“During the last quarter, the […] number of characters in Dreadnoughts declined considerably, from 1,125 to 767. One plausible reason might be lower interest in territorial warfare since the announcement of sovereignty system changes in Dominion. That would also explain the increased general interest in industrial ships, as corporations and alliances shift from war mode to production mode in preparation for Dominion.”
–Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP Games former in-house economist
IT ALLIANCE WAS SPEARHEADING an initiative it was now privately calling the Dominion Offensive, and it was secretly assembling a coalition of willing forces. The plan was to work not as a united coalition, but in loose concert with one another. Rather than a single invasion, this was to be a timed attack across several fronts. IT Alliance, Against ALL Authorities, and the Russian alliances in the Drone Regions each had private goals they wanted to accomplish. The Drone Region Russians wanted to take space away from the Northern Coalition, while Against ALL Authorities wanted to take Querious from Goonswarm, and IT Alliance wanted to take Fountain from Pandemic Legion. If any of them attacked individually, all of those enemies would have banded together and supported each other. By attacking simultaneously, however they had an opportunity to keep them divided.
The best way to imagine this is by picturing a donut sliced into six pieces, red icing on one piece and blue on the next so the colors alternate. Now we have three red pieces and three blue pieces that represent the powerblocs of 2010 nullsec. If all of the red donut pieces were to focus their attack on one member of the blue donut team in an effort to destroy it, then all of the blue donut pieces would rush to their defense, and it works the same way in reverse. That is, after all, why this equilibrium was established in the first place. The Dominion Offensive sought to disrupt that equilibrium. All of the red donut pieces would attack their clockwise blue neighbor, ensuring that each blue donut piece was engaged in a private war that would prevent their enemies from supporting any of the others.
Dominion was hyped as an expansion that would alleviate lag and allow for larger fleet battles, but word was circulating back from EVE Online’s Test Server that the Dominion expansion was experiencing crushing lag and disconnection issues in battles as low as 250 people, extremely low on the scale of major nullsec fleet engagements. Plus, new expansions mean new mechanics, new user interfaces, and all sorts of logistical problems brought about by the changes. Alliances throughout EVE were forced to learn in order to maintain sovereignty, and learning while stressed and under attack was bound to lead to errors. New expansions and patches introduce logistical problems for alliances for the simple reason that it takes time for information to spread through human networks.
When Dominion launched on December 1, 2009, IT was getting settled and preparing itself to become a potential sovereignty-holding power. It was basing its operations out of Syndicate, a region famous in EVE history for being the original home of the Goons back in 2005. One night its fledgling base was struck by Pandemic Legion’s entire capital ship fleet, and a several hour dreadnought battle ensued in the old Goon home.
“Goons called ‘em up,” said Slinktress, a diplomat in the nearby Northern Coalition who was keeping tabs on the situation.
When the attack was repulsed, SirMolle was enraged, and decided to bump up the Dominion Offensive plan. “We said, ‘fuck it, let’s go take Fountain,’” he said. “So we went from that battle, reformed ships, and then took everyone into Fountain. All in the same day.”
IT Alliance’s long-term target was Goonswarm-held Delve, on Fountain’s southern border. SirMolle wanted to use this moment of courage to rally the everyday pilots that filled the ranks of IT Alliance to overwhelm Pandemic Legion in Fountain, and hopefully train them into something resembling a proper force capable of the assault on Delve in the process. When it was over, the plan was to take control of the moon-mining network in Fountain to secure an ongoing cash source, and use that cash to fund a steady stream of ships to use against Goonswarm on the southern border.
The invasion of Fountain was like a practice run. The rank-and-file recruits of IT Alliance simply weren’t as experienced as the people SirMolle was used to commanding.
“We had an axe to grind,” said SirMolle before adding a caveat. “We had five corporations that knew each other in and out, and then we had six thousand people who knew nothing. In other words, training wheels.”
The invasion was intended to give these green recruits some experience in large fleet actions. Pandemic Legion was a burgeoning power, but it stood little chance in the face of IT Alliance’s massive membership which taxed the shaky Dominion server everywhere it travelled.
WE DIDN’T WANT THAT REGION ANYWAY
The massive fleet under the command of SirMolle stretched out from Syndicate to attempt to capture its first nullsec territory since the fall of Delve, being careful never to bring so many people to any particular system that the server crashed.
IT Alliance began its push into Fountain and immediately gained the upper hand when Pandemic Legion’s defense instantly faltered. An ally of PL’s had screwed up its sovereignty bill payment (part of a new mechanic introduced in the Dominion expansion,) causing it to suddenly lose ownership of a set of systems in the middle of Fountain. This will not be the last time in this story when a failure to click “autopay” will change history.
With those systems suddenly up-for-grabs, IT Alliance quickly seized its first stars in nullsec. Pandemic Legion CEO Shamis Orzoz reportedly commented that he didn’t want those star systems anyway, and that this was ironically a good thing because now that IT Alliance was moving into nullsec it could be trapped and ground into dust.
The one advantage Pandemic Legion had to counteract IT Alliance’s massive numbers was its impressive supercapital fleet, one of the best in New Eden. During the years of the Great War it had managed to build or acquire more than half a dozen of them. However, the Dominion expansion had introduced significant changes to the Titans. In the past, a Titan’s Doomsday weapon was capable of wiping out dozens or hundreds of smaller ships at once in a massive, battlefield-clearing area-of-effect attack. After Dominion, the Doomsday became the polar opposite: a focused, single-target attack capable of destroying almost any single ship. (Most players were happy with this change, because the previous area-of-effect Doomsday weapons rendered any ships smaller than a Dreadnought borderline useless in fleet combat.)
This change gave IT Alliance a decisive advantage, because it could field hundreds or even thousands of battleships and cruisers that were vastly smaller and less expensive than Dreadnoughts or Titans. IT needed this advantage, because its fleet was no longer what it once was. The four Titans lost by SirMolle and the thousands of dreadnoughts, carriers, and battleships lost in the defense of Delve were gone for good. IT Alliance was starting practically from scratch.
The two fleet styles clashed on January 3, 2010, a month into the invasion, in the system Y-2ANO, in the deep south of Fountain on the border of Goon territory in Delve. IT Alliance launched an attack on the main trading station in Y-2ANO under the famous Fountain nebula—a rust-colored star factory that covered the sky.
Feeling a bit uneasy about the huge force en route to its capital, Pandemic Legion informed its allies in Goonswarm about what was happening, and a chorus of fleet commanders in Goonswarm said it was their duty to help their old Great War allies. They added that it was also a strategic imperative, since a failing Pandemic Legion would put IT right on Goonswarm’s northern border. The Goons in turn rallied the Northern Coalition who also sent a fleet. Though all were tied up facing their own attacks, the defense of Y-2ANO was considered essential to keep “Band of Brothers” from taking hold in nullsec again.
And so it was at the climax of the campaign that hundreds of IT Alliance ships found themselves facing an imposing fleet spearheaded by five Pandemic Legion Titans and entire fleets of capital ships from Goonswarm and the Northern Coalition. It was the most anticipated battle of young 2010. Pandemic Legion and its Goon/NC allies fielded a fleet more than sufficient to fend off this IT offensive, but fate conspired with buggy networking code to produce an outcome that nobody expected.
For IT Alliance, the Battle of Y-2ANO was the most triumphant moment in the history of EVE. For Pandemic Legion, it is remembered as less of a battle than an unjust execution. For everyone else, it’s an object lesson in the realities of live game design.
“Band of Brothers was already in-system with a shitload of stuff,” said Goon Fleet Commander Mister Vee, who would catch hell later because he was the person who lit the “cynosural field” (jump bridge) that warped the Goon fleet into Y-2ANO. “We knew we had more [ships] and we knew we could win the fight, but we also knew that back then system nodes were extremely unstable, and jumping in would be a massive risk because sometimes everybody just black screens and they just sit there like fish in a barrel.”
Pandemic Legion’s Titans arrived in the system, emerging from within the silently rippling electrical spirals of a cynosural field. But as the fleet arrived in-system, its pilots never did. Most of them never even loaded the system, because the lag was too great. So while the hulking ships materialized, their pilots couldn’t fly them. Because they had gotten into position first, IT Alliance wasn’t nearly as badly affected, but they didn’t know that yet.
They stared across the depths of space at the defending PL/Goon/NC fleet for nearly an hour without knowledge of the other side’s catastrophic connection issues. After hesitating for so long, one of its scouts named Judge Reaper began to warp to the location of the PL fleet, more than five minutes away at full speed. After finally arriving at the fleet’s location in deep space, Judge Reaper found most of the fleet offline. Reaper quickly set up fleet-wide warp disruption bubbles to prevent the fleet from escaping (often shorthanded as “tackling”) and called out in all-caps in the IT Alliance fleet chat channel the names of the enemy Titan pilots that should be targeted, “Titan KILLS. 5 TitanS TACKLED. MORKHT DRACK IS DOWN. NIGHT JACKAL IS MELTING. JANKO IS LOCKABLE.”
Once the fleet arrived, the IT Alliance chat channel was abuzz with players trying to lock on to different PL/Goon/NC ships and then alerting their fleet in all-caps when a ship of strategic importance could actually be locked onto in the glitchy, nearly incapacitating lag. Once the fleet was locked on, the destruction of a ship took only a short time. Over the ensuing hours, a disaster unfolded and salvagers began looting wrecks from the largest massacre in the history of EVE Online. Footage from the battle site shows a tangled mess of derelict hulls and scattered debris.
EVE is a live game. You only get one chance at anything, which is what makes these battles so thrilling for the people involved. A million things can go wrong, and the weight of responsibility to the allies who have entrusted you with a task lies heavy. So when an opportunity presents itself, players don’t stop to ask whether their enemy has had a proper amount of time to form a defense. At the first glance of an opening, the attack begins, and it doesn’t stop until every single opportunity has been taken advantage of. Only after the battle reports are written by the opposing fleet commanders do they find out that the reason they won was because something went catastrophically wrong for the enemy.
The tattered remnants of the defending fleet extracted, but the damage was already done. Four of Pandemic Legion’s Titans were destroyed and the Goon/NC capital ship fleet met the same fate. Roughly a quarter of all Titans ever destroyed in the game at the time were lost that day in Y-2ANO.
“Beaten not by the invaders but by the servers,” lamented Bagehi, a commentator and history writer on the EVE news and culture website CrossingZebras.com, about Dominion’s first month of live play. “A month of black screens and lost ships—not because of mistakes or inferior tactics, but because of server performance.”
By the end of December, CCP patched the netcode to eliminate the bugs that kept causing the server to struggle because of large player numbers. It didn’t reverse the loss of Pandemic Legion’s Titan fleet, but it meant that alliances could now reliably escalate engagements and bring in reinforcements. But as soon as an improvement to server stability was added, EVE alliances responded by rallying even more troops. Good nullsec fleet commanders became intimately familiar with server mechanics, and knew exactly how far they could push the limits.
The battleground of EVE often exists on an extremely unstable foundation. Though it was weaponized most effectively during the early stages of this “Dominion Offensive,” the state and performance of the server has had an extremely heavy hand in shaping the state of the game throughout all eras of EVE.
After this disaster, Pandemic Legion was left deflated and discouraged, and lost all interest in defending its space. Pandemic Legion was a highly coordinated group that simply couldn’t deal with the IT Alliance mob, or the roiling wake of lag that it caused.
Whether it was just or not, the slaughter in Y-2ANO left Pandemic Legion in a state of in-fighting and blame-casting. When time came to debate what the alliance should do next now that its days as a sovereignty-holding power were over, it was split.
One of its most active sub-groups was a corporation called Illuminati who believed they should head to low-security space to fight with pirate gangs while earning money doing mercenary contracts. But the others wanted to return to being a player in the nullsec sovereignty space. The majority ruled, and Illuminati was kicked out of the group. It scarcely mattered, though, because Pandemic Legion quickly began falling apart.
At this moment, a low point for Pandemic Legion and an ascendant high for IT Alliance, the citizens of EVE would have found it strange indeed to know the truth: that IT Alliance’s days were numbered, but a galaxy-shaping destiny was in store for the now adrift Pandemic Legion. In its own records and words, Pandemic Legion refers to this alternately as their “7 Years of Darkness Period” or their “40 Years in the Desert Period.”
They would return to shape events again one day, but for now there was a far more pressing concern: the northern border of the new Goonswarm stronghold was threatened by a new SirMolle-led alliance, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he intended to return to claim his home in Delve.
Goonswarm’s leader of intelligence gathering informed the alliance of the situation:
“Fountain will have fallen by tonight at approximately 3:00 eve [standard time], since Pandemic Legion pulled out. […] Fifteen hours later Molle will launch a new campaign, which inevitably will mean us.
Since we’re already being invaded by [Against ALL Authorities,] this is hardly a surprising move. However, the pressure of a possible combined [US Time Zone] force of [Against ALL Authorities] and IT is not to be underestimated.
:siren: THINGS TO DO :siren:
1. Stockpile fitted combat ships, particularly battleships, logistics and drakes.
2. Make sure your assets are secure.
3. Be on jabber and alert for broadcasts re: enemy actions.
4. Expect to be outnumbered heavily by incompetent people flying terrible ships. However, as Goonswarm itself is a testament to, this can be very dangerous.”
–The Mittani, Goonswarm
Along with his allies in Against ALL Authorities and an upstart alliance called “Atlas Alliance,” IT formed the core of what SirMolle was now calling his “Southern Coalition.”
But unbeknownst to SirMolle, as he planned his invasion of Delve, the Sword of Damocles was already swinging closer and closer to the head of the new Goon leader in Delve, a player named Karttoon.
Goonswarm was about to fall without SirMolle having to lift a finger.
