On February 4, 2009, Band of Brothers ceased to exist as an alliance, violently disbanded in the most destructive act of espionage in the history of online gaming. Shortly thereafter the three-year long Great War was at an end with Goonswarm and the anti-BoB forces (Notably including Pandemic Legion and the old Northern Coalition) victorious and living in Delve, BoB’s former home. The end of the Great War - a most bitter conflict of extinction with more than 40,000 pilots on each side - brought the defining narrative of nullsec in Eve in that era to an abrupt close. Yet if it wasn’t for an unexpected flash of insight while munching on a croissant one afternoon while I was bored at my office, BoB would never have been disbanded, and the Great War might have reached an altogether different conclusion.
At first, it was just going to be a bog-standard ‘smash and grab’. A Goonswarm member, Tamir Lenk, had recruitment scammed an alt of a Band of Brothers director named Haargoth Agamar from Black Nova Corp. In a mere three days on the other side, Haargoth realized that he’d had more fun in Goonswarm than months being at the top level in Band of Brothers.
Rather than having his alt kicked, Haargoth offered to come in from the cold, revealing himself to be a high-level director in Band of Brothers, much to the surprise of everyone. Not merely a director, but someone with ‘full director’ access in Tin Foil, the executor holding corp tying Band of Brothers together.
In 2009, espionage was everything in Eve Online; a highly-placed spy could offline control towers and hand over system sovereignty, as well as stealing everything not nailed down in his corporation hangars. Haargoth was the highest-level defector Goonswarm had seen, but at first the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency didn’t realize the extent of its capability to ruin BoB with Haargoth. Since Haargoth was defecting, there was no obvious warning sign to BoB or risk that he would be prematurely ‘burned’, yet at the same time we wanted to strike as soon as possible in order to ensure that Haargoth didn’t have second thoughts about his defection.
To plan the sabotage out properly - to think clearly through the nervousness the opportunity caused - we tried to game out every angle, finding the stockpiles of Black Nova Corp capitals in hangars across Delve such that they could be wiped out in the fastest possible way. A smash and grab ends the moment the spy is noticed and a director can be found to yank the agent’s roles, but Haargoth would have more time than most - an actual CEO would be required to remove his ‘full director’ status. Yet while Haargoth was a ‘full director’ in Tin Foil, the executor corp, he was only a ‘director’ in Black Nova, meaning that his access could be yanked from BNC the moment a host of full directors like Lady Scarlet noticed something was amiss. Hmm...
I wish I could claim that it was all part of a master plan hatched out of my experience with espionage and Machiavellianism, but the truth is that in 2009 ‘disband an alliance with a spy’ had never been done; it wasn’t part of the standard playbook. It came to me in an abrupt flash, like a voice outside of myself, unplotted: using Haargoth’s Tin Foil full director, we could individually kick out every single corporation from Band of Brothers, shut down the alliance, and then immediately create a new corporation called ‘Band of Brothers’ ourselves, not merely annihilating Band of Brothers but literally stealing their name forever. Absolute devastation.
We pulled the trigger, and it worked - insult to injury, we also ran a smash and grab on the Black Nova Corporation hangars and dread caches. In each now-empty hangar, Haargoth left a bookmark labelled ‘The Mittani Sends His Regards’, and then swiped the BNC and Tin Foil wallets for good measure.
The loss of the alliance would completely remove BoB sovereignty across the galaxy map, leaving their famous ‘Fortress Delve’ with its invulnerable Sov 4 constellations swept aside. In one stroke, no cynojammers, no jump bridges, nothing: all ex-BoB territory would become a completely vulnerable wasteland, begging for invasion.
Which Goonswarm promptly did.
BoB tried to recover by pushing all their corporations into a temporary alliance called ‘KenZoku’, but without their sov defenses to guard them, it was all over but the screaming. Goonswarm abandoned all its territory in the galactic east - nearly eight regions worth - to invade and occupy the land of their old foe, with Pandemic Legion and the Northern Coalition playing primary roles in twisting the knife. By April, what was once Band of Brothers was now Goonswarm’s, and the Great War was over.
I was there. Goonswarm wasnt pulling the strings, Pandemic Legion was, Goonswarm was actually threated as 3rd world citizen and rightefully so, because their players [except high management] are uber terrible. At the end of long campaign Goonswarm only had few less important regions and one important region, rest of coalition took over better regions. After few weeks they had problems defending those regions, it was amazing PVP region, because of NPCs distributed all over Delve and Aridia.
