“So few real Goons actually play this game anymore in comparison to the number [of members] required to hold space. I’m doing what I feel is the best thing I can do right now before leaving this game. Euthanasia.”
–Karttoon, CEO, Goonswarm
SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL of Band of Brothers, at EVE Online’s annual fan convention “Fanfest,” Goon-leader Darius JOHNSON was invited to give a speech on a panel with other EVE leaders.
JOHNSON arrived wearing a brown Dick Tracy trenchcoat and a 1930’s-era replica pilot’s cap with attached flight goggles, visibly hung over. He proceeded to give a lecture about Goons and the fall of BoB which began with a description of Goonswarm. He introduced his organization by quoting a rival who had described Goons in the past.
“Goons are a bunch of uncouth, savage, crass, foul-mouthed, vulgar, immature, racist-epithet-uttering ogres who can’t seem to say one sentence or make a single joke without using the worst of the worst profanity (or referring to some body function, bodily fluid, or body part,) then giggling like a 10-year-old.”
Darius JOHNSON paused for dramatic effect: “Guilty as charged,” he retorted, giggling like a 10-year-old.
GOONS
Despite its trollish origins, Goonswarm is still probably the most fascinating organization that has ever arisen within EVE Online. Even its most vocal enemies—and they are many—would have a difficult time denying that fact.
It has survived destruction half a dozen times. It is ostensibly a troll alliance, and yet it produces propaganda that is genuinely impressive. It prided itself on its outsider status despite being several years old. It was now an institution in EVE Online, and one that had a heavy hand in shaping the modern culture of the community. However, that outsider identity is a critical element in the group’s social cohesion.
The Goons of EVE Online are a common type of internet user who find it fun to transgress, and to trample on norms of social behavior. They often play this game in part because they see it as a sort of masquerade ball, separate from reality, in which everyone can act as a different version of themselves. The questionable morality of their actions in this place is irrelevant to them, because they believe none of it is real. “Space pixels,” they call it.
It is EVE Online’s open nature that attracts them, because EVE doesn’t judge them or ban them. It allows them to behave how they choose to behave, unless the harassment strays beyond the bounds of the virtual world and into real life. Even this distinction is often hard to define. For better or worse, EVE allows the Goons to define a place for themselves in the universe. Many within the EVE community argue full-throatedly that it has been for the worse. No group in EVE Online history—not even BoB—has been more controversial than Goonswarm. As the writer of this history I feel uneasy about upholding that characterization—even if the Goons might welcome it—but others in the EVE community have felt no such reservations.
Well-known EVE blogger Ripard Teg offered the following description of some of Goonswarm’s internal programs which were suggestively named to inspire fear in enemies.
“[They have] their ‘Ministry of Love’—where the enemies of Orwell’s 1984 were tortured and murdered. And they have their ‘Reavers’—who in [the sci-fi TV show] Firefly rape and murder their victims and wear their skin. Before ‘MiniLuv’ there was ‘Jihadswarm,’ complete with a fat bee wearing a shemagh and wielding Russian weapons and a suicide vest… do I really need to get into the symbolism of that? For virtually their entire existence, Goonswarm has advocated scamming new players, using rental and membership scams on corporations and whole alliances, and suicide ganking. [Goonswarm-led coalitions] have invaded and conquered more regions in New Eden than anyone in EVE’s history. […] The Mittani boasted in his most recent ‘State of the Goonion’ and in his most recent fireside chat of the destruction of whole alliances at [his coalition’s] hands.”
Since EVE is designed to be a cold, dark, and harsh universe, the villain is often victorious and even occasionally applauded for the mastery of their villainy. But that does nothing to change the fact that they’re the villain in this place. The rest of the EVE community usually still treats them as such. Goonswarm wouldn’t have it any other way. To call them a villain is a form of affirmation that validates their sense of self in the game. The louder their enemies wail and complain, the happier they are, and the tighter their community of like-minded peers becomes. The success of their villainy and the increasing hostility from others both puts them in danger and draws them together for protection.
Their enemies say that the Goon philosophy took things too far, and that by focusing on the distress of the players behind the avatars the Goons had crossed an important moral boundary that separated the game world from the real world.
THE GOON IMPERIUM
In the social hadron collider of EVE, the breadth and complexity of the Goonswarm organization was an unparalleled achievement that would not be matched in EVE for many years. Goonswarm is one of the largest video gamer organizations in history. But the group was not always so powerful. Goonswarm traces its EVE roots back to 2005, when a couple dozen members of the SomethingAwful.com forums got together and decided to try to found a group of “Goons”—as they call themselves—to play together in EVE. What makes someone a Goon is simple: pay the $10 fee (“tenbux”) to begin posting on the SomethingAwful.com forums. That’s it. But that simple barrier works wonders. SA Goons have nothing in common with each other and yet they share a certain cultural cohesion because they’ve all made that $10 commitment to associate with others fond of a certain “Anything Goes” nihilism.
In EVE, they are united by the single-minded pursuit of fun and humor, but they often arrive at their fun by a means most people would consider backward in the extreme. Most famously, they have a long tradition of trolling and griefing. When asked about this behavior, they often say that their goal is to make a joke of the person who has allowed a video game to become so important to them that they could be driven to rage.
EVE is not the only game that has been visited en masse by SA Goons, and denizens of many games have written about them as a virus that seeks only to destroy the host game’s community, an accusation that Darius JOHNSON addressed on-stage in his speech. JOHNSON’s speech concluded by coining one of the most enduring mantras of Goon-kind:
“We’re not here to ruin the game,” he comforted. “We’re here to ruin your game.”
The nuance is seldom appreciated by their enemies.
But as the group’s membership swelled into the thousands, a shared love of griefing was no longer enough. An organizational structure has developed within Goonswarm out of necessity, and it is a structure that would seem to run counter to the Goons’ own impish natures. Leadership of the Goons of EVE Online is given to whichever player has received the most praise on the forums. Thus the role tended to go to Goons who have long histories on the forums, extremely strong writing and debate skills, an uncanny ability to motivate thousands of rogues, and who have managed not to become the butt of too many jokes. This requires a keen insight into what motivates the membership, because one of the few things that unites most Goons is an abject disrespect for authority. They’re usually just waiting for a leader to screw up so they can begin heckling.
Once a leader has successfully navigated that social gauntlet, they must then attempt to build a government. This means providing authoritarian legitimacy for a host of bureaucracies, fleet commanders, and communities that loosely coordinate 10,000+ people. Some of Goonswarm’s institutions even persist from government to government (certain Jabber channels, meeting places, forums, and programs, for example) allowing them to continue building on the organization that their predecessors established.
Most other alliances in EVE Online are simple, discrete conglomerates of player corporations. The individual corporations come together in common interest, sign a treaty of some kind, and then the corporations cooperate toward a certain end. In the early years of EVE this level of cooperation was a cutting edge social idea. The players designed diplomatic systems that allowed their networks to grow to sizes previously unimagined by the game’s own developer.
Groups within EVE quickly grew so large that they pushed up against natural human limits on social group formation. It’s no coincidence the original capacity for a single corporation in EVE was 125 people. It’s just shy of “Dunbar’s Number” which is a Sociology term that describes the average number of people a person can maintain relationships with. But when early EVE corporations began to cooperate on a mass scale they started to complain to CCP that there were no official mechanics for alliances between corporations. So CCP built those mechanics, and integrated a system for alliances into the game. There are still no mechanics in the game for managing coalitions (and most recently, super coalitions) of alliances of corporations of players. The players are making all of this up on their own, finding new ways to structure themselves in an attempt to defy Dunbar’s Number.
VIRTUAL SURVIVAL
Goonswarm realized early in its history that in order to survive long-term it needed to identify its own social weaknesses. It saw that the generally accepted alliance model was inherently weak because the corporations that formed an alliance were always going to be more loyal to their own corporation than to the umbrella alliance. Nobody much cared about the alliance as a whole because it was an imaginary construct that individuals rarely had a personal connection to.
Therefore, if 10 corporations enter into an alliance, that alliance will almost certainly eventually separate again into 10 corporations more or less the same as they were before they joined the alliance. This made that theoretical alliance extremely vulnerable to social attacks, because their enemies would recognize this fact and attempt to separate them into 10 individuals again rather than 1 whole.
Thanks to its highly developed spy network, Goonswarm often had a front row seat to the dissolution of other alliances, occasionally even including detailed logs of conversations between leadership during the collapse. Its leaders realized that player groups in EVE have differing levels and types of social cohesion. Social groups in EVE are a bit like asteroids in the real universe. Some of them look massive from afar, but if you study one closely you might find that it’s actually a giant ball of loose gravel that will scatter in infinite directions if struck firmly. If an asteroid hits your home as a solid mass it might obliterate all life, but if it strikes as a cloud of gravel then it will create a lovely meteor shower (apologies to the astrophysicists of EVE for the crude analogy.)
The key to winning wars in EVE, Goonswarm began to realize, was to find the source of the center of gravity that keeps their enemies together and nullify it somehow. Destroy the leader’s reputation. Twist the storyline. Foment dissent. And if the key to winning wars was to destroy or nullify your opponent’s social gravity, then the key to not losing wars was to prevent them from doing that to you. Goonswarm’s social strategy involved tying its social net closer together by creating a bureaucracy that combined the members of its many corporations into units which worked together to organize the alliance, study the enemy, and hunt for their weaknesses.
THE GREAT BUREAUCRACY
Managing an alliance of 10,000+ human individuals from many different parts of the world is a constant challenge. An alliance of strangers will absolutely collapse into in-fighting almost as soon as they’re allowed to, because players begin factionalizing and defining their factions to contrast themselves to their peers.
Most alliances try to manage this problem by allowing each corporation to maintain its own identity and culture. This generally placates the membership and allows them to insulate themselves from cultures clashing with other corporations. This only works for so long. As the alliance grows larger, accidents and misunderstandings become increasingly likely, and individual corporations begin competing for resources and budget. If animosity develops between two corporations, there’s no mechanism for resolving it besides a strong alliance leader telling them to knock it off. That method often works—if there’s someone in charge everybody respects—but its effectiveness diminishes as grievances accumulate and resentment sets in.
Goonswarm approached the problem much differently, according to former members. Whereas most alliances kept each corporation separate and discrete, Goonswarm relentlessly integrated the members of each alliance into their grander whole. They did this by creating ongoing bureaucratic programs which pulled their membership from the alliance’s constituent corporations. These programs were run by members recruited from across the disparate corporations.
Those projects tied the group together by creating a more intricate web of connections between the membership, and gave them a chance to form strong personal bonds with members of the alliance’s other corporations.
In essence, Goonswarm believed that the strength of the alliance’s social bond depended on the little bonds between the individual members of the coalition. This worked in concert with the alliance leader’s propaganda and large-scale political aims to create a group that is not just tightly knit, but also self-knitting, as these groups created a virtuous cycle that strengthened the alliance while bonding the membership.
For instance, there was an economics wing that members could apply for which analyzed Goonswarm’s economic policy and tradecraft, monitoring the markets in Jita and the regional hub systems “Hel” and “Dodixie.” There was a “black ops” group which focused on secret operations to minutely target and exploit enemy mistakes. Whatever type of gameplay a Goonswarm member might enjoy, there was sure to be a sub-group devoted to it. This system is how Goonswarm also ended up with a sizeable Russian membership from its old coalition allies, and maintained close ties with the Russian community for years.
Members of these bureaus were drawn from all the alliance’s corporations, and thus help tie those corporations together. This system keeps members focused, practised, and most importantly, it keeps them playing EVE in a way that is uniquely interesting to them. It gave the average member a stake in the well-being of the alliance.
Now that you know more about how Goonswarm had succeeded, you can begin to understand the circumstances that led to its incredibly rapid collapse in early 2010.
ZAPAWORK
At the peak of the Great War, the Goonswarm IRC channels and forums were buzzing with plans and discussion of the war. The forums were awash with memes and MS Paint drawings of SirMolle. But after the war passed, and the excitement had gone, membership activity in Goonswarm began to wane. Many of its senior leaders were going longer and longer without logging into the game. The Great War was an energizing event that had rallied the Goons and kept their attention on EVE, but what could possibly follow that act?
With the retirement of the second Goon leader Darius JOHNSON—who had guided the organization through the Great War—leadership of Goonswarm fell to a player named Zapawork.
“Zapawork was an old-school SA Goon who came from a time when Goons just [used] frigates and had fun in Syndicate and didn’t own sovereignty,” said Goon fleet commander DaBigRedBoat. “He changed Goonswarm in a radical way by removing a sub-forum we had called the War Room. Under his leadership he didn’t believe there would be another war in Goon history. We didn’t need to go to war with anyone. BoB’s dead!”
By all indications, Zapawork never cared much for the drudgeries of large scale nullsec war campaigns and believed that the Great War was only necessary because BoB—by its own declaration—was an existential threat to Goons. Thus, to Zapawork, the end of the Great War was in fact an end to all Goon wars. They could at last return to their roguish calling as the great trolls of New Eden.
In addition to closing the Goon forum where it discussed war strategy, Zapawork also put a halt to military spending.
“In his eyes, there was no need for any of that stuff,” said DaBigRedBoat. “There was no need for a war room, no need for strategic ops. So he was downsizing. He even told me himself that there was never going to be a need for big fleet [operations] because who needs them when there’s no war, and it was going to be for the best.”
Zapawork had a vision for a peacetime Goon organization. The future of Goons—as Zapawork saw it—wasn’t nullsec power, but fun. That is to say, fun in the way the Goons saw it.
Much to the dismay of Goonswarm’s fleet commanders, he decreed that the fleet’s efforts would be focused not in nullsec, but in high security empire space, where they’d have fun by making life a living hell for average players. Pilots studied and practised the art of ganking other players (using loopholes to destroy players in secure areas before the space police can stop it) and generally wreaking havoc in dastardly creative ways.
After a few months of budget cutting, Zapawork stood down from his brief reign. The obvious choice for a successor was The Mittani, director of the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency. However, as he freely admits, his previous stint as Goonswarm director went quite poorly and so he was passed over.
With membership activity waning and alliance interest at an all-time low for the Goons, they were forced to do something they’d never done before: hand over leadership to someone who was not an old school Something Awful Goon. The leader they chose, a relative unknown named Karttoon, was an outsider to the Goons, and the first leader who didn’t have a history in their motherland, the SomethingAwful.com community. He was a spy manager in the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency who had been with Goonswarm long enough that he was able to climb the ranks even though nobody actually knew him personally.
“Karttoon’s passion was attacking high-sec and having fun,” said DaBigRedBoat.
Karttoon was not a good peacetime leader for the Goonswarm. His contemporaries describe him as lacking a passion for organization, which is a difficult character trait to endure when your task is to run an alliance of 10,000+ people. Nevertheless, he was tasked with safeguarding the crown jewels of the Goon Kingdom, which included rare and precious possessions such as ownership of the only alliance in EVE named “Band of Brothers.” He is said to have regularly neglected to appoint new members to top positions in the bureaucracy and many departments became understaffed.
What Karttoon and his predecessor didn’t understand is that peace has a way of making alliances weak and bored, and it was causing a brain drain throughout Goonswarm as players either stopped playing EVE, or dispersed to play EVE with other groups.
DELVE IS KARTTOON’S
As Karttoon took over Goonswarm, IT Alliance defeated Pandemic Legion in Fountain and was moving in on the northern border. Remarkably, Karttoon thought little of it.
He didn’t believe that IT Alliance posed any threat to the mighty Goonswarm, and steadfastly held to the decree that prevented the Goonswarm from rebuilding its wartime armada. It controlled the wealthiest region in New Eden, but it wasn’t spending that money on Titans, Dreadnoughts, or building up its jump bridge network. The only thing it was being used for was wreaking havoc on newbies in high-security space.
Some of Karttoon’s contemporaries pleaded with him to see the threat that was looming now that IT Alliance had managed to take over Fountain.
“I pushed hard along with a couple other guys to back Pandemic Legion up, because they were there for us [in the Great War],” said DaBigRedBoat. “Because if Fountain dies then we’re next. That was the feeling. And without Pandemic Legion to back us up it would be hard to defend Delve.”
However, the other prong of the Dominion Offensive, Against ALL Authorities, was attacking Goonswarm from the East. Karttoon sent DaBigRedBoat to deal with the Against ALL Authorities threat, but when he tried to form fleets he found just a few dozen Goons willing to fly on the campaign. When DaBigRedBoat inevitably failed to curtail the attack by Against ALL Authorities, Karttoon said it was a disaster, demoted DaBigRedBoat, and further entrenched himself in the belief that the hassles of nullsec were causing Goons more frustration than fun. He mused privately that it might be time for an end to come for Goonswarm.
Karttoon would later admit that he had already begun plans to destroy Goonswarm from the top down so it could start fresh.
THE SECOND FALL OF DELVE
Near the end of January 2010, Karttoon went on his honeymoon. It was a dreary time in the alliance, and by coincidence Goonswarm’s Chief Financial Officer also found himself burned out on the game. With neither of them actively logging in to EVE they didn’t notice the warning emails being sent to them by the EVE server that their alliance account was critically low and the auto-payment for their sovereign systems was coming due soon.
On January 26, 2010, the sovereignty bill came due and Goonswarm’s corporate wallet was short 7 billion ISK to make the payment. All of its sovereignty claims simultaneously dropped, and Goonswarm’s territory was returned to neutral ownership.
The heavy gates of Fortress Delve swung open and left Goonswarm vulnerable to half a decade’s enemies.
While Karttoon relaxed with his betrothed in Mexico, IT Alliance fleets immediately surged toward Goonswarm space, gleefully taking advantage of the opportunity to sack the stations of their age-old rival.
“With the CEO absent, The Mittani called a State of the Goonion, wherein he stated that NOL[-M9} and J-L[PX7] were both lost, and with them the Goonswarm market hub and Capital [ship] hangar. Without them, it would be impossible to mount any kind of offensive to retake Delve. Standing orders were made to have Goons evacuate Delve and to start making their way to Syndicate, the cradle of [the original goon corporation] GoonFleet. It was declared that Delve would burn.
In the early hours on 27 January Junkie Beverage led a fleet to break our capitals out of J-L station which was already in the hands of IT Alliance. On the 28th, evacuation ops weren’t as successful, but the 29th went smoothly. Former Goonfleet CEO Darius JOHNSON called a follow-up State of the Goonion address for the weekend that followed.”
–Goon wiki log
A few days later, Karttoon finally returned from his honeymoon and found the alliance in disarray trying to salvage the situation. The actual logs from the leadership Jabber channel were preserved and we can see Karttoon logging in and getting word from alliance member Knar and former alliance leader Darius JOHNSON about what had happened. Spirits were remarkably high. Just moments prior The Mittani went AFK to get an espresso, and Vile Rat and Darius JOHNSON were joking about how American beer is bad. They were mostly laughing the whole thing off.
karttoon: What happened?
knar: sup karttoon
knar: we lost delve
karttoon: Yeah I saw
karttoon: How’d it happen?
Darius_johnson: Wasn’t enough money in the wallet to cover the bill
[…]
karttoon: Jesus
[…]
knar: then bob took [NOL-M9] and [J-LPX7]
karttoon: Welp
knar: trapped all our shit
knar: -welp-
knar: so how was your honeymoon
–Jabber logs from the day Goonswarm lost sovereignty en masse
The general membership was far less forgiving, and the forum posts were merciless. A post was made on the internal forums polling members on whether they thought Karttoon should resign, and the result was 2:1 in favor. With their sovereignty lost, enemies at the gates, and members calling for the leader’s resignation things were about to get much worse for the Goons.
THIS TREACHEROUS NIGHT
The next night at 23:00 EVE time, Karttoon logged in to EVE Online, but said nothing in Jabber. First he kicked out every corporation in the Goonswarm alliance. Next he revoked the hangar privileges of every corporation.
He also revoked everyone’s access to the alliance’s starbases, leaving hundreds of ships inside the shields of starbases that they didn’t have permission to be inside. The EVE Online system has a very specific way of dealing with this permissions conflict: it fires the ship out of the station at tens of thousands of miles per second, into deep space. Goonswarm space instantly became a madcap, ridiculous scene as ships shot out of their stations at ludicrous speed the instant their pilots logged back in after downtime.
Karttoon then drained the alliance coffers of all the ISK he could get his hands on. He stole approximately 60 Dreadnoughts (worth hundreds of billions of ISK) and thousands of smaller battleships and logistics vessels. One estimate put the damage of Karttoon’s theft at approximately 1 trillion ISK, a virtually unheard of sum even eight years later. At the time it could’ve been worth as much as €40,000.
“If it was in his access, he grabbed it all,” said DaBigRedBoat. “He stole everything that wasn’t nailed down, and because there were no directors active there was nobody to stop him. Since the sov was dropped, IT Alliance [took our stations immediately.] So we had to run.”
On February 3rd, 2010—a month after IT Alliance’s crushing victory in Y-2ANO, and almost exactly one year after Haargoth Agamar disbanded Band of Brothers—Karttoon, the very leader of Goonswarm, did essentially the same thing.
Karttoon published his official tell-all on the Something Awful forums:
“I’ll try to keep this short since I’ve never been one for long boring stories.
I was originally planning to do this about a month ago. I prepped everything one evening with a post at hand, and moved my characters into our major cache locations. I noticed that NOL had a large logistics ship cache worth of 10’s of billions in […] ships, so I spent about two hours moving them to lowsec. By the time I was finished it was getting late, so I decided to get some sleep and mash buttons the following night. The next day I received intel that SirMolle was going to move IT alliance to work with AAA [to] invade our space, and decided to let things continue since the idea of them alarm clocking until 5AM for weeks at a time made me [giddy] inside. […]
So I’ve been looking a lot over the past month at Goonswarm, and the Goons and pubbies that reside in the alliance. The majority of Goons for the most part are disinterested in eve online at this point (with good reason) […] I’ve been looking at our post Dominion strategy, and strategically speaking things are easily winnable. The problem is, we’ll have to pack Goonswarm with exponentially more pubbies, and negotiate standings with people I would rather never have to deal with to in order to achieve this.[…] So few real Goons actually play this game anymore in comparison to the number [of members] required to hold space. I’m doing what I feel is the best thing I can do right now before leaving this game. Euthanasia.
I’ve already kicked every single corp out of Goonswarm. I’ve also removed all of our standings with everybody. Feel free to spend the next few days blowing everyone up, or whatever. Additionally I’ve set GoonFleet into self destruct mode.
Tl;dr: Fuck pubbies, fuck eve, and :fuckgoons:.
Amusingly enough when I returned from a 1.5 [week] vacation to discover that most of what I was going to do was already done… by accident. I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard and long in my entire life.
At this point finishing the job was obvious, but I wanted a day or two to get a few things prepared, such as unlocking all of the Titan and Mothership [Blueprint Originals] and letting the logistics crew ninja some of the stuff out for me first. […]
I am leaving enough isk in the wallets of both executor corps to ensure the alliance bills can be paid for at least a few years [editor: he’s saying it’ll be impossible for them to regain access,] and I am riding into the sunset (quitting eve) leaving all the isk and assets locked in-game. I’ll probably check back in a year or so and donate it all to some random goon of my choice, assuming the game still exists.”
–Karttoon, Traitor, Goonswarm
Feb 4, 2010
The mightiest group in the star cluster, the champion of EVE’s grandest struggle, was being dismantled by its own leader, and everyone was talking about it. Rumors and gossip were rife in the EVE community about what Karttoon had actually stolen. Legend spread that he destroyed the dreadnought fleet he stole, self-destructing them one at a time just to spite Goons (and collect on insurance payouts) though that particular legend seems to be untrue.
“Well, the job of purging Delve is going to be lighter,” commented Selest Cayal, CEO of IT member corporation Nex Exercitus in an article about one of the supercapitals that was destroyed after being ejected into space by its station’s shield. “The circle is completed: they disbanded BoB and now they manage to get themselves disbanded. But we also lost a great enemy. I’m sure we will see the Goons again, in some form or another.”
Karttoon himself confessed these crimes, but not everybody believes his version of events. Today some Goons believe all the events were connected, and that Karttoon was downsizing the alliance because he was planning to rob it all along. Other Goons believe Karttoon simply screwed up. They believe his failure as a leader came down to ineptitude, not a grand plot to destroy the alliance from within. They allege that Karttoon made up the story of a secret plot to destroy Goonswarm in order to save face, that he preferred to be reviled as the villain who orchestrated the death of the largest alliance in EVE rather than mocked as the buffoon whose leadership brought the storied alliance to ruin. In Goon culture, the desire to be remembered as a legendary troll rather than an incompetent dolt makes a certain amount of Goony sense.
Many in EVE think of Karttoon as a “puppetmaster”—diminutive slang for everyday EVE players who pretend to be shadow manipulators behind galactic events, but are more often writing fan fiction about themselves to cover up their own very human mundanity.
“Firstly I don’t believe for a second it was ‘planned for a while,’” said Darius JOHNSON in an interview with EVE reporter Brendan Drain shortly after the heist. “The organizational structure of GoonFleet is such that the CEO wields supreme power. Therefore the CEO has the capability to choose to or not to disband at any time. Karttoon was a terrible CEO. He made some bad decisions. Goons called him on those decisions and he chose to be a giant baby and ‘punish’ them by disbanding the alliance. Really there was a loss of assets, but the space had already been lost due to his lack of management ability. So the assets and [Goonfleet corporate] name were in essence just water under the bridge that goons couldn’t access because he was an absentee.”
DARIUS RETURNS
Karttoon may have embellished his story to make it seem like a premeditated master stroke rather than a spiteful theft of opportunity when his rule was already failing, but the result for Goonswarm was the same. The era of Karttoon was over, and Goonswarm was left in Delve with no sovereignty, no leader, no credible defense, a severely weakened fleet, low membership participation, emboldened adversaries, and no liquid cash to begin fixing any of those problems.
When JOHNSON returned and saw the sorry state of affairs, the first item on his agenda was to get the hell out of Delve.
“The only people that could be found were The Mittani, and Darius JOHNSON comes out of nowhere and leads everyone out of Delve,” said DaBigRedBoat.
He had no illusions about defending the territory he spent two years taking from Band of Brothers. He ordered that the Goons should pack up everything that hadn’t been stolen by Karttoon and set a course for their old home in the star region Syndicate. They organized the core of the alliance into a corporation called “GoonWaffe” (a typically antagonistic reference to the “Luftwaffe” air force of Nazi Germany) and worked long hours to salvage the situation, trying to ensure that this devastation was not the end of Goons in EVE. This was, after all, the empire that JOHNSON had spent years of his life building.
One report from Darius JOHNSON suggests IT Alliance had already begun taking systems from the Goons within 10 hours of the Karttoon heist. Trapped between SirMolle, Against ALL Authorities, and its own treasonous leader, the Goon empire had collapsed completely.
“JOHNSON has stated that Goonswarm will no longer be seeking to function as a space-holding alliance, but will be pursuing goals of mischief and destruction from their new home-base in Syndicate,” reads an article posted on EVEOnline.com by author Svarthol. He was taking Goonswarm back to the first home it had ever had in EVE.
“There is joy in the killing,” Darius JOHNSON stated in the article. “There is not joy in the building.”
In an alliance update he was even more direct, “As many of you may have noticed we no longer have an alliance. The very gentleman who is CEO of fleet is the likely culprit so we’ll be dropping Goonfleet as well. Goonfleet is dead. Goonswarm is dead. We will now bask in the glory of Goonwaffe.”
JOHNSON refashioned Goonswarm into a roving alliance, and helped stabilize the now much smaller organization. However, he was a reluctant leader. He had accepted a cybersecurity job with CCP Games and knew he wouldn’t be allowed to participate in Goonswarm for very long, because CCP had changed the rules regarding developer behavior. Developers were no longer allowed to hold prominent positions in the in-game universe, a policy that also affected other players; Mercenary Coalition’s leader Seleene, for example.
He wouldn’t be around for long, and the Goons knew they would need to find a new leader. However, with membership draining and activity waning, nobody was left with the experience or even the desire to save the faltering Goon alliance. Player participation was already at an all-time low before Karttoon’s heist, and for many players this was a sign that—one year since the fall of BoB—the glory days of the Goons were already over.
“The year in Delve was good, but with our allies falling one by one and our enemies at the gates, it might not have lasted,” reads the Goon wiki about this time. “Some goons welcomed the end of the chapter. For some, it was an opportunity to take a break, while for others, it was a return to the cradle of where the alliance launched.”
With some of his final acts, Darius JOHNSON kicked out a number of smaller Goon corporations who he had always hated. “They may have been longstanding Goons, but Darius just couldn’t stand them anymore so he wiped them out,” said DaBigRedBoat, explaining that many of those groups eventually joined Pandemic Legion. “We were dead,” he said.
Darius wasn’t long for the leadership position, but before he left he put DaBigRedBoat in charge of salvaging the military situation, and also approved the creation of a diplomatic subdivision called Corps Diplomatique. “Vile Rat was in charge of that. He, Darius, and Mittens were good good good friends.”
Though The Mittani and Darius JOHNSON were well-known players to the community by now, Vile Rat had existed on the fringes and in the shadows, preferring to stick to his passion—spywork and diplomacy—while Darius and The Mittani stood in the spotlight. The player behind Vile Rat was an American IT expert named Sean Smith who worked for the US Government and was often posted at embassies around the world. His job was to ensure the internet was up-and-running at all times, and a great way to do that was by chatting constantly with people from around the world about internet spaceships.
He was a cunning player who had been scheming in online games for more than a decade. In EVE, he built up backchannel relations with every notable leader in nullsec. He even started a VIP Jabber channel where the disparate leaders could congregate and make deals called “Jabberlon5.”
Vile Rat was an integral part of the new Goon organization given that he and The Mittani were two of the only members from the old days who were still around. Like The Mittani, he usually barely played the actual video game. Vile Rat’s EVE took place in chat programs like Jabber where he nurtured relationships with a rogue’s gallery of spies, nullsec leaders, mercenaries, and myriad other shady persons residing in EVE’s underbelly. The character Vile Rat was a pale man of maybe 55 years, shaved bald, with pointed eyebrows, and wrapped in the black-and-gold robes of the Amarr. He was a grim sight, and his character biography (a short section in the User Interface for players to write background info about their characters) contained only an equally grim poem called “The Second Coming” about the inevitable collapse of human civilizations which now seemed painfully prophetic. “And what rough beast,” that poem asked, “its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
~A FUZZY MITTEN~
“Darius [JOHNSON] went and talked to our old friends Tau Ceti Federation—all the French of EVE—they lived in Deklein,” said DaBigRedBoat who was one of the few Goons active at the time. “They invited us to come hang out and couch surf with them in Deklein. So we moved into Deklein and we started to rebuild our alliance. That’s when Darius goes ‘OK I’ve done my job Mittani you’re in charge.’ Darius goes back into retirement, he quits.”
The leadership role passed to The Mittani, with his years of experience and deep knowledge of EVE’s political state. As he took control of a severely weakened and demoralized Goon alliance, the forum commenters were still slinging quips about the disaster of his previous reign, but for The Mittani this was a chance to build a new legacy.
“When Mittani took over after Karttoon disbanded he kind of had a blank canvas to recreate Goons how he wanted to,” said Sort Dragon, who at this time was a member of IT Alliance.
The long-time spymaster would indeed get a second chance to write a new story for himself, but for now he was left with an alliance that could barely muster 30 people in a fleet, let alone reconquer the galaxy.
The problem, he told me in an interview, was that in his previous administrations he had striven for transparency and democracy. He would listen to dissenters, engage with critics, and seek input from high ranking peers before making decisions. But after seeing how that approach had failed, he came to believe that his people didn’t truly understand what was best for them. Two years later, he felt he had matured in his understanding of what it means to govern in EVE, and had discarded his democratic inclinations. With his next attempt at leadership, he wanted to test out some new theories about digital governance.
“People are taught in western schools that democracy is the best form of government, but the reality is that’s not true in a video game,” he told me. “It can be disturbing how much people want to subsume themselves to a common cause.
“Particularly with how they respond to tyranny.”
