"were you there?"
Odysemus asked that question of the whole corp on April 8, 2026, and then answered it himself. This is the story of the days around that message, told as far as possible by the people who lived it, in the words they typed at the time. We have stitched the quotes together and added just enough narration to keep the timeline straight. Spelling is theirs.
Before: "First CTA"
The first weekend of April 2026 brought a new deployment, as Imperium forces pushed into Amarr space and the alliance moved to meet them. The corp fleet-pings channel lit up.
Pict1on: @everyone LETS GO BOY'S First CTA of the new deployment!
CTA1 pings do not usually come with that many capital letters. Within a couple of days they would seem understated.
The night: "Its time to make history"
By the afternoon of April 6, the system was already fuller than most pilots had ever seen one. Kloria put the number in the ping.
LETS GO 5.5k in system already, ITS TIME TO MAKE HISTORY!
A few hours later, Pict1on followed with the most efficient fleet ping ever written:
Pict1on: @everyone Login login login
What followed was the kind of night EVE players tell each other about for years. Time dilation2 slowed the grid to a crawl. Modules took forever to cycle. Pilots who blinked found themselves at the login screen. In corp chat, people were already doing the arithmetic on what they were part of.
One TNF pilot: definitely is the biggest since it holds the record for most players in a system
The same pilot, a minute later, with the joke everybody was thinking:
One TNF pilot: most players in a system and most login attempts?
And Pict1on, confirming it for the record:
yub broke two world records
The morning after: "wait for alliance pings"
The morning of April 7 was quieter in space and louder in chat. A lot of pilots had been disconnected mid-fight, and the server was asking everyone to stay off it rather than pile back in at once. Motty 007 took to the announcements channel with practical advice.
Motty 007: @everyone for those of you like many that couldnt get back in or logged in space etc from the tidi shitfest last night. Before you log on wait for alliance pings or ask people before logging on. People will do it anyway but lets not yeet stuff unnecessarily.
Among the pilots who had been knocked out was Xander Ryn, who had brought something special to the fight. This was meant to be his first flight in a force auxiliary, the capital-class logistics ship.
I was at least hoping to rep some folks with my first FAX flight, but it did not happen.
Earlier that day he had been more hopeful, and more practical:
Xander Ryn: Hopefully a ping will go out soon to regroup.
If you want the full story of how the newbie of three years earlier got there, we wrote Xander's profile in June.
Voices from the grid
Corp chat over those two days reads like a field diary. A few entries:
- Emperor Caligula: "that fleet was so fun, i actually only spent 12 hours in fleet and i got on 5 kill mails."
- Trajon Thrax: "It was brutal, but I guess I can say I was there... 14 hours straight. I can see me now. An old bitter vet, telling my war stories. 🤣"
- Ramsey Lightseeker, an hour into the login queue: "Been trying to join the fight for more than 30 min now! LOL" He spent the wait reading local and wondering whether people knew "this is only a game."
- miki Terona made it onto grid before the crash ("i did attend though") and checked the killboard the next morning with relief.
- oli Padecain, two months into nullsec, squeezed in dinner and hoped to "join the fight" in the two hours he had.
- Tamanade, stuck with an early start at work, sent the fleet off with "Have fun guys, kill a nerd or two for me please !!"
- SadisticSloth counted 22 kills on his own killboard by the end of it.
- Xander Ryn, looking ahead: "Agreed on lots of fights, this should be great."
Meanwhile, in corp chat: "RL isk for ya"
Not everything that week was about the battle. With Fanfest a month away, a corpmate asked what currency Iceland uses, since he could not seem to find it on Google. Pict1on, who lives there, was delighted to help.
Pict1on: Isk
Pict1on: Íslenskar krónur
Pict1on: RL isk for ya
He then supplied a currency converter, because of course he did. It is good to know that, even in the middle of a record-breaking war, TNF will stop everything for a pun.
Day three: "No wonder there is tidi"
Later on April 8 the grid had settled into a slower, grumpier rhythm, and local chat had filled up with spam. Odysemus, never one to suffer in silence:
Odysemus: I have blocked like 50 people so far. No wonder there is tidi in the system 😛
That day, in the PvP channel, Trajon Thrax shared a personal best. He had joined TNF barely three weeks earlier.
I got 77 yesterday and that has to be my record for one day. It was like shooting "kids in a barrell"
The message: "Hear, don't listen"
Rewind to the small hours of April 8, before the spam and the personal bests. Odysemus posted the message this article is named after. It became one of the most-reacted posts of the spring. It opens the way his posts always do, with "Time and Emotionally Appropriate Greetings," and then it does something unusual for a corp leader after a rough night. It lists everything that went wrong.
Odysemus: I was frusterated... I was disappointed.. ... by the crashing. ... by the tidi. ... by a server that didn't ever really recover.
The list goes on: the losses, the "wasted time." And then a turn:
Odysemus: but.. I was there.
He knew what the next few days in comms would sound like, and he told everyone how to handle it.
Today, tomorrow and for a while you will hear a lot of disgruntled comments about the battle. Hear, don't listen.
Then came the list of things you could count on: the enemy showing up again, "the development of new tactics, the process of discovery," content "in every capacity," and above all:
Odysemus: you were part of history! The largest PvP battle in gaming history.
Speaking as "an old vet," he asked the newer pilots to trust that what came next would be "well worth the cost, even if in the heat of the moment it doesn't seem that way." He quoted Churchill ("Blood, toil, tears and sweat"), because a war deserves a war speech. And he signed off with the line TNF has been repeating ever since.
Oh yeah, I was there.
His last instruction: "lets stay positive and maintain those authentic, TNFed positive vibes. Much love @everyone!"
The week after: "friggin awesome"
Odysemus was right about the content. The fighting spilled across the region, and the corp's killboard chat ran hot all week. Motty 007 had a one-line review for Judas Aralius:
Motty 007: Im not kidding Judas, friggin awesome.
Judas had his own advice for anyone keeping score, posted the next day: "Every single kill counts. Thats all you have to focus on is the next one, doesnt matter if its 10 or 1000."
By April 9 the race on the alliance leaderboard was close enough that Pict1on had to remind everybody of the priorities:
Pict1on: How ever this ends up we just need to beat the lemons ❤️
Nobody has yet explained the lemons to the newsroom. We have chosen not to ask.
The official record
On April 16, Odysemus updated his message with a link to CCP's own write-up of the battle on the official EVE Online news site, and shared it in the public newsroom channel too. It is not every week your corp's weekend shows up in the developer's news feed.
Afterword
Big fights in EVE are rarely clean. Servers struggle, plans fail, and the post-battle mood can sour fast. What a corp does in the forty-eight hours after a rough night tells you more about it than any killboard.
In TNF, those forty-eight hours produced a newbie FAX pilot shrugging off a disconnect, a three-week member setting a personal record, an Icelandic currency lesson, and a corp leader telling everyone to hear the grumbling and not listen to it.
Six months on, ask anyone in TNF about April 2026, and you will get the same answer.
Oh yeah. I was there.
Notes
Call To Arms: an alliance-wide ping meaning "everyone who can, undock now." Usually reserved for the fights that matter.↩
When too many pilots are in one system, EVE slows time down there so the server can keep up. Read more on the EVE University wiki. At its worst, time dilation runs the game at a tenth of normal speed, which is roughly how fast everyone's patience was running by the second night.↩
