odds, he succeeded, and then managed to make his way back to the Serpentis Prime system with his prize despite constant attacks from a horde of god-knows-how-many capsuleers who wanted the glory of killing him, which he later attributed to the (smaller) horde of capsuleers that decided they wanted to help him.
  
  TL;DR: Sarpati fought his way into the heart of a Gallente Federation naval base and hijacked New Eden's equivalent of the Death Star. Monumental Theft doesn't even begin to describe it.

Gameplay/Player-Generated

Perhaps the most awesome aspect of what EVE Online offers is the playing field that allows the boatload of entries below this sentence to happen. Everything on both this and the funny list is made all the better because almost all events in this game are caused by the players.

General

• A dark awesome moment of Manipulative Bastardry - Goonswarm disbanding BoB.
• Kartoon, Goon's CEO, freezing all of Goons' dreadnaught cache, removing all director roles, kicking every corp from the Goonswarm alliance except the wallet corp and the supercapital corp, and put the "Goonfleet" corp into the Band of Brothers alliance whose name they stole almost exactly a year before. The new Goon corporation is Goonwaffe and their alliance is "SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSO[LODRA]" Over all, he stole more than a trillion in ISK.
  • Kartoon also self-destructed some of the Goon dreadnaughts, though in his defense some of them were named names that when put together, read "seriously, fuck you kartoon, and niart too." (Niart being the guy who forgot to pay the bills.) Here's a pic of the destruction.◊
• As described on Cracked's "7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming", the "EVE Super Heist" gets one not for the scale of a battle, but the elaborate setup of a plot that's best described by Cracked as "what Ocean's Eleven would have looked like if it took place in the Star Wars universe". The story begins when the Guiding Hand Social Club (a group devoted to assassinations for profit, and looting their money and cargo for bonuses) is contracted to eliminate "Mirial", the CEO of the Ubiqua Seraph corporation. Certainly no small task. So, what does the Guiding Hand do to get an opportunity to kill Mirial? They got jobs at Ubiqua Seraph, and slowly worked their way up the ranks, with the leader of the Guiding Hand's hit squad becoming second-in-command of the entire firm. Then, after preparing for over a year in real-time play, the Guiding Hand struck with no mercy, destroying Mirial's Navy Apocalypse ship, completely emptied Ubiqua Seraph's accounts and hangers, stole everything that wasn't bolted down, destroyed whatever WAS bolted down, and rounded it off by frying Mirial's escape pod. The Guiding Hand's contractor paid a tidy sum of $500 in real-world money for the hit on Mirial, but that's chump-change compared to the $16,500 that they stole or destroyed in their raid of Ubiqua Seraph.
• The many exploits of Rooks And Kings, an elite PvP alliance that innovated various tactics for fighting while severely outnumbered that were difficult for less organized alliances to replicate. Although now dissolved there was a time when "Oh shit Rooks and Kings" was frequently followed by entire fleets being wiped out.
• The Goonswarm managed an incredible bit of awesome Manipulative Bastardry by not just repeating but ostensibly topping their takedown of Band of Brothers in September 2017. To make a long story short, they managed to turn Circle of 2's Council of Stellar Management rep to their side. When the heist came, Co2 suddenly found itself deprived of virtually everything and it's CEO copped a permaban from issuing threats in anger at the traitor. The long story can be found here, for those interested.
• How Scooter McCabe, attempting to scam a small-time player named Scottmw15 who made the mistake of insulting The Mittani's friend, used an alt to infiltrate Scott's corp of newbies (called Standing United) to find it was an NPC 'ratting labor camp out in Russian space, where they couldn't communicate with the Russians who would brutally murder them if they escaped. At first, Scooter made the entire corp's lives a living hell. After he found out Scott was the bad guy and the newbies were being forced to rat and suffer verbal abuse, Scooter used his main account to tell the Mittani how bad it was. After an Australian roaming group shoots him down and asks what he was doing out of curiousity, Scooter tells them about Scott. The leader of the group remembers him, and goes to collect the 100 million ISK bounty Scott placed on Scooter, only to demand 20 BILLION or Standing United was history. Scott snaps and starts kicking out every one of the corporation members to leave them stranded in Russian space, and Scooter informs Markonius that they have to save the newbies, and Scooter guides a fleet of Goons on Eve's first humanitarian-aid mission. Keep in mind this heroic effort came from the most notorious scammer in a world of scammers and jerks.
  • The parent alliance The Imperium has posted an article from the words of Scooter himself if you wish to read it.
• Doubles as a Crowning Moment of Funny, but the Goonswarm Federation killed off the first Blood Raider Sotiyo Shipyard that appeared in the recent Eve update with frigates. Then two TEST Alliance Interceptors swooped in and snatched loot from the Sotiyo's wreckage. Both ships died, but two BPC went with them: a Chemosh Dreadnought and a Molok Titan. With the second guy snagging the Molok BPC that survived from the first guy's wreck, and then the Molok BPC was destroyed with him. BPC don't have prices, but 430 Billion ISK worth of potential ships went up in smoke because the Goons couldn't keep space ninjas from stealing the BPC in the first place. That said, TEST couldn't get the BPCs either, but it truly reflects the nature of EVE that one Alliance immediately tries to steal the loot of the first Pirate Faction Sotiyo off the hands of competitors the moment everything came online.
• On September 27, 2018, BlueMelon, a prominent participant in the Eve Online Alliance Tournament, pulled off the most expensive heist in EVE Online to date. Seven years ago, BlueMelon was tricked and had his prized Erebus Titan stolen by Pandemic Legion, who kicked him from Corp shortly after. Seven years later, back in PL's good graces and planning to retire from the game, he made off with 18 Alliance Tournament ships - unique, irreplaceable ships distributed as Alliance Tournament rewards and most worth at least double the ISK of a single Titan in the modern day - worth 5.5 trillion ISK from PL's hangars. No revenge colder than one spent cooling seven years.

Major PvP Battles and Wars

• A notable encounter so much that it threatened to crash the server was a 3,000 player battle that had originally spawned from a group of alliances that had been forming up into PvP fleets.
  • The Battle of Asakai, as it became known, was not a planned battle at all (in fact, larger fights have happened but they were planned, pitched battles). Asakai started as the equivalent of a scrap between two corporations over a cobalt moon POS, a low-tier mining resource in lowsec (unclaimable ‘pirate’ space). This happens all the time in EVE Online, and would have not been notable had it not escalated so quickly (over 10 minutes, in game) into a battle that sucked in two of the bigger Coalitions in EVE online into a slugfest that rivaled a campaign to take entire star systems in nullsec (player owned space) and dragged in almost every major alliance (TEST, Goonswarm, Pandemic Legion) into a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
  • The trigger for this began with a nearby reinforcement team accidentally jumping a Leviathan Titan (read: very expensive ship) into the fight rather than ‘bridging in’ a support fleet into the system. Not only did this strand said support fleet several systems away, but it also stranded the Titan in lowsec when it got tackled and pinned down. With the initial group calling in reinforcements, the fight escalated as the reinforcements then called in their reinforcements (such as a fleet of dreadnoughts that were being transported nearby, as well as several more Titans) dragging in combat fleets from all over the surrounding regions and the situation escalated so quickly that time dilation (controlled lag, basically) slowed ‘game time’ to 10% of ‘real time’ ... but only for systems on the same server "blade" as Asakai, allowing people to race to the battle from all directions while the combatants struggled with the lag - including spectators from high-security space, only two gates away. Three Titans (none of which were the first Titan) were destroyed, as well as fifty Dreadnoughts, six Super Carriers, forty Carriers and numerous subcapital ships ranging from frigates to battleships all of which totaled the losses to 717 BILLION ISK ($22,000 USD). And this only happened because of a single misclick.
  • All that over a 150 million ISK low level moon mining structure.
  • So in conclusion, the crowning moments are: a Funny for Dabigredboat, the Titan pilot which triggered it all. The Awesome(s) go to CCP, for being Crazy-Prepared enough to be able to program in a controlled lag system so that the server wouldn't crash. Another Awesome goes to the HBC for winning, and another goes to the 3000 players involved in the fray.
• The Battle of Asakai was dwarfed on July 28 2013 with the battle of 6VDT between TEST Alliance and Goonswarm's CFC. The final engagement of The Fountain War has set the record as the largest online battle of any MMORPG ever with 4070 players at once with 2900 ships lost all totaling almost 2 TRILLION ISK.
• The epic Battle of B-R5RB, a record-breaking battle that made even Asakai and 6VDT look like playground scuffles occurred on January 27th, 2014 (incidentally one year to the day from the Battle of Asakai mentioned above) between the Pandemic Legion/N3 Coalition and the Clusterfuck Coalition/Russian Heavy Coalition that spiraled into a massive fight spanning a whopping 7,548 (at least) players, destroying 370 Dreadnoughts, 13 Supercarriers and 75 Titans, costing a whopping 11 Trillion ISK (To put this into perspective, official estimates put this figure to about $315,000 USD). After the battle, EVE Online placed a memorial called "Titanomachy", made out of a wrecked Titan husk, commemorating the battle the record-breaking loss of Titans.
  • And how did this happen? Someone on the N3 Coalition forgot to pay the bill on their fortification there.
• The 49-U6U Slaughterhouse. Taking place on the Chinese server Serenity, and against all odds, it eclipsed the B-R5RB Bloodbath only two months after the more famous Bloodbath of B-R5RB. While it is contested due to differences in economic value between servers, there were more ships destroyed in the Slaughterhouse than in the Bloodbath.
• One of the more important PvP fights in EVE Online history; the clash of political giants between The Imperium (formerly Cluster Fuck Coalition, composed of many longstanding leaders whose claim to fame has made it to news circles outside of EVE) and Moneybadgers Coalition and its allies (consisting of mostly other major low-sec groups that aren't with the Imperium, including big names like TEST Aliance and Pandemic Legion), culminating in what was first called "The Easter War" and later renamed "World War Bee" (named after the Goonswarm Federation's icon); a conflict containing multiple simultaneous battles that spanned M-OEE8 and its surrounding systems (29 March 2016) which saw The Imperium, who held dominant position over the game for years with no real challenge and was trying to expand its influence over low-sec regions in the past months getting counter-attacked hard and forced into retreat, with several allies leaving for Moneybadgers' side. It also set a new record on most null-sec PvP kills in one day. Some details can be seen in EVE Online Reddit here and here. As of 28 April 2016, Goonswarm Federation now only holds a fraction of its territory, having been driven out from their historic home in Deklein. Also, the Goon's old CEO Darius JOHNSON decided to come out of retirement and create a Goon splinter alliance off from Mittani-led Goonswarm. By late May, Goonswarm lost all nullsec holdings.
  • Now officially recognized by CCP Games!
  • Here is an article at PC Gamer and this on Rock Paper Shotgun which provides more coverage on how it actually starts.
  • It's also a crowning moment of awesome for the low-sec clans. Everyone thought that the Imperium would steamroll low-sec effortlessly, but they forgot one crucial thing. Since low-sec systems can't be permanently owned like null-sec systems, the fight for low-sec players is survival of the fittest. Thus, most low-sec clans require you to be a medium-to-high level before joining, making individual low-sec players much stronger than the average null-sec player. When the Imperium's initial attack got pushed back, they got serious and sent massive swarms of low-level players. The low-sec clans immediately set aside their blood feuds and united, and the fleets they assembled easily defeated Imperium fleets several times their size, often with low-sec casualties in the single digits. Eventually, even the massive Imperium was running low on troops to send in. In the end, the low-sec clans actually decided to make small invasions into the Imperium, and neatly crushed the Imperium wherever they went.
• On December 4, 2016, Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition united to finish up the last bit of Circle of Two's hold on the Tribute system, a Keepstar. A few days prior, it hadn't attacked, leading them to think that it had been disabled by a spy. It was a trap: it hadn't been disabled and the Keepstar proved to be fully armed and operational, causing a massive kill count. The Circle of Two also staged a sneak attack on their reinforcements after retreating from the system and scored massive casualties. However, at that point the battle was already lost and on Dec 13, 2016 the Keepstar was destroyed, becoming the first Keepstar that was fully operational to be destroyed in a fight.
• On August 3, 2018 yet another record-breaking battle occurred in X47L-Q. The battle was between The Imperium and the Northern Coalition over ownership of Keepstar Fortress. The Imperium damaged the Keepstar enough in this engagement to hopefully destroy it within a week but Northern Coalition dug in its heels and is trying to keep it alive. The totals clocked in at over 4500 active players, 50 titans destroyed, and super capital ship clash on a scale yet unseen, and the first-ever destruction of a Molok (the Blood Raiders Faction version of the Avatar Titan).