If, like me, you read virtual worlds sites like Terra Nova, you soon come across the idea of “player-created content.”  Some games let you make horrible little missions for your friends.  Some let you sell prosthetic penises to men pretending to be women so they can Goonfleet corporation was very young, and most of its pilots had been members for only a few weeks or months, they came to the attention of the greatest power in Eve: Band of Brothers.  Sensing an easy target, they manufactured a crusade against Goonfleet, harassing and griefing their newbies for weeks, preventing them even undocking and turning the greatest powers in the game against them.  After doing so, they declared that “There are no Goons.  Goodbye.”  They stated that Goons would “never be allowed to build up again in 0.0”

And so the Goonswarm alliance was crushed forever, Eve cleansed, and the Band of Brothers’ position in Eve secured.

The Redswarm Federation

 
Worry not, dear readers, for our heroes are not dead after all!  Instead, they hid in fen and fastness, offered shelter by the game’s other despised outcasts, the Russians of Red Alliance.  Forgotten for a time, they regained their strength and numbers, unnoticed by their enemies.  Red Alliance had been targetted by a grand coalition of all the South’s other alliances, driven back to a single outpost, their numbers dwindling.  But they, too, had held on.  Now, with the numbers of Goonswarm as a weapon, they erupted outwards.  Think the Fremen from Dune, or the Arab conquest: in a matter of a few months Goonswarm, Red Alliance and the French of TCF had exploded across the south, taking not just outposts but whole regions, until they dominated almost a quarter of the Eve galaxy.

Reversal of Fortune

But we dug too deep!  As we neared the destruction of Lokta Volterra, the last of those who had besieged the Russians, Band of Brothers realised the threat on their Eastern borders, and decided that they had to react.  In what was to become a theme, they failed to exert the necessary effort to save their allies, but as our holdings pressed up against their borders, they decided that we needed to be taught another lesson.

This was probably the worst time in Goonswarm’s history.  The Band of Brothers controlled a vast, feudal empire and could bring over ten thousand allies into a conflict.  They had titans, which were at that time unstoppable instruments of destruction, able to wipe out entire fleets from perfect safety every 30 minutes.  They had mastered exploits which meant that even the shields of our orbital towers were not safe.  Our founder, Remedial, held that we could not survive.  He left us, but not before he stole the funds goons had been contributing to build our own titan.  And as the campaign proceeded, it was revealed that Band of Brothers were not just being given gifts and information by the game’s developers, but that they had developers amongst their members.  One of those developers, it transpired, was the consistently-successful FC of their all-conquering capital fleet.  Many things clicked.

And so we were driven further and further back, defeated time after time as stations, systems and then whole regions fell before our enemies.  We had no answer to the enemies’ numbers, to their ability to deploy titans round the clock to destroy any fleets we assembled, or to their huge capital fleets at a time when Goons were struggling to field properly fit battleships. Our replacement CEO The Mittani went, frankly, a little mad under the pressure.  We discussed retreating to a single region in the north of our holdings and attempting to hold a last redoubt.  Goons kept turning out to fight, but it was, apparently, hopeless.  Laughing at our outrage about exploits, titans, and developer misconduct, Band of Brothers’ members constantly replied with the refrain that “we’re just better than you.”

It was at this point that we were saved by an odd group of people: a scientist, a hacker, a newbie, an idiot and a general…