On October 5th, 2020, one of the alliances in the temporary mega coalition PAPI, the main aggressor in the war to evict goons from their space in World War Bee 2, began onlining a Keepstar in a NPC Delve system named FWST-8. This Keepstar, anchored by Fraternity, would signal the beginning of the end for The Imperium but only if it were permitted to online.

The Keepstar, which was anchored in secret, was suddenly the center of a lot of attention. The Imperium began forming massively to kill it, leaving the PAPI alliances to rageform to defend it.

TEST, one of the major PAPI alliances, had not prepared its members that this was going down as it was done in secret and so it was left getting whatever members it could into fleet. A long battle was kicked off where goons primary means of assault was the Stalingrad style strategy of bringing in small groups of longrange fit dreadnaughts into pings around the Keepstar. These dreads would die to the PAPI supercapitals and carriers that were formed on the Keepstar and then quickly be replaced as wave after wave of these small groups of capital ships were sent in for hours on end.

This strategy, spearheaded by the russian Drone Region Federation a couple of years before, proved effective in the end. The Keepstar died but only after The Imperium was bled on a staggering amount of around one trillion ISK worth of ships destroyed.

Fraternity immediately anchored a second Keepstar in the same system in a baller move.

The stage was set. Another battle just like this one would be fought the next day over that Keepstars onlining timer. This time however, PAPI would preping and prepare.

On October 6th, 2020, the second Fraternity Keepstar came out of onlining and began its repair timer. PAPI had multiple subcap fleets on grid as well as supercapitals, long range dreads and carriers parked on top of it. A wall had been built. The Imperium however, was going to contest it hard.

The second Keepstar was well prepared by PAPI, prepinged multiple times to ensure max numbers and all assets either brought to bear or on standby.

For a gruelling 14 hours, The Imperium threw battleships and dreads at the repairing structure. So many goon battleships died that day that a new record was set with the most battleships lost by one side in a single battle in the history of EVE but the more impressive record was the most pilots involved in a battle of all time. 8,825 human pilots (representing 11,258 accounts) were involved in the fight, with a peak concurrent total of 6,557 human pilots at one time.

Once the steam of battleships dried up to a trickle, goons were forced to increase the number of Stalingrad dreads they were suiciding into the Keepstar as well as throwing whatever subcaps they could into the meatgrinder. Ratting subcaps soon became the dominant sight of goon forces on the battlefield while they waivered on the idea of deploying supercapitals, which they never did. PAPI on the other hand had multiple supercapitals already in system of which a Horde Nyx was commissared as it turned out it was a goon spy who had been dropping dreads only days before joining Pandemic Horde. The Nyx had been shooting the Keepstar the whole time it was in system.

A TEST Hel also was lost as it disconnected and emergency warped off. It was caught and dreadbombed by goons.

Regardless of their steady and heavy losses, the goons managed to keep dps up on the Keepstar for most of the battle, finally succeeding to destroy it at the end. Summarized, goons had lost roughly one and a half trillion ISK in the battle in subcap and capital losses. The most notable losses in this battle were 307 out of 359 fielded dreadnaughts, 1227 out of 1275 battleships, 518 out of 532 combat battlecruisers and 419 out of 441 cruisers. Out of the roughly 2 trillion isk recorded destroyed in the battle, 600 billion belonged to PAPI, the rest being Imperium losses.

As the invasion of Delve still was arranged in battle lines at its borders, the war was still in full swing. Only days later, at 11th of October 2020, PAPI began anchoring another Keepstar. This time in the system of 319-3D in NPC Delve.

• “Imperium Sacrifices 250 Dreads to Kill Keepstar in FWST-8”, Imperium News Network, by Bill McDonough
• “A Tale of Two Keepstars in FWST-8”, The Ancient Gaming Noob, by Wilhelm Arcturus
• “Liveblog: FWST-8 Keepstar Part 2”, Imperium News Network, by Rhivre
• “Outnumbered in Eve Online: surviving the biggest battle in MMO history”, Polygon, by Charlie Hall
• “The Scope - Fury at FWST-8”, Youtube.com, by The Scope
• “A Tale of Two Keepstars, the Record-Breaking Battle in FWST-8”, New Eden Post, by Redline XIII
• “EVE’s Biggest Fight: FWST-8”, Imperium News Network, by Ban Syrin
• “Two Guinness World Records Titles Broken!”, EVE Online, by CCP Convict
• “Fury at FWST-8 Battle Report”, EVE Online, by CCP Convict