“My name is Oofig VanDoogan and I’ve been sent from the future to warn Atlas of the impending Pandemic Legion threat.”
–Oofig VanDoogan, forum poster
DEEP IN THE DRONE Lands, the Russians were biding their time.
After Red Alliance lost Insmother to Atlas Alliance, the Russians cloistered themselves away in their Drone Region citadel, a vast place that most of the EVE community had written off as a waste of time, unworthy of the cost of the ammo it would take to conquer. Most believed the Russians had been allowed to survive there simply because it wasn’t worth it to evict them and take what many saw as the Russians’ junkyard. Between October 2009 and July 2010, most of EVE Online hardly thought about the Drone Regions.
But even without the natural advantage of technetium moons, the Russians had built a stockpile of raw minerals worth trillions in the quiet of the notoriously vacant Drone Regions. In their decrepit refuge—a great black sea dotted by inhuman drone hives built of equal parts hollowed asteroids and twisted metal scavenge—the Russians were hard at work developing a weapon system to regain what had been taken by the Western cur Bobby Atlas.
It might seem like hyperbole to those who don’t understand the reality and permanence of virtual places, but the Russians were utterly fixated on reclaiming their home and getting revenge on those who had dared dock their ships in Russian stations, dared raise their flags over Russian outposts. During most of 2010–while Goonswarm was collapsing, TEST was taking its first steps, and Atlas expanded through the South—the Russians were building. For ten months they lay silent, quietly building a supercapital armada to rewrite the history of New Eden, built from scrap and yet more powerful than anything that had previously been thought possible.
The age when Titan-class ships were a rare sight was long over. After the Great War their production had skyrocketed, and the wealthiest groups in New Eden—including Atlas Alliance—beamed with pride as they looked upon indomitable fleets backed by a dozen or more of these behemoths. CCP Games watched with horror as the players found ways to build more than a hundred Titans across New Eden in just the first three years. What was once conceived as a rare crown jewel for the mightiest empires was now a common sight for all nullsec pilots. In addition to being common tools in combat, there was usually a Titan parked outside most alliance headquarters stations just to serve as a logistics transport ship. Fleet commanders would pilot them on alternate characters and use their warp tunneling ability which helped shuttle fleets around the region with ease. Their leaders thought their borders were impregnable, for what force could possibly contend with coalitions of alliances that could summon such overwhelming strength? Many believed the scales had tipped in New Eden, that those who held power now might never be unseated. But there were those who wanted to prove that the established order could still be overthrown.
The fleet the Russians were building was a tool to do exactly that. Within a year they would shock the EVE community when they fielded an unthinkable supercapital fleet, more than 150 strong. Half a dozen of them flown by Death himself, like a great multi-boxed chariot.
ATLAS OF INSMOTHER
There are two main ways that I’ve seen Bobby Atlas characterized by his contemporaries. The first and perhaps most generous casts him as an extremely meticulous leader. He micromanaged every aspect of Atlas Alliance. He kept the alliance organized. He kept the corporation CEOs happy and rich, and he decided the alliance’s fleet strategies.
The other characterization conveys the same story, but is somewhat less complementary. This version of the Bobby Atlas story tells of a jealous leader who would not dole out power because he was hoarding it for himself. Bobby wanted to be powerful, and to lead a powerful coalition, and nowhere in that vision of power did he see a place for a bureaucracy that might help the coalition stay organized and functional without his involvement. Both stories convey the same message: everything went through Bobby.
As his alliance grew to control half of the south, Bobby Atlas saw that his plan was succeeding. He was on his way to becoming one of the great leaders of New Eden, his alliance controlled huge swaths of territory, and the Russians—from his perspective—seemed bested. From the end of 2009 through the first half of 2010 an uneasy peace reigned through the south as both Atlas and the Russians contemplated their next moves. Bobby began to believe that it wouldn’t do for EVE’s greatest leader to remain a mere vassal of IT Alliance. He wanted to be the leader of his own coalition.
On July 20, 2010, Bobby Atlas sent a message to his allies in the Southern Coalition: Evil Thug (leader of Against ALL Authorities) and SirMolle.
“As of today my Alliance and my pets will be resetting the entire Southern Coalition,” he wrote.
To “reset” is EVE shorthand for wiping the slate clean. All past political affiliations and alliances are dissolved.
“I thank all of my past friends, but now it is time to form my own coalition. Thank you BoB/IT Alliance, Against ALL Authorities […] for helping us along the years,” Bobby wrote. “With the recent and drastic reset hopefully nobody will be hurt by my decision but it has come to my attention that we have separate views on how we want to run our coalitions.”
PANDEMIC LEGION
What Bobby Atlas didn’t know is that just days prior, Death had quietly contacted the roving mercenary outfit Pandemic Legion that had been kicked out of its nullsec region by IT Alliance a few months earlier.
After a period of darkness and soul-searching, Pandemic Legion had found a new calling in mercenary work. Pandemic Legion was approached by Death and offered the contract of a lifetime to hit Atlas territory and generally make life hell for Bobby. As part of the contract, Death even gave Pandemic Legion several Titans to use in the effort.
Pandemic Legion was keen to use this as an excuse to stretch its legs and test itself against major powers again. Its figurehead fleet commander had returned to the game to reinvigorate the alliance. That leader, a player by the name of Shadoo—a veteran of the Coalition of the South that had fought Red Alliance in 2006–was helping to pioneer new fleet strategies as well, and he wanted to see how his new fleet concept would fare in a live war.
Pandemic Legion was an alliance of older players who had been in the game a long time. Atlas Alliance was much younger by contrast. In EVE, far more than other games, this can have extreme implications, because characters gain skill points in real-time throughout the months and years that they are subscribed to the game rather than by gaining experience killing rats and pirates.
Because Pandemic Legion’s pilots had been playing the game for so long, they already had the skill points needed to fly just about any type of ship. Plus, they were quickly becoming reviled for their most insidious tactic: talent poaching. Every group I’ve ever interviewed who fought Pandemic Legion has told me stories of its best players being quietly groomed by Pandemic Legion talent scouts during the conflict. Any fleet commander or pilot who repeatedly distinguished themselves in battle against Pandemic Legion would often get golden offers to come play with the Legion and fly expensive, cutting edge fleet concepts with some of the most experienced veterans in the game.
By contrast, other alliances were made up of a hodgepodge of new players, old players, and everywhere in between. The main problem with this is that there was no way to know which players would be able to fly which ships when they joined a fleet. It wouldn’t do to have every player in the fleet flying a ship that was meant to fight in a different way. Fleets needed to have coherent strategies to them in order to be coordinated with any kind of effectiveness. Trying to come up with a coherent strategy was often a logistical nightmare. Even if the alliance was wealthy enough to buy ships for players outright, there was no guarantee the pilots would be able to fly them. Fleet commanders and theorycrafters compensated by keeping their strategies loose and often downright informal. Up to this point in EVE’s history the fleet strategies could be as simple as “everyone bring heavy armored ships with railguns,” or slightly more coordinated with dictates like “bring sniping battleships” (long-range mid-class ships.)
Pandemic Legion realized that with a little bit of foresight it would be able to get hundreds of its members in extremely high-value, high-skill ships in a way that no other group of players was able to. Its theory was that they could get an entire fleet to fly the same ship with the exact same components, and unify its attacks and strategy in a way that would’ve been unthinkable a year prior. This simply was not the way EVE was normally played. Pandemic Legion’s new “ArmorHAC” fleet concept, short for “Armored Heavy Assault Cruiser” featured hundreds of ultra-tanky Zealot-class hulls fitted with an expensive array of “Tech 2” components. In their final form they were also quick and good at fighting at close range. Those ships would be supplemented by repair and command ships that made them extremely difficult to kill, the ideal setup for fighting outnumbered. Ordinarily ships this expensive wouldn’t be fielded because it would make reimbursing them too expensive for the alliance. By this point, however, many of the older veterans had grown wealthy enough that it wasn’t as much of an issue.
On July 18, (just two days prior to Bobby Atlas’ announcement that he would be resetting his allies) Pandemic Legion began its contract on Atlas and its pets. The first Atlas ally to be struck was called “Honorable Templum of Calcedonia.” The result was utter havoc. Not only was the ArmorHAC fleet effective, it launched segments of the EVE community into a full-on panic. Not one ship from Pandemic Legion’s new fleet was destroyed. It was so badly demoralizing that Honorable Templum of Calcedonia packed up and retreated immediately, and the more hysterical members of the EVE community screeched that Pandemic Legion had discovered some new hack or bug.
Worse still, the fact that none of the Pandemic Legion ships were destroyed was actually hugely important, because it meant that the losing side couldn’t figure out what the fleet was made out of. Nobody could see the inner workings and reverse-engineer this new fleet concept.
Pandemic Legion had arrived in terrifying fashion, a fundamentally rebuilt alliance that was meant to be lean and fast and capable of striking anywhere at any time. But they had struck one of Atlas’ pets, not Atlas itself. While they were Atlas’ allies, they weren’t exactly revered or respected. Most in Atlas assumed that the disaster was caused by the incompetence of those allies who had been put in that position specifically to be the buffer they were now serving as. Few in Atlas were too perturbed.
And so, two days after Pandemic Legion began its campaign, Bobby Atlas went ahead with his decision to spurn IT Alliance and Against ALL Authorities, and forge ahead with his own coalition.
ATLAS FALLS
There are episodes in the history of EVE with the flavor of a heroic epic; The Siege of C-J6MT, or the opening battle of the Great Northern War at P-FSQE, for example. But there are others which are the exact opposite.
The story of Atlas is important to the history of nullsec, but as I said at the beginning of this tale several chapters ago: it’s anti-climactic. In fact, one possible reason why Atlas’ history has largely been lost on the EVE community is because the story lacks a certain sense of climax. There’s no memorable hook for people to place their hopes for the game upon, no great calamity that captured the community’s attention. Just a punchline about fried chicken that will make Bobby Atlas into a mockery.
In July 2010, Atlas broke its coalition on the eve of a major invasion in a moment of admirable ambition and regrettable hubris. In August 2010, that invasion began in earnest, and Atlas enacted a retreat-based defensive action.
“Red Alliance regained their strength and allied with other Russian groups and eventually Pandemic Legion, Red [Alliance,] and White Noise began pushing into Insmother. Atlas responded in kind and the battles in Insmother went back and forth for many days/weeks, especially the system C-J6MT. Pandemic Legion was employed. They came into the battle and at that point the battle tide turned from a stalemate to a full slaughter,” wrote one Atlas Alliance pilot in retrospect.
Pandemic Legion was now being led by fleet commanders like Shadoo and Grath Telkin. While Shadoo was known to be a pretty mild-mannered guy in real life, Grath Telkin was anything but mild-mannered. A mountain of a man with a booming voice, wild grey facial hair, and long grey hair tied back into a ponytail, Grath was more like a folk character from a tall tale. Telkin gained infamy in the EVE Online community after getting into a tiff with another player on Reddit. When the situation threatened to escalate from a forum beef to a physical encounter at EVE’s annual Fanfest gathering, Telkin used the opportunity to reveal he had a real life criminal past and would be more than willing to go down that road.
Grath Telkin remembered the first true battle of the war when Pandemic Legion finally managed to force an engagement.
“Their first major defeat (they had avoided contact) saw Dancul1001 and like 2 other Titans with a hand full of [supercapitals] augment a PL ArmorHAC fleet, a doctrine the game hadn’t adjusted to, and saw that combined fleet fucking obliterate the much larger Atlas group. The space siege after that was Bobby trying to fight a war of attrition by retreating constantly and leaving the massive amount of space in the south as a buffer we had to burn through to get him.”
“Atlas lost C-J and the war was squarely in Red Alliance/White Noise/Pandemic Legion’s favor,” wrote the Atlas pilot. “Atlas retreated to our main hub of 0-W778 in Detorid while fighting other battles around the regions.”
When Red Alliance finally regained control of the station in C-J6MT it was renamed to “RA CJ6 REBIRTH,” and eventually back to “RA Prime” as they believed it always should be.
By all indications, Bobby Atlas’ strategy was to burn out the momentum of the Russian/Pandemic Legion forces by ceding the alliance’s vast territories and leaving them as an undefended wasteland that the attackers still had to take weeks to conquer. This often has a way of sapping an attacker’s morale by forcing them to engage in boring infrastructure clean-up operations. This tends to reduce an attacker’s fleet force because its pilots stop logging in to participate in boring gameplay.
While that territory was being conquered, the diplomats in Atlas Alliance spent that time lobbying their old neighborly allies Against ALL Authorities to forget the time Bobby Atlas dissolved their coalition and come save them from the Russians and Pandemic Legion.
Manfred Sideous, who had replaced Evil Thug as the leader of Against ALL Authorities, announced that he would oblige and come to Atlas’ aid. Even though Atlas had reset its political affiliations, Against ALL Authorities still had a remarkable amount of bad blood with Pandemic Legion, and Sideous felt forced to defend Atlas against unfair odds.
Against ALL Authorities sent fleets to aid its embattled ally, but when it arrived it found chaos. There was no clear indication of who was in charge of Atlas’ forces, Bobby was AFK, and communication was non-existent.
There was a problem at the core of Atlas Alliance, and it was Bobby Atlas himself. As things began to get tough he simply wasn’t logging into the game as much as he used to. He was becoming disillusioned with the entire game as the unstoppable Pandemic Legion and Russian fleets crushed his former homeland. After seeing the state of Atlas’ leadership, Sideous called off the rescue and went home.
“At that point Atlas was dead on the inside, and it’s impossible to save someone when they aren’t willing to help themselves,” said Against ALL Authorities’ Manfred Sideous. “Most of Atlas’s leadership were missing. The invasion took them by surprise.”
By now Atlas Alliance’s achilles heel had become blindingly obvious: it was Bobby.
“Bobby Atlas ran the alliance with a small group of directors and FCs,” wrote that same Atlas member. “When Bobby was AFK, Atlas suffered.”
Atlas Alliance had run headlong into a classic problem with the dictator model of governance: what happens if the dictator stops putting in the hours?
“They completely abandoned all their vassals at that point, and turtled up in 0-W and Pandemic Legion and the [the Russian alliances] set up towers in-system and moved in for the kill,” wrote Grath Telkin on Reddit in retrospect.
Though the rest of the EVE community had already moved on and considered Atlas Alliance a lost cause, within Atlas there was still a small spark of hope. Bobby Atlas came back.
After a significant amount of inactivity in the preceding weeks, Bobby was being seen once again in the alliance channels and he began hyping a great last stand as the Pandemic Legion/Russian force bore down upon the Atlas capital and formed a camp of artillery ships.
The next evening, Bobby Atlas rallied more than one thousand Atlas Alliance members—a massive turnout—to defend Atlas’ home base as the final reinforcement timer elapsed and his capital station at O-W778 became vulnerable. This was Bobby’s opportunity to turn back the tide, and put a stop to the destruction of all he’d sought to build as the leader of Atlas. The great flotilla of ships lumbered out from the capital to engage the invaders and make a statement that would define Atlas Alliance throughout the rest of EVE history.
The clock ticked down, the station became vulnerable. The Russian and Pandemic Legion force had swelled to about the same number of pilots but backed by dozens of Titans and several lethal ArmorHAC fleets, each 256 pilots strong. Bobby Atlas gazed upon the unstoppable armada that had come to conquer his home, and he gave the order.
“Stand down,” he typed in fleet chat. “I’m going out for fried chicken.”
BOBBY’S CHICKEN
“Morning came and Bobby had a massive Atlas turn out and faced a huge combined fleet of PL and DRF forces,” wrote Grath Telkin in retrospect. “At the moment the timer came out, Bobby stood down and literally went out for fried chicken. Not even kidding.”
There are moments in EVE that are so human they manage to somehow surpass the surreal. Reality, I’ve learned from EVE, is stranger than fiction, and the internet is stranger than reality. But to me it all makes a certain human kind of sense. What else was there for Bobby to do? Several nullsec leaders I spoke to for this book described the pain of what it’s like to lose in EVE Online. How devastating it feels to build something for years and years only to have it ripped down—and your friendships ripped apart as you become more and more powerless to stop your worst enemies from exerting their will upon you and your people. How liberating it must have felt for Bobby to just let go, step away from the keyboard, and walk out the door to find some fried chicken.
“This whole war came to its climax at the battle for 0-W,” wrote a different Atlas pilot. “Bobby logged in and was able to muster up about 1000 people with our enemies doing the same. Our [Titans and supercarriers] were logged in ready for an all-out brawl. Then Bobby just told us to stand down. (I was salty.) No fight was had and that pretty much sealed the fate of Atlas.”
“0-W fell not long after and Atlas’ market hub and financial might was crippled,” wrote another Atlas pilot in a retrospective Reddit thread.
As the Russians pushed past Detorid and into Atlas’ last vestige in Omist, the new leaders of Atlas who had tried to pick up the pieces in the immediate aftermath of Bobby’s departure decided to surrender and ask for a treaty. Having been so thoroughly bested militarily, there was no doubt that their remaining territory was only Atlas’ because there was so much of it that the Russians needed more time to conquer it all. Atlas was in an extraordinarily weak bargaining position. It’s temporary leaders had no leverage, and the resurgent Russians took them for all they were worth at the bargaining table.
“Earlier this morning a ceremony was held on the forward deck of Noobjuice’s Titan. Present were such dignitaries as Campaign Commander Fintroll, Backup FC Shadoo, Morale Officer Jogyn, and Commissar Krutoj. Vice Admiral Ray Butts was also in attendance.
Bobby Atlas, feigning illness, failed to attend and Atlas Alliance was represented by Dastommy, who signed the following agreement:
Quote:
This war has ended today with the surrender of Atlas alliance to the Russians.
Both sides have deposited collateral with Chribba to ensure compliance [editor: 65 billion ISK and 115 billion ISK respectively,] and Atlas has agreed to the following conditions:
-Atlas will provide 2 Titans and 3 supercarriers to the Legion of xXDEATHXx/White Noise/Red Alliance coalition
-Atlas will drop the Atlas Alliance name
-The Russians and PL will set temp blue status to Atlas to allow them to evacuate their old space
-The remaining Capital Ship Assembly Arrays active in Omist will be allowed to complete their production
With the complete destruction of Atlas Alliance, Pandemic Legion has begun to de-mobilize from the region. […] The somewhat poorly named VD Day (Victory in Detorid) has been marked with debaucherous celebration amongst the Legion and their Russian comrades, as Atlas forces stream outwards from their fallen capital […] to their refuge in Omist.
To all former members of Atlas, the blind greed of your leadership led you to this point. We wish you a peaceful future as non-combatants of the Russian bloc. Farewell.”
Phreeze, Pandemic Legion
August 29, 2010
The extraordinarily ostentatious deal stipulated that Atlas must disband its alliance, give the Russians a quarter of its surviving supercarriers and Titans, and sever ties with any allies they had left. In exchange, its leaders would be able to keep the rest of their Titan and supercarrier fleet, and some of their corporations would be allowed to stay in the deep south of Omist as vassals of the Russians.
The evening after the treaty was agreed upon, days after the failed last stand at O-W, Bobby Atlas finally returned, having caught wind of big events happening inside his alliance. He arrived amid an alliance in turmoil and mass evacuation, and from reading the alliance chat window—the logs of which were later leaked to the EVE public—he found out what was going on.
“A deal with Red Alliance, are you guys crazy,” he wrote. “The minute Red Alliance get [our] supercapitals they’re just going to continue the invasion with Legion of xXDEATHXx and friends.”
Bobby Atlas was furious, but he didn’t even know yet that his subordinates had agreed to shut down the entire alliance as part of the surrender.
“That is an actual term in the deal?” he asked, bemusedly, about the disbanding of Atlas. “Are you fuckin’ joking? I will not sit by and watch a sellout to Red Alliance. I will sooner disband it myself. In seven days the alliance is disbanding.”
It was already too late. Within days, Atlas Alliance lost 1500 of its 3000 members, and the rest left over the course of the next two weeks. With Atlas in a failure cascade, even its old friends Against ALL Authorities—infuriated that Atlas’ directors gave Titans to the Russians for free just to save some of the directors’ own Titans from being destroyed in battle—camped out Atlas’ evacuation route back to empire space and hunted its retreat convoys.
“We called the deal for what it was—a treasonous act to all pilots in Atlas,” wrote an Against ALL Authorities fleet commander named BlasterWorm. “We hoped Atlas leaders would reconsider but to no avail. Atlas was given 48 hour window to sort out their position. When this did not happen—we [cut diplomatic relations with] them. The vast majority of Atlas’ allies were already making plans about the future without them. Death to traitors.”
The Russians moved in and captured everything. From the factory in Tenerifis where SirMolle’s first Titan “Darwin’s Contraption” was destroyed, to the old wreck of Steve still floating in Esoteria. Hundreds of star systems including the Atlas capital at O-W778 were now occupied by Russian alliances like White Noise, Red.Overlord, Legion of xXDEATHXx, and Solar Fleet.
The lineage of Russian alliances now controlled almost all of the former RedSwarm Federation’s territory, from the deep south of Omist up to the far northern reaches of Cobalt Edge. Most crucially of all, C-J6MT was back in Russian hands. The other leaders of nullsec were left to wonder, however: would the Russians be satisfied with their conquest of the south, or was this a community in expansion that would continue to take over EVE? The truth was that the Russian factions of this time were deeply divided, and had only come together to destroy Atlas which they perceived as a mutual threat.
Pandemic Legion was elated by the result of the campaign as its commanders now looked forward to a grand return to glory for the hellraising mercenaries backed by a surge of income, confidence, and Russian Titans.
The only other group in New Eden that could serve as a viable counterweight to the Russians and Pandemic Legion was the Northern Coalition, and it was too busy dealing with drama and raising up a generation of TEST newbies to pay much attention to the southern conflict.
Bobby Atlas never came back. Forum legend has it he’s still out there somewhere. Searching for fried chicken.
