“There was no animosity. Everyone was just sad. I think the sadness came from us wanting him to tell us its over. Please, just tell us its done. Tell us we’re finished.”
–Sort Dragon, IT Alliance
IN A TESTAMENT TO the human-driven nature of EVE, a massive change in the EVE political state can only be explained with a love story.
In November 2010, the real life player behind SirMolle was busy packing up his real world home and selling off much of his belongings. After eight years sailing the skies of New Eden, he was now planning a flight through the skies of the North Atlantic, to the United States to be with his new family: a diplomat from the Northern Coalition named Slinktress, and her five teenage daughters.
“Basically, I sold everything I owned in Sweden then I took two bags and went over to the US,” he said.
“We lost our space to Pandemic Legion, and that’s where I met Molle,” said Slinktress, an officer in a small corporation allied to the Northern Coalition. “Molle was coming around and picking on them, and I had a proposition to make. I sat on his TeamSpeak for three days waiting to get his attention.”
When Slinktress finally got SirMolle’s attention she at first wanted to discuss a partnership, but the two found they had that certain spark, and spent hours talking in private chat rooms away from the memes and petty arguments of the common membership.
“Marriage was not anywhere in the imagination, oh my gosh! We had a common enemy, and I guess I was entertaining,” she said adding that SirMolle got a whole bunch of grief from IT Alliance members for going off into a private chatroom with “some character named Slinktress.”
“We were both leading large groups of people too,” she said. “I liked his leadership style, it was very similar to mine: honesty. And all of the things that I hated about BoB [as a member of the Northern Coalition]…if he had known about it there would have been some head-rolling.”
Though ostensibly about war negotiations, these secret TeamSpeak rendezvous were about something altogether more human. The warmongering HVAC repairman from Sweden was falling in love with the enterprising American diplomat. SirMolle had conducted campaigns which had reshaped the geography of New Eden. Slinktress was doing her best to protect a small alliance that had been buffeted by those epoch-making events.
It wasn’t widely publicized within EVE, but those in the know were well aware by now that SirMolle was “busy IRL.” He was in the United States now making a new home, dealing with the daily blur of activity that comes with parenting five children, and the worst problem of all was that his new home had crappy internet service. “After February 2011, Molle didn’t have decent internet, so he couldn’t really play,” said Slinktress. “We tried to keep that on the downlow so our enemies wouldn’t get too excited.”
The attempt to keep it secret wasn’t very successful. Their enemies didn’t know SirMolle’s real life situation, but their spies could sense his absence from his coalition as his corporation leaders began to bicker without him as a figurehead.
HEROES OF OLD
There was a growing rift between two factions within IT that wanted to take the alliance in different directions. There were the old school BoB corporations who wanted things to largely stay the same, and then there were Finfleet and X13, corporations which wanted to pursue a more roving, mercenary-based life like the up-and-coming Pandemic Legion. Amid all the bickering and egos, Pandemic Legion appeared one day out-of-the-black to assault IT Alliance’s home constellation in Delve. Years later, after some chat logs were leaked to the public, the reason for Pandemic Legion’s attack was made clear.
“It came out that Finfleet and X13 hired Pandemic Legion to come shoot Reikoku [one of the founding corporations of both BoB and IT] assets in Delve,” said former IT fleet commander Sort Dragon. The ideological rift about how the alliance should be run was tipping toward open civil war because SirMolle wasn’t around to bridge the divide. Spies relayed intel back to the ClusterFuck Coalition that two factions had split IT Alliance and would soon come to blows.
After the MAX campaigns, the CFC had already started expanding on the old Northern Coalition jump bridge network to more efficiently transport ships to the border in case of an IT attack. Now that network reached nearly to the doorstep of Fountain. When IT attempted to shut down that jump bridge network, the CFC used that attack to justify a full-on invasion.
SirMolle was checking in on the alliance and keeping tabs on the situation, but he wasn’t inside EVE like he had been before. He talked them through the crisis late at night on TeamSpeak when he had time.
“What you guys will see is a truckload of spin, propaganda,” he was recorded saying one night as the TEST invasion moved across the border and spilled through the Fountain stargate network. “You’re going to see people posting about ‘you lost all your manpower, you have no quality left.’”
When TEST Alliance attacked PNQY-Y, the bridge into the core of Fountain, SirMolle was in America starting his new life. “The first couple of months I didn’t have time for anything EVE-wise,” he said. “Thanks to that, there were too many egos in IT Alliance, and it just crumbled and fell unto itself.”
SirMolle had seen all of this before in Band of Brothers. The creeping malaise. The declining fleet numbers. The egos and the infighting. An alliance that is assembled around one person is like a body intimately intertwined with a strong beating heart, and it makes no sense to consider the survival of one without the other. There may be other important organs, but it’s uncommon that one can step into the central role of pumping life into the collective.
“IT was full of massive egos,” said Sort Dragon. “Myself included. You had the original BoB corps who were the major egos. The actual downfall of IT came down to the fact that the only reason why IT survived was that Molle was always there to counteract the egos. You had technically a ticking time bomb, but nobody expected it to go off because nobody expected Molle to level up and escape EVE.”
“Molle deserved this, he deserved to have his real life at this point,” said Sort Dragon. “He deserved to be happy. Unfortunately, the problem that happens these days with leaders is that when it’s time to call it quits and either leave or hand over [leadership,] the leaders are sometimes too arrogant and end up taking the alliance or coalition down with them. Even at the bitter end, the final meeting between all of the CEOs and directors and Molle. There were deals made about the splitting of assets, and Molle still only gave up a small percentage of it. He just left. But he didn’t even just leave. He existed without existing. He wasn’t dealing with the issues that were coming to pass. So when the mini-civil war happened between [Reikoku] and Finfleet, he could’ve stepped in at any moment and shut it down but he didn’t. And there was a lot of animosity.”
When he was able to be around, SirMolle instead focused all his efforts on keeping everyone’s nerve steady. He commanded them to batten down the hatches and prepare to hold their headquarters in Fountain, 6VDT-H.
“The frontline is going to be Fountain,” he was recorded telling his pilots. “It’s not going to be in Delve. It’s not going to be Querious. It’s going to be Fountain. If someone ran round like a headless chicken and moved their stuff out of 6VDT-H: Get. It. Back.”
SirMolle ordered the entire alliance’s ships stockpiled in 6VDT-H where the defense would be headquartered. IT Alliance prepared for a long siege, expecting the incoming TEST and Deklein Coalition allies to grind down the vast territory slowly. However, Vile Rat’s spies in IT Alliance relayed news about the stockpile, and The Mittani saw an opening to end the war in one stroke.
“Mittens (The Mittani) basically had us where he wanted us because we were too badly in-fighting,” said Sort Dragon. “Then Mittens moved in. We realized they had a spy in Finfleet and they had a spy in Reikoku, and they could see the turmoil that was coming. When they realized that X13 and Finfleet were leaning toward not helping in 6VDT-H, he made the call to go for it.”
The massive attack on the station eventually evolved into what’s commonly known in EVE parlance as a “hellcamp,” essentially a mass of ships that amounts to an unbreakable blockade. More than 800 CFC pilots formed a blob around the station at 6VDT-H, killing anything that tried to go in or out.
“When the big fight at 6VDT-H happened and we were hellcamped […] we weren’t able to deal with it because Finfleet and X13 pulled their supercapitals out and refused to engage,” said Sort Dragon. “I was one of the main FCs that was leading the defense of that. I led most of that Fountain campaign, myself and a guy named Hawk Firebird.”
When the final battle for the station came, it was little more than a distraction so that freighters could sneak out as many IT Alliance assets as possible while the TEST/Deklein Coalition fleet was engaged.
“This is/was IT’s staging system for their defence of Fountain,” said Devilish Ledoux, a Goonswarm member, on the day of the battle, recorded by a forum reporter. “Rather than continuing to degrade their systems over time, we decided to strike at the heart of their strength in the region. It’s not a very subtle strategy, but so far, it’s been very effective. The fight going on right this moment is their first serious attempt at a defence, [IT Alliance] appear to be much more interested in escape than actual defence at this stage.”
“It seems TEST/Goons/[CFC] have had the upper hand all day,” said an anonymously-quoted IT Alliance member. “Especially seeing as they steam rolled through a lot of Fountain overnight it seems. […] I think IT Alliance will lose 6VDT-H and some more.”
Entire corporations of players began leaving en masse as they started to sense that IT Alliance wasn’t going to be able to survive this latest attack, and the alliance began to swiftly collapse.
“That basically brought down IT because they then decided to go do their own thing and so the rest of us had to escape on our own,” said Sort Dragon. Once again, the major corporations of IT Alliance did not die, but were dispersed and scattered to different corners of New Eden.
Within just two weeks of the beginning of the assault, Fountain was taken, and TEST Alliance was installed as the new owners. Fountain would be fertile soil for the up-and-coming Redditors, and 6VDT-H—the site of their victory over IT Alliance—was its symbolic home, a place they would defend to the last.
The fall of IT Alliance was less of a grand battle than a structural collapse. The great, hastily-constructed ship was sinking before the community’s eyes. Once again, one of the pillars of the community, the second largest organization of players in the entire game, simply ceased to exist. This time it wasn’t betrayal that dispersed the organization, but rather a complete structural dissolution. The invasion began in late January 2010, and by mid-February IT Alliance’s membership had dwindled from 8,000 at its height to now just 2,500.
“Molle was like the dad of BoB and IT, and you can’t talk bad about your dad,” said Sort Dragon. “Do you want to be the guy who comes to him [as a newlywed] and says, ‘why aren’t you leading your space empire?!’ There was no animosity [toward SirMolle personally.] Everyone was just sad, they weren’t mad. It was just an understanding that IT was finished. I think the sadness came from us wanting him to tell us its over. Please, just tell us its done. Tell us we’re finished. That was the biggest thing that was needed. Was for Molle to say, ‘OK my children it is OK to go.’ And that is something that I will take with me for the rest of my life as a leader. Is that when it’s time to pull the curtains and it’s time to leave do what’s right. Close the door. Because your people deserve that kind of honesty.”
There are occasions in EVE in which players report experiencing a profound awareness that larger events are transpiring. They don’t always feel comfortable saying it out loud, because they feel silly being moved by the events on their computer screens. When you’ve seen these things for yourself, however, you can sense in the way they talk about certain events that there was something truly unique about their experience. People within the game and who are connected to the community can feel things happening even though they’re not directly involved. The whisper network of EVE is vast and interconnected, and when events like this occur there’s a special sense of awe that comes from knowing that events so much larger than yourself are taking place all around you. In this case the event in question was the rapid evaporation of IT Alliance.
By the time TEST and the Deklein Coalition had taken Fountain, IT Alliance was a functionally broken organization. While the northern half of IT’s turf crumbled, the southern end was swiftly invaded as well.
As TEST stepped into its new home both the leadership and the line pilots saw that TEST’s time had arrived. Beyond that, a new coalition was organizing in the south to take advantage of the fall of IT. Among them were Pandemic Legion as well as a former IT Alliance renter called Nulli Secunda, “Second to None,” led by a player named Gorga and his infamous fleet commander: ProGodLegend.
But SirMolle didn’t even mind. In Virginia, SirMolle and Slinktress were building their new life, and SirMolle was preparing for his first alliance barbecue since moving to America. When a player uses the lessons and relationships they build within EVE to eventually quit the game and move on to a new phase of their lives, they are often congratulated by the community for “winning EVE.”
“[SirMolle] claimed in one article that because he got me, he won EVE,” said Slinktress. “And I felt the same way. My archnemesis was [redacted] and once she found out Molle was marrying me she up and quit the game. I guess we’re romantic.”
