On the morning of 22 October, two threads climbed to the top of r/Eve with the same story: a large group of Ishtars, all lost to NPCs at the same moment. The screenshot was posted with the title "Many Chinese players synchronously lost to NPC at 01:34" and stayed in the subreddit's top 25 for about 45 hours, hitting rank 1. Nobody has explained it officially. What follows separates what the posts show from what the comments only guess.
What was actually posted
The first thread, titled "botnet ded" and tagged Propaganda, went up around 01:47 UTC on 22 October. It shows a list of losses and ships and little else, and its title already says what the author thinks happened (thread). About nine hours later a second poster shared the screenshot above, asking what kind of defect could cause it (thread). The title gives 01:34 but no time zone, so we will not guess one.
That is the whole factual core: a screenshot, shared on Reddit, in which many Ishtars appear to be lost together. One commenter pointed out that you can filter such a list by ship type, so the image alone does not prove the pattern is as clean as the title suggests. We could not verify the underlying killmails from the threads.
The theories in the comments
Players offered several explanations, and none is confirmed.
An outage. Some suggested a datacenter or regional internet problem. One user noted that if the machines running the clients had gone offline, the clients would not necessarily have closed, leaving ships sitting in a site. Others pushed back: a regional outage would not hit only Ishtars, and the ships would not die in the same site at the same moment. A related thread the day before reported connection trouble to Tranquility from the US, with one user linking a Guardian report on a London datacenter power outage on 20 October (thread). Nothing links that to the Ishtar losses.
Automation. Many commenters read the screenshot as a group of automated accounts that stopped responding together. Several accused specific groups of tolerating or running them. Those are accusations from anonymous users in a subreddit that loves a fight, and we are not repeating them as fact.
A single player. The least dramatic reading: one person multiboxing a large number of Ishtars whose PC or connection died. Several commenters pointed out that this is possible, and that the screenshot may show only one or two people's fleets.
Reports and bans
One commenter wrote that they had reported many of the ships when it happened and that around 70% had since come back with an "action has been taken" email. That is one player's account and we could not confirm it. Another said he received a batch of ban emails the same day. Neither amounts to an announcement. Fenris Creations has not commented in either thread, and we did not find an official statement on the forums or news pages at the time of writing.
The mechanics argument it set off
The "botnet ded" thread turned into a familiar design debate. Some players want tethering disabled for NPC combat, or an NPC combat timer that blocks tether the way a PvP timer does. Others replied that bubbling a structure, or logging off and returning, makes catching these ships hard. Another thread idea was a captcha-like check, which others said would be a nightmare for real players mid-fight. These are proposals from players only. Nothing was announced about changes to tethering or anti-botting.
Why it matters
Ishtar farming has long been a lightning rod, and a screenshot like this reopens it fast. It also arrives while a CSM 21 election is under way, where several candidates are talking about game integrity, and in the same week as a row over EULA breaches that we covered in our CSM 21 voting piece. Expect the topic to come back if Fenris Creations publishes numbers on bans.
For now the honest summary is short. Many ships were lost together, the cause is unknown, accounts may or may not have been banned, and the community has strong opinions. We will update if Fenris Creations says anything.
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