“We are going to go to the heart of high-sec, the beating heart of EVE Online and we are going to stab it repeatedly.”
–The Mittani, CEO, Goonswarm Federation
ON APRIL 27, 2012, in the Jita star system in the heart of empire space, Goon freighters were loading a ship hangar with 14,000 identical ships. Day after day, more and more of the identical ships arrived off the assembly line. They were heavily modified Thrasher hulls, rewired so that all the ship’s energy focused on its weapon. No shield generators. No microwarpdrive. Just a Goon armada waiting in Jita—ostensibly the safest star system in EVE Online—with a single bullet in each ship’s overclocked artillery gun. The ships were there to mount an all-out attack on the central hub of this virtual world.
Why? Because 30 days earlier, CCP Games had banned The Mittani from EVE Online.
FANFEST 2012
The story of the burning of Jita begins in Iceland on March 26, 2012 at EVE Online’s annual fan convention “Fanfest.” Each year, the EVE Online community came together to meet each other in real life and give a series of presentations aimed at sharing knowledge and enhancing the common understanding of this spectacularly opaque and famously complicated video game.
It was also—in keeping with longstanding Icelandic tradition—an opportunity to consume spectacular amounts of alcohol. Throughout Reykjavik, the resounding cry of Fanfest weekend is “Skål!” the Icelandic “cheers.”
Many of the game’s most well-known figures were in attendance, and for three days in 2012 the community was united in celebration for a game at the peak of its popularity. Those who had climbed and clawed their way to the upper echelons of EVE found themselves at the top tier of a game that was constantly ascending to new peaks. Few would have suspected when they began playing that they would one day end up speaking on-stage at a conference at the top of the world, covered by dozens of media outlets.
Of particular interest at Fanfest are the player presentations, in which some of the game’s most well-known figures speak to an audience about what they’ve learned over the previous year about how to succeed in EVE. Famous fleet commanders present advice on fleet strategies, market geniuses speak about the secrets that made them digital trillionaires, and CCP developers present their plans for the future of the game.
In 2012, one of the centerpiece presentations was an alliance leader panel, in which many of EVE Online’s most popular player organizations were given a chance to introduce their alliance and talk about their group’s story and ethos. Over the long 75 minute panel, six alliance leaders prominent in EVE traded stories and ill-advised shots of Jagermeister and Redbull. After an hour of talking and drinking, The Mittani’s Goonswarm presentation was last. Within 24 hours of the presentation The Mittani would no longer be the chairman of the Council of Stellar Management, and he would be banned from EVE Online.
THE WIZARD’S HAT
The crux of his presentation—delivered while wearing a large purple wizard’s hat emblazoned with gold stars—was based upon the half-sarcastic thesis that Goonswarm truly does love the rest of the EVE community. There’s a lot of truth to this, of course, because the EVE community itself is Goonswarm’s favorite toy, and yet everyone understood the sarcasm of calling what Goonswarm does “love.”
During the speech, which lasted roughly ten minutes, The Mittani presented several case studies in which Goons had not only scammed, destroyed, or invaded other players, but relished their wailing cries in the process. Pretty basic stuff by Goon standards.
In a tone of deep mockery, The Mittani, (by now heavily intoxicated and continuing to slam Jager shots during the speech) read several of the communications he and his GIA agents had received from other players or intercepted from their forums. One was a post from a religious member of the old BoB ally Firmus Ixion who had posted a literal prayer to God to deliver the alliance from the hard times it had fallen on. He also read two notes that were from enraged players who had been taken by Goon scammers.
The most revealing anecdote was about a player from high-security space that some Goon bombers had discovered flying 22 mining ships all by himself during the ICE Interdiction. After the bombers destroyed the miner repeatedly, they then suckered the miner into purchasing a fake “protection program” then blew them up again anyway. The miner sent a message to the bomber crew at the peak of despair.
As The Mittani read the miner’s impassioned plea aloud, thick with sarcasm and ridicule, the audience often chuckled along and the co-presenters occasionally egged him on, handing him more drinks. Yet others were aghast at what they were hearing. The miner’s letter read:
“So now it looks like you will still gank me, and I work hard to keep going in this game. Sorry I am very mad [I was going to sell those minerals to buy subscription time] for my guys. Yes I can make that back easily mining if I could mine. Now I will just get popped by you guys no matter what. […] Now I feel that I have been suckered into giving away 1.3 billion ISK. Since my divorce, all I want to do is die, and I’ve been doing that a lot in this game.
I am sorry I did not understand. I am just sick and tired of sitting here alone and having to play with myself. Everyone that I have helped out in this game and in real life just takes what you have and that’s it. Never to hear from them again. I am getting tired of everything. It was nice mining ICE while it lasted, took my mind off everything. Even though some people may say I’m a bot, I am not. I run all 22 accounts myself. It is not easy, but it keeps me sane.
Sorry for making you mad at me. I will leave you alone now and never enter your space again. I will be off looking for a nice quiet corner somewhere.”
Many were shocked that The Mittani would mock a person who appeared to be in sincere distress, and yet this was not entirely unexpected from a delegate of Goonswarm. The culture of the organization has long been focused on exactly this type of griefing and scamming, and they partially exist in EVE Online specifically because the game and its developers don’t technically prohibit those actions. Some of the audience was sincerely amused by The Mittani’s anecdotes, because this was far from unusual at the time in EVE which was scantly moderated. In context with previous Fanfest player presentations which were occasionally spectacularly juvenile this wasn’t completely unusual. In fact, Darius JOHNSON had given a pretty similar speech with a pretty similar blood alcohol content at Fanfest three years prior.
The Goon point of view would say that the humor in these anecdotes comes from the absurdity of a person allowing a game to become so important to them. The Goons of this era would likely have said they were doing this person a favor by helping them break their unhealthy attachment to spaceship pixels. It’s part of an ideological battle that dates back to the dawn of online roleplaying games. There is a fundamental disagreement between players about how the simulation should be treated. Is this real life? Does any of this matter, and is it OK if it matters to you? Or is EVE a half-realm where everything is imaginary? Should virtual actions have a morality attached to them? Some players simply don’t believe so, and believe that anything that occurs within the virtual realm is fair game. That’s the very reason some of them are here. To exercise a demon without the risk it would carry in the real world.
There was a tenuous truce in the community where most conduct—even the sincerely vile—was permitted as long as it stayed within the virtual realm, and never crossed the line into real world harassment. Then that line was unambiguously crossed.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
At the end of The Mittani’s presentation there was a Q&A session in which an audience member brought up The Mittani’s story about the despairing miner. In his response to the question, The Mittani said, “Incidentally, if you want to make the guy kill himself, his [in-game] name is…”
While some in the audience and on the panel had laughed along with the entire performance others in the audience were furious, and within hours the story was picked up by gaming media who were covering the event. Overnight The Mittani’s reputation experienced a drastic whiplash. No longer was he the devious emperor of space, the scribe of the well-read EVE Online column “Sins of a Solar Spymaster.” Now he was, as one Kotaku.com headline called him, “the EVE Online Suicide Taunter.” Cracked.com would eventually rank it among the most impressive dick moves in the history of online gaming.
CCP Games swiftly provided a statement condemning the speech and deflecting blame when approached by journalists about the controversy. However, CCP was on shaky historical ground. CCP had been advertising EVE for years as a cold, dark, and harsh space where anything can and did happen. Stories of players robbing, scamming, and griefing each other had been part of the marketing message of the game for as long as anyone could remember because those stories had a way of conveying the vividness of EVE’s virtual frontier. When you encourage players to explore the boundary of virtual morality you shouldn’t be surprised when one of them steps over it.
“I want to reassure you that CCP in no way condones the harassment of players, especially those who suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts, as we understand the possible consequences of such abhorrent behaviour.
Our Terms of Service (TOS) mirror our company’s stance on this matter.
While the content of online interactions between players cannot realistically be gated within our game worlds, we do take very seriously accusations of such behaviour between our players.
Furthermore, we have a suicide hotline protocol which has, in specific cases, made a difference for several unfortunately troubled players. We appreciate you voicing your concerns on this level, and CCP will be very vigilant in monitoring any behaviour directed towards the individual named in the presentation.
We are undertaking a full internal review of this panel as well as the process used for vetting the panel’s materials. Even though this panel was billed as unfiltered by CCP, we expect public presentations to be courteous and professional towards others.”
The gravity of the situation clearly began to dawn on The Mittani as he flew home from Iceland to the United States. He issued a lengthy apology upon returning, and it opened up fascinating questions into where the virtual realm began and ended. Were The Mittani and Alex Gianturco two distinct people? If so, where was the line drawn?
“I feel absolutely ashamed of my behavior at the Alliance Panel. It’s one thing to play a villain in an online roleplaying game—when I post on these forums or on Twitter, I usually do so as ‘The Mittani,’ and do my level best to convince everyone that I’m an unrepentant space villain, as that kind of facade provides an in-game advantage to me and my alliance. But I am not that character in real life, as anyone who has met me can attest. I went way, way, /way/ past the line on Thursday night by mocking the Mackinaw miner at a real-life event. I, as a person, am not the entity that I play in EVE; I am not actually a sociopath or a sadist, and I certainly don’t want people to kill themselves in real life over an internet spaceship game, no matter what I may say or do within the game itself. CCP may say ‘EVE is Real’, but EVE is not real—and the line between the game and reality should not be overstepped.
I’m relieved to discover that the Mackinaw miner is doing fine and mining away, despite being blown up by Goonswarm in-game. He deserves, and he has, my heartfelt apologies—here in public as well as a private apology. There’s no excuse for what I did—while some might try to use my inebriation as a mitigating factor, I put myself in that compromised mental state, and the guilt of that is entirely mine.
If I could go back in time and not have included the slide mentioning the miner, I would do so. While the EVE Online character ‘The Mittani’ would never apologize for any sort of villainy in-game, I myself, […] feel utterly ashamed and sickened by my behavior.”
–The Mittani, Goonswarm Federation
If there was one thing the community could largely agree upon, it’s that the developers should not interfere with interactions between players unless they result in real-life threats or other very specific crimes. In this case, that hard line had actually been crossed, and CCP felt forced to take action. What action could realistically be taken, however? The issue hearkened back to something Raph Koster wrote about during the development of Ultima Online. “What sort of punishment is even possible for virtual crime?” he mused.
Did CCP Games have the power to ban the most powerful player in its community? What would happen if it tried? Couldn’t The Mittani simply create a new character called “The Mittani.” or “xXTheMittaniXx”? And how could CCP stop him from managing his alliance outside the game using services like Skype, Discord, Slack, Google Docs or any other services they have no control over? Did they even have the right to? The vast majority of that work took place outside of its virtual jurisdiction. By attempting to ban him, would they instead turn him into a martyr who could spark the next riot in Jita?
With all of this public attention CCP was forced to do something, and with few good options, it decided on what one might call a slap on the virtual wrist. CCP banned The Mittani from EVE Online for 30 days.
STATE OF THE GOONION
In the aftermath of the decision The Mittani called a State of the Goonion address. On March 29, 2012, more than 2000 Goonswarm members gathered on a Mumble server to hear a speech in which The Mittani explained what happened, what it meant for the alliance, and what would come next. It was a dramatic moment in which The Mittani’s speech oscillated between a genuinely concilliatory tone and intense anger that popped his microphone audio. In the speech he attempts to move the Goons on from the controversy, and to detail the revenge plot masterminded by a Goonswarm leader named Aryth. It was a plot they had come to call “Burn Jita.”
“I wanted to get everyone together here today because obviously I just got banned. I want to reiterate to everyone that this ban is completely meaningless to the function of this alliance and this coalition. […]
I did something dumb at Fanfest. I did something really, really dumb. I apologized for that. That apology was real. I’m 33 years old. I have never slipped up like that before. [Lag interrupts speech] This is the first time in my life that I have had one of those regrettable ‘I did something when I was drunk and I need to apologize to people’ situations. The problem of course was that this happened on a live feed at a Fanfest that had a massive number of press from outside the game.
My apology was genuine. A lot of people in our coalition thought that was a troll, because it’s very rare for me to break character and say ‘I feel really, really terrible about this.’ I don’t normally do that kind of thing. I know it. Everybody knows it.
I fell on my sword, and I owned it and I did it proudly, and I’d do it again. […] But I don’t think I can be an alliance leader of Goonswarm effectively, and be the chairman of the CSM. This incident has shown that. I can either be a nice, upstanding citizen, and screw over Goonswarm by not being allowed to use the kind of tactics that are necessary to be able to have us succeed and survive in nullsec—which people in the media don’t understand is like lawless Somalia, you can’t show weakness in nullsec, you can’t behave like a good citizen or you end up like Ascendant Frontier did, those wonderful citizens who of course got rolled over by a stronger power at the first opportunity.
So I resigned from the CSM. When I landed in Boston I felt terrible about what I had said and what I had done. I tweeted that I was going to resign and I didn’t think that this was going to work anymore as part of my apology. And I did just that. […]
Why did this happen? There have been many things said and done at many Fanfests before. This Fanfest was different from ones in the past, and I’m trying to interpret what has happened. It is true, I said a terrible thing, and I did apologize for it. This Fanfest had a whole host of media people who were brought here for Sony’s major [Dust 514] launch. They weren’t EVE reporters, they were FPS/Sony reporters. The entire crew shipped in more than 70 of them.
The intent that CCP has in working with Sony is clearly to grow the size of EVE and [Dust 514] by bringing millions of console players into the game world. This means that there was a lot of scrutiny at this Fanfest that simply wasn’t there in the past as well as corporate interests that didn’t exist previously.
Now, no, this isn’t some sort of wacky conspiracy theory. It’s hard to say if what we’re seeing from CCP in reaction to what happened is coming from CCP themselves or from some other influence. We must wait and see—when I am unbanned—whether EVE is still the EVE we love. […]
So here’s what we’re going to do. April 28th is the day that I will be unbanned. A month is a suitable amount of time to prepare, and to ensure that we have absolutely enough supplies and material to be able to burn Jita to the ground. And then we are going to do exactly that. We are going to annihilate Jita. We are going to go to the heart of high-sec, the beating heart of EVE Online and we are going to stab it repeatedly.
And if CCP is still the old CCP, this will be heralded as an amazing in-game event, a “Free Mittani” event, as it were, my first day out of the box. And everything will be fine. We will go on and we will continue enjoying the game—and it sucks that I was a terrible asshole and fucked everything up and I still feel really horribly guilty about it—but EVE Online will continue being EVE Online. If there is some sort of crackdown or reaction from Goonswarm being Goonswarm, then we will have more information and can make an informed decision as to how we proceed.
I know that after we have had conflicts in the past with CCP—with the T20 business, with the Threadnought—and in the past, my own reaction in 2007 had been extremely unreasonable. I started a raging threadnought against CCP because T20 was of course giving [Blueprint Originals] to Band of Brothers, [he] was in Band of Brothers, and we basically went to war with CCP. It was a disaster.
We’re not going to do that this time. I have learned that rash action in this sort of context is *not* wise. It’s not going to accomplish anything. You can’t shoot CCP with a laser. And it might not even be necessarily their fault. It might not be the reasonable way to go. So what we are going to do is we are going to think, and we are going to keep this alliance and this coalition going, and then in a month, we will test the waters. We will destroy Jita. And we will see where things go.
For now, we have work to do. […] All of today Raiden has come into our territory and [attacked more than 15 starbases.] [Inaudible] It is obvious to me that Raiden cannot be tolerated to exist on our northern border. If we are to exist as a coalition Tenal. Must. Be. Conquered.
I don’t want you to unsub[scribe.] I don’t want you to quit. I don’t want you to rage impotently in Jita. Because the problem with this, if we do that, is our enemies will all benefit. They will see us having our downfall. They will point, and they will laugh. And at the end of the day we’ll be letting our own people down.
So I know. I know you’re mad. I understand you want to point at CCP. I understand that I have been fucked. And I understand that it is shitty.
But we have work to do. And that work is in Tenal.”
–The Mittani, Goonswarm Federation, Clusterfuck Coalition
March 27, 2012
It’s a brilliant speech by any measure, delivered with dramatic timing and with tints of anger and defiance at all the right points.
The ban itself amounted to essentially a symbolic moment in which CCP needed to be seen taking action. It was not particularly meaningful to the bureaucracy of Goonswarm, roughly akin to banning the CEO from the company Slack for 30 days. It’s not even particularly clear how CCP would go about banning a person who likely had multiple accounts, access to shared accounts in the alliance, and dozens of underlings who weren’t banned and could relay information. But symbolic moments are often important because of the message they send to the community. This speech was about The Mittani rewriting that message for his people.
The speech also deftly interweaves genuine EVE history with Mittani fiction. He uses the speech to reframe the narrative of the entire event. He explains that it is impossible to be the leader of Goonswarm and the chairman of the CSM, because he couldn’t use the tactics needed for Goonswarm to survive in nullsec. But that was a smoke screen. This controversy had nothing to do with tactics in nullsec. In fact, he had recently boasted about what a success his first year on the CSM was, and how fruitful it had been “in the right hands.” So he reframes the relationship as one that was destined to fail simply because he’s a Goon.
Later, he references the T20 scandal of 2007, reminding his members that CCP is the real enemy who had been caught cheating four years in the past. However, he stretches the truth by conflating the T20 scandal with the “threadnought,” which refers to something that happened five months later over a separate scandal in which CCP was largely cleared of wrongdoing. By fusing the two events together he creates a powerful new narrative: “In the past I was rash in the face of this kind of blatant corruption, but this time I will be wiser,” he seems to imply.
The speech clearly had two primary driving goals. The first was to paint CCP as a company that had fundamentally changed due to its naked ambition and corrupt interests in trying to expand the EVE subscriber base. He raised the looming specter of CCP “bringing millions of console players into the game world.” The other was to stabilize The Mittani’s control over the alliance, and move people on from the event itself. Essentially, it aimed to bury the old controversy by making clear apologies, and then move the Goonswarm community on to a different controversy—one that had worked many times in the past: CCP malfeasance. After all, the entire EVE community was still on a hair trigger following the Summer of Rage in 2011.
A secondary goal of the speech was to give the Goonswarm community things to do and to look forward to which would carry them beyond the controversy. The task he gave them to occupy the moment was to retaliate against a resurgent enemy: Raiden, a bastion for old Band of Brothers directors.
The Raiden campaign was never going to be a difficult campaign for Goonswarm. Goonswarm took Tenal—historically speaking—in an instant. The sovereignty flipped in the Tenal region in a matter of days. The ease of this conquest makes Raiden’s prominence in The Mittani’s speech as an existential threat all the more ironic. When it was over, The Mittani installed RAZOR Alliance—one of the old cores of the Northern Coalition—back into their traditional home region. RAZOR had lived in the Tenal region for more than half a decade as part of the old Northern Coalition before the Drone Region Federation conquered its home. Now it was home again as part of the ClusterFuck Coalition. Much of the old Northern Coalition was back together under new leadership. Even while banned, The Mittani was advancing geopolitical goals.
THE SACKING OF JITA
While the Raiden campaign was underway, Goon logisticians and engineers built a massive stockpile of ships to facilitate the campaign against Jita. In order for the burning of Jita to work effectively, Goon pilots needed to know that their ships were disposable and free to replace. The whole thing would collapse if members were risking their own ships or were forced to fly all the way back to nullsec to get a new one. And in order for their attacks to work and kill an enemy in a single shot, the ships needed to follow strict instructions in terms of how their armor, weapons, and capacitor power were allocated.
The burning of Jita was premised upon a loophole in the way the AI police force guards Jita and prevents it from being taken over by player groups. The CONCORD police force warps in almost instantly to punish someone who commits acts of aggression against other players. Almost instantly. They don’t stop the act from taking place, they respond to it. So Goonswarm’s plan was to combine its two great loves—griefing and social engineering campaigns—to mount a massive ganking campaign indiscriminately targeting every single pilot who undocked from the newbie hub. Goonswarm built a massive communal stockpile of 14,000 disposable ships in the Caldari Navy Assembly Plant at Jita 4-4, and prepared to sacrifice every one of them in order to collect their most precious resource: the salty tears of “carebears” who play in high security space. It was part protest, part macabre Welcome Home party for The Mittani.
Thirty days after the ban was instated, in the early morning hours just after midnight on April 27, 2012, more than 1800 Goons made their way from their headquarters in Deklein and rendezvoused at the mountain of ships stockpiled in Jita for a fleet operation they’d been looking forward to for weeks.
The Goon fleet overwhelmingly consisted of Thrasher-class ships. Eighteen hundred of them floated in the sky above the Caldari Navy Assembly plant near the most heavily-trafficked trade hub in New Eden.
The Mittani had placed an enormous question mark over the entire Burn Jita operation: how will CCP react? In the past, CCP had celebrated player ingenuity on a grand scale. When players found clever ways to thrive and have fun within the rules of the game, CCP was well-known for celebrating that and letting players sort things out themselves. Their attitude in that regard is largely the reason why this book can be written.
Because this attack had been publicized by Goonswarm far in advance CCP Games actually had time to anticipate the event and shore up the servers. It even prepared to engage Time Dilation for the first time in high-security space in anticipation of an overwhelming event. Not only would CCP allow and endorse the deviously creative Goon offensive, it actively worked to facilitate it, and publicized Burn Jita as an example of EVE at its best.
In an interview during the event itself, CCP lead developers remarked that they loved the ingenuity of the players finding a unique way to spice up the game world without breaking the rules. These players, they noted, weren’t evading justice. They were accepting it, and paying the accepted penalty: losing their ship. They’d simply come up with a plan so well-coordinated that losing their ship was almost meaningless.
The 1800 ships rendezvoused near the docking port of the station at the heart of EVE, and at the mark of the first fire command, 1800 Thrashers rained down a torrent of 1400mm Howitzer guns and smartbombs which obliterated a random freighter just outside the Caldari Navy Assembly Plant. Cargo and mining ships of innocent bystanders went up in smoke. CONCORD arrived and swiftly destroyed the ones who had fired, but within moments they were back in position in fresh ships and ready to do it all over again. Over and over again the ships were slammed with a hail of fire and then burst. The chaos continued for hours upon hours throughout the day, and kept up through the entire weekend amid a hurricane of Goon laughter, and a growing, glitchy graveyard of scrap metal picked clean by players harvesting the wrecks of ships destroyed in the calamity. Even the corpses of the dead traders killed were often scooped up as mementos. The player would be resurrected in a new body, but these bodies would always be the ones that died the day that Jita burned. The Goon mission to bring nullsec culture to high security empire space was both a nightmare and a roaring success.
One anonymous player who was in Jita for the event summed it up better than anyone else. “There’s just something special about building 14,000 spaceships and loading their guns with 1 round of ammo to shoot. And doing it right in front of the police,” they wrote.
“This weekend has been a milestone for EVE,” Lazarus Telraven, one of Goonswarm’s top fleet commanders told EVEOnline.com. “The first time anyone has declared war on a solar system. The game worked wonderfully. Among the Jita Burners, complaints are few and praise is plentiful, but we all agree that without Time Dilation none of this would have been possible.”
“It’s what makes EVE a really good game,” said Kristoffer Touborg at the time the lead game designer. “Do you want to play a 15 minute match of Call of Duty that you won’t remember the next day, or do you want to spend four months manufacturing 14,000 Thrashers to do this? It’s just so big and awesome.”
The flames in Jita eventually dissipated, as the Jita Burners’ numbers dwindled and they lost the critical mass necessary to take out ships before being destroyed by CONCORD. The event was a hit, however, and has since become an annual staple on the Goon calendar.
For Goonswarm this was a landmark event, more important as a symbol than for the number of ships destroyed. For years now, The Mittani had been using large scale symbolic moves and backing them up with publicity campaigns to emphasize their impact. The ICE Interdiction, for example, wasn’t important because of the miners destroyed which was actually quite low and ultimately irrelevant. What mattered was that the miners of high-sec believed they would be destroyed. Which stopped them from even attempting to mine. It was an intimidation campaign meant to augment the force projection of the spookily-named “Dread Pirates.”
Burn Jita was essentially the same thing on a massive scale. It provided a clear statement that nowhere in EVE Online is untouchable, and that the very economy of the game was not beyond their reach. If the CFC could take over Jita one time then it could do it at any time of its choosing. Which effectively meant it was never truly safe.
This I think was ultimately Burn Jita’s legacy. It raised a series of uncomfortable and fascinating questions about EVE Online. This time the question wasn’t whether the EVE community or CCP Games was in control of the off-switch of the game, as it had been during the Jita Riots, but whether a faction of players could gain control of it through force. And if not—as seemed to be the case, thankfully—could they harm quality of life within the game enough to affect subscriber rates?
In retrospect, this event has the flavor of an unspoken truce between Goonswarm and CCP Games.
When I look at this event I see two ambitions colliding. The first was the ambition of The Mittani who was clearly building the ClusterFuck Coalition into a superpower that could stand astride nullsec and atop the EVE community. He was peerless in his understanding of how to use forces outside of the game to affect the world within it. The Burn Jita campaign, in particular, was backed by a media push that again put Goonswarm and EVE center stage in the press. The event itself seemed conceived specifically to be attention-grabbing in the media so it could spread beyond the bounds of the virtual universe.
The second was the ambition of CCP Games, who dreamed of a digital EVE multiverse but needed to maintain EVE’s massive cash flow to keep everything running. The “Golden Goose” had to keep laying eggs every quarter or the whole thing would fall apart. Though they had heartily endorsed the Burn Jita campaign it raised the question: so what if they didn’t? Could they have stopped it? Probably. But what would have happened if they had tried? They’d have turned The Mittani into a martyr, and risked exacerbating the Burning. And if it did begin to affect subscriber numbers then how should CCP explain such a situation to investors? “Sorry we lost money but the players are uprising?”
One of the things that separates The Mittani from other despotic characters throughout EVE’s history is that he studied social engineering to better understand how to break the social bonds of his enemies. He understood that CCP Games might be devs but they were not gods. CCP was ultimately just another group of human beings. If you can understand how the group works then you can influence it. As a former Washington D.C. lawyer he intuited CCP Games’ vulnerabilities as a corporation staffed by employees, backed by investor money, funded by a public audience, and he occasionally used that to apply pressure on the company and its employees.
Though it had been on a long journey over the past two and a half years since its collapse at the hands of Karttoon, the new Goonswarm Federation was looking stronger than ever, and the ClusterFuck Coalition was largely unchallenged. It seemed nothing could stop the rise of nullsec’s new superpower. From a military and public relations perspective, The Mittani seemed invincible after recovering from a ban by spending three days as EVE Online’s first ever emperor of Jita.
However, humility would come soon, and from the most unlikely place imaginable.
Later in 2012, The Mittani will write to his members to tell them a story about where this journey in EVE truly began. He will write that he met up with his friend and alliance-mate Vile Rat—the infamous Goon spy and diplomat—in D.C. in 2006 while Vile Rat was in town to receive training for his real world job in the U.S. State Department. He will write that they went out to dinner, then drank vodka, logged into EVE Online, and flew their newbie frigates to 1V-LI2 to troll the old power Lotka Volterra. He will write that they concocted a scheme that night to infiltrate Lotka Volterra by convincing them Vile Rat had defected from Goonswarm and was looking for a new alliance. The Mittani will say that this unlikely sequence of events is what led Vile Rat to the battle where he witnessed the strength in Lotka Volterra’s enemies: Red Alliance, as he watched from among the fleets that failed again and again to destroy the Russians at the Siege of C-J6MT. He will tell them Vile Rat was the man who sparked the six year adventure he and Goonswarm have been on ever since.
He will also write that he feels dead inside, and that he had made plans to see Vile Rat again before he left for Benghazi.
