“One alliance stood out as a beacon of gibbering, unpredictable madness. Under pressure, OWN Alliance had become something completely novel, a unique drama vector in an aging and jaded galaxy.”
–The Mittani, CEO, Goonswarm
LATE ONE NIGHT, IN October of 2010 as Tau Ceti Federation left the north and Goonswarm took command of Deklein, a player named Teredrum was fuming in the local chat channel of his alliance’s home station in CU9-TO.
Teredrum was the leader of OWN Alliance, one of the former guests of Tau Ceti Federation who were allowed to live in the Deklein region under the new rule of Goonswarm. He had a reputation for an unpredictable temper, but tonight it was worse than usual.
He told his members to ignore the dozens of non-combat freighter ships that were orbiting his headquarters offering free ships and sympathetic words. The commander of the fleet of haulers—the famously non-threatening Badger-class, to be specific—said they had heard about the plight of OWN Alliance, and were here to offer what help the philanthropic pilots could to the downtrodden.
The pilots in the haulers were from the newly minted TEST Alliance Please Ignore who were flying in OWN’s space spamming messages through the system-wide chat channels about wanting to help get OWN back on its feet. The cargo holds of the Badgers were stuffed to the brim with deconstructed Rifters—traditionally thought-of as the cheapest ship hull in EVE—and were offering them to OWN pilots without charge out of the goodness of their hearts.
It was obvious from the outset that the gifts were tinged with more than a little sarcasm. One TEST member managed to fight through the giggling long enough to skillfully maneuver their Badger in front of the docking port of OWN’s space station. When it was just outside the undock, the TEST pilot initiated the self-destruct sequence. An escape pod blasted back toward the fleet, and a single firework flower popped in front of the docking port before scavengers swiftly arrived to loot the wreck and found nothing but garbage-tier items. The pilot later said it was “to better distribute the supplies.”
By now it was obvious that this “OWN Aid Flotilla” was an extremely elaborate prank. But it was a prank done to send a message to the ~1500 members of OWN: we have reason to believe Teredrum has stolen more than 100 billion ISK from your alliance.
REPLACEABLE SHIPS
Teredrum was furious about the stunt, and he thought he knew who was really behind it. Not Montolio, leader of TEST Alliance, but The Mittani, leader of Goonswarm. Montolio was in charge of TEST which had executed the stunt, but it was The Mittani who had invited the young TEST Alliance to live in the north to begin with. To Teredrum, TEST and Goons were two names for the same thing: trolls. Not “Elite PvPers.”
There was some truth to that viewpoint, though Goonswarm and TEST were still entirely separate communities. While Goons had now been in EVE for many years and had since undergone genuine hardship, TEST was new to the game and fresh with enthusiasm. This had a way of fostering a certain joy that is often missing in a traumatized star cluster.
It was a joy that reminded a lot of people of the joie de vivre of the Goons many years earlier when they had first arrived in the game—before the Great War and the Karttooning of Delve—and in the eyes of many they were natural cousins. Trolling, griefing, immature, giggling cousins, but cousins nonetheless, united in their belief that trolling was a force for good in this universe.
TEST was among the most junior of members in the Northern Coalition, and as such it was given management of just two of the over 200 technetium moons controlled by the Northern Coalition. But even these two moons were a generous gift. Thanks largely to the Northern Coalition’s manipulation of the technetium market, Goonswarm’s gift provided a suitable income for the large up-and-coming alliance of Redditors.
With the proceeds, TEST Alliance had even instituted a model of a program that had recently been pioneered by larger and wealthier Northern Coalition alliances: a Ship Replacement Program (SRP).
In this time, having an SRP was something that alliances advertised in order to attract members. It was sort of like how every bank in the USA wants you to know it’s a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). An SRP was a symbol of stability, safety, and of member-focused alliances. It was a way of showing that the structure of the alliance existed to facilitate fun experiences for the average pilot, not the enrichment of a few stakeholders at the top of the organization. Not every organization was so concerned with sending this message to its members.
“THE MADNESS OF OWN”
When TEST found out that OWN had six technetium moons yet virtually no ship replacement program for its pilots, a “threadnought” (a forum or Reddit thread that gains a great deal of momentum) started to snowball.
On both Reddit and the EVE community backchannel site “Kugutsumen.com” (a third-party website created by the infamous hacker who discovered the cheating CCP developer T20) commenters were aghast that the members of OWN were expected to risk their own ships while flying on operations for Teredrum. Many players worried that his pilots were getting a poor impression of the EVE community just because they accidentally got recruited by Teredrum, someone the wider community was increasingly seeing as “a delusional ruler of a hermit kingdom,” as the Mittani had called him in a piece called “The Madness of OWN” published on November 22, 2010.
On Reddit, the threadnought gained momentum until eventually TEST Alliance broadly agreed on which punishment for OWN was the funniest: TEST would begin offering a Ship Replacement Plan…for OWN Alliance’s pilots. For two days only, any OWN pilot whose ship was destroyed could send the kill mail (an exhaustive receipt of the encounter) to TEST’s bookkeepers who would check the details and issue reimbursements as appropriate. It was a slap in the face that gently questioned OWN’s right to exist as a modern alliance, and beckoned its pilots to jump ship and join TEST.
Both OWN and TEST were minor members of the Northern Coalition, but by now the drama was thick enough that the entire star cluster was eagerly watching what was happening between these “New Goons” (TEST) and a defensive, cornered Teredrum who loudly professed ignorance about why his alliance couldn’t afford a Ship Replacement Program.
OWN was in the game because it liked to fight. It was a “PVP-only alliance” which meant that its members were expected to engage exclusively in fighting other players or training and preparing to fight other players. In return for sovereignty in the North, OWN was expected to muster dutifully when a “Call to Arms” was posted on the coalition calendar.
Teredrum took this ethos extremely seriously. His pilots were his sole grip on power, and their skill in combat was all that made the alliance relevant compared to any other group of pilots, so he resorted to uncommon means to keep them focused on their sole pursuit.
Teredrum and other moderators in his leadership cabal supposedly enforced strict communication rules on the alliance’s players. Players were discouraged from fraternizing with each other on the forums. People who were caught discussing things unrelated to player-vs-player combat were either punished or outright silenced. Players who so much as asked questions about mining, for instance, are said to have been scolded and told to focus on PvP. Teredrum’s enemies allege that players who made mistakes in live operations were often pulled into private voice comms servers where they would be berated with raised voices. Players who questioned why leadership was silencing them were called spies who were fomenting dissent in an otherwise harmonious alliance. EVE is not always fun and games. Numerous examples exist of leaders who turned abusive once they were too powerful to be held to account.
When Tau Ceti Federation was strong it had been able to constrain the worst instincts of Teredrum; rumor has it that TCF once even forcefully destroyed a previous iteration of OWN Alliance to breakup what was seen as a malignant crew. But as Tau Ceti waned in power, Teredrum was able to remake the alliance more or less as it was before.
Though OWN was a bit-player even by the standard of regional politics, this small amount of authority quickly emboldened Teredrum without a healthy Tau Ceti to serve as a counter-balance.
Inside this small set of about twelve star systems, Teredrum was a king who could not be questioned because he controlled the technetium. So long as he controlled his six technetium moons, he was able to maintain that grip on power within his alliance.
That began to change when TEST started taking a closer look at that technetium money, wondering why OWN couldn’t afford to buy its members ships.
AUDIT
TEST Alliance mobilized, and swarmed into OWN territory not with warships, but with that most deadly of EVE weaponry: spreadsheets. Every single starbase and moon mining operation was scouted out and documented. The bookkeepers of TEST Alliance figured out the exact amount of money that OWN should have been getting from its technetium moons and all its other sources of cash, and when it was all calculated and the math was made publicly available, it pointed to a scandalous conclusion: OWN Alliance should have had 100 billion more ISK than it was claiming it had. In 2010, that amount of money could have bought several Titans, which OWN clearly did not have. So the question rang throughout all of EVE:
Where’s the money, Teredrum?
By now most of the EVE community was aware of what was going on in this tiny slice of space just north of the Cloud Ring. Though this had begun as a mere squabble between two allied player groups (“blue drama,” something that is a daily concern for all alliances) by now it had attracted the attention of tens of thousands across EVE, and as the new leader of the Deklein Coalition (of which TEST and OWN were a part) The Mittani could no longer ignore the issue.
Teredrum insisted that this was all just a dark plot by The Mittani and his troll pet TEST to destroy the Northern Coalition from the inside. First, he said, Tau Ceti had coincidentally collapsed after the Goons’ arrival. Next, they would destroy the military backbone of the north, OWN! And soon, The Mittani will reign over the entire Northern Coalition, and march against all of EVE! Ironically, though nobody believed him, Teredrum’s vision of doom would not be far from the truth.
Teredrum even posted chat logs on the forums showing The Mittani apparently confessing his grand machinations to him in private, but they were visibly doctored and written with Teredrum’s imperfect English. Teredrum wrote in excellent English for a non-native speaker, but as these things go, most fluent English readers would be able to discern that the writer of the logs was almost certainly not The Mittani, whose own language is not just fluent, but—as in his account below—often exactingly precise.
“I realized that things were going to go hellishly wrong when I first had a chat with OWN’s leader, Teredrum, on TeamSpeak,” The Mittani later wrote. ”I’ve had personal conversations with a whole spectrum of EVE players over the years, and while some were obnoxious nerds, I had never encountered someone who left me feeling truly disturbed until I met Teredrum. Veering wildly between outright hostility and sneering obsequiousness (an emotional tone which I didn’t even realize existed), Teredrum managed to use the phrase ‘with all due respect’ at least ten times in as many minutes, as if it were a verbal tic. The content of the conversation wasn’t much better: Teredrum looked down on the other Deklein Coalition members with absolute contempt for not being ‘pvp focused’ while seemingly asserting OWN’s independence, despite their ‘guest’ status.”
The Mittani asked Teredrum to submit to an audit of his alliance’s finances which could’ve been easily achieved by handing over his access code (called an API key) which would allow others to use out-of-game software to ask the EVE server what Teredrum had been up to.
There were two possible scenarios which the Deklein Coalition was worried about: either Teredrum and his leadership had used those funds to buy ships for themselves personally, or they had sold the ISK out-of-game and sent it off to the highest eBay bidder. Then again, maybe the information would exonerate him, and prove that TEST’s calculation was wrong or that simple incompetent economics were to blame.
Without the API key, it was impossible to know for sure, and so Teredrum’s repeated refusals began to look more and more suspicious. The Mittani later wrote that these refusals forced his hand. He couldn’t just let Teredrum go now that he looked so damn guilty (whether or not the worst accusations were necessarily true,) and worse, he was asserting OWN’s independence and refusing to cooperate with inspections. To let Teredrum off the hook would be to repeat the mistakes of Tau Ceti Federation, which had lost control of its guests.
For The Mittani, this was an opportunity to make a public example of someone. To show the EVE world that this was a more mature Goonswarm. This new organization stood for order and control, and The Mittani wanted to make clear that in his fledgling Deklein state he would no longer be tolerating dissenters or financial trickery.
So he did what he thought was just: He commanded OWN Alliance to leave Deklein, but gave them a chance to resettle elsewhere in the North. It wasn’t that bad of a deal for OWN, except for the fact that this new territory was on the border with the Russians. If it was PvP Teredrum wanted, he’d find plenty of willing combatants at 4am in the Drone Regions.
“OWN alliance is being evicted from Deklein for their leadership’s repeated refusals to submit API keys to explain their breathtaking financial malfeasance. Vuk will be finding them a new home on the eastern front.
Over the past two months the leadership of OWN have demonstrated a persistent resistance to working with us in the region when not outright conspiring to try to poison us to the rest of our allies.
Despite weeks of patient restraint on my part, my tolerance has reached its end. OWN will be decamping to Venal, or wherever; I don’t give a fuck. They have a week to evacuate their membership’s assets and must commence de-soving their territory immediately. If they resist or attempt to fight they will be reset and purged with extreme prejudice.
Please be prepared to ensure their safe exit from Deklein should their leadership continue to display their signature disregard for our ownership of this region.”
–The Mittani, CEO, Goonswarm
OWN had been, diplomatically speaking, owned. The TEST Aid Convoy was intended as a funny poke at a nearby ally who wasn’t doing enough for its pilots, but it had snowballed into the defining moment of Fall 2010. This collision of egos was emblematic of this era of Northern Coalition politics. The Mittani and Goonswarm had come into ownership of one of the wealthiest territories in the game when Tau Ceti Federation left, and they weren’t about to be pushed around by someone they viewed as a bit player. The Swarm was looking stronger and wealthier than it had since the Great War, and Montolio and Vile Rat were cultivating a close bond between what were now two of the largest alliances in the game. The Goons became veteran teachers and mentors to the flock of Redditors.
Though largely still newbies, TEST’s Aid Convoy stunt was essentially a galactic debut for the alliance and, critically, it was also a joke that put TEST on the good side of The Mittani. Though The Mittani says he did nothing to engineer this event, he was nevertheless likely very pleased that TEST had single-handedly manufactured a way for him to get rid of more members of the old Deklein Coalition in a way that left his hands clean politically while allowing him to look the part of the stable, measured ruler.
Tales of the TEST Aid Flotilla seeped out beyond the bounds of EVE, attracting even more players to try EVE and to fly for TEST. Behind-the-scenes Montolio was working day and night to forge the alliance into a proper nullsec power beyond its relationship with Goonswarm.
It seemed nothing could stop TEST’s rise. As the story of TEST and OWN spread virally across the internet, the call rang out. Even those who had never before heard the names Montolio or TEST howled through tears of laughter:
“TEST ALLIANCE. BEST ALLIANCE.”
