AUTHOR’S NOTE
IN THE STORY THAT follows I have done my best at all times to delineate appropriately between the real and the fictional, but in certain cases I am powerless to stop EVE from muddying the distinction. So although the events that follow will at times seem surreal it’s worth stating explicitly that Empires of EVE is strictly non-fictional.
These are the events of greatest importance as they took place within EVE Online from the years 2009 to 2014 as accurately as I could write them as a mere observer of this virtual community.
The story takes place primarily within the digital realm, but EVE is also deeply intertwined with the real world. So the occasional juncture with reality is unavoidable such as when the story leads to that Russian bathhouse in New York City, that bar in Reykjavik, and that embassy in Benghazi.
To keep the line between real and unreal as clear as possible I do not employ storytelling devices like reconstructed dialog or imagined scenes. Anything between quotation marks was actually said or written by the person it is attributed to often in a political speech, forum post, leaked document, or one of approximately 150 interviews conducted during my research.
Similarly, every image of EVE Online you’ll see in this volume was photographed inside the game universe, and minimal photo editing was employed to create these visions of New Eden.
The vast majority of the artwork in this volume was created by a screenshot photographer of rare talent named Razorien who agreed to go on a journey inside EVE in 2019 to photograph locations of importance to the narrative. Razorien crisscrossed the stargate network of New Eden in a cloaking ship for weeks to bring us a better view of the wonders of the Tranquility server. The nebulae, planets, and space stations imaged are all really there, and the ships pictured are being flown by actual players.
Amid the shattering of ship hulls and the clacking of hundreds of thousands of keyboards from around the world this book is about the fates of digital societies, a vision of the future of life on the internet set in its past.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy the story.
–Andrew Groen
“What exactly is the population of an online world, and what social forces drive it? One word seems at the center of the issue: Power.”
–Raph Koster, Lead Designer, Ultima Online
ON MAY 6, 2003, the tiny Icelandic video game studio CCP Games released a spaceship game called EVE Online to stores around Europe. In EVE, as it existed in 2003, players piloted starships through a hostile science fiction universe populated by thousands of other players. Though it was predated by an elder lineage of online virtual worlds, this spaceship game had two things that set it apart from its predecessors.
First, it took place in a single online environment. Everyone who played the game inhabited the same, persistent online world as everyone else. That single virtual environment, a cloud of more than 5000 star systems collectively called “New Eden,” was online 23.5 hours a day, 7 days a week, pausing only briefly each night for server maintenance.
The other factor that made this game different was a unique sense of object permanence. The starships players could build and fly in EVE were costly, and when their hit points reached zero, they were gone forever. That meant every ship, regardless of how big, expensive, storied, or overpowered it was, could always be permanently destroyed. In other words, loss was an integral part of the game design. Every player’s kill was another player’s death. Every ship and every character had a story all its own, and every story was intertwined.
Because the game of EVE is online essentially at all times, events cannot be reset or reversed. Whatever the players manage to achieve—good or bad, purposeful or for lulz—is written into the history of the game, live, as it happens. EVE looks the way it does today because of what happened yesterday, and yesterday can trace its lineage all the way back to the days of the game’s launch. Every one of the player characters is linked to every other, even if they play on opposite sides of the star cluster, even if they are from opposite time zones, and even if they played years apart from one another.
In EVE, as in the real world, today comes after yesterday and inherits its conditions. If you lost your ship yesterday, you no longer have it today. Nor tomorrow.
As a result of this continuity, the history of EVE Online comprises one singularly grand narrative, with millions of characters across—as of this printing—nearly two decades. The majority of those characters scarcely affected the universe at all; most people who try EVE quit after only a few minutes. EVE is hard. But those who stayed found a universe they could shape according to their personal designs.
That singular narrative has the flavor of the fictional space opera world it takes place within, but because each character is controlled by a real human person the characters are all non-fictional. They are each a real person. Even when a player is actually secretly controlling multiple characters, those characters’ choices are still controlled by a human mind, and players’ real lives outside the game affect their destinies within it. When we examine the story that exists between all the players we find a spectacularly complex narrative belonging to no individual, but created by the convergence of the entire community.
EVE Online is like that classic parable about a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters eventually producing the complete works of Shakespeare. The difference is that the great ape species of EVE is the slightly more intelligent homo sapiens, and they are far greater in number than a thousand. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, if the history of EVE mirrors Macbeth.
THE STORY OF EVE
Some aspects of the game have changed throughout the years. New sectors of space have been added, landmarks have been placed to mark historic events, and CCP has made more than a few graphical improvements. But many things also remain the same. Then as now, the game is set in a cluster of stars called “New Eden”—each star with its own planets and moons, many with space stations, pirate hideouts, or mysterious relics from secretive lost races—for players to explore and encounter each other within. The universe of New Eden is one of extreme beauty and grandeur. Enormous, ribbon-like nebulas streak across each system’s skyboxes, and hulking, iron ships slip with perfect grace in and out of the ports of the orbital space stations that serve as player trading hubs.
The star systems in the center of the star cluster are controlled by non-player empires playing out a fictional space opera. Those empires employ a police force called CONCORD which is capable of punishing players who attack other players. In the outer rim of the star cluster, however, far beyond the borders of the NPC empires the star systems have no protections of any kind. Players are free to venture out into “nullsec” (zero security) space and do as they please. They can access rare and valuable materials inside the nullsec asteroid belts and in the wrecks of NPC pirates. They can fight and kill other players. They can institute their own laws if they have the strength to enforce them. They can form groups and become rich, building hubs of commerce.
Previous online games had already shown that players will inevitably seek to form their own virtual societies when given the opportunity to communicate and interact sufficiently. But in the long history of video game development, nobody had ever put so many people in a single confined digital space and forced them to compete for scarce resources. What followed was somewhere between Ready Player One and Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
THE SOCIAL WEB
Back in 1990, virtual world pioneer Richard Bartle published a seminal essay describing the four chief archetypes of personalities people exhibit in online worlds. The first are the Achievers, who spend most of their time striving to advance further in the game. Next are the Explorers, who search the far corners of the world and test the fine details of its systems. Third are the Socializers, who view the game primarily as a means for interacting with other people and roleplaying other identities. The final type Bartle describes is the one with the most profound implications for the EVE universe. Bartle nicknamed this group the Killers, and described their chief governing impulse:
“iv) Imposition upon others.
Players use the tools provided by the game to cause distress to (or, in rare circumstances, to help) other players.”
Richard Bartle, co-creator of MUD1,
From the essay Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs, published in 1990
All of Bartle’s archetypes found a home in the expansive cosmos of EVE Online. But it was the Killers, and their myriad methods of “imposition upon others,” who set it on the path to what it is today—for better or worse.
Most of the early players of 2003 EVE had already been testers in its incomplete beta state. Those players used that time to establish social networks and figure out advanced fighting techniques and money-earning strategies, so that when the game officially launched those players immediately became important and influential. They knew how to mine and run trade routes in order to get rich quickly on EVE’s first day, and they knew how to leverage that into wealth beyond the average player’s wildest dreams. While they were busily building their fortunes, these players had also unconsciously begun to forge EVE’s greatest asset: the vast and intricate social web which binds the community together through virtual space and time.
But many players were not content to merely make their fortunes as merchants and manufacturers. Instead, they built advanced warships and set up devastating blockades on heavily-trafficked nullsec stargates. These pirates gleefully destroyed and looted the mining ships of brand new players who had no idea yet that player-killing was even possible. Hundreds of these virtually victimized players sent angry messages to CCP Games’ game managers. CCP, in turn, calmly explained player-versus-player combat to this first crop of EVE newbies, some of whom were playing in their first ever online world.
Some of these players knew that EVE was predated by other online games, and that it had inherited their problems. As they always had, the Achievers, the Socializers, the Explorers, and the Killers mutually agreed that their counterparts had no place in the game and were a scourge. They would attack each other and beseech the game developers to change the game mechanics to make it more hospitable to their preferred playstyle and inhospitable to the others. In EVE, they do so to this day. And yet, there is a peculiar interdependence between these player groups, despite their mutual animosity, that EVE seeks to exploit.
Raph Koster, designer of the legendary virtual worlds Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, put it well in his observations on Bartle’s findings:
“The fascinating part of the essay is where Bartle discusses the interactions between these groups. Killers are like wolves, in his model. And therefore they eat sheep, not other wolves. And the sheep are the Socializers, with some occasional Achievers for spice. Why? Because killers are about the exercise of power, and you do not get the satisfaction of exercising power unless the victim complains vocally about it. Which Socializers will tend to do.
Further, Bartle pointed out that eliminating the Killers from the mix of the population results in a stagnant society. The Socializers become cliquish, and without adversity to bring communities together, they fragment and eventually go away. Similarly, Achievers, who are always looking for the biggest and baddest monster to kill, will find a world without Killers to be lacking in risk and danger, and will grow bored and move on.
Yet at the same time, too many Killers will quite successfully chase away everyone else. And after feeding on themselves for a little while, they will move on too. Leaving an empty world.”
Raph Koster, Lead Designer of Ultima Online, one of the primary design inspirations for EVE Online
May 7, 1998
The magic of EVE is that it seeks to find a balance between these types of players, and provides a grand interstellar stage for that human social ecology to play out. CCP Games vowed to judge no one’s playstyle. The universe was a sandbox, and whatever you decided to build with the sand was your choice. It was even your choice whether to build with the sand or throw it in someone’s eyes and smash what they were building. Where in previous online games Killers were reviled as literally immoral, EVE Online offered them a place within its ecosystem and allowed them to fulfill their role as catalysts for change. It asked the community of the game to govern itself as much as possible, only stepping in themselves if there was outright cheating or a threat of real world violence. At the same time, the developers nudged EVE toward war by creating systems for collaborating with friends and uniting against enemies.
In 1998, in response to a dispute between Killers and Socializers within his own community, Ultima Online’s Raph Koster wondered what he was truly observing:
“What exactly is the population of an online world, and what social forces drive it? One word seems at the center of the issue: Power. The conflicts that arise are there precisely because competing agendas (and often, as in the case of the playerkillers versus the roleplayers, competing play styles) attempt to exercise power over one another. […]
We must have playerkillers in UO, because the world would suffer if we did not have them. But they also must be channeled, so that their effect is beneficial, and not detrimental. […] It’s largely about perspectives. The issue for the Killers is whether they will gain the wider perspective and cease to be “virtually sociopathic.” And the issue for the Socializers is whether they will recognize that the Killers are a part of their society too, and not always a bad one.
The thorny issues that then remain are the nitty-gritty of virtual community building: how do we govern in a world of anonymity? How do we police, and who polices, the players or the game administrators? What sort of punishment is appropriate for virtual crime? What sort of punishment is even possible for virtual crime?”
Raph Koster, Lead Designer, Ultima Online
May 7, 1998
Reading Koster’s and Bartle’s writings, it is hard not to believe that they somehow knew the destiny of EVE before it was even built. It seems that the patterns at play in EVE Online are hardcoded into our systems, similar to the patterns that govern the motions of cities. However, just like cities, the design, layout, and governance of a virtual world play an essential role in shaping the people and their quality of life. Each person is undeniably an individual, and yet—knowingly or not—they fit inescapably into a grander human pattern.
The ability of EVE Online players to exert power over one another incentivized piracy, plotting, and bold schemes. The risk and danger caused by this forced people together and lead them to form groups for safety. The groups they formed almost always coalesced around certain types of gameplay: socializing, exploration, achievement, and—most infamously in this universe—“imposition upon others.”
EVE is an experiment that has been evolving since Day 1, and we continually observe new behaviors. In many ways EVE Online has always been an astoundingly forward-thinking game. It pioneered a number of technologies and design practices that are still being jealously studied by CCP’s competition to this day. In 2003, for instance, the server hardware that operated EVE Online was so advanced that CCP Games needed to lobby to get an exemption from the United States Military in order to export it from the US to Iceland. Almost twenty years later, its technology is still capable of amazing feats, yet its design is full of old truths the gaming industry has forgotten.
The design of the game meant that the community was constantly tearing itself apart and putting itself back together again.
PRE-HISTORY
The story of EVE is not something that can be written down in full. There are more characters in that story than there are words in both volumes of this book. The community’s travails, told in full, could fill a thousand books with a thousand pages, each story intimately interwoven with the others. It would likely be impossible to read because all of the stories happen concurrently.
Empires of EVE: Volume 1 summarizes the story of EVE’s first six years of existence, focusing on the player-conquerable “nullsec” regions of space. The EVE community was generously patient with my storytelling as I tried to condense a 4-dimensional story onto the 2-dimensional page, necessarily leaving out volumes of detail and nuance. I’ll have to ask for more of that patience as I attempt to summarize that summary:
On May 6, 2003, when EVE first launched, the vast majority of players were still learning how to play the game in high-security space, and the few who were brave enough to venture outward found hundreds of star systems that were utterly vacant. A steady stream of players began to make their way into the nullsec regions, exploring their outer reaches. Nullsec was famously spare and lonely in those early days, with the exception of the occasional merchant ship taking the risky road in search of profitable minerals, and the pirates who preyed on them. On occasion, those pirates found choke points in the stargate map that could be used to shut down entire regions of commerce. The wolves essentially found a mountain pass that funneled the sheep directly to them. One such incident by a pirate group called M0o very nearly broke the entire game. Early nullsec was ruled by these roaming pirate gangs.
In the far more populous interior star systems called empire space, many miners and traders (nee: achievers and explorers) became early billionaires who could afford to construct the game’s most expensive ships. It was only a matter of time before the industrial billionaires realized they could use their superior weaponry and pay mercenary pilots to force out the talented, but underfunded, pirate fighters. The cleverer billionaires simply bribed the pirates directly to become their “military.” These industrialists offered the player-killers a new story: instead of being vagabonds who robbed travellers, they could be soldiers for a cause. In exchange for coexisting with the peaceful players inside of a structure of rules, the Killers got better weaponry and the opportunity to be part of larger groups and bigger operations. However, the combination resulted in constant ideological friction. The two groups could never agree on rules governing behavior, because they weren’t just people who wanted to play different ways; they were people who saw the game’s purpose differently.
This is how the first makeshift governments of EVE were formed. Roleplayers, traders, and industrialists (Socializers, Explorers, and Achievers) allied with pirates (Killers) out of mutual advantage. When friction inevitably emerged, they formed council governments to resolve those disputes. These alliances were a cutting edge social technology, and the best of these groups gained immense wealth. As these alliances grew rich, they expanded. They used their new wealth to offer incentives to new recruits by spamming local chat channels and offering free ships and regular paychecks. But the most important thing they offered their pilots was the chance to be a part of something larger than themselves: a community. These communities or “corporations” attracted like-minded players, and encouraged other established communities to form alliances. These corporations’ quickly expanding populations spread out over hundreds of largely vacant star systems, which they controlled by using starship patrols to hunt down pirates.
One of the most famous inter-faction conflicts in these early days was a war between a roleplayer named Jade Constantine and her corporation Jericho Fraction on one side, and an ultra-wealthy industrialist named Ragnar Danneskjold and his corporation Taggart Transdimensional on the other. Jade Constantine was a master socializer—one of the greatest in online gaming history—who used her voice to paper the forums with screeds about how Ragnar had been caught associating with rogue pirate factions. Their enmity eventually exploded into a series of civil wars which broke their organizations and created new, more complex ones.
From the ashes of their war was born the “Phoenix Alliance,” a broad coalition of corporations which, though each had its own individual culture, were united under a strong leader named Halseth Durn. Guided by their leader, this organization amassed incredible wealth and power in the northern reaches of New Eden. Durn, an accomplished EVE diplomat, achieved this great political feat by bringing together all three major alliances of the north into a single coalition under the “Northern Alliances Security Treaty.”
But that early coalition was undone by a scandal among the leadership (which seems to be unavoidable in groups of this scale) and collapsed during the “Great Northern War.” Both sides of the conflict lobbied the other player groups of the star cluster to side with them and enter the war on their side. Over months of battles the conflict grew to encompass nearly a third of the zero security areas of EVE Online. Player alliances that were too far away to send their members to fight would send ISK, ammunition, and ships to their allies.
There had always been small-scale conflicts in EVE, but the Great Northern War in 2004 was a wake-up call. It forced the young EVE community to reckon with three truths: 1) it was possible not only for a virtual society to form, but for a geopolitical framework to be established, 2) that very geopolitical framework could potentially ensnare every major group in the game into a single all-encompassing political net, and it foreshadowed 3) that this net could drag all the alliances of EVE into a massive game-wide battle.
The end of The Great Northern War dismantled the power structure of the north and heralded a new dynamic for EVE Online partially stimulated by its ever-growing playerbase. No longer was every alliance its own discrete group of corporations. Each of them was intimately intertwined with the others in what were now being called “coalitions.” In essence, everyone needed to be a part of a larger coalition of powers in order to defend themselves against the threat of their enemy’s coalition of powers. As one group adopts a new social technology, so must the others or perish.
The players formed into “corporations.” The corporations merged into “alliances.” The alliances formed into “coalitions.” The scale of diplomacy and conflict soared to ever more impressive organizational heights. The wars that occured could ensnare tens of thousands of players, and yet the dramas that drove these organizations to war were almost always small, human-level controversies between just a few people who happened to command vast influence.
The most important event to occur in this era was the founding of an organization known as Band of Brothers (BoB). In the tempest of the Great Northern War, the social networks of the combatants collided, and several of the military organizations in that conflict realized they would be more powerful if they could come together to form a singular, unstoppable military alliance.
In his 1990 paper, Bartle described what happens when Killers encounter one another, and he might as well have been describing the formation of Band of Brothers. “Killers try not to cross the paths of other killers, except in pre-organised challenge matches,” he wrote. “Part of the psychology of Killers seems to be that they wish to be viewed as somehow superior to other players; being killed by a Killer in open play would undermine their reputation, and therefore they avoid risking it.”
At first, this group was merely a roving military group, but its leader—a Swedish heating and cooling repairman who went by the name SirMolle—soon set his sights on territory of his own, and Band of Brothers went on a mission of conquest.
Their first wars were with well-selected, soft-targets meant to allow Band of Brothers a chance to practice large-scale warfare. Dreadnought-class siege ships had just been patched into the game, and their heavy cannons became the go-to tool for grinding down crucial enemy infrastructure. BoB used soft targets to test out these new and expensive ships and observed how they operated in the field. As their victories continued, the alliance grew ever more bold.
The fact that Band of Brothers played the game at the very top level attracted many players who desired to join its ranks, including some of the game’s developers. Some of them saw this as an invaluable opportunity to experience their own game live, and see how it actually worked. Fueled by this new membership, and the spoils of his victories, SirMolle soon came to see himself as a great conqueror.
In one of the more surreal moments in EVE Online history, SirMolle was interviewed by the New York Times:
“Our goal is to control all of EVE,” he told New York Times reporter Seth Schiesel. “It’s totally impossible to claim all of EVE physically. But it’s possible to control the people. It’s possible to control the alliances, be it by economic means or fighting means or political means. That was the goal and that is the goal.”
He and his inner circle devised Operation Clockwise, a cocksure plan to dominate all of EVE Online by moving around the star cluster, destroying or subjugating their enemies one by one. He even joked about eventually acquiring enough power to kill every NPC, conquer the game, and then set off to Iceland to conquer CCP Games’ headquarters near the docks in foggy Reykjavik.
In the early days, Band of Brothers’ most formidable opponent was a large group of players known as Ascendant Frontier. This group was comprised mainly of former players of the older online space game Earth & Beyond. When Earth & Beyond was shut down by its publisher Electronic Arts, many of that game’s largest organizations joined EVE Online as a group. Earth & Beyond was a game far more tuned for Achievers than Killers, and thus the group that joined EVE Online was a group focused on building as much as possible as quickly as possible. Band of Brothers controlled the west, which it built into a fortress. Ascendant Frontier controlled the south, which it built into a prosperous economic hub. The north had recently banded together in a defensive pact called the Northern Coalition, to protect themselves against the clear-and-present threat of Band of Brothers.
Ascendant Frontier’s leader was CYVOK, a satellite communications expert for the US military who ran Ascendant Frontier in his off hours. CYVOK was a calm, well-liked alliance leader who was focused on building a community of players, and a thriving hub of commerce in the nullsec territories.
In the summer of 2006, CCP Games introduced the all-new Titan-class ship, a colossal interstellar juggernaut armed with a devastating “Doomsday” weapon that could wipe a battlefield clear of enemies in a single blast. CYVOK made the decision that Ascendant Frontier would be the first to build one. It took three months for CYVOK and his closest allies to build the ship. Much of this time was consumed by counter-espionage, as the other nullsec alliances would have banded together to prevent him from acquiring the mightiest ship in the game if only they had known where he was building it.
On September 25, 2006, CYVOK’s Titan was born. The reveal shocked the EVE community and CCP Games alike, because it had been built months before CCP Games believed it should have been possible to do so. CYVOK said it was “three months of the most boring thing I have ever done in EVE Online.” He named it “Steve.”
STEVE
Unknown to CYVOK, SirMolle was in the midst of his own Titan project—”Darwin’s Contraption”—and was furious that his 13 kilometer flagship would not be the first in the history of the universe. SirMolle reasoned that if he could not be the first to build a Titan-class ship, then he would be the first to destroy one. SirMolle announced Band of Brothers’ intent to invade Ascendant Frontier just two days after Steve was born.
Seventy-seven days later on December 11, 2006, a battle broke out near the front line of the Band of Brothers assault. Two relatively small fleets engaged each other and skirmished for control of a system in the devastated no-man’s-land between the two virtual empires. And lo, Steve did enter the battle to confront Band of Brothers. The BoB fleet scattered at the sight of the behemoth, but not before two BoB ships were obliterated by the Titan’s primary “Doomsday” weapon.
CYVOK warped Steve to a safe spot in deep space, and—the legend goes—he switched to a different PC in his home to try to clear up some system latency issues, forgetting that his ship would remain in space after he had destroyed those two BoB ships. After logging off, a BoB scout conducting a random sweep found Steve the Titan floating lifelessly through space without an online pilot.
Upon hearing the scout’s report, SirMolle ordered his entire dreadnought fleet to warp to the Titan in deep interstellar space, and begin tearing into its hull.
CYVOK logged back in and discovered Band of Brothers’ dreadnought fleet staring back at him, and logged back out of the game. Just days later he quit EVE forever, and without his stewardship, Ascendant Frontier—a community of thousands of gamers—fell apart completely and was steamrolled by the experienced, well-coordinated BoB fleets.
For most of EVE Online’s history it was believed that Steve had been destroyed because CYVOK logged off too soon after the battle—that his ship never completely logged out of the game due to the recent combat, and it was discovered by a fluke scan by a BoB scout. CYVOK has always maintained that this story is false. He says the murder of Steve was an inside job, perpetrated by someone with developer access who abused their developer powers to find CYVOK’s ship when it should have been impossible to (since he had teleported it to a deep space location that should have taken any BoB ship 23-hours to fly to unless they had the secret jump coordinates.) However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and in this case CYVOK acknowledges that evidence is nearly impossible to come by because he wasn’t recording his gameplay at the moment it happened. Most of his EVE contemporaries don’t believe him, but I spoke privately on one occasion with a former CCP developer who does.
CYVOK quit the game a few days later, but still says he loves EVE and thinks it’s the greatest MMO ever made. He does not allege that it was a conspiracy. He thinks it was just another classic case of a random Killer—who happened to have developer privileges—exercising power over an Achiever he thought was ruining the game by flooding the economy with cheap ships, and dominating nullsec with a Titan he shouldn’t have been able to build.
Regardless of how it actually happened, the result of Steve’s destruction was the same. CYVOK left the game, and Band of Brothers swept through Ascendant Frontier’s territories, claiming everything for themselves. With the fall of Ascendant Frontier, fully half of EVE Online was now conquered by a single group of a thousand pilots and the many vassal alliances it installed.
But the same fear that kept BoB’s vassals loyal also inspired resistance from the other powers in nullsec. Band of Brothers’ expansionist goals were obvious to anyone who was paying attention, and the other alliances knew that they were bound to share Ascendant Frontier’s fate if they didn’t stick together. On top of that, whispers were circulating that members of Band of Brothers were actually cheating devs.
And so the disparate leaders of nullsec put their differences aside and formed a mutual defence pact against Band of Brothers. The battle lines were drawn. You were either with Band of Brothers or against it. BoB vs EVE.
As SirMolle prepared to invade and topple the Northern Coalition, scandal struck. A hacker working as a rogue intelligence agent broke into Band of Brothers’ out-of-game forums and communications channels and discovered evidence that a member of Band of Brothers actually was an EVE Online developer who he could now prove had illegitimately used his administrative powers to help Band of Brothers acquire a cache of highly valuable “Blueprint Originals” which created a persistent flow of income for the alliance.
When the hacker revealed this to the EVE public, there was a community revolt. This, many people thought, was the perfect explanation for Band of Brothers’ massive success. To them this developer wasn’t a lone wolf, it was merely the first wolf they’d managed to catch. BoB’s political enemies jeered, calling them “Band of Developers,” while urging justice-minded EVE players to join their crusade to undo the corrupt BoB regime. Just because history can’t be reversed, they thought, doesn’t mean it can’t be unmade. In a staggering display of cooperation, dozens of alliances came together with the goal of overthrowing Band of Brothers and destroying its means of organization.
The coalition of alliances opposing Band of Brothers struck quickly over a massive area. Invaders flooded into Band of Brothers territory, but BoB proved remarkably resilient to the onslaught. One by one the attackers were driven back as Band of Brothers miraculously stabilized against a horde of foes.
SirMolle recruited the soldiers-for-hire Mercenary Coalition to strike back in the north, and with staggering effectiveness the whole of the north was captured, ceded to the control of Band of Brothers.
“For those who did not play EVE at the time, it is difficult to comprehend just how powerful BoB had become,” wrote James 315, one of the few players who documented the events and characters of this early era. “Its core was made up of the oldest and most successful PvP alliances in history, some from the beta. It had never lost a war. Ever.”
By now, 2007, the war effort to unseat BoB had backfired spectacularly. Rather than containing Band of Brothers, the attack had unleashed its true potential. Though Band of Brothers had been implicated in scandal, it was still nullsec’s preeminent military organization and included some of the oldest and most successful combat-focused groups. Ironically, given its earlier crusade against Steve, BoB soon became widely despised for building more than a half dozen Titans of its own. These, coupled with the expertise of the empire’s pilots, made them functionally impossible to fight. Two-thirds of the game now rested under the control of BoB and its allies, and “Operation Clockwise” ticked on toward midnight.
In the East stood the last true hope of stopping SirMolle from conquering every star system of nullsec: RedSwarm Federation, a union between the Americans of Goonswarm, the Russians of Red Alliance, and the French of Tau Ceti Federation, which came together with the singular goal of dismantling the BoB power bloc.
The Goons were an anomaly in EVE Online, populated as it was mostly by pompous space dictator personas and grand war fleets. Its pilots fit into the “killers” category, no doubt, but they were more famous for griefing and luring other players into scams (activities they considered perfectly acceptable gameplay) than for stellar conquest. And since they recruited their membership entirely from the SomethingAwful.com community, the leaders of New Eden often saw them as outsiders to be feared.
The same was largely true of the Russian community, whose members were vilified as cheaters involved in Real Money Trading operations (the selling of in-game items/ISK to other players or brokers for real world currency.)
The geopolitical conflict was fueled further by a deep multilateral grudge. Two years earlier, SirMolle had bullied Goonswarm, and sought to drive the Goons out of EVE after one of its members made a stick figure comic mocking the real world death of a BoB pilot who had died in a motorcycle accident (and whose father was also an active member of BoB.) SirMolle famously declared on the forums, “There are no goons,” and camped the Goon headquarters in the region of Syndicate.
The Russians of Red Alliance had faced similar treatment by many of BoB’s allies, who had captured and occupied Insmother, the Russian “ancestral homeland” in EVE. The effort by BoB and its allies to drive Red Alliance and Goonswarm out of the game instead gave them common cause. The glue that bonded them was the mutual experience of being told “your kind isn’t welcome here.” Even when it happens virtually, this is not a feeling human beings take kindly to.
RedSwarm Federation was a “coalition of pariahs”—as one leader would later call it—formed specifically because of their mutual outsider status, having been pushed to the brink by EVE’s powers-that-be.
The tremendously bitter war between RedSwarm Federation and the Greater Band of Brothers Community raged for months. At times, each side seemed to have victory within its grasp. But at last, a flurry of inspiration combined with a sudden shift in game mechanics to change the course of the war. As SirMolle tried to break through RedSwarm’s faltering defenses, he forgot that CCP had recently released a patch that nerfed Titans. He was trapped, and Darwin’s Contraption—his prized Avatar Titan—was destroyed. It proved a critical turning point. Over the next 18 months, BoB’s gains were slowly undone, and as each of SirMolle’s next three Titans went nova in succession, the illusion of BoB’s mastery unraveled.
THE DELVE INVASION
In time, RedSwarm shocked the EVE community by using its enormous membership to overwhelm Band of Brothers and force a full retreat into BoB’s home region of Delve. Inside his “Fortress Delve,” SirMolle made his last stand. Siege defenses were anchored in every possible location in every star system.
With Band of Brothers and Mercenary Coalition forced to hole up in Delve, the Northerners rose again, reconquered their home, and in a few weeks were able to join in the final assault. Together, the Northern Coalition and RedSwarm Federation launched a full-scale attack on Delve and the battle of the decade was begun. Tens of thousands of ships were destroyed in the calamity—faster than the industrialists of EVE could build them—leading to resource scarcity all across New Eden.
But as the lag cleared, Band of Brothers was still standing. Its enemies complained that the game was imbalanced as they retreated from the battlements of SirMolle’s Fortress Delve. One by one, the alliances that comprised the Northern Coalition and RedSwarm Federation gave up hope of capturing Delve and returned home.
Spared ultimate destruction, Band of Brothers rebuilt and regained much of its former strength, but the conflict was far from over. A small squabble between two unrelated groups soon dragged in several other alliances, which eventually dragged in both BoB and Goons, and began the inevitable next phase of what was now becoming known as “The Great War.”
Both sides braced for yet another long, violent siege of the Delve region. But it was treachery, not warfare, which decided Band of Brothers’ fate. A high-level player inside Band of Brothers named Haargoth Agamar—a director with access to the corporate accounts and ship hangars—had secretly been growing to hate his own alliance. Agamar defected to his former rivals in RedSwarm Federation, declaring that “BoB is all emo now and can’t even stick to a fucking plan.”
But Agamar did not simply defect. His treachery consisted of nothing less than the complete destruction of his former alliance. With his final act as a Band of Brothers director, he used a little-known loophole to shut down the shell corporation that served as the umbrella organization for all of the alliances in Band of Brothers. It was as though there was a massive power switch that turned off Band of Brothers as a whole. Because of the way the gameplay mechanics in EVE work, this meant that every single one of Band of Brothers defensive emplacements were shut off the next morning when the server tried to determine who owned them and found no alliance on record named “Band of Brothers.” Goonswarm quickly re-registered an alliance called “Band of Brothers” so that the original BoB could never regain its own name.
The old BoB corporations moved quickly to re-register themselves as a new alliance—their new name was Kenzoku, a Japanese word meaning “a family of people who have made the same commitment”—but in this era of EVE it took 4 weeks for defenses to reach their full power and potential. This meant that for the next month SirMolle’s impregnable citadel was completely exposed.
It had been 18 months since the beginning of hostilities between Band of Brothers and the coalition that RedSwarm assembled to destroy them, and in this moment RedSwarm Federation saw an opportunity to end it forever. The leader of RedSwarm—Goonswarm CEO Darius JOHNSON—decided that this was to be the final battle. He ordered that every member of his alliance should pack up everything they owned and prepare to move directly into Band of Brothers’ home region. Every piece of infrastructure in the former Goonswarm territory was to be torn down or destroyed.
To say that the fighting that ensued inside Band of Brothers’ home region was fierce would be an extreme understatement. For weeks on end there were thousands of people fighting inside the 80+ star systems that comprised the compromised Fortress Delve. But the result was inevitable: After two weeks of the most fierce and lengthy battle in the history of online video gaming Delve was taken, and Band of Brothers was destroyed.
It was mid-2009, and Band of Brothers had dominated the game since 2004. Nobody knew what a world without BoB even looked like. Some organizations had no other goal or purpose for being except fighting Band of Brothers. They were left rudderless, confused even, in the wake of the relatively sudden death of their great enemy.
The defeat of Band of Brothers ushered in an entirely new era in EVE Online. RedSwarm Federation and the Northern Coalition were left as the only two credible power blocs in nullsec, and the entire fate of the game was left up in the air. Nobody knew what came next, but anyone could see that a new age had dawned in EVE Online.
COLD, DARK, AND HARSH
Early in EVE’s life, a community manager summed up the game’s ethos with one of the most enduring descriptions that defines the game to this day.
“EVE isn’t just designed to look like a cold, dark, and harsh world,” they wrote. “It’s designed to be a cold, dark, and harsh world.”
It’s an understatement. EVE is a social bloodsport in which the cost of failure is often the destruction of your community. And because there are no limits on how much the player can apply themselves toward their goal, gameplay at the peak of EVE sometimes involves drastic extremes of human behavior like rage, deceit, propaganda, character assassination, and weaponised racism and misogyny.
In creating space for the best in us, the EVE ethos also created space for the worst in us, and there are many scars and much graffiti on the history of EVE to prove it.
However, there are many people here who are genuinely warm, bright, and kind. For them, the fight against the cold, dark, and harsh is the entire point of their time in EVE. The leaders of these organizations of players describe their experience with striking similarity. Many of the corporation leaders I spoke to describe a feeling of deep exhaustion. It is often only through sheer zeal and community loyalty that many of the organizations described in this book manage to survive against the crushing natural entropy of the EVE universe. If there’s one thing that unites most EVE players I’ve met it’s a shared love of darkness. Either fighting it or revelling in it.
Every one of those leaders has told me they would quit EVE if they could; some of them desperately want to. They’re tired, but they’ve been here long enough to know how rare their light is in this place. Many of them have been here since 2003, and they’ve endured 17+ years of cruel conquerors and cynical con artists becoming increasingly sophisticated and diminishingly discerning.
With their newbies chattering on comms in the glittering darkness, the humble corporation CEO waves a torch to keep EVE’s nature at bay a while longer, wondering how long they have until the fire gets too dim to scare back the darkness.
Which it eventually will. In EVE, nothing is more certain.
TRANQUILITY
Never was this principle of inevitable entropy more clear than in the case of Band of Brothers, who had once looked as if it had broken the game and would be impossible to stop from establishing a system of complete control over all of New Eden. This was the story of Empires of EVE: Volume I.
Empires of EVE: Volume II is the story of the next stage in that unending cycle: of those who came to power amid the downfall of BoB, and how those powers grappled with an entirely new dynamic in nullsec. The balance of power had changed. The game mechanics of nullsec were set to change. The Internet itself was changing outside and around the game, and EVE Online was on the brink of a golden age.
With the conquest of Delve complete and the final BoB base at 49-U6U captured, SirMolle and his lieutenants were chased back to empire space in defeat. Goonswarm CEO Darius JOHNSON resigned from his post and with his final proclamation trolled triumphantly, “Delve is Goons. Anime is cartoons. Welcome to the most profitable and heavily fortified region of space in the galaxy. Delve is impossible to invade. We know because we’ve tried. Our bitter struggle is finally over, and at long last our revolution is complete.”
Much of the story that follows deals with the seismic effects of this revolution, and the farflung destinies of the groups who managed to achieve it.
It’s also the story of how the victors managed to blow it completely.
