“In the spring of 2011 many of the Northern Coalition’s long-time enemies joined forces with the Drone Region [Federation] superpower, and hired supercapital power Pandemic Legion to form a supercapital fleet massively surpassing anything the galaxy had witnessed before. Many predicted a repeat of former invasions, but this time the NC was spent early. The Fortress was finally broken.”
–Morsus Mihi History Wiki
THE COURSE OF EVE Online’s history—the ebb and flow of fleets and communities—has often been decided by just a handful of people. One of those people was Daroh, leader of Rebellion Alliance, a neutral group situated on the border between the DRF and the Northern Coalition as a sort of buffer between the two superpowers.
Though Daroh himself was not considered to be in a position of power, he had specific powers which were critical in their moment. Daroh originally brought the alliance together to have fun and find big fights and in order to do that he had to make alliances on both sides of the divide. However, the Northern Coalition was now asking more and more of its ally to defend the Russian time zone, and Daroh decided that facing down an armada of Russian ships was not what his alliance had originally come together to do. Daroh said that he felt “enslaved” to the coalition and the need to constantly be on-call whenever they were attacked. Daroh chose to disband his alliance in the face of a massive supercapital invasion rather than serve as the RUS timezone “meatshield” for the Northern Coalition.
“It seems that Daroh of Rebellion Alliance (-R-) has decided to disband his alliance this morning, leaving six stations in Geminate vulnerable,” reads an article on EVENews24 dated February 13, 2011. “What makes it worse is that the Drone Russian Federation seems to be invading […] starting today. The NC is currently scrambling a defense so we should once again see an escalation of hostilities in Geminate.”
Furious Northern Coalition pilots hurled accusations of bribery, saying that once again the infamous Russian EBay ISK Kingpins had bought off a fellow Russian with ill-gotten gains. Daroh himself posted a lengthy reply to the drama on the Russian forums, denying the accusations and giving his perspective. He wrote of how his alliance had come together to find a way to have fun in this strange universe, and that entanglement in complex alliances slowly killed off any sense of freedom that he and his pilots had. What follows is a translation of part of his 2000+ word goodbye letter to the community:
“Unfortunately, relations in the Rebellion Alliance Council have reached the so-called point of no return. I am not going to advertise the reasons for this (I don’t want to pour shit, although I can imagine how much shit will pour on me now), but I can only say that disagreements arose over which I do not see my corporation’s continued presence in this alliance.
The Rebellion Alliance was created by me and it will end its existence with my exit from the alliance. You can say that I had no right. That I threw people away. That I was scum and ruined everything that others built. But the members of this alliance should think about what they have, what they built, and how it affects their fun before blaming me for taking something away from them.
If the fish has already rotted almost to the tail, then it is better that something that is not rotten remains. […] I wish you good luck finding all the Rebellion pilots in this game. Remember, there is always a solution and at first glance a negative event does not always lead to a negative result.
Thanks to all.”
–Daroh, Rebellion Alliance
February 13, 2011
There was scarcely any time to debate the true cause behind what had motivated Daroh. Within hours of the disbanding of Rebellion Alliance more than 100 supercapital ships were seen slowly moving forward from DRF territory into one of Rebellion’s abandoned systems in Geminate.
Fresh with enthusiasm inspired by the “traitorous” Daroh the Northern Coalition sent out an urgent Call-to-Arms. Legendary Fleet Commander Imperian would lead thousands of pilots into battle to retake Daroh’s abdicated systems.
TITANS CAN’T DOOMSDAY IN LOWSEC
Imperian’s plan was to allow the DRF to capture Rebellion’s systems but set a trap for the DRF fleet on its way back home. However, as previously noted, the Russians and Pandemic Legion by now had an extensive spy network within the Northern Coalition fleet, and word reached Shadoo (Pandemic Legion) and Death (Legion of xXDEATHXx) about what Imperian (Northern Coalition) planned to do.
The DRF quietly assembled a Titan fleet in secret, and instructed them to log out of the game nearby, and wait for Imperian to bite the lure. As the DRF bait fleet began heading back to the Drone Regions after securing the last of Rebellion’s systems the fleet jumped into the low-security system “Uemon.” Imperian triggered his trap and jumped in the entire Northern Coalition fleet. Seeing a huge tactical advantage, Imperian committed 24 Titans to attack the DRF fleet.
As the Titans arrived, Imperian gave the order for three Doomsday weapons to target the Pandemic Legion fleet commander Shadoo. But instead of enormous beams of laser light converging on Shadoo’s flagship, nothing happened. The fleet had completed its jump and the small subcapital fleets began to engage each other. Drones poured out of supercarrier loading bays by the dozens, and yet Imperian’s Titan fleet remained motionless. The trap had gone off without a hitch, and the NC fleet towered over the vulnerable DRF force. There was just one problem Imperian hadn’t accounted for: Uemon isn’t technically in nullsec. It’s a border system in “low-sec,” where Titans aren’t allowed to use their Doomsday weapons. For most Titan pilots there was never a reason to bother flying their prized ship into low-sec so the issue rarely came up. Now, Imperian had brought not just his Titan to low-sec, but every available Titan in the Northern Coalition. Imperian realized his mistake, but it was too late. Russian Heavy Interdictor ships (warp scramblers) charged into the fray, and began attempting to scramble Imperian’s most valuable Titans.
Cynosural fields ripped open in the center of his fleet, and out poured the Drone Region Federation counter-drop force with entire fleets of supercarriers and Hellcats that were far more capable of operating successfully in the Doomsday-less low-sec battlefield. Roughly a third of the Northern Coalition’s supercapital fleet was stuck here in low-security space, as the DRF and Pandemic Legion seized their first good opportunity to break this war wide open.
The thousands of ships on both sides clashed together and became a chaotic mess. Viewed from afar it looked like a diffuse spherical mass of ships—most of them too small to see—slamming into each other. Amid the teeming mass of warships, every once in a while a civilian would wander through the chaotic scramble; not a miner or an innocent bystander, but a curious EVE player who heard about the fight in low-security space and wanted to see it first hand.
In the list of casualties in these battles there are always a handful of the worst ships in the game, the ones you automatically get when you open an EVE Online account. These players create new characters just to fly disposable ships into the fracas, and get their names in the data of the record books. In the post-battle statistics detailing the destruction of Titans and supercarriers, there are also small newbie frigates flown by joke characters named “Jergon McDerp” and “boringspaceshipgame.” Even during a climactic battle, EVE’s bizarre brand of humanity always shines through if you know where to look.
The Northern Coalition fleet began disintegrating immediately, both from the guns of Hellcats, and the flight of pilots who could plainly see that the battle was already lost. The server creaked under the strain of these thousands of ships, struggling to calculate the damage and movements of 4000 pilots relative to each other, while rendering their lasers, ship hulls, explosions, and particle effects.
Many of the Northern Coalition had already begun attempting to log out, and soon the rest were ordered to do so by Imperian himself, hoping to salvage as much from this embarrassing debacle as possible. Some were destroyed when they tried to sneak away in the aftermath of the battle. Over the next two days the true impact of the disastrous situation revealed itself, and as the final straggler ships were caught and shot down the final cost of the slaughter was tabulated.
For the Northern Coalition, this was a mistake that cost a record 10 Titans and a staggering 1.2 trillion ISK, more than double the devastating toll it had inflicted on Pandemic Legion earlier in the war. For the Drone Region Federation, it cost just one-fifth as much.
O2O-2X
The disaster at Uemon left the Northern Coalition skittish and unconfident. If Imperian—the coalition’s hero fleet commander who was to deliver them from the Russian threat—could be humbled on that kind of a scale, many wondered what hope the coalition could possibly have. Vuk Lau was having increasing trouble convincing Titan and supercarrier pilots to log in for battles because confidence had been so bruised by the previous losses. The Northern Coalition was said to be full of relatively green industrialists who had managed to earn enough to build or buy themselves a Titan, but really weren’t interested in losing their pride and joy in a battle they might not even win.
This was compounded when reports came back from scouts the next day after Uemon reporting that the exact same Russian players whose Titans had been destroyed in Uemon were spotted again at a skirmish in fresh Titan hulls. The belief was that the extremely wealthy Russians had so much liquid ISK at this point that they were able to simply purchase new Titans off the open market. Some of their Titans, it was rumored, were actually purchased from Northern Coalition industrialists who weren’t required to do background checks on their clients. It’s very difficult to prove whether those transactions took place, but one of the most enduring characterizations of this conflict was the irony of the Northern Coalition selling Titans for profit to a hostile power bloc. In effect, the chaotic Northern Coalition was profiteering off a war predicated on its own destruction.
You could scarcely imagine a more ironic fate, and perhaps that’s also why we should distrust that temptingly pure schadenfreude. True stories are not usually so easy to distill into delicious irony.
The replenishment of the Russian supercapital fleet was a burdensome reality, however. As the Northern Coalition’s fleet continuously diminished, the Russian fleet seemed miraculously unscathed, growing at a faster rate than the Northern Coalition could hack it down.
After the gaffe at Uemon, the Russian invasion rolled forth into the Northern Coalition region of Geminate as the Russians began to make real progress for the first time.
Imperian tried once again to stymie their progress, and drew a line in the sand at O2O-2X. He had disappeared for two weeks after Uemon, and the Northern Coalition breathed a sigh of relief that its legendary commander was still in the fight. The Northern Coalition had three primary Fleet Commanders: Imperian, Yaay, and Sala Cameron. The loss of any one of those three would have been a wound.
For two weeks, the two coalitions brought their full weight to bear against O2O-2X in three major rounds of battle. In Round 1, on February 26, Imperian led 500 pilots organized according to a new fleet strategy that they hoped would turn things around. They were flying a unified fleet in the “Alpha Maelstrom” style. Essentially, the goal with this fleet was to use well-coordinated long-range battleships to focus-fire on an enemy ship and destroy it in a single volley. Imperian’s adoption of this fleet style was partially based on his experience in Uemon, as he attempted to adapt to the fact that “soul-crushing lag” was going to be a reality in this war. The Alpha Maelstrom doctrine helped mitigate the problem of lag because a ship could usually be destroyed in one shot without much room for latency to disrupt the plan.
The 500-ship fleet met a DRF fleet of similar size and soon became mired in stalemate. Eventually they were rescued by three supercarriers from a group of Rebellion Alliance holdouts calling themselves “Gypsy Band,” (the word “gypsy” is an exonym referring to the Romani people of Europe and is usually considered a slur) who had stayed together to defend the Northern Coalition after Daroh allowed the DRF across the border. With its help, Imperian cracked the DRF defense, and propped up the Northern Coalition’s confidence.
In Round 2, the DRF countered Imperian’s tight Alpha Maelstrom formations with masterful bombing runs by its legendary Bomber Fleet Commander “Old Hroft,” who was known for his skillful use of area-of-effect ships that could take out dozens of enemy ships at once if properly positioned. Northern Coalition forces were driven back, and the two sides prepared for the next in a series of attacks and counter attacks that might stretch on indefinitely. As so often happens in EVE, however, the conflict would not be decided solely by fleet tactics.
YAAY’S DECEPTION
Round 3 of the fighting in O2O-2X came on March 17, 2011, and the Northern Coalition envisioned this as a fight to end the stalemate and force the Russians back into the Drone Regions. The Northern Coalition coordinated its supercapital pilots for a massive showing, and on the day of battle, Yaay jumped into O2O-2X at the head of 20 Titans and 92 motherships, one of the greatest fleets ever assembled in its day. The showing was so large, in fact, that neither Pandemic Legion nor the DRF would dare to engage. However, Yaay didn’t want to waste a battlefield advantage by letting the enemy disengage while he had all these ships ready at his command. With no way to force Pandemic Legion and the Russians to engage, Yaay set to work on a plan to trick them into confidence.
The Northern Coalition knew very well that its alliance was infiltrated by Pandemic Legion spies. They simply weren’t well-coordinated enough to be able to root them out and expel them. Who has time for a mole hunt in the middle of a war? These things were just a fact of life that had to be endured. Pandemic Legion was going to find out the Northern Coalition’s battle plan, and there was little that could be done to stop it.
Instead, Yaay decided to use his enemies’ spies to his advantage. He declared openly on fleet comms that the enemy had retreated and the need for supercapitals was over for the day. He said those ships should leave the system while the subcapitals should stay put and guard the retreat. Pandemic Legion’s spies’ ears perked up at that order. Yaay had just given a command that would leave his entire subcapital fleet undefended and outnumbered. The spies relayed the orders to the Pandemic Legion fleet commander, who began planning to jump in and destroy the subcapital fleet once the Titans and supercarriers had jumped out of the system.
But secretly, Yaay sent personal communications to his Titan and supercarrier pilots to stay put and ignore the public order.
“On comms Yaay told all supercapital ships and regular capitals to jump out, except several carriers that had cynosural field modules fitted. Apparently at the same time on a different channel Yaay told the supercapitals to stay put. After jumping I loaded grid and heard [the fleet commanders] starting to shout on comms for bubbles, and for all the carriers to light their cynos. About 12 cynos went up and our whole capital fleet jumped back in. Lag wasn’t horrible to start, but got bad shortly as their caps and supercaps landed on us.
They apparently thought they were warping on top of a bunch of stragglers, hoping to grab a few easy kills before we were gone. Our hictors and dictors (Heavy Interdictors and Interdictors, anti-warp ships) went to work and we started slowly taking out their Titans.”
–Anonymous Northern Coalition (Mostly Harmless) pilot, quoted by EVENews24.com
March 18, 2011
The DRF fleet warped into O2O-2X expecting to meet a few hundred subcapital battleships but instead met the full brunt of the Northern Coalition’s power, unmoved and waiting for their enemy. More than 100 supercapitals, one of the mightiest fleets ever assembled in EVE, poured firepower into the DRF’s most valuable hulls. What followed was one of the most one-sided massacres of the war. Before they managed to escape, the combined DRF/Pandemic Legion fleet lost 18 supercapitals, amounting to 1 trillion ISK, nearly cancelling out the Northern Coalition’s historic losses in Uemon the month earlier. Such comparisons are never perfect, but the grey market value of that loss could’ve been as much as €60,000.
“The Solar Legion of Red Noise, [DRF] was expecting the Northern Coalition to use their usual tactics and blob the O2O-2X system to reinforce the station and stay there. […]
The main mistake was made by a scout, which informed the FCs that NC supercaps left the field. After, the DRF fleet jumped into the system. First DRF Ragnarok was down in seconds (took eight Doomsday hits) by NC Titans before he even managed to enable [shield] hardeners. The usual lag began and half of DRF fleet didn’t manage to load in to the system. Some of the supercap pilots lost their connections and didn’t manage to get back in-game during the battle. After the situation was clarified, DRF FCs gave the command to supercaps to leave the battlefield. Some of them managed to escape.
Overall lag situation affected both fleets, however, NC managed somehow to bring more people into the system and because they were in the system first, looks like they had little bit less problems with lag.”
–Anonymous DRF Pilot
Mar 18, 2011
Though it may seem that server randomness plays an overly heavy hand in this story, it’s important to note that the players all knew this very well, and the fleet commanders literally studied the server architecture to learn how it would react to certain pressures.
“The capital ship fleet commander (Yaay) pulled a rabbit out of a hat and showed the Russians that having spies doesn’t always pay off,” said an anonymous Northern Coalition member quoted by EVENews24.com.
Victories like this helped prop up the Northern Coalition’s morale at a precarious moment. Their hero fleet commanders were performing as well as anybody could possibly hope, given that wars on this scale were nothing anybody could prepare for. Nobody actually had experience with campaigns on this scale, the players at the top level of EVE have always been exploring the game’s rules day-by-day.
The Russians, miraculously, were undaunted. In battle after battle they had lost Titan after Titan, and yet the pressure from DRF supercapitals wouldn’t let up. The Russians regrouped, and forced Round 4 of the ongoing, three-week-long battle for O2O-2X. Both sides recognized this was certain to be the defining bout of the fight, and it was all-hands-on-deck for the final battle for the Geminate region.
A familiar sight played out as four Northern Coalition fleets (900 pilots) jumped into the system near a DRF force (1000 pilots) positioned close to one of the DRF’s defensive starbases. Both sides waited to find out whose fleet would be more adversely affected by server latency, neither wanting to recommit old mistakes by jumping into a lag-induced disaster.
The server was performing as well as either side could have hoped at this stage, and the two fleets engaged in one of the bloodiest contests of the war, this time trading blows with fully operational Titan Doomsday weapons. The battle remained close throughout, but the scales began to tip when the DRF ships began turning around and “slowboating” (burning sub-light engines) their way inside the shield of a nearby starbase they had erected here earlier. This maneuver allowed their shields to absorb a great deal of the NC fleet’s damage output while the ships escaped ultimate destruction, an impressive feat of fleet micromanagement.
In the ever-important Titan count, the Northern Coalition lost six more Titans to the DRF’s three. The Northern Coalition was left to absorb yet another near-trillion ISK loss as O2O-2X was finally captured by the Russians.
While everyone on both sides vocally agreed that this slugfest was extremely fun, within the Northern Coalition a certain sense of doom began to propagate.
NCDOT
Complicating matters, two new enemies declared war on the Northern Coalition, and they require a short bit of explanation. When IT Alliance splintered months earlier, its fragments allied with different established groups and formed new alliances. The first group consisted of some ex-IT/BoB corporations working with an ancient enemy of the Northern Coalition. This new alliance had one thing above all else in common: they hated the Northern Coalition. So deep was the enmity within this group of pilots for the Northern Coalition that they chose a new name for themselves: “Northern Coalition.”. That’s not a typo. There’s a little tiny extra period at the end. (Pron: “Northern Coalition Dot”.) For our purposes we’ll refer to the group as “NCdot.”
Two weeks after the showdown in O2O-2X, EVEOnline.com published an article about the mess the Northern Coalition now found itself in titled “NORTHERN COALITION ATTACKED ON ALL FRONTS.”
“The Northern Coalition is currently being pressed hard by fleets from the Drone Region Federation, Pandemic Legion, and the [NCdot] Alliance,” reads the article by author Svarthol. “Today, a fleet from the [NCdot] Alliance [along with many allies] reinforced five out of eleven Capital Ship Assembly Array towers in the 6OYQ-Z system in [the Tenal region] during a three-hour joint operation. They have also been attacking in Pure Blind and Fade regions. Simultaneously, Raiden (a different group of ex-IT/BoB corporations) and the Drone Region Federation have been attacking towers in Vale of the Silent, Venal, and Geminate. The plan seems to be to collectively deprive the NC of a part of their capital ship production facilities as well as the extremely valuable technetium deposits in the Venal region.”
The article quotes a spokesperson for the Drone Region Federation who remarked, “Everything they do is to split Northern Coalition forces. Just like in any war, you need someone making the front line as big as you can. This tactic has always worked against those who can only fight when they outnumber, but if they have split interests and split areas, they will either have to choose or break down.”
This bit of strategy proved remarkably prescient. The alliance of forces united behind Pandemic Legion and the DRF was tearing the Northern Coalition apart by the seams. By putting pressure on a large swath of the Northern Coalition’s territory, it ensured that dozens of different groups within the coalition had different priorities. One corporation might want to protect their in-build Titan under attack by Pandemic Legion in a vulnerable Capital Ship Assembly Array. Another corporation could be pinched because NCdot had shut down its technetium moon and it needed it operating normally to pay its debts. Meanwhile, more constituents were calling for help on the front line near the border every day.
All the while, Death fomented dissent within the Northern Coalition by lobbying Goonswarm Federation’s Coalition of Deklein to stay in the West and largely out of the fight. Death had been a friend of Goons for years—since before the beginning of the Great War in 2007—and that meant he could go behind Vuk Lau’s back and speak with The Mittani and Vile Rat, director of the Corp Diplomatique, directly whenever he wanted.
“We were real life friends with Death,” said Goonswarm’s DaBigRedBoat. “[Ex-Goonswarm leader] Darius [JOHNSON] and Death lived within an hour of each other and were real life best friends.”
I told DaBigRedBoat about a rumor I had heard that Death would wine-and-dine potential partners at a local New York City bathhouse, mostly expecting him to laugh it off or demur. To my surprise he instantly exclaimed:
“I’ve been to that bathhouse [with Death]! It’s a Russian bathhouse and you feel like you’re in the mafia when you walk in. Like, I thought Death was mafia because he would snap his fingers and servants came out it was hilarious.”
Boat added that Death was somebody Goonswarm wanted to stay on the good side of because he made for an unusual adversary.
“Death did something that not a lot of people did,” said DaBigRedBoat. “Today it’s commonplace for people to multibox and run multiple accounts. Death ran 89. He kept all of it on a spreadsheet. That’s how he kept track of it. He would run four Titans by himself, and he would defend his own sovereignty by himself.”
THUNDERCATS
Throughout April 2011, the war continued to go badly for the Northern Coalition. The battle reports from this time are full of drastic Northern Coalition losses at every level, from battlecruisers up to Titans. The situation worsened over the course of the month, reaching its zenith on April 27 as hundreds of Northern Coalition pilots fell to Pandemic Legion’s brand new fleet concept: Thundercats. Another evolution of its original concept, Thundercats used the Tengu hull with afterburner boosters allowing them to launch barrages of missiles while maintaining a speed so high that enemies couldn’t target them.
“I am completely in awe of [this fleet],” wrote the player Ripard Teg, a well-known EVE Online blogger, about the Thundercat fleet style. “They have no holes, no exploitable weaknesses… nothing. A fleet of children… a fleet of complete noobs… could get into this ship and win battles, as long as those child noobs had [a lot of skill points] each and could follow a fleet commander’s orders.”
The combined DRF/NCDOT force was consistently dominating the battlefield, and it was getting worse all the time. To deal with the mass numbers of Northern Coalition pilots, Pandemic Legion had invented a new type of Titan weapon configuration. Previous Titans were fitted with components that upgraded their Doomsday weapons and armor plating to help them survive opposing Doomsdays. Titans had many other weapon capabilities, but these were considered to be a secondary concern to the main Doomsday weapon. But Pandemic Legion’s new “Tracking Titans” used rows of laser batteries as well. Ordinarily these huge guns would move too slowly to be able to lock and shoot down a battleship, which is roughly 1/1000th the size of the Titan. But Pandemic Legion’s fleet wizards managed to figure out how to compensate for that problem by fitting just the right components with just the right fleet buffs. This allowed the Tracking Titans to one-shot almost anything. Larger ships would fall to its Doomsday while smaller more nimble ships would be mowed down by rows of laser cannons.
Against both the Thundercat fleets and these new Tracking Titans, there was no hope of victory in everyday engagements. The best strategy the Northern Coalition ever figured out for fighting back was its Alpha Maelstrom fleets, usually staffed by Goons and TEST. But these also had a nasty habit of being blown up by the bombers of Old Hroft.
Losses like this were bad for coalition morale. In particular, the western alliances of the Northern Coalition led by Goonswarm Federation and TEST began to feel that they were sacrificing more in this war than the eastern alliances who started all of this mess. Though The Mittani had always doubted the wisdom in provoking the Russian bear, it had happened anyway. He now had to seriously face the prospect of a future in which half of his coalition was conquered, and the Deklein Coalition would be alone against this massive and growing coalition of enemies. Worse, he saw in the Northern Coalition precisely what he had seen in dozens of other alliances he had spied on when they were in their death throes.
There may be no other person in EVE who has such intimate knowledge of what organizations are truly like when they’re falling apart. After all, The Mittani had personally engineered several such collapses, and been an avid reader of his enemies’ forums during the process. Nobody was more familiar with the predictable pattern of cracks that form within a group under stress. The Mittani seems to have begun to recognize signs of imminent destruction and collapse within the Northern Coalition. It’s around this time that he made a series of public statements disparaging democratic institutions like the Northern Coalition in favor of “strong” autocratic rule-by-despot.
In a prepared State of the Goonion address, he referred to the Northern Coalition as “a sort of a loose council without any clear lines of authority” adding that Vuk Lau was in charge “in theory.”
In the middle of the DRF invasion, The Mittani gave an interview to PC gaming website RockPaperShotgun.com and was quoted saying:
“Autocracy is the most effective form of government in nullsec. Council systems don’t work very well. Goonswarm is very lucky in that we have one large corporation, GoonWaffe, which used to be GoonFleet, which is mostly Something Awful members and has over 2,000 people. Since I’m the CEO of that corporation all the other ancillary corporations in the alliance are relatively powerless, and that works towards an autocracy. […] Democracy is death. In a situation where you need to be able to respond quickly and with force to strategic problems, invasions or what have you, you can’t wait for a vote.”
But history also shows that autocracy in EVE is fraught with risk. Heavy lies the crown, and the responsibility necessary to run a large-scale EVE organization is equal to or greater than a full-time job. And what happens when your leader gets burnt out and the alliance isn’t accustomed to functioning without direct leadership? What’s more, I am certain The Mittani wasn’t about to accept anyone else as that envisioned autocrat. It’s probably fair to say that what The Mittani really meant was that his autocracy was the best form of government in EVE.
All the while, the DRF machine churned forward, deeper into Northern Coalition space and toward Vuk Lau’s Fortress Tribute. The majority of EVE still believed this space to be impregnable, and the DRF Legion coalition wasn’t taking any chances. As the invasion crawled toward Tribute, the Russian commitment to the invasion grew. In April, a guest alliance of the Northern Coalition, “Majesta Empire,” saw its capital sacked. The DRF had overwhelmed the system with 34 Titans flanked by a massive wing of 121 supercarriers, likely the largest supercapital force ever assembled in this era.
As the DRF attacks reached Tribute core, Death was still privately lobbying Goonswarm to stay out of the defense of Tribute. He said that the invasion was effectively over, and the “attacks” on Tribute were just a “victory parade” to blow off steam and celebrate. Nonetheless, it would be best if the Goons weren’t there for the defense. The Russians posed no threat to the Goons, Death would say perhaps while nude and boiling in a Russian bathhouse, but it would be safer if the rest of the DRF didn’t see the Goons defending Tribute. The sight of the collective defense, he said, might goad the DRF into further attacks. Death told him to stay out of it, and he’d convince the other Russians to go home once Tribute fell and the old structure of the north was dismantled.
It’s not clear whether The Mittani was taking him seriously, but their diplomatic talks were disrupted in early May when the Goon forums—their hallowed cultural homeland—came under a days-long, sustained Dedicated Denial of Service Attack that sent them into disarray on the eve of the DRF “Victory Parade.” As the DDOS attack was still underway, The Mittani gathered his alliance for a speech to let everyone know what was going on and that the suspect was PsixoZZ Kahi’s DRF alliance White Noise, a recording of which survives on Soundcloud.
“This is going to be pretty informal. I just want to talk to people about what the fuck is going on. […]
We are investigating the people who are responsible for DDOSing us. We’re suffering under a botnet of approximately 25,000 IPs. […] The initial timing of this attack is very suspicious. It occurred only a couple of days before this ‘victory parade’ in Tribute. Then Razor’s Jabber has also come under attack. The timing of things makes me think the parties responsible are in White Noise, but that might not actually be true. […]
So, who is White Noise? White Noise appeared out of nowhere with a shitload of supercaps a while back. Their leader is the same now as it was then, a guy named PsixoZZ. At some point they ended up with a shit load of outside capital.
It appears—we’re investigating this, we’re not entirely sure yet—but it appears that one of the major RMT [Real Money Trading] shops that used to be associated with Against ALL Authorities, essentially moved into backing White Noise. They were able to rapidly purchase and acquire a massive supercapital fleet which we suspect is primarily bought. They buy Titans wholesale off of sale orders. They basically started throwing a shit load of isk around that came from nowhere.
Essentially White Noise appears to be a business. Their FCs and their leadership are on payroll. Nync is one of their FCs and he’s made no secret about the fact he’s on payroll. The reason why the White Noise situation is special is because [Against ALL Authorities] has a grudge and is burning their southern territory in Detorid and Tenerifis. We suspect that White Noise wants to move into the north for real not to just attack the north and then fuck off as in the MAX campaigns. The MAX campaigns were bullshit. […] White Noise’s territory is being burnt behind them, and they may very well *need* to live in Tribute.
What we’re fighting against here is a business model. There was the initial investment in buying the supercapital fleet, requiring the ISK to buy that and put their FCs on payrolls. What we suspect—though this is unconfirmed and we’re investigating it—is that they hope to take the North, live in the north, and seed the north with renters such as Raiden in Vale of the Silent.
From Tribute they can control and project power throughout the technetium holding areas of the north. And it’s just a tremendous amount of real world money. It’s a massive amount of profit that is potentially to be had if they’re able to do that. They can recoup their investment very easily.
This is why Deklein [Goonswarm’s home region] is under threat if Tribute falls. Because Tribute is centrally located, it is essentially the key to the North. If Tribute and Morsus Mihi and thus the North falls, we are going to be facing a rapacious business that isn’t going to be content with just sitting there and saying ‘we have enough.’ Goonswarm’s expansion eventually stopped because we had enough to feed and cloth our people in Maelstroms and Titans etc. Businesses have no such level of contentment.
We’re trying to source which RMT storefront is associated with White Noise. We don’t police RMT, I’m not CCP’s cop even though I am the chairman of the CSM. In this case, however, it appears that some RMTers are coming to threaten us personally. Which means that we have to start caring.”
The Mittani’s address then struck a remarkably different tone as he attempted to navigate the complex political situation set out before him and addressed one final topic to try to keep this from spiraling into a war against the whole Russian community.
There is one thing I want to talk about though as we get into this which is uh, we are going to be fighting Russians. Mainly we’re going to be fighting White Noise which is the driving impetus behind the Drone Russian Federation. […] This is something that I really want to hammer home because it’s something that has fucked up a lot of other alliances over the course of EVE:
We have a lot of Russians in Goonswarm. We’ve been friends with Russians before we were friends with anybody else. We were friends with Russians when they were united under one banner: Red Alliance. We are going to war essentially against a business, an RMT shop in the form of White Noise.
Do not make this fight into a fight against “Russians.” Exciting Russian nationalism, uniting them under one banner, ethnic slurs. [That’s] one of the stupidest things you can do in EVE Online. I watched Lotka Volterra do this. They’d make jokes about Russians, they’d shit on Russians in local [chat]. A lot of the people in the Eastern Northern Coalition, the people in Vale of the Silent from Eastern Europe, Slovakia, Slovenia, whatever, have issues with Russians and they would shit on Russians in local. This is part of why the DRF was so eager to burn them to the ground.
We are at war to defend Tribute, and to fight against an RMT shop. We’re not doing this because we like to fight Russians. So make sure you guys figure your shit out.”
–The Mittani, GoonSwarm CEO in a ‘State of the Goonion” address
April 11, 2011.
The speech closed with an obligatory thank you shout out to the myriad allies who were coming along to support Goonswarm, and an encouragement that pilots should be polite and thankful to those pilots who gave up their free time to help.
“The next three days we have [starbases that will be vulnerable,]” The Mittani concluded. “We’re going to see whether Death is telling the truth that this is a ‘victory parade’ or whatever.”
The very next day it became clear this was anything but a parade, as serious DRF attacks struck all of those starbases. The “Horn of Goondor” was sounded, and the Deklein Coalition rallied to Tribute to try to hold back the invasion.
The last refuge for the eastern half of the Northern Coalition was Vuk Lau and Morsus Mihi’s home—H-W9TY, the Jewel of Nullsec.
