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Split-screen war banner: the Minmatar Fleet fist logo on the red left against the CVA crest on the gold right, divided by an orange rift; ships scattered across a Providence starfield.

·event MAJOR

The Providence War (2024-25): The Wallet, the Rat Cult, and a Keepstar Worth Watching

Image: Community propaganda art (Minmatar Fleet / FL33T), r/Eve · Community / fair-use editorial

For two decades Providence belonged to Curatores Veritatis Alliance and its Not-Red-Don't-Shoot doctrine. In 2024 faction-warfare alliance Minmatar Fleet (FL33T) argued CVA's nullsec wealth bankrolled Amarr militia, and made the region a grinding wallet-war. It peaked in August 2025 when The Initiative. destroyed the Keepstar of Absolute Order, a much-maligned group CVA hired to defend, in a CCP-promoted spectacle costing ~778.9B ISK. CVA was bled hard but not exiled; it still holds the region.

all nullsec
The Scope: Carnage Peaks in Providence & Lowsec · CCP Games / The Scope

The Providence War (2024-25): The Wallet, the Rat Cult, and a Keepstar Worth Watching

Some EVE wars are fought to take ground. This one was fought to make a point. For roughly two decades the nullsec region of Providence had belonged to Curatores Veritatis Alliance (CVA) and the Provi-bloc, the last serious practitioners of the Not-Red-Don't-Shoot doctrine - a wealthy, Amarr-roleplay-flavoured institution that almost nobody could be bothered to evict. In 2024 a faction-warfare alliance decided the bother was worth it, not by conquering Providence but by bleeding it. The campaign that followed climaxed in August 2025 with a CCP-promoted Keepstar kill watched by thousands, and it ended in a way that resists a clean headline: the showpiece structure fell, the hired defenders were humbled, and the twenty-year holdout was still standing when the smoke cleared.

The wealth and the grudge

CVA founded itself on the last day of November 2004 and has held Providence longer than most EVE alliances have existed. Its signature doctrine, NRDS - Not Red Don't Shoot - made the region a rare welcoming corner of nullsec, governed by a kill-on-sight list rather than the default shoot-every-neutral posture of the rest of the map. That openness, and a refusal to expand much beyond the region, is exactly why Providence survived as long as it did: it never held enough wealth to justify the cost of taking it, so the rest of New Eden mostly let it be.

The challenger had no such patience. Minmatar Fleet Alliance, ticker FL33T and commonly called Minmil, founded itself on the first day of 2023 as a Minmatar-aligned faction-warfare group. In the FL33T telling, roughly eight months before its mid-2024 war update the alliance uncovered what it called a shocking truth - that one side of Amarr/Minmatar faction warfare was being bankrolled by nullsec money, and that the money was CVA's. The argument was that decades of nullsec hoarding had let CVA quietly fund Amarr militia entities, and the war was framed as a reckoning for it.

That casus belli is worth handling carefully. The richest single account of the war is FL33T's own propaganda, which opens by asking who will win, "CVA's wallet or the morale of a crazy rat worshipping cult," and disarms itself in the next breath: "I'd like to say it's unbiased, but look at who's posting." The rat cult is FL33T's own self-deprecating brand, and the funding claim is its argument, not an audited fact - CVA-side commenters openly mocked the premise, with one laughing at "the idea of CVA having hoards of absurd wealth."

Glassing the warzone, then the root

Minmil's first move was not against Providence at all. Per its own report, the alliance burned the entire Amarr faction-warzone first - in its framing, a place where a wallet alone could not purchase victory. Roughly two months later it claimed to have destroyed the last Amarr militia structure in the warzone, and pointed prospective pilots toward the replacement Amarr-FW groups it had found enjoyable to fight.

Only then did Minmil turn, as it put it, to "the root of the corruption, Providence." The pivot happened over 2024, and from there the war became a grinding, near-weekly affair: skyhooks, moon drills, refineries, and citadel timers, week after week. CVA-side battle reports treated the violence as ambeint weather. "Providence is burning," one recurring AAR author opened, before adding that nobody should pretend to be surprised, since it happened every week.

CVA's wallet war

The cost climbed fast, at least in the attackers' accounting. FL33T claimed that CVA, a group that rarely lost a trillion ISK in a year, "paid the rust price of 1 trillion ISK in 6 months, with several trillions paid by their allies," and that Providence went from a region that rarely cracked 500 billion ISK destroyed monthly to one losing one to two trillion every month. Those are partisan figures from the side doing the killing, and should be read as a claim about pace rather than a balance sheet - but every account agrees the region's destruction had jumped to a different tier.

CVA did not fight that war alone, and frequently did not fight it in person. It leaned on its defensive coalition, RMC - which Minmil glossed two ways, the Red Menace Coalition and the RMT-flavoured insult Real Money Coalition (an accusation, not a fact, and presented here only as the attackers' jibe). RMC carried much of the actual timer-holding, since by the attackers' account CVA rarely turned up to defend its own timers. Component groups named across the reports include D3ad End, which repeatedly committed carriers and faxes, plus RED and AAA. Beyond the coalition, in the FL33T account RMC and CVA reached for hired guns: the mercenary outfits BIGAB and Snuffed Out (SNUFF) were paid to evict RC, a rival pirate-rooted coalition in the region. Who paid BIGAB is disputed across the threads, but SNUFF kept turning up on the defenders' side in the big fights afterward.

Enter Absolute Order

When numbers alone were not winning fights - FL33T claimed CVA's side outnumbered it as much as two-to-one and was still getting rolled - the coalition reached for a more contentious reinforcement. CVA and RMC brought in Absolute Order (AO), a large, recruitment-driven group that arrives in nearly every conversation about the war pre-loaded with controversy.

The archive treats AO factually and at altitude. It was a much-maligned in-game group, built around aggressive recruitment of new and defeated players and fielding waves of cheap, replaceable doctrine hulls; it drew heavy criticism for its highsec conduct and for a much-mocked donation drive. What matters for Providence is narrower: CVA hired AO as additional bodies to defend the region, AO staged out of the system Y-MPWL behind a Keepstar it had acquired from a departing alliance, and that Keepstar became the war's trophy. AO's defenders, for their part, argued the group simply showed up and fought regardless of the odds - which, whatever else is true, it did.

The summer bash

By August 2025 the war drew the kind of attention that ends in a set-piece. Fraternity. and Siberian Squads (SB-SQ) had already deployed for summer content, with TEST present in the region in body but, in the running joke, mostly in soul - an alliance that staged up but rarely undocked. Then The Initiative. (Init) committed in force. It brought a roughly 600-pilot Rokh/Eagle/Tengu fleet, contested and took Y-MPWL sovereignty, flipped the skyhooks, reinforced AO's Keepstar, and - in a tidy bit of structure warfare - anchored its own Fortizar on the Keepstar grid, timing it to finish just after the Keepstar's armor timer.

The armor fight itself became a marathon. By the CVA-side AAR, roughly 580 defenders (AO Rokhs and Feroxes, CVA and RED Nightmares, D3ad End carriers, AAA artillery Naglfars, SNUFF cruise Barghests) faced about 780 Init pilots and another several hundred third parties who shot more or less everyone. It dragged for hours at heavy time dilation, came down to whether the attackers could pin Rokhs long enough to kill the structure, and ended on a knife's edge: in the author's words, "Keepstar is reinforced with 46 seconds left." The defenders had narrowly failed to save it, and the consensus afterward was almost comic - a single missing piece, the humble dictor, would have held the line.

The final timer was the spectacle. Per the community cinematic report, "the last timer drew the attention of all New Eden. CCP promoted the event, The Scope hovered on scene, and streamers broadcast it live. Local surged past 3,700... Time dilation locked the system at 10%, dragging the battle into an endurance test that stretched for hours." On 24 August 2025 the Keepstar died. The single killmail registered 2,514 attackers and a killmail value near 239 billion ISK; the cinematic author put the multi-day tally at about 778.9 billion, while cautioning that "reporting might not be fully accurate." On the decisive killmail TEST was in fact the second-largest attacking bloc, so the no-show gag undersells its part in the kill. CCP's own framing rounded the spectacle up - "nearly 800 billion ISK worth of damage... with over 3,200 ships destroyed and thousands of capsuleers taking part" - and its in-character Scope wrap-up a week later noted simply that another Keepstar had been downed at Y-MPWL.

The bleed and the aftermath

The fall of one structure was not the fall of a region, and the war's edges stayed ragged. The anti-CVA effort was always a loose pile-on rather than a coordinated conquest: Brave Collective brought around a hundred pilots to burn AO Eagles, SB-SQ shot RMC out of long habit, and assorted RC and smaller groups turned up to tip individual fights. CVA also bled talent - the attackers counted defecting FCs among the people they were now fighting, naming Gian Bal as one of CVA's best who had crossed over, later seen leading a Minmil fleet. (The well-known commentator Jin'taan is sometimes folded into this story; his public CVA departure belongs to the earlier 2018 fall of Provi-bloc, not this war, and is not counted here.)

The honest outcome is a draw that leans to the defender's survival. The decisive loss was AO's showpiece Keepstar, not Providence. The Initiative. deployed for content and left without taking sovereignty. Minmatar Fleet, the alliance that started it all, ended the period holding nullsec sov of its own - but elsewhere, not in Providence, and the FW-purists in its own comment threads kept telling it to "move to null sec already." Absolute Order lost its null foothold and retreated to highsec, where it was still active and recruiting late in 2025; it was humbled, not destroyed. And CVA, bled badly but not exiled, still holds the region. Unlike the 2018 exile, no conqueror walked away with Providence. This is recent, partisan-sourced history, documented almost entirely by the people who fought it, and the region simply went back to burning every week - which, for Providence, is the natural state of peace.

Returning player note

If you left during World War Bee 2 and are wondering whether the old set-pieces still happen, this is your answer. The August 2025 Y-MPWL Keepstar fight ran at 10% time dilation with 3,700 in local, CCP promoted it on its own channels, and community cinematics covered it like a sporting event - the genre is alive, even if the server still groans under it. The mechanics have shifted, though: carriers that once shredded a Rokh wall now turbofeed against modern subcap fleets, and structure timers turn on small things like whether anyone remembered to bring dictors and a bubble catapult.

Providence is also still Providence. CVA holds it, NRDS is still the doctrine, and the region remains a perpetual low-grade war zone five jumps from a highsec exit - the place to deploy a squad for a weekend or train a junior FC, exactly as it has been for years. If you want to drop in, both sides were openly recruiting through the war, and in the words of one local, there is never -not- a war in providence. The honest caveat for a returning reader: nearly all of this is reddit-sourced and partisan, the big ISK figures are one side's claims, and the war's broader settlement was never tidy.

Campaign stats

Indeterminate
System
Y-MPWL · Providence
Sides

Curatores Veritatis Alliance

Anchor

On side: CVA, RMC, and hired Absolute Order (defenders)

Absolute Will

Partner

On side: CVA, RMC, and hired Absolute Order (defenders)

Snuffed Out

Mercenary

On side: CVA, RMC, and hired Absolute Order (defenders)

The Initiative.

Anchor

On side: The Initiative., Minmatar Fleet, and the anti-CVA pile-on (attackers)

Minmatar Fleet Alliance

Anchor

On side: The Initiative., Minmatar Fleet, and the anti-CVA pile-on (attackers)

Fraternity.

Partner

On side: The Initiative., Minmatar Fleet, and the anti-CVA pile-on (attackers)

Brave Collective

Partner

On side: The Initiative., Minmatar Fleet, and the anti-CVA pile-on (attackers)

Siberian Squads

Partner

On side: The Initiative., Minmatar Fleet, and the anti-CVA pile-on (attackers)

ISK destroyed
778.9 B
Decisive doctrine
Init Rokh/Eagle walls vs Nightmare/Rokh/Ferox defense; the Keepstar fell when the defenders lacked the dictors and bubble catapult to pin attacking Rokh fleets, but CVA was never exiled - the region stayed contested
Caveats & contested numbers

Recent and partisan-sourced (mostly r/Eve AARs from FL33T, CVA, and AO sides), with no mainstream press. Attribute contested claims to their side: the 'CVA wealth funds Amarr FW' casus belli, the ISK-bleed figures, and the 'Real Money Coalition' RMT slur are attackers' assertions, not archive facts. ISK figure is a campaign aggregate (the multi-day Keepstar siege), not a single-battle peak; the ~239.23B Keepstar killmail is the hard primary anchor. Outcome is honestly indeterminate / contested: the AO Keepstar fell (a major attacker win), but CVA was NOT exiled - it still holds Providence in 2026, The Initiative. took no sov, and Minmatar Fleet's nullsec sov is elsewhere. This is NOT a 2018-style fall of the region. Absolute Order is reported strictly as a controversial, much-maligned in-game group hired to defend Providence whose Keepstar fell; the real-world-political accusations in the sources are deliberately excluded.

Context at this date

Total ISK destroyed ~778.9 B

Campaign aggregate — not single-battle peak

Killboard

via zKillboard

Gallery

A still from the community cinematic battle report showing Absolute Order's Y-MPWL Keepstar exploding, captioned with the 778.9 billion ISK campaign tally.

Sources

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