“Unity succeeds division, and division follows unity. One is bound to be replaced by the other after a long span of time. That is the way of things in the world.”
–Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms
SOMETIME IN MID-JUNE 2009, as the Band of Brothers defense was in its failing stages, there was a demonstration of sorts in EVE Online.
A coalition of player pilots from RedSwarm Federation and the Northern Coalition gathered its combined fleet of Titan starships—27 in total—for something like a military parade. The star system was 49-U6U, the site of BoB’s final outpost.
The 27 ships—more than a quarter of all Titans ever built in EVE Online at this point—organized themselves into an arch around a single dummy ship just outside the outpost. A sight like this would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the Great War two years ago, when there were only four Titans anywhere in EVE and each was a tightly controlled strategic asset. But the Great War had created the infrastructure to push military production to previously unthinkable heights, and now 27 of them were drifting in space, waiting to destroy an empty, stripped down capital ship hull. Just for fun.
“The camp was a show of force, a show of strength if you will,” a fleet commander named Viper Shizzle of the alliance Pandemic Legion told EVEOnline.com. “Sitting 27 Titans in a hostile system 100km off of a station has no strategic value other than simply [saying] ‘we can do this and you can’t stop it.’”
A countdown began, and as it reached zero the pilots fired their Doomsday weapons by type. First, the Avatar-class Titans drowned out the light of the nearby star with nova flares of holy Amarrian light. Next came the Erebus ships, which bathed the entire area in a sea of slow red flame. Third, the Leviathans summoned pulsing blue wormholes. Finally, there were the Ragnaroks. The last four Titans erupted with a scatter of hundreds of missiles firing chaotically in every direction, which detonated in a lumpy ball of digital smoke and flame some 1000 kilometers across (or the width of your thumb, depending on how closely your camera was zoomed.)
The Titan fireworks display was a statement to BoB—or ‘KenZoku’ now that Goonswarm had stolen its name—and to the rest of the EVE Online community meant to show beyond any doubt that BoB’s time had come to an end.
THE JESTER
If the Great War were told on an ancient papyrus scroll it would go something like this: After telling a despicable joke, the Court Jester (Goonswarm) was beaten and jailed by The King’s guards (Band of Brothers.) Stewing in prison, the vengeful Jester concluded that the funniest revenge possible would be to break out of jail, unite the kingdom’s enemies (the Russians and the Northern Coalition,) overthrow the government, exile the king, and paint new historical scrolls in which The King gets peed on by a dog.
SirMolle was in exile. Goons now stood upon the battlements of Fortress Delve, the newly captured home of a coalition that numbered tens of thousands of players. To mark the new era, a Goon artist under the name “Poluketes” truly did paint a massive 22-page papyrus-like relief depicting the Great War in which SirMolle is unseated from his throne atop a great war elephant (symbolizing his overpowered Titan fleet,) and yes, is even peed on by a dog.
The 27 Doomsdays were a punctuation mark at the end of the Great War, the harbinger of a new post-BoB era. But if there was one thing the Jester hadn’t counted on, it was that this absurdly ambitious plot would actually succeed. When it was all over, the Jester had no jokes left worth telling, and RedSwarm Federation faced an existential crisis.
RSF
The coalition known as RedSwarm Federation consisted primarily of three factions: the Russians of Red Alliance, the largely American Goons, and the French of Tau Ceti Federation.
The coalition itself was never meant to last beyond the destruction of Band of Brothers. The Goons and the French had helped Red Alliance get its revenge on the Coalition of the South, and the Reds had returned the favor by helping Goons destroy BoB. It’s not even clear that any of them truly believed BoB could be destroyed. BoB was literally referred to as “omnipotent” by RedSwarm at the time (a reference to the fact that a member of BoB had been caught abusing his developer powers.) So it’s doubtful that anybody in RedSwarm was giving too much thought to what was going to happen after the war. For all they knew going in, there might never have been a true ending to that ancient rivalry.
But now that an end to the war had come, there was nothing keeping the three organizations together, and each began a new and independent chapter. The path that each of them took—and their enduring trans-national friendship forged in the Great War—plays a critical role in shaping the grand storyline of EVE for the remainder of this book.
TAU CETI FEDERATION
Tau Ceti Federation was invited by its Great War-allies in the Northern Coalition to travel to the northern regions and become permanent members of the largest and wealthiest (and most Euro-friendly) coalition in EVE now that BoB was dead. They were given control of a lucrative star region called Deklein, and settled into a peaceful post-war existence surrounded by allies and easy ISK.
The Northern Coalition viewed the Great War as the ultimate bonding experience. They decreed that the old anti-Band of Brothers team were inseparable allies who would rule over nullsec as a triumvirate, providing safe gameplay for a generation of EVE players. Their motto was literally “Best Friends Forever” which applied mainly to its member alliances, but was also loosely applied to everyone who had fought to destroy BoB.
With its wealth growing, Tau Ceti Federation began inviting new partners to live under its protection, including the smaller combat-focused groups “Tactical Narcotics Team” and “OWN Alliance,” and together they formed the Deklein Coalition, named for their collective home region. With Tau Ceti Federation at its head, this Deklein Coalition became an important subgroup serving the much larger umbrella organization of the Northern Coalition.
RED ALLIANCE
The Russians at last returned to their homeland in the southeast. They took up their rightful residence in C-J6MT, in the region of Insmother, after three years of war. That war had begun with the famous Siege of C-J6MT on May 25, 2006, and the Russians had managed to retain control of the system throughout the conflict. The only difference was that now it was surrounded by a veritable kingdom spanning likely more than 2000 star systems. The entire eastern half of EVE Online was Russian, and the famous cloning station at C-J6MT was its symbolic capital: “RA PRIME.”
The leaders of the loosely aligned Russian alliances—primarily the players Death, Mactep, and Nync—built a massive rental network where any corporation could pay a fee to be given access to any of their star systems for a period of time. There were people all around the world who wanted to make ISK in nullsec but weren’t involved in any of the major coalitions. Red Alliance capitalized on this by allowing others to piggyback on their sovereignty, for a price. The renters from high-security space would pay a set amount based on the type of moons and asteroid belts that spawned in that star system, and they’d be given a proof-of-purchase code they could present to any Russian defense patrols they might encounter passing through the system. As long as they kept up with their payments, they were left to exploit the star system however they wished.
With this enormous amount of territory, several of the Russian alliances were able to attract what essentially amounted to tenants. Small groups of entrepreneurs would use the alliance’s systems for a week or so at a time to extract as much wealth as possible from a lucrative nullsec star system, and give up a cut of their yield—be it ISK or minerals from killing NPC drones—for the privilege of renting premium space.
With this rental empire secured, the Russians had an extremely steady source of passive income that could fund whatever they wanted to build. Cloistered deep in the Drone Regions, the core alliances of the Russian community began stockpiling huge quantities of ISK and minerals for a secret project that would eventually alter the course of the nullsec story.
But the Great War had also fractured and divided the Russian community even as it spurred growth. Nobody knew yet what had caused the growing rift, but it was becoming apparent that the godfathers of the Russian community were no longer on speaking terms.
GOONSWARM
The Goons ensconced themselves in Band of Brothers’ former headquarters in Delve, and began a conversation about the purpose of Goon-kind in EVE now that its great enemy was defeated. Goons had been fighting Band of Brothers for three years. It was a mythic rivalry as great as any in the history of video gaming. Justin vs Daigo. Flash vs Jaedong. Alliance vs Na’Vi. BoB vs Goons.
These rivalries defined the games they took place in because there was something within them for the game’s community to believe in. Some of these rivalries centered on national pride, personality, or preference of playstyle. The BoB vs Goons rivalry was all of that and something more. It was a rivalry the community placed its hopes in because it spoke to the central conflict of EVE itself: Order vs Chaos.
The rivalry was also about how these players viewed the late-2000s internet and the virtual world of EVE Online. Many believed it was a sandbox that existed for nothing but fun in the present moment. Many Goons viewed the internet itself as a kind of joke realm in which nothing was real, and therefore everything was inherently silly. This made them diametrically opposed to the extreme self-seriousness of Band of Brothers.
At the end of the Great War, Chaos triumphed and Order collapsed. But when Order is defeated, Chaos loses the context in which it spread.
WORK
The war itself had been an extraordinary PR opportunity for RedSwarm, but it was also exhausting on its key membership in a real way. The final invasion of Delve called each of them to contribute hundreds or thousands of hours of work over a period of years.
I use the word “work” deliberately. Though this was ostensibly a video game, much of this event involved activities that would be absurd to call “play.” Fleet operations could take hours and result in nothing more exciting than shooting a heavily-armored, undefended, stationary target just to roll the invasion forward a single moon. When they were done, the Fleet Commander put a checkmark in a master Google Doc, and proceeded to the next starbase, hundreds of times. During the pitched battles EVE could be life-changingly exciting, but more often than not, the game was a laborious grind driven by zeal.
It is mindblowing to consider the amount of cumulative human labor involved in these campaigns. The EVE Online of 2009 was vast and took hours to traverse. Conquest timescales were measured in months. Planning a war campaign meant night after night of hours-long meetings balancing the priorities of easily ruffled allies. After tens of thousands of coordinated human-hours of work, the mission of RedSwarm was finally achieved, and it moved forward into an uncertain future.
The fight to control the legacy and narrative of this event is still raging to this day, and has deep implications for all who wish to grow or maintain power in modern EVE Online. Factions disagree not only over what happened, but who was there, who said what, and how the story is told. In the historical writings and records of these organizations you can occasionally see characters disappear from an organization’s history retroactively after running afoul of the leadership. In other cases, usurpers may challenge a leader’s authority by writing a new version of the history which rearranges the cast of characters. In the canonical history, the leader may be a grand war hero, but perhaps in the new history they were actually a pompous royal who sat in the back of the battle “leading from behind.” Most player-created histories are full of clear malice toward certain people. In many ways, the histories themselves exist for that purpose. They are ideological statements, defining from whose perspective the organization has agreed to see the past, who were the villains, who were the heroes, and who lost the faith along the way.
After the exhaustion of the Great War, a conversation took place among the Goons about what they should do now that Band of Brothers was finally—in their view—defeated.
It represented the completion of the group’s grand unifying goal, because to them SirMolle’s posturing represented hubris run amok. Goonswarm’s pilots were united behind the idea that BoB was too corrupt (and annoying) to be allowed to survive. The day-to-day of the campaign to destroy BoB was often boring drudge work—anathema to the culturally impish Goons—but they were willing to commit themselves to it in service to the larger, grander joke at the core of the campaign: “wouldn’t it be hilarious if we managed to beat these wannabe space emperors at their own game?” They would’ve been the good guys if they weren’t intentionally foul.
The destruction of BoB brought with it a sense of relief, because RedSwarm was nearing the edge of its endurance. At long last, this great endeavor was over and peace was at hand. The Goons thought this was the beginning of a great reign of terror in which their griefing exploits would be backed by a massive cash flow stemming from their control of the most valuable region in nullsec. It was to be a grand return to what they believed was the true state of EVE: anarchy.
All the factions of nullsec, in fact, looked forward to a return to normalcy, even if it wasn’t clear just what that meant anymore. Tens of thousands of new players had joined EVE to participate in that grand spontaneous event, and for these players life in nullsec before the Great War was just a bunch of legends the old timers talked about late at night on TeamSpeak. The Great War had drawn every other major group into an alliance. BoB vs EVE. So now that BoB was dead, all that was left was the massive alliance. Everybody’s friends now, right? Perhaps. But as we’ll soon see, these bonds of friendship came with their own complex set of problems—problems that aren’t unique to a virtual world. After all, Alexander wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer, didn’t he? How long could a group of powerful allies stay content with the limits of their power?
Destroying the last of the old guard power structure took away the only true purpose that Goonswarm had ever known. Now that its nemesis was dead, everything started to get quiet. There was no great enemy to lampoon in propaganda posters. No dire battles to take part in. No culturally-unifying rants to read on the forums.
Goonswarm spymaster The Mittani would later say that after the war, the Goons felt like a cat pawing at a dead mouse. The Goon wiki describes the time like this:
“The future for Goonswarm looked bright. Unlimited cash supplies, the best region in the game, and high off the utter defeat of BoB at the hands of the Coalition, who had all finely tuned themselves in order to destroy BoB. After years of work and collaboration, they had achieved their goal. Still, the question remained: how long could a horde of supercapital-capable alliances, all having invested ludicrous amounts of money into their capital fleets and capital production lines, remain friendly to each other or find something to do after the destruction of BoB? Would they turn on themselves? Would BoB return, becoming the pest that never goes away? Time would tell.”
–Goon history wiki
DOMINION
Most established alliances were willing to give peace a brief chance, because a new expansion was coming to EVE. Called “Dominion,” this new expansion promised to change the way sovereignty was captured and held in nullsec. Previously, sovereignty was awarded to the corporation or alliance with the most starbases around the moons in an individual star system, turning invasions into a tedious, months-long grind over hundreds of starbases. CCP announced that the Dominion expansion, scheduled for release on December 1, 2009, would do away with starbase sovereignty. Rather than battles being fought over potentially dozens of starbases throughout a star system, the new Dominion mechanics centralized the focus onto one structure known as an Infrastructure Hub or iHub. Attacking alliances would attempt to hack into and shut down the iHub’s defenses so that it could be destroyed and the system conquered.
This caused a great deal of uncertainty. Much about conquest in nullsec space was about to change. Fleet commanders would have to learn new tactics and protocols, and pilots would have to master new skills, commands, and logistical procedures. Those alliances that were the very best at starbase warfare might not be the best at iHub-based combat, at least not initially. Most groups—including the Northern Coalition and Goonswarm—wanted to avoid making bold moves right as the foundation of nullsec power was about to be shaken. In particular it seemed like the new system might cause the scale of individual battles to escalate far beyond anything seen so far.
For those who were presently out-of-power, however, this seismic shift seemed like the perfect opportunity.
IT ALLIANCE
One of the key differences between a real war and a virtual one is what’s being attacked. The players themselves are never in any real danger of being killed or destroyed. The true target is the players’ ability to work together. Ships, territory, bonds of friendship, and the corporate structures which make resource sharing possible—all of these had been attacked during the Great War while the players themselves remained safe behind their screens. The pilots of Band of Brothers hadn’t been destroyed, they’d just been deprived of the ability to cooperate. So what happened to its members, its fleet commanders, and perhaps most importantly, to SirMolle?
When Band of Brothers was finally destroyed, some of its people took a break from EVE, but many of its pilots were still in the game. In some cases they transferred to other corporations that vowed to keep hunting Goons. Others went to play in other parts of EVE, like the newly-introduced wormhole space (2600 uncharted, unconquerable systems that can only be accessed by travelling through semi-random wormholes.)
The founding corporations of the Band of Brothers alliance were still very much intact after the Great War. There was a dip in morale after Delve was lost to RedSwarm, and many key members stopped playing for a while, but BoB’s former leaders, SirMolle and Dianabolic were soon back at the drawing board trying to figure out how to take back their home.
They were notoriously calm people, and to them this was merely a setback. They looked at the problem as strategists, and conducted an autopsy of the lost war. After deliberation, they ultimately concluded that the reason they lost the Great War was that the game design favored Goonswarm’s style of mass-pilot strategy, in which the enemy is overrun by sheer numbers. Acting on this theory, they set out on a mission to build themselves a new organization to rival the breadth of the famously populous Goons.
Though RedSwarm had destroyed BoB’s ships, its defenses, and its alliance, RedSwarm couldn’t destroy SirMolle’s fame, notoriety, and massive social network. SirMolle and Dianabolic used those intangible assets to assemble a veritable armada of small alliances who saw this as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the next great EVE power. Many of them were the same members of the old “Greater Band of Brothers Community.” But there was also a colossal diplomatic recruitment drive as tens of thousands of players were directly or indirectly lobbied to join SirMolle’s new group “IT Alliance” (pronounced “it”.)
“We took the valuable allies in various alliances and told them ‘you are too small, form everyone into one alliance and join us on this venture,” said SirMolle. “And the venture was IT Alliance. So IT Alliance was formed in one day, and went from zero to 8000 members in one day.”
The data from “dotlan.net”—a player-operated website which has tracked virtually every change that has occurred in EVE Online since 2008 from the populations of alliances to daily soveriegnty changes and thus contains practically the entire history of EVE in raw numbers—shows that SirMolle’s memory exaggerates a bit. IT Alliance was formed on August 18, 2009, and grew to about 4500 members—still quite large—over the coming five months. SirMolle’s corporation Evolution was the first to join. A month later they were joined by groups like X13, Dark-Rising, Finfleet, Black Nova Corporation, and Reikoku. As well as renters like a young group called Nulli Secunda who would grow to significance later on. IT’s mascot was a cartoon clown in front of the word “IT,” a reference to the Stephen King novel. Practically everyone I spoke to besides SirMolle called them “eye-tee.”
Was IT Alliance just Band of Brothers by another name? Yes and no. Some leaders in EVE at the time regarded IT Alliance as a wholly new entity that carried very little of BoB’s old DNA. Others didn’t even acknowledge the new name and kept calling them Band of Brothers. The reason for the split opinion was because while it had many of the same key membership, IT functioned off a completely different organizational ideology. Whereas Band of Brothers was like an elite military unit/country club for the old guard of EVE, IT Alliance would accept almost anybody who promised to participate in their campaigns at least a little.
In contrast to Band of Brothers which was run like a strict military unit, the bulk of IT Alliance was a mammoth blob of borderline strangers who SirMolle attempted to funnel into his grander revenge strategy. The DNA it retained from Band of Brothers in the top level of its leadership, namely SirMolle and Dianabolic, was enough to retain most of BoB’s former enemies.
With this huge group of people IT Alliance also attracted strong allies such as the Russian splinter group Against ALL Authorities which always seemed to go against the flow of the rest of the Russian community, and traditionally held power in the south.
Former IT Alliance leaders I’ve spoken to told me IT Alliance was a sinister hive of ambition whose members largely joined because they were looking to suck up to SirMolle or were looking for an advantage for their corporation, rather than because of a unifying goal or culture.
With the mob of IT Alliance assembled, SirMolle began looking for the moment he would make his triumphant return to nullsec sovereignty. He was looking for a soft target to stretch out his alliance’s legs and try out his new warmachine. The first effort was timed to coincide with the release of the upcoming Dominion expansion.
What is hard to capture in these pages is that it was always somewhat clear to the community that IT Alliance would ultimately go down as a mere footnote in the larger story of nullsec—widely regarded as a sort of social aftershock of the Great War. But that brief history impacted the events of this story in significant ways.
IT’s first encounter would be with an old enemy from the Great War: the mercenaries Pandemic Legion.
