“Her syndon geferede, feorran cumene
ofer geofenes begang Goona leode;
thone yldestan oretmecgas
Sesfan nemnad.”

The Turn of the Tide

We are now a year into this story. Goonswarm stands at bay, morale cracking and leaders left, our fall eagerly awaited by a host of enemies.

In Indonesia, a Frenchman called Kugutsumen had once infiltrated Goonswarm’s IT infrastructure, at the request of their enemies. Not the sharpest tools in the shed, those enemies had then refused to pay him his fee. Further, his time spent reading the Goon forums had impressed him with how much fun they seemed to have had during their time in Eve, compared to those he had dealt with. This was the first of two Goon Cultural Victories that would shape Eve.

Kugutsumen changed sides. He broke into the Band of Brothers’ forums and discovered the extent to which CCP was supporting their pet alliance. He made this public. Although he was banned by CCP for life, the outrage created by his revelations forced CCP to distance itself from their favourites. For the first time in their history, the Band of Brothers would stand or fall by their own abilities.

Death of a Titan

Others were at work. CCP had released titans into the Eve universe because they believed that more experienced pilots should have a way to defeat great numbers of less experienced ones. In fact, they had dissuaded combat and made one site impervious to the other’s attacks. Bane Glorious, a goon, wrote a vast and detailed analysis running to many pages, explaining to CCP how their creation was broken, the damage it was doing to the game, and what must be done to fix it. It clearly laid out the numbers that they had never bothered to run. CCP buckled.

Titans’ doomsday weapons were changed so that they had to be present in space with those they wished to attack (yeah, I know). And a new class of ship was released which was capable of preventing their escape.

Enter the idiot. Nobody in the history of the game has cost their alliances more valuable ships, money, space or, well, alliances than Sir Molle, leader of Band of Brothers. But on the morning of June 22nd, 2007, all that lay in the future. The Band of Brothers were still apparently invincible and unstoppable, the extent of their reliance on now-withrawn help not yet apparent. Sir Molle decided that he would use his titan to kill a group of Goonswarm newbies on a gate in the 46DP system. He unleashed his doomsday, killing all those who did not leave at once, then, alone on the grid, he cloaked his titan over a hundred kilometres from the gate to wait until he could jump out.

A young member of Goonswarm called Hrin, however had had the presence of mind to note the vector off the gate where Sir Molle had appeared. Returning, he burned in that direction. At last, we had a stroke of luck: one which turned the war. Successfully decloaking Molle, Hrin exposed him to attack. Within minutes, every Goon who was online was burning for 46DP, while others were being phoned and IMed, along with the Russians of RA.

Sesfan, the new CEO of Goonswarm, took charge of the fight: the leaders of the two alliances were clashing in a vital battle. Amongst the oldest of Goons, Sesfan had led us into fights since the earliest days of the Swarm: you can still read his battle reports on our forums if you look back to the second-last page of the archive.

Band of Brothers scraped together everything they could: they sent an appeal out to their entire alliance via their IRC network, and everything from assault cruisers to carriers arrived to save their de facto flagship. To no avail: Sesfan was victorious (you can hear him FCing the last phase of this fight here, in one of our movies, and this is a fun, realistic view of the battle from beyond the fourth wall). Molle’s titan character, Shrike, was dead, and his much-feared doomsday weapon was melted down to make frigates for Goon newbies.

If you listen to the very end of those youtube clips you will hear the relief of hundreds of people who have had their backs to the wall for months, and who have just destroyed the chief instrument of their suffering. You will also hear that Sesfan, out of everyone, was calm: “Check, check… we have work to do.”

The March Through the South

First came Stalingrad: the 9-9 system. For weeks the system was a battlefield, where heavily outnumbered European Goons would pick away at BoB, costing them valuable ships as they operated at the end of an over-extended logistics chain. Both sides threw everything they had into the fight. Tens of billions of ISK were poured in by the wealthy Band of Brothers, who hoped to shatter us with the hopelessness of competing with their impressive resources. Whole fleets were swallowed by a system that was for weeks the most violent and deadly in the whole Eve cluster. BoB won battle after battle. But the margin was getting narrower.

The battle for 9-9 had begun at the start of July, 2007. It lasted until the middle of August, when Goonswarm, after weeks of learning but losing, started to win a series of stand-up fleet battles. Frustrated, the BoB FCs sent their fleet back again and again, with the same result each time: humiliating defeat at the hands of the people they had painted as worthless newbies. For an entity defined only by their superiority, this was a Naked Lunch moment of the most jarring and unpalatable kind.

And so, one day, BoB's assault fractured and failed.

They had reached their high-water mark in the fight against Goons. They left their towers in 9-9, but their fleets withdrew from Detorid to West Tenerifis and Omist, where they held defensible systems. But those could not be held either. Across the south they retreated, occasionally holding a position for a few weeks, but gradually shedding members and vassal alliances as more and more rented space was lost. One day, we woke up and discovered that they had abandoned their remaining allies' space and announced a retreat to their homelands. Delve, the wealthiest fortress in the game, lay before us.