“Opinions vary regarding the exact motivations of the split between TEST and Goonswarm. Some believe that TEST’s leadership resented the limited way in which the CFC had assisted in the south [against IT Alliance.] Some think, rather, that the seed of the rift lay in TEST CEO Montolio’s continued feeling of insecurity and desire to prove himself every bit as much a leader as The Mittani.”
–Matterall, commentator and journalist, Talking in Stations
ON JANUARY 28, 2013 the global news was topped by stories about a deadly fire at a nightclub in Brazil, an oil spill on the Mississippi River, and the Honey Badger Coalition dunking three CFC Titans in Asakai.
The news coming out of Asakai was mind-bending for the average person in early 2013. Video game fans had long been intrigued by what went on inside EVE, but mostly because of stories about heists and high-profile deceptions. Those stories were often opaque and difficult for readers to fully grasp. Most of the time you were left with a vague sense that what was happening in EVE was awesome even if you didn’t fully understand why. People often tried to explain EVE, but it rarely worked because EVE is steeped in decades of context that nobody outside the universe knew.
But here was a story that anyone could understand. Some dude named DaBigRedBoat misclicked—like any of us have a thousand times—and a cascading sequence of political agreements straight out of a World War I history book caused a ruinous battle. EVE Online had a high profile as a major online video game, and it had been highly intriguing to members of the video game community for years, but Asakai put EVE on a whole other scale of notoriety.
It’s important to remember that even though EVE had been creating battles between hundreds and even thousands of players for years before this, the average video gamer wasn’t really aware of this except vaguely. Two-hundred player battles that lasted hours were happening in EVE as far back as 2004 when most video games only supported a maximum of 16 players in a single match that usually lasted less than 15 minutes. But the problem with EVE, of course, is that everything is happening live, meaning that word of these huge battles usually only reached people days after the fact. CCP had trouble marketing its thousand-player battles because it couldn’t promise prospective players they would actually get to participate in one. The best CCP could do was to say that if you play EVE, someday the political situation might ensnare you and you might end up in a grand battle. That’s exciting in an abstract sort of way, but it made for a tough sales pitch. Asakai, however, was streamed live as it happened, and screenshots were sent to the major gaming blogs in real-time.
But since this was the first time some of these bloggers had ever written about EVE before, they tended to over-inflate the importance of the battle in order to make it seem more climactic for readers. This meant that even though Asakai was mostly just a very costly screw-up—a “welp” as EVE players would say—many readers were seeing stories about how the CFC was now on its back foot, struggling to recover from the brutality of the battle. The reality was that the CFC’s ego was bruised by the bad press more than its supercapital fleet was by the Honey Badgers.
In the EVE Online community, onlookers were awed. The battle had been spontaneous, and the objective was mostly to have a good time and kill DaBigRedBoat’s Titan. It wasn’t about conquering ClusterFuck Coalition space and so the CFC mostly took it in stride and congratulated the other side on a fun event for the players.
However, seeing The Mittani or Goonswarm on the losing side of a major battle often has the effect of spurring EVE Online players to write near-poetic forum postings. In the wake of the Battle of Asakai one TEST pilot wrote on the internal TEST forums:
“After some time, it was clear there was a general move towards war between the two coalitions, while the Space Tyrant [The Mittani] moved to maintain his precious [technetium] supply above all else.
The root of his folly was a failure to realize his position depended on the good graces of his powerful allies TEST and Pandemic Legion. […] He forgot his true broskis. Whilst he may claim everything is patched up, the truth is quite different. The cat is out of the bag. Mittani’s actions is all about his own grandiosity, and he will trample on any allied coalition, valid issue or not. CFC priorities are #1; true broskis are disposable. Make no bones about this, his own actions have forever poisoned the well with TEST, and PL is paying attention too. Who would want an ally like that?
The truth is that there is likely a limited amount of time until smaller, more skilled pvp alliances start to capitalize on this situation; alliances with both the anti-goon grudge, and the expertise to over-match limited goon skills. It won’t take long for the sharks of EVE to come out and feast upon the distended whale of the CFC once it is clear that PL and TEST will not their savior be.
Quite simply, the emperor has no clothes.”
–Anonymous TEST Pilot
January 27, 2013
The relationship between TEST and Goons was fraying as the ambitions of Montolio and The Mittani butted up against one another. Montolio had grown increasingly independent as TEST’s power was growing, and it was glorified in the victory at Asakai which had been broadcast in news outlets around the world. Anybody who has played a video game will know how exciting and addictive a thrilling win can be, but imagine if you once won a video game—alongside thousands in your community—on such a scale that it made worldwide news.
That’s not just a thrilling video game win. It was perhaps one of the greatest achievements of Montolio’s life. It would be for almost anyone. He would later say that after Asakai he coveted another such event, and he knew the only adversary in EVE who could deliver it to him was his supposed ally, the ClusterFuck Coalition. No one else could match TEST’s numbers to create that level of escalation. So, if Montolio and TEST were going to get another hit of the soaring high of Asakai, they would need to be fighting Goons.
Throughout this time Montolio became increasingly erratic according to multiple sources, as he tried to instigate another battle with the CFC without openly declaring war. Some supported him in this, and others tried to keep the peace. Shadoo of Pandemic Legion, for one, suggested an elaborate war game between the coalitions to blow off steam.
“Several figures both within the [Honey Badger Coalition] and outside the HBC were pressing me to go for full-on warfare with the [ClusterFuck Coalition,]” Montolio later wrote. “This sounded like a great idea to me, casually, because I don’t know why everyone else has chosen to play this game, but why I started playing is because of the stories that happen in EVE Online. The stories you read about, the wars you read about. The vast coalitions collapsing. Reading about EVE is probably more fun than EVE most of the time. […] What I desired was a large-scale conflict. I want to see thousand vs thousand-man battles. Asakai is essentially what I am after.”
But he was ultimately unsuccessful at instigating war, because otherwise the state of technetium was too profitable for the major powers. The CFC and Pandemic Legion alike shuddered at the thought of a prolonged war that would cut off technetium production.
Within a short time the stress of the leadership position compelled Montolio to take a break from the game. Throughout February 2013 he remained absent, biding his time and considering TEST’s future.
Meanwhile, the ClusterFuck Coalition was busy dealing with its own internal drama. Sion Kumitomo of Goonswarm—who became the director of the Corp Diplomatique after Vile Rat’s passing—wrote that on March 6, 2013 he officially notified one of the CFC’s strongest PvP groups “Circle-of-Two” that something was so deeply wrong with their finances there was only one conclusion: they were being robbed. According to Sion, Circle-of-Two leader Gigx never took any action based on that intelligence, and would wait another 13 months before firing the director accused of an ongoing theft of hundreds of billions of ISK. It seems the CFC may simply have been too distracted to be drawn in by Montolio’s warmongering.
When Montolio returned to TEST Alliance it was only a few weeks before he became overwhelmed by leadership duties and resigned.
“I concede,” he wrote. “It isn’t what I want, but it is what you want. I want war. I want gigantic fucking battles. I want to crash nodes because people are so fucking interested in this shitty game.”
He opened his final post with the common shoulder shrug emoji indicating defeatedness:
“v0v
Shit was too much work, it wasn’t fun anymore. We had friends for strategic reasons not because we actually liked them. Internal politics was shit. Running a space empire was shit. Being on call for EVE 23/7 was shit.
I love TEST and I love Dreddit, I have friends in both. I didn’t steal anything on my way out or disband/kick anyone. I just couldn’t handle the situation we were in. It is entirely my fault that we ended up in that situation, all I can say is that it was fun up until it wasn’t. I would never run a coalition again, it changes you.”
–Montolio, Executor, TEST Alliance Please Ignore
March 21, 2013
Montolio’s resignation left TEST Alliance without a leader, and after some brief internal disputes the CEO position was taken by a player named BoodaBooda.
SORT DRAGON
That would’ve made Shadoo of Pandemic Legion the CEO of the Honey Badger Coalition, but Shadoo passed and said he wanted to pull back to spend more time advancing his own alliance’s goals. He offered the CEO position to anyone who wanted to give it a shot. In the absence of any obvious takers, a veteran member of Pandemic Legion named Sort Dragon—formerly of Band of Brothers and IT Alliance—offered to take the lead role. However, Sort Dragon had only ever managed individual corporations, never an alliance, let alone a coalition on this scale.
The Australian Sort Dragon formed a new alliance called DARKNESS and began recruiting other corporations to help him form the core of the new Honey Badger Coalition. However, when he began looking into the forums and day-to-day operations of other alliances in the coalition, he was disturbed by what he saw.
“Looking in on this I saw a trend starting to form and I knew something had to be done,” Sort Dragon wrote in a post on the TEST forum. “I am the first to admit I myself can be an asshole to an extent, but what I saw was no longer friendly banter or even strong-handed playfulness between friends. What I saw festering in our coalition was a pure hatred for each other and I knew if we were to survive, this could not continue. If we as a coalition were going to stay together we had to find a way to coexist.”
Sort Dragon held a meeting with the new CEO of TEST, BoodaBooda, and he laid out what he believed was an existential crisis within TEST. Big changes were needed to the internal structure of TEST or else he believed the alliance would soon collapse. BoodaBooda had often said it was his dream to cut TEST’s membership in half and purge the less committed players—essentially what Sort Dragon wanted to do. But at the same time BoodaBooda did not take kindly to the elder Sort Dragon telling him how to operate his brand new alliance. Especially when Sort Dragon’s own position of power was somewhat natal. To make matters worse, Boodabooda seems to have gotten the impression that Sort Dragon might try to replace him if he didn’t take action.
DARKNESS was far newer and far younger than TEST Alliance. Though Sort Dragon was nominally the leader of the Honey Badger Coalition, it was only a title. Sort Dragon and Boodabooda were both just new alliance leaders, and TEST was the far more powerful alliance. Imagine a brand new president of the European Union telling the Chancellor of Germany how to run the country on their first day on the job, and you have a strong allegory. The youthful BoodaBooda—who was only about 20 years old at the time—saw the demands as a sort of threat.
However, all of the drama and realignment in the Honey Badger Coalition was going to have to be put on hold for a week, because in April it was time for all the biggest alliance leaders (and wealthiest alliance members) to pack their bags and head to Reykjavik, Iceland for Fanfest 2013. But not all the drama was safely packed away, and 2013’s gathering turned out to be the fatal blow for the powerful coalition.
FANFEST
This was to be the biggest Fanfest yet, a celebration of the tenth anniversary of this amazing alternate reality. With EVE Online still climbing to new peaks of popularity, the theme for this year’s event was “EVE: The Second Decade.”
Veterans from the creation of the game itself in the late 1990s came back on stage in the keynote to tell the tale of the creation of EVE, and how it all began as an upstart virtual reality company in Reykjavik that didn’t know what it was doing. Throughout the event CCP was streaming interviews with the players live to an audience on the streaming platform Twitch.
One night, after the convention had closed, the players were doing what they’d done every night of Fanfest for the past nine Fanfests: cramming into bars. Since the pack of Fanfest attendees is a smorgasbord of nationalities predominantly from around Europe and North America, the group usually sticks to the bars on the tourist-friendly street “Laugevegur” next to the convention center. It’s a cobblestone street surrounded by the historic Icelandic parliament buildings that had seen protests in 2011, just down the street from CCP Games’ new headquarters building. Since the crash, when Iceland’s stint as a banking superpower ended in catastrophe, the Icelandic government had begun investing heavily in modernizing Iceland as a tourist destination. That meant building dozens of new tourist-facing businesses in the downtown area near the convention center.
The historic downtown streets which saw the birth of the world’s oldest democratic government were now also lined with gift shops, tour guide centers, and bars sporting American flags and Chuck Norris jokes to attract tourists.
One such small bar played host to more than a dozen EVE luminaries that night, drinking along with dozens of others in a noisy bar. Among them were Sort Dragon, his girlfriend, and some of his long-time friends. Late in the evening, ProGodLegend—a rival fleet commander from Nulli Secunda of the N3 Coalition and an old nemesis of Sort Dragon from way back in the IT Alliance days—walked into the bar with some of his friends.
Sort Dragon says that his presence alone was a clear provocation, because the two of them had beef going back years. They were both members of IT Alliance in different capacities, and the resulting split had left them with bad blood that was exacerbated time and again through three years of personal animosity that both of them shared for the other. Though they were nominally allied through the Honey Badger Coalition, neither was fond of the other.
Their enmity for one another grew in parallel to this book’s story as time and again they found themselves on opposite sides. It all came to a head that night in the bar. To hear Sort Dragon tell the tale, ProGodLegend became outwardly aggressive toward Sort Dragon’s group, goading Sort Dragon to fight and insulting his girlfriend.
ProGodLegend tells the story more like a drunken adventure as might be expected from someone who was in his early twenties and technically on vacation. In an interview ProGodLegend recounted the evening in detail:
“So we go to Fanfest, and we go out to a bar one night. I am hammered drunk, and everyone is hammered drunk. And the group that I was with in Nulli [Secunda] was a bunch of college kids like myself who are a little trolly, a little memey, and just…fucking with people. And Sort Dragon is there with his girlfriend. And he’s a little drunk, and he’s a little bit of a dick at the time.
So he’s at the bar, and the way I remember it is he was being an asshole, and I told him to fuck off. He said, “you wanna step outside?”
I said “sure thing, man, let’s do it.”
And he didn’t want to do it, and I don’t think I wanted to do it either, but eventually he and I were starting to tell each other to fuck off, and his girlfriend was right there, and she was kinda standing by him, and she was saying some shit too. And as I’m walking away I said, ‘you know what Sort, fuck you and your psycho bitch girlfriend.’ I didn’t think anything of it.
Next day we all wake up, and we’ve all got hangovers. People start checking the forums, and someone says to me, ‘have you SEEN the ping that Sort Dragon just sent out to the Honey Badger Coalition?’ I was like ‘no, I have not.’
Sort Dragon [messaged] the ENTIRE Honey Badger Coalition that they were gonna go to war with Nulli Secunda. That shit had gone down at Fanfest, and they were going to go to war with [us.]
And I was like Oh My Fucking God. I can’t believe he did that.”
–ProGodLegend, Nulli Secunda, N3 Coalition
Sort Dragon’s story, which I was asked not to record, comes off a bit more like a horror story in which ProGodLegend provoked and insulted Sort Dragon and his girlfriend for no particular reason and then threatened to fight him. The incident left him disgusted and shaken, and he felt he was given little choice.
The next day Sort Dragon was due to give an interview on the FanFest live stream in the wake of his war declaration. ProGodLegend’s story continued…
“And so Sort Dragon gets on the Fanfest Live Stream… and it was epic.
You had a CCP person [CCP Guard] running the stream, and Shadoo and Sort Dragon are right there. And [CCP Guard] is asking Sort ‘what happened man, why you going to war?”
And [Sort Dragon] is trying not to make it too much about real life, but he’s like ‘you know, we need a war, war is the best way to gel a coalition and get everyone to work together and you need content and they gave us a reason to do it. And Shadoo is like, ‘Yeah Sort. What’s the reason?’ *laughs*
And Sort Dragon’s like ‘well some shit went down last night, and they were disrespectful and we need a war.’
And the CCP person is like ‘Shadoo, what’s Pandemic Legion gonna do?’
And [Shadoo] is like ‘we’re not really involved in this and we’re actually going to be resetting Honey Badger Coalition.’
And that’s the first time Sort Dragon had heard of it. The look on Sort Dragon’s face when he realized “oh my god, Pandemic Legion is not going to be with me on this’ was fucking priceless. Like, Sort Dragon was shaking.
And so everyone goes home from Fanfest, [and] BoodaBooda who is the new executor of TEST was really young. And he didn’t like Sort Dragon telling him he needed to make changes or TEST was going to die. And he definitely didn’t like Sort Dragon—as he put it—‘going to war to defend his girlfriend’s honor.’ *laughs*
Everyone gets home from Fanfest and BoodaBooda calls an alliance meeting. He’s like ‘I don’t know what the fuck Sort Dragon is doing, he can’t tell us what to do. In fact, he can’t tell us anything, because we’re resetting him. The Honey Badger Coalition is dead. Everyone else in the Honey Badger Coalition is reset immediately. Sort Dragon go fuck yourself.’
This all happened in the course of like four days. It was one of the most amazing moments ever. All the people who were at that bar egging Sort Dragon on were like ‘omg we just killed an entire coalition.’
It was great. This was amazing. This was the perfect storm. HBC was a major power player and then it instantly went away.”
–ProGodLegend, Nulli Secunda, N3 Alliance, interview excerpt
BoodaBooda came back to his alliance to explain his reaction in a Jabber chat room, saying “we don’t want to live under the oppression of a backstabbing tyrant.”
The characterization of Sort Dragon as a “backstabber” would become a reputation he had a difficult time shaking—especially given what happens in the next chapter—even though from his perspective his actions were perfectly justified.
BoodaBooda continued in a more public announcement to TEST:
[02:58:07] BoodaBooda > We left the HBC because the leader of the HBC made irrational demands
[02:58:09] BoodaBooda > such as
[02:58:15] BoodaBooda > I will take over your alliance
[02:58:18] BoodaBooda > i will take all your corps
[02:58:20] BoodaBooda > i will take all your space
[02:58:24] BoodaBooda > so i said NO SIR
[02:58:37] BoodaBooda > YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY ALLIANCE
[02:58:42] BoodaBooda > YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY CORPORATIONS
[02:58:45] BoodaBooda > YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY SPACE
[02:58:52] BoodaBooda > YOU WILL NOT MAKE DEMANDS OF TEST ALLIANCE
[02:58:56] BoodaBooda > WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHIT
[02:59:01] BoodaBooda > WE WILL NOT GO DOWN WITHOUT A FIGHT
[02:59:04] BoodaBooda > WE’RE GOING TO LIVE ON
[02:59:07] BoodaBooda > WE’RE GOING TO SURVIVE
[02:59:10] BoodaBooda > TODAY WILL BE
[02:59:16] BoodaBooda > OUT INDEPENDENCE DAY
[02:59:19] BoodaBooda > R*
Sort Dragon, for his part, claimed the war was a necessity, the incident at the bar had merely made ProGodLegend and Nulli Secunda the target.
“The whole thing about my partner being called ‘A Psychotic Dumb Bitch’ by ProGodLegend more than once without cause just gives me personally something to get behind,” he wrote.
As BoodaBooda declared TEST’s independence he also gathered the alliance for a “State of the Alliance” speech which he summarized in a blog post:
“A week or so ago, I took over as the TEST executor. So far I’m having a great time, really. This leadering thing isn’t so bad. […]
The huge critical point from the [State of the Alliance speech] was the declaration that we were rebelling from the HBC empire. This is the juicy bit that I had to hide from everyone for a week. Tearing down the house Montolio built was actually incredibly fun.
I took TEST executor and began getting involved during Fanfest. I was surprised when we started getting information leaked from Fanfest about Sort’s plans for the HBC. […] When Sort finally came home, he had us all waiting with baited breath. No one really knew what he was going to say. At this point most of us were very upset with the whole situation. […]
Sort confirmed all the crazy rumors we heard. […] He explicitly told me how I needed to change TEST to better comply with his demands. He threatened us, saying TEST was doomed to fail. […] He told me that if Sort Dragon says we do something, we do it without question or hesitation. […]
I could go on and on with this, but the general idea is that Sort showed an absolutely critical lack of leadership ability or understanding of how TEST and the HBC function.
For the next few days I had to work hard to keep things pretty quiet. I discretely convened most TEST CEOs together to reassure them that we had a plan, and that I was going to make EVE more exciting for us than it has been in years. I strategically leaked information to insecure channels so Sort would catch wind. […]
What I’m saying is, we are an alliance with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE. Everything up to and including getting brutally murdered would be a great opportunity to do something new.
When a threat comes knocking on our door, we will face it with our historic reckless brutality, and the force of thousands of screaming, suicidal pilots.
We will defend our home with every last POS on our moons, every last SHIP in our hangars, and every last god damned ISK in our wallets. […]
So, who’s with me?”
–BoodaBooda, Executor, TEST Alliance Please Ignore
THE CFC AND PANDEMIC LEGION
As the drama tore apart the Honey Badger Coalition, Pandemic Legion was already long gone, spending most of its time out in the Drone Regions attacking Solar Fleet. It was believed that the reclusive Russians had grown weak after months of idle land-holding as the only viable Russian alliance out there. Many of its players—Mactep included—became more and more removed from the game. Pandemic Legion was looking to establish its own renter farm to fund its high-stakes, high-cost supercapital gameplay, and the Drone Regions proved easy pickings.
To the surprise of few in the EVE community at the time, PL and N3 (Nulli Secunda, NCdot, and Nexus Fleet) carved through the massive and largely vacant Solar Fleet renter empire quickly, riven as it was in the wake of the BigMaman defection, the Mactep revelations and the Russian Civil War. Within only a couple of months, Pandemic Legion had created for itself a huge plot of rentable territory while sending Solar scrambling back to empire space to regroup.
When its fleets arrived to take ownership of the hundreds of Drone Region stars they often found average players flying through star systems that once belonged to Solar Fleet. When Pandemic Legion destroyed those vessels, fleet commander Elise Randolph once told me they’d often get a chat request from the person they’d just destroyed. But these players weren’t upset or looking to vent at the group that destroyed them. Instead they were friendly and humble. They’d say things like, “whoops, my fault, I didn’t realize the space had been conquered. Who can I talk to about renting from you guys? What’s the Paypal link?”
According to multiple unconfirmed stories I’ve been told, the former renters of the Drone Regions were so accustomed to paying for access to their space in real cash that they didn’t actually know it was against the rules of the game. In fact, they were often annoyed when Pandemic Legion told them they had to pay in ISK, not cash. They’d grumble about how it was way more annoying to do it that way.
As Solar Fleet collapsed, Pandemic Legion and N3 emerged as perhaps the only counterbalance still left to combat the ClusterFuck Coalition. Many of the enemies of the CFC were still the same individuals that they had always been, veterans of the Great War and of the alliances the CFC had managed to destroy over the years. As I’ve written in previous chapters, individual players can’t be destroyed by the wars they participate in—the only true casualty is the phenomenon of their cooperation. There was a sense that, if only the enemies of the CFC could work together, they could shake up the power structure of nullsec. But with the drama so thick after Fanfest 2013, opportunities for cooperation were in diminishing supply.
B0TLRD
The dissolution of the Honey Badger Coalition left Pandemic Legion with no serious way to existentially threaten the CFC, and yet the CFC still had a tremendous amount to lose if Pandemic Legion was to commit to an organized harassment campaign against the CFC’s renters and moons. With the geopolitical situation at a stalemate, the two saw a benefit in keeping things civil so they could continue earning enormous sums of money.
The standing agreement between Pandemic Legion and the ClusterFuck Coalition was that neither superpower would challenge the sovereignty of star systems that were owned by the opposing bloc. It wasn’t necessarily an alliance. Nor could it be called a non-aggression pact because they were not agreeing to abstain from aggression entirely. They only agreed that the renters and their systems wouldn’t be disrupted. If either broke the territorial truce it would result in mutually assured destruction, because reliable two-way peace is required to make broad renter programs work. As long as the money kept rolling in, the two had similar enough values to tolerate one another.
The agreement became known as the B0TLRD Accords, a portmanteau of the initials of Pandemic Legion’s renter corporation “Brothers of Tangra” and “PBLRD” (pron: pub lord) which was the commonly used abbreviation of the CFC’s coalition-wide rental program also known as the “Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
However, even the ostensibly agreeable cause of making money for the entire coalition became a source of friction inside the CFC. According to the new top diplomat, Sion Kumitomo, the player “Gigx” of the CFC alliance “Circle-of-Two” was now demanding that renter territory be given to his alliance so he could attract new recruits. Gigx was envious of the kinds of social programs other wealthy alliances in the CFC had. Sion clapped back that Gigx’s poverty was not because the coalition hadn’t given him enough, but because—as Sion had already warned him—Gigx’s own financial director had been robbing the alliance blind of hundreds of billions in ISK for months.
“We repeatedly denied CO2’s requests for more space in [the freshly conquered] Vale of the Silent since it was being used for coalition income,” wrote Sion Kumitomo in 2016. “[Circle-of-Two] advocated that their personal income as an alliance mattered more than shared income across the coalition, and we politely replied that the entire coalition took that space, and should benefit in the best way possible. CO2 spent months furious about this. Note how greed, isk, and more of both are becoming themes here?”
Though it was invisible for the rest of EVE to see, the CFC was dealing with serious internal issues that were threatening the coalition’s future.
New Eden’s nullsec territories were essentially evenly divided between the CFC and the coalition between the N3 alliances and Pandemic Legion, and two of those entities had made a pact not to attack one another. Most of that massive territory was either vacant or renter space. For the time being, a chaotic peace reigned in nullsec as the wealthy blocs could not attack each other, and assuaged their boredom by picking on smaller entities.
The only hiccup in this simplification of the star cluster was that TEST was growing increasingly independent, and through numerous political actions had sought to distance itself from the ClusterFuck Coalition which had been its ally from TEST’s earliest days. BoodaBooda may have been taking TEST in his own direction, but he inherited Montolio’s decisions and his enemies, and had already made some of his own. With the ink now dry on the B0TLRD Accords, opportunities for shooting stuff were becoming scarce on both sides, and TEST’s “independence” was now looking like a liability. BoodaBooda once wrote during this time that he was getting the sense that The Mittani was trying to trick him or some TEST member into breaking some sort of rule. He said he felt like The Mittani was probing for some cause to pin a public uproar upon.
But the trigger that would set off the war was not a scandal but a patch. CCP was beta testing changes to the game which were poised to break up the CFC’s technetium cartle—the Organization of Technetium Exporting Corporations (OTEC)—which formed the backbone of the finances of the CFC. Those changes—part of the Summer 2013 expansion “Odyssey”—were poised to move that money-making potential into Fountain and Delve, both owned by TEST.
ODYSSEY
“In June, CCP tweaked the economy with the introduction of Alchemy,” wrote the journalist, history writer, and podcast host Matterall in a retrospective. “Alchemy allowed other moon materials to replace technetium, breaking tech holders’ monopolies. In addition, new moons were seeded, including a high number of valuable moons in Fountain and Delve.”
The Mittani quickly realized that, if he did not act immediately, Goonswarm’s home in Deklein would become massively less profitable, while TEST would get much richer. Worse, some stronger entity might remove TEST and take the moons for themselves, becoming a wealthy border threat. The Odyssey expansion was set to launch on June 4th, 2013, and when that day came the CFC would have choices to make. CFC leadership at first tried to gain control of the moons through diplomacy, but the negotiations fell through leaving the CFC to worry about its future.
The Mittani weighed his options, and gathered the alliances of the ClusterFuck Coalition for an historic State of the Goonion address where he would reveal his plan for the future of the CFC and nullsec broadly.
Meanwhile, Sort Dragon and DARKNESS were left without allies, but that didn’t mean Sort Dragon had no role left to play. He never forgave BoodaBooda for dooming the Honey Badger Coalition just as he took control. As The Mittani prepared to deliver his speech, Sort Dragon seethed. His retaliation would come swiftly, and TEST would say it was yet another Sort Dragon “backstabbing.”
“It wasn’t backstabbing,” Sort Dragon told me. “It was retribution.”
