“H-W9TY [in the region of Tribute,] stronghold capital system of the Northern Coalition, was nullsec’s version of Jita. The Northern Coalition’s territories and [ally] list spanned most of the northern half of New Eden. Tribute was a beacon of civilization in an otherwise barbaric galaxy.”
–Vik Reddy, Gamer Tribute
THERE IS A SENSE of permanence that certain groups and people can obtain in EVE Online when they’ve been in the game a long time. For players going about their lives in-game these people and their power structures can feel like an immutable fact of life. Organizations persist for years, until the individuals inside them can no longer imagine life in EVE without them. The only true constant in EVE, however, is the very change that is so impossible to imagine.
The older and more sophisticated members of the community know the truth: that nothing is eternal and that claims to power are illusory and temporary. But not all players have the benefit of experience. Newbies enter into an online universe that is old and full of people who are massively wealthier and more powerful in terms of income, firepower, social savvy, and game knowledge. They are told a history that details why the power structure is the way it is. For a new player to reject the established power structure and attempt to institute their own would be like a child attempting world conquest.
As a result, from the perspective of many players, their leaders can become legends whose position of power and privilege is unquestioned. The longer someone or some-alliance stays at the top, the more players there are who never knew life in EVE before them, which only enhances the mystique of their position.
If you were to have asked any player in 2010 who was the most powerful person in EVE, their answer would have been Vuk Lau. In EVE, he was the leader of the Northern Coalition, commander of the largest and wealthiest fleet in New Eden. In real life, the owner of a net cafe in Belgrade, Serbia.
The player groups who run EVE become far more real than the fictional factions of the game’s lore. If you wanted to accomplish something in 2010 EVE, the person you needed to talk to was Vuk Lau, not High Priestess Jamyl Sarum of the Amarr Empire.
With that said, nobody I’ve ever spoken to has been able to explain why Vuk Lau was the leader of the Northern Coalition, but his success was arguably greater than any other individual in the history of EVE. Many in his time alleged that this success led to real world gains as well, supposedly, to the tune of millions of Euros from an elaborate ISK-selling operation.
I had the chance to interview him once, and he denied it. He talked about his time in the game as though it was a calling. He described to me his experience of applying to join a corporation which was a member of the Eastern European alliance Morsus Mihi, which was one of the two main pillars of the Northern Coalition.
He told me he met with a recruiter who gave him an application to fill out which asked questions about his history in EVE and his ambition for the future. The final question asked, “What do you hope to achieve in EVE Online?” To which Lau said he wrote: “To be a great leader.”
NORTHERN COALITION
After years of squabbling and in-fighting in the early years of EVE what eventually brought the alliances of the north together was Band of Brothers. Or, perhaps more accurately, fear of the specter of old BoB.
The result was a group that came together for mutual defense and was bonded by external aggression. That external aggression created a central villain—SirMolle—for tens of thousands of people to unite in opposition to. The Northern Coalition was a counterbalance in the community created to offset SirMolle’s blatant despotism and aggression.
At the time, SirMolle was quoted in the New York Times as saying he intended to conquer all of EVE, and his demeanor matched that dark goal. The alliances of the North formed a defensive pact, vowing that the northern regions were a distinct area of EVE and that the protection of it from Band of Brothers was a grander goal than any of their individual squabbles.
“We were all joined across the common idea that BoB represented everything wrong in this game,” Vuk Lau told me. “We were holding a lot of grudge against BoB. It’s a fact, BoB was abusing every possible game mechanic, and back then CCP developers were allowed to play in [nullsec] alliances so they really had an unfair upper hand. And SirMolle was playing perfectly his role as archenemy of everything good. I hated the guy. Not even just in-game but personally for a long time. Until I eventually realized that actually he is a good guy. But back then there was a lot of emotion in the game. I couldn’t believe that any game could be so immersive as EVE Online.”
Then Band of Brothers actually invaded the Northern Coalition with its 2008 MAX Damage campaign. The campaign was designed specifically to incapacitate the north’s ability to cooperate and wage war. To SirMolle the campaign was like a fun hunting trip with his members. But to the Northern Coalition it was the fulfillment of a prophecy—that one day BoB would come to destroy them.
The animosity continued throughout the Great War and beyond, and the experience of defying SirMolle’s MAX campaigns was quite obviously thrilling for the Northern Coalition. Vuk Lau was full of pride that he had made good on his organization’s mission statement to defend itself against Band of Brothers. The surge of morale propelled the coalition into a golden age.
And through all the threats it faced—BoB, Southerners, Russians—The Northern Coalition had beaten just about everyone and survived just about everything. Though it was derided by much of the existing EVE community as an alliance of “carebears”—a diminutive word used by EVE players to describe a player who is scared to engage in combat—the Northern Coalition embraced this image. Its art and propaganda was filled with sparkly rainbows and, well, actual Carebears.
The Northern Coalition adopted an alliance motto, usually typed in all-caps and surrounded by cartoon hearts and colorful bears:
“<3BEST FRIENDS FOREVER!!!<3”
Despite its reputation for supposed incompetence, the NC was a marvel of stability. From its perch at the top of EVE’s map it watched the mightiest empires of EVE’s history rise and fall. And yet for years it managed to remain steady, enjoying more or less the same borders and core member alliances.
That core consisted of two of the oldest European alliances in the game: RAZOR and Morsus Mihi. RAZOR had held the northernmost region in EVE (Tenal) since 2004 after the Great Northern War. Morsus Mihi was a newer group composed primarily of players from the Balkans and Serbia, including Vuk Lau and many other players from Belgrade.
The bonds of friendship within these alliances contributed greatly to their survival. Vuk tells of one occasion when much of Morsus Mihi’s leadership had gathered in Belgrade for a party only to find out that one of their stations was under attack in-game by an old rival who had found out they were all AFK. When the on-duty fleet commander texted Vuk Lau the red alert they lamented that much of the alliance’s core personnel were offline at the gathering. “If only you guys had computers…” the fleet commander mused.
“No problem,” Lau replied. He drove everybody to his netcafe, and twenty minutes later they defended the station on LAN. Best friends forever.
H-W9TY
The coalition itself was designed as a triumvirate that divided power and wealth among three “full member” alliances: Morsus Mihi, RAZOR, and a third member which usually changed about every six months. At the time of IT Alliance’s invasion, the third member was—and had been for an unusually long period of time—Tau Ceti Federation. TCF was a French Alliance which had put the “Federation” in “RedSwarm Federation” a year earlier, and in the wake of the Great War had approached their European brethren about putting down roots in the North. EVE Europeans don’t always share an intercontinental bond with other Europeans, but the French were accepted as a member because they would bring activity to the North during its peak European hours. This, combined with the implicit cultural diversity, made the North a busier, more active, and more interesting place to play EVE for every alliance’s members.
In the charter of the Northern Coalition, it is stipulated that each of the three full member alliances are allowed to host three “guest” alliances within their borders. Those alliances—or “pets” as the community calls them—were granted the right to engage in commerce and gameplay in the North, and were also given a small number of star systems to take sovereignty over.
The result was that the Northern Coalition capital in H-W9TY (Tribute) at this time was a grand hub of people and languages in EVE. There were more than a dozen alliances, primarily from around Northern and Eastern Europe, bringing wealth and unprecedented prosperity to the North. It was nearly as bustling as the trading hub in Jita, but entirely player-conceived, player-built, and player-operated. In 2010, H-W9TY was the jewel of nullsec. It sat nearly at the center of an elaborate network of jump bridges constructed by the coalition to bypass the traditional stargate routes, in part to make industry more efficient and in part to help them reach their front lines quickly in case their fabled enemy returned.
Shipyards operated by players in hundreds of systems across the North churned out gear, ships, and equipment which would then be shipped out for sale in regional marketplaces all across New Eden, to be purchased by the vastest playerbase EVE Online had ever known.
To utilize this wealth the Northern Coalition instituted EVE’s largest “Ship Replacement Program.” Because destruction is permanent in EVE, player groups often ran into a problem that is difficult to solve: how do you encourage your members to use their ships and put their assets at risk when the safer strategy is to leave them docked in a station? If your members aren’t flying their ships then it’s likely their skills will start to atrophy, and worse yet, nobody will be having fun. Nullsec leaders didn’t want their pilots to face a crisis of loyalty every time there was a battle because they didn’t want to put their best ships on the front line.
Their solution was the SRP (Ship Replacement Program.) An SRP was effectively a promise from an alliance to its players that they would reimburse them a set amount of money if their ship was destroyed while conducting alliance business. The one stipulation was that in order to be eligible for a payout, the ship needed to be equipped according to specific alliance guidelines, because nobody wanted the alliance to go broke reimbursing pilots who weren’t following the latest fleet design theories. In effect it is a form of large-scale training program that economically incentivizes players to stay up-to-date on the latest instructions.
This was a way that nullsec alliances could use their wealth to actually provide an enhanced gameplay experience for players. It was effectively a social safety net established in order to encourage positive gameplay practices. This had the three-fold effect of 1) encouraging people to use their ships more, 2) educating the average member about fleet strategies, and 3) enhancing their fleet-readiness by giving people more experience in fleet engagements. Many alliances instituted such programs, but the Northern Coalition’s was by far the most generous, due in large part to the organization’s vast wealth.
The wealth of the Northern Coalition—both in terms of its huge membership and its deep pockets—was aided by the surge in subscriptions to EVE Online at this time. Word had reached the outside world that something fascinating was happening in EVE, and the number of people exploring the game rose steadily between 2003 and 2010.
In contrast to most massively multiplayer online games, which tend to grow extremely large in their first two years and then steadily lose subscribers over time, EVE Online was a tougher sell and it had taken years for it to establish itself as a truly popular game. EVE retains players at a famously poor rate. The experience of playing the game itself is often much slower than video gamers are used to, and the experience of playing it alone is derided by its own players as likely the worst of all major online games. The majority of people who try EVE will quit almost immediately. However, a small percentage of people manage to get through that, learn to read the game’s complex language, and find a community. And when they do, they tend to stay for an extremely long time. Seven years into its lifespan, this slow, deliberate pace was beginning to pay off. The vision CCP Games had for EVE was expanding as well. The company had now been working in secret for years on a new expansion that would change the EVE universe forever by allowing players to dock their ships in a station and walk around as their avatars. With EVE succeeding beyond CCP’s wildest dreams, they decided to dream bigger.
By 2010, more than 350,000 people were subscribed to the game, and almost a seventh of them were in the Northern Coalition in one form or another, selling goods en masse to the other six sevenths. Those customers included a surprising number of eager Russians hailing from the Drone Regions, many of whom were seeking a grey market for nullsec’s most tightly controlled strategic asset: Titans.
MANY MOONS
What changed the Northern Coalition from a regional power into the dominant power of EVE Online was a resource called technetium.
For most of EVE’s history, technetium was “an obscure resource of moderate value” (according to the EVE wiki) gathered exclusively from moon-mining operations in nullsec. Moon-mining was how most nullsec alliances made a nice living, and afforded the expensive fleets used in war campaigns. A mining array would be setup modularly onto a starbase that orbited the moon, and would begin passively collecting mining yield from the surface below over time.
When the Dominion expansion was released it introduced a whole new type of equipment and ships called “Tech 2.” These were leaps and bounds better than their older predecessors in the Tech 1 class, and were absolutely critical for anyone looking to do just about anything at the top level of EVE.
However, there was a bottleneck resource in the production of Tech 2 items. All things Tech 2 required technetium. This once-obscure mineral was suddenly at the center of an economy that would shape the next few years of gameplay in EVE.
Technetium could only be collected by mining a specific type of moon called an “R64” moon. These moons were previously about as valuable as any other commonplace moon found anywhere in nullsec, but the introduction of Tech 2 items created a massive new demand for technetium from players throughout EVE Online who needed it in order to construct the equipment necessary to compete at the top level of gameplay.
By a quirk of the topography of EVE, the vast majority of technetium-producing moons were located in the northern regions, within the borders of Northern Coalition members. The forums exploded with accusations of developer misconduct unfairly favoring a segment of players yet again.
More than 200 technetium moons were under Northern Coalition control. This meant that the resource itself was actually quite plentiful. There was no shortage of the material being mined, so it wasn’t valuable because of natural scarcity. But market enthusiasts within the Northern Coalition realized that they could constrict the supply and artificially inflate the price.
The Northern Coalition was already the oldest, most established, and most militarily dominant power in EVE Online, controlling a third of the map. Then Dominion came, and it was like the Northern Coalition had suddenly discovered a massive oil deposit right under its feet.
The resources of these moons were used to further consolidate the Northern Coalition’s position of power. Technetium mining operations were gifted to the most loyal people and corporations, who then gained a powerful incentive for falling in line with the mother alliance. The stakeholders in the coalition essentially received a massive, ongoing payout in the form of this new Technetium cartel.
The result was a massive period of growth for the coalition, as they could now fund any type of gameplay that anyone could dream up. The two most obvious signs of the Northern Coalition’s wealth at this time was its enormous membership (50,000 characters at its height) and its unrivalled production of supercapital ships (supercarriers and Titans.) Its ability to produce ships became so vast, regular, and safe that even as the Northern Coalition built a massive reserve of dozens of Titans for its own military, some of its industrialists were openly building Titans to sell on the market in Jita. Thanks to these enterprising industrialists, any sufficiently rich person could now buy their own supercapital ship, an honor previously reserved for only the most powerful nullsec fleet commanders. So stable was the Northern Coalition’s place at the top of the EVE food chain that its corporations were selling off the most valuable strategic tools in the game to anyone with cash, secure in the knowledge that the Northern Coalition’s massive membership made the alliance essentially untouchable.
Dominion was, after all, a notoriously unstable game build, and that instability worked to the Northern Coalition’s advantage. It was infamous for using its throngs of pilots to its fullest advantage to “blob” a system with ships and either overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers, or overwhelm the server and end the attack that way. Crashing the server on purpose was against the terms of service… but if it happened to crash in the normal course of escalating a battle to gain a tactical advantage… well then one could hardly be blamed.
“They had so many members,” said Manfred Sideous, at this time the main fleet commander of rival southern alliance Against ALL Authorities. “Their whole identity was based on safety through numbers so they’d recruit as many members as possible. There was a lot of hate for them, because they’d say, ‘We’ll come blob you to death,’ and they did that a number of times. They’d just shove thousands upon thousands of people into a system…it was like clogging your guns with bodies.”
It was through these tactics—overwhelming numbers, and a willingness to rally those numbers to the mutual defense of the coalition—that the Northern Coalition became the most powerful group in EVE Online history. One year since the end of the Great War—amid the collapse of Red Alliance and Goonswarm—the Northern Coalition BFFs were the only old power still remaining, and they had inherited the wealth of the star cluster.
In March 2010, near the zenith of the Northern Coalition’s power, Vuk Lau was informed that one of his full member corporations, Tau Ceti Federation, had invited a new group to become its “pet” in the region of Outer Ring. The new pet was an alliance nobody had ever heard of, called “SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSO.” It was Goonswarm, flying under a joke name they made up after the betrayal of Karttoon forced them to create a new alliance.
OPENING THE JAILS
The name “SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSO” was a Goon in-joke after they realized that in an alliance of scammers and scoundrels there was nobody they could trust. Nobody, they reasoned, except their server admin Solo Drakban, who had never betrayed them despite having complete access to all of their forums and private communications since their beginning. It was an all-caps, character-limited prayer that they be spared another betrayal at this vulnerable moment.
Once the Goons (nee SOLODRAKBANSOLODRANKBANSO) got resettled under their new leader, The Mittani, they refounded the organization as “Goonswarm Federation,” and though the prior name was forgotten, it nonetheless does a great job of illustrating the Goon mindset at this time.
This was not the same Goonswarm that had destroyed Lotka Volterra and Band of Brothers. Nor was it the grand war machine that had sounded the 27 Doomsday cannons in 49-U6U. Goonswarm had undergone a cataclysmic metamorphoses and arrived in the north sputtering, low on fuel, chased by the IT Alliance mob, and with members abandoning ship at an astounding rate.
But at the very least, Goons still had some friends. The bond of the old RedSwarm Federation was still strong, and the Northern Coalition’s “anti-BoB BFFs” diplomacy was still in effect. Tau Ceti Federation had offered to take the Goons under its wing in its home region of Deklein, within the borders of the Northern Coalition. The EVE community jeered that the Goons were convoying to Deklein “to crash on TCF’s couch.” It was on that couch that The Mittani plotted to rebuild all that Goons had lost, and bring the alliance back to its former infamy.
The Mittani arrived in Outer Ring with a Goon organization that was a shell of its former self. In an interview, he described Goonswarm as barely capable of getting 30 pilots into a fleet. Most Goons from the Great War generation had had their fun and moved on; to other games, and to other parts of their lives. Many of those who left still treasured their identity as Goons, but they didn’t care to be a part of this era of the alliance in which they were forced to engage in tough, time-consuming parts of EVE’s gameplay rather than indulging in their singular joy: lulz.
The first thing The Mittani needed to do was to raise participation back up in the alliance, but this was no easy task because Goonswarm was exclusive about membership. To become a member you had to be a Goon, which simply meant you had to pay the $10 fee for posting on SomethingAwful.com. But with only Goons to recruit from, and with most of the Goons moved on from EVE, the famously populous alliance had lost its eponymous “swarm.”
The Mittani could be a bit theatrical, even in real life. He liked to use historical parallels of grand drama to describe EVE because, though perhaps a bit hyperbolic, his analogies have a way of helping people cut through the game mechanics and understand the root story behind what he’s trying to communicate. So I had a feeling I knew what he meant when—in describing how he brought Goonswarm back from the brink of complete collapse—he told me that he “opened the jails.”
Everyone who had previously been banned from Goonswarm was allowed back in. Hundreds of players who had formerly been deemed too vile, too disruptive, or simply too annoying to be allowed in Goonswarm at its height, were given a second chance to prove they could be decent Goons, (“decent” according to their own proprietary moral compass.) To raise their combat readiness, the Goons picked fights with small corporations and used low-stakes battles to begin training up a whole new generation of fleet commanders and pilots.
Maybe it was the difference in governance, or maybe it was that their fleets were so often filled with the formerly-banned, but Goonswarm never quite meshed with the established order of the north.
Goonswarm has always been an autocracy ruled by a single leader. The Northern Coalition, by contrast, was dominated by council governments which settled most decisions with votes from the corporation CEOs. In day-to-day business, the buck stopped with Vuk, but for alliance-level actions, the council had to have its say.
“The Northern Coalition and Goon ‘culture’ was very different historically and it came up every time we deployed with them or helped them out anywhere or had anything to do with them at all,” said Vuk Lau.
Suffice to say, the Goons and the rest of the Northern Coalition—while united in diplomacy—were decidedly not BFFs. The Mittani, for his part, agrees with this analysis.
“There was a massive culture clash,” The Mittani told me. “Some of [the Northern Coalition] despised us. Others were afraid of us.”
MITTANIGRAD
When the Goons first arrived in Deklein they thought they would be under the wing of the more stable Tau Ceti Federation, but they quickly discovered that TCF was no longer the alliance it once was during the Great War.
TCF was struggling with its own organizational problems after four years in the game. The peace that was supposed to be its just reward in the north became its greatest challenge, as many of its combat-focused corporations left the alliance looking for a new fight. In response, TCF had to rely on its guests to fill its fleets and secure itself as a power. TCF itself was merely the nominal leader of a group of alliances more accurately referred to as the Deklein Coalition: Tactical Narcotics Team, Defi4nt, BCA, and a unique pvp-focused alliance called OWN which had a habit of ignoring its Tau Ceti overlords.
As the Goons arrived in the north, the leaders of the French community who had formed TCF “to unite the passion of the French people and to forge it into common objectives and activities” had come to the conclusion that there were serious problems in the alliance.
The main leaders of TCF got together for a meeting to decide the fate of the alliance, and discussed all of the issues: TCF member activity was on the decline, Defi4nt was—true to its name—refusing to pay back debts to TCF mostly because TCF no longer had the strength to force it to, and to make matters worse Tactical Narcotics Team hated Goonswarm and the leader of the corporation harbored a deep grudge against a Goon subgroup. Every alliance in EVE is a tangled mess of power trips, informal agreements, and grudges, but Tau Ceti’s ‘Deklein Coalition’ was in worse shape than most.
One day a Tau Ceti council member named Aranthil made a long-awaited announcement. In the following quote I took the liberty of cleaning up some of Aranthil’s English because his statement deserves to be read with the sincerity its author intended:
“We [have been] decaying [for] a few months, becoming a shadow of our former self,” Aranthil wrote in a message to the entire alliance. “Yesterday the leadership council decided this should end.”
“A majority of TCF’s previous corporations have now joined Goonswarm Federation, a member of the Northern Coalition. We want to keep the memories of every [heart-pounding] moment, of every breath we had together in this long adventure with our friends.”
And so, after four years, Tau Ceti Federation packed up its hangars, and began organizing an orderly shutdown. The goods and ships were divided up between the corporations, and the largest French-exclusive organization of players was allowed to perish peaceably. But the question then remained: with Tau Ceti gone, who owns Deklein?
“TCF starts having internal drama, and they decide they want to go their separate ways so TCF dissolves,” said Goon fleet commander DaBigRedBoat. “So they gave all their space to us. They gave everything to us. And that upset a lot of people in the north. A whole lot of people. Not too many people were happy that Goons were given everything.”
The main station in the capital system of Deklein “VFK-IV” was re-named “VFKhaaaaaaaaaaaaan!” for a while before settling on a more permanent title:
“Mittanigrad.”
Goonswarm, for its part, was a victor in this situation in several ways. First of all, it was the landing pad for most of Tau Ceti Federation’s remaining corporations, which meant an influx of hundreds of dedicated and experienced pilots who were now free to staff the Goon bureaucracy and fly in its fleets without the baggage of its former alliance. Second, Tau Ceti Federation bequeathed all of its star systems in Deklein to Goonswarm. And most crucially of all, it also inherited TCF’s spot as one of the three “full member” alliances in the Northern Coalition itself, and thus became the official leader of the Deklein Coalition.
This tragic moment for the French community was an enormous boon for the struggling Goonswarm, who used this as an opportunity to solidify its position in nullsec. With the handover of Tau Ceti’s systems it now had a consistent cashflow in the form of the region’s technetium moons. This gave Goonswarm not only financial security but, in geopolitical terms, a seat of power.
However, the diplomatic situation with the other members of the Deklein Coalition was far from tidy. They had been part of the coalition far longer than Goonswarm, and many were displeased that they hadn’t been treated preferentially. These other members, Tau Ceti Federation’s “guests,” had been allowed to stay in the north under TCF’s watch, but The Mittani had no connection to these alliances, and often saw no reason to honor previous agreements with trouble-making groups.
“When TCF announced that it would be pulling out of Deklein and handing stewardship of the region to Goonswarm, chaos erupted among the Deklein Coalition,” he wrote in a memoir about this time. “Defi4nt, which had previously been able to ignore its massive financial debts to TCF, was evicted for failure to pay. The leader of TNT, who held a long-standing and curious grudge against a small corp within Goonswarm, left his alliance and began shooting Goons.”
The former Deklein Coalition fell apart rapidly as The Mittani evicted those who wouldn’t fall in line with the new order. The remaining members began to coalesce behind a new Goon-led coalition. It kept the same name, and it still counted many of the same Goon and Tau Ceti pilots among its membership, but the leadership was all Goon. For The Mittani this represented a tremendous diplomatic victory which helped Goonswarm stabilize during a critical moment. Though he was ostensibly still under the command of Vuk Lau and the Northern Coalition high council, some within the Northern Coalition murmured warnings that The Mittani’s latest move had effectively split the Northern Coalition into two roughly equal power centers. Others added that The Mittani was not the type to share power with a democratic council.
One of the first things Goonswarm did was invite some of its own pets to occupy the space of those who had been evicted in The Mittani’s purge. In particular, there was one up-and-coming alliance who had caught the eye and warmed the heart of the normally quite nihilistic Goons—Dreddit.
Reddit’s presence was continuing to grow in New Eden. The Goons loved Dreddit’s style, and its throngs of new pilots had proved a crude-but-effective tool for shutting down SirMolle’s ill-fated “MAX 2” revenge campaign. Goons wanted to help nurture this nascent group of young pilots who they suspected could one day grow strong enough to help Goonswarm reshape the established order. But whether that relationship would endure as Dreddit grew ever more experienced and bold was anybody’s guess.
Dreddit was diffuse, and bound by no strict order or cultural ideal, but like the Goons they shared a common social network. Over its first few months, Dreddit’s founder, Fletcher Hammond, had built the original corporation into an entire Reddit alliance cheekily called “TEST Alliance Please Ignore,” a callback to the most popular post ever on Reddit at the time “TEST post please ignore” which quickly exploded in popularity as thousands of people arrived to reply “don’t tell me what to do.”
With his labor complete Hammond stepped down and appointed a new CEO of TEST, his successor: “Dank Nugs.” The reign of Dank Nugs would last only a few months before passing to “Montolio” who would define the organization’s direction for years to come.
Shortly after Montolio took control, TEST Alliance membership surpassed 3000 players, and a new mascot was adopted. After testing the limits of CCP’s patience with the first design, TEST eventually settled on a more respectable-looking version of its original concept: Middle-Management Dinosaur. TEST had found an identity that could unite a disparate social network, and there was no telling how large the alliance might grow as its leaders charted the nascent organization’s future.
2011 EVE
While the Northern Coalition was blossoming into the largest power of 2010, it’s no coincidence that the Drone Regions were a different story.
Drama had gripped the Russian coalition in the Drone Regions though nobody at the time in the Western community seemed to know what was going on. With the benefit of hindsight we now know that there was thick drama dividing the top Russian leaders, but at the time EVE Online knew Mactep, Death, and Silent Dodger (Red Alliance’s leader) as best friends and pillars of the community. It would take some time to find out why the Russians were ostensibly allies and yet were rarely ever seen together. The only thing that seemed to be able to get them to work together was getting revenge against Atlas Alliance.
In the southwest, IT Alliance was in turmoil as well after the failure of SirMolle’s MAX 2 campaign put the alliance into a state of chest-thumping and finger-pointing. Meanwhile in the deep south, Bobby Atlas had decided that this moment of chaos was the perfect opportunity for Atlas Alliance to step out from behind SirMolle’s diminishing shadow.
