TBH those big epic battles are more of a thing where the story is better than the reality. I've been in a fight with 2000 pilots in system and basically the way the EvE server manages that load is through a mechanic called TiDi (short for time dilation) where everything slows right the fuck down by a major amount to accomodate 2000 pilots worth of traffic without having to drop anything. This is good in the sense that backup is quick to arrive because time is moving a lot faster for people en route through unaffected systems, but bad in the sense that you're basically commited to a 3-5+ hour long fight in super slow motion. You can't just pull out without risking the loss of your expensive ship and you can't do anything to speed it up either, some alliances have made a name for themselves by purposely crashing a node when the fight isn't going their way. It's a clusterfuck all in all.
5-10 man cruiser gangs are a lot more fun IME, there's no TiDi BS to deal with and there's a real sense of pilot independence and working as a team to blap a target. I haven't really been playing lately because it just takes a bunch of time but if anyone is interested in getting into it let me know and I'll give you the crash course on how to get your character into some action with the least wait time. Would be pretty fun to have a dozen TD people in the game, when everyone has their supplies set up in a station it's possible to cut a roam down to 1-2 hours and get the most out of it.
