The war between the CFC (or the Imperium) and The Money Badger Coalition (MBC) in the last few weeks has become a near constant hellcamp of the Saranen undock (more on this here), where the Goons and their allies have been staging from since January, and throughout the loss of their territory over the last couple of months. Despite these losses that are so fundamental to a former Null Sec power Bloc, The Mittani has maintained that this move is great for goons, as the Fozzie Sov system of sovereignty claiming is biased towards the attacker, and that their fighting in Saranen is attacking their enemies will to play eve by making the game a gruelling, uphill struggle with no real enjoyable content – either they get welped by Goons in hurricanes, interceptors or stealth bombers and superior numbers, or the Goon forces remain docked, denying the enemy the satisfaction of a good fight – tactics that have been in place since the ‘Betrayal of M-OEEB’, where Circle of Two reset the Imperium mid-fight after calling for maximum support to protect the system’s ihub.
One of the tactics that The Imperium have employed is a single minded campaign of oppression against Pandemic Horde, who set up a mining and ratting staging system in O1Y-ED. The Mittani has had the Imperium using fleets of stealth bombers to destroy targets of opportunity in hit and run, guerrilla style combat (examples here and here), often when response catalysts are undocked and ready to warp to bait Procurers (or even ventures). The idea behind it has been simple – make the game unplayable for the enemy, one alliance at a time, and the Imperium has some rather interesting maths to back up their claims that Pandemic Horde is close to breaking point since these tactics began, despite having lost very few actual pilots, these are merely becoming inactive and not logging in, due to how little enjoyment the players are being allowed by Goons.
In fact, the oppression fleets have been so successful that the Mittani has consistently claimed in his Fireside Chats in recent weeks that the data available on Pandemic Horde player activity (Crunched by the GSF’s own Strategos) show that, while their net member loss is currently negligible (thanks to an impressive recruitment campaign), they are losing massive amounts in player activity on a weekly basis and projections show that if this trend continues the alliance may well not survive for very long. The publicly viewable spreadsheet is available in ‘read only’ format here, and is a weekly updated feature that is already promised for future campaigns against the other members of the MBC when their turn comes.
The reason for this drop in activity, CFC claim, is the detrimental effect the Imperium’s constant harassing has had on Pandemic Horde’s will to play, and to engage in the war. While it’s true that there may be other reasons, it’s hard to deny that there has been a lot of activity in O1Y, and the battle reports show a campaign against ratting and mining that has targeted the newest members of PH exclusively. A couple of example killboards can be seen below:
(Click for killmail)
While this is impressive (if a bit dishonourable) work by the Goons and their allies, it’s important to note that they themselves have been the target of a similar, much larger scale campaign of oppression that has seen them shoe-boxed into the Saranen V Moon 9 station, while all their sovereign systems were razed and the enemy came (literally) knocking at the last door. The constant harassment, the near constant undock hellcamp and the complete blockade of all ratting and mining (or isk making of any kind) should surely have had a similar impact on the Goons, who infamously have a large number of non combat pilots who lived in Deklein (as pointed out by most of the anti GSF propaganda in game left in their allies’ territory). So, let’s turn the maths around and look at how the war has affected the Goonswarm Federation and it’s allies – The Bastion, Tactical Narcotics Team, Get Off My Lawn, RAZOR Alliance, The Initiative. and Executive Outcomes, and compare them with each other, using the same data points for each to draw some of my own conclusions on the effect the war is having on the member alliances of The Imperium. While we are dealing with just quantitative data here, it is important to include the disclaimer that the interpretations of this data are my own opinions, not in any way fact, and I would encourage any and all readers to seek the truth for themselves, and post their theories/explanations of the data in the comments section. The data is all easily accessible on Dotlan, Eve Hunt and zKillboard.
Pandemic Horde
The target of Mittani’s first campaign of hellwar, Pandemic Horde have been a willing and active participant since the beginning of the war. The Mittani maintains that the data shows their oppression fleets are working to bring the Horde down, making the pilots unwilling to fight against the imperium, and turning O1Y-ED into a ‘burnout machine’ for new players, leading to less and less people logging on. While it is true that Pandemic Horde has a long list of inactive players, this is hardly something that they alone are guilty of. Pandemic Horde have been impressive recruiters, bringing huge numbers of new members to Null Sec in a short time, and their population graph on Dotlan shows a steady and consistent rise in membership. The Goonswarm Federation math on player activity (born from player login date, admittedly a more accurate measure of activity than the involved in active PvP data I have used) shows that despite this recruitment, week on week they are losing more activity than they are gaining from new members. But by my calculation, (using active PvP numbers) Pandemic Horde have a 19.53% Participation in PvP, which would, when compared to the biggest Imperium Alliance, the Goons themselves, be quite impressive, however it is important to note that the Imperium’s tactics of hunting ratters and miners in the Pandemic Horde staging system means there will be a lot of non-consensual PvP content, so this number should not be taken as a barometer for participation in the war. It should also be noted that with their leaving Querious to take up full time residence in Fade, Pandemic Legion will have far more members in striking distance of Saranen, and potentially a lot of the ‘inactive’ players may return for easy content.
The Imperium
Immediately, you see a large amount of inactivity across the board, with the highest percentage of PvP participation being offered by the LAWN alliance, at 16.7%. They are also the smallest of the alliances left in the Imperium, having lost 37.5% of their members since the 9th of May, and as much as 50% since January, and they aren’t the only Imperium alliance to be suffering a membership culling, as shown by the table below:
Despite losing 1,176 members in the last month (according to Dotlan), The Goonswarm Federation member base has been surprisingly stable, considering they are the target of the biggest joint offensive in Eve History. This retention despite the harassment of the MBC forces and the loss of all their sovereignty is impressive, but is not reflected their allies. Both the youngest of the Alliances, the Bastion, and the (now) smallest of the Sovereign Holding Alliances, LAWN, have lost a third of their number in the last three and a half weeks, and both Alliances have lost over half their membership since January – when LAWN boasted a membership of approximately 2,500 members, and Bastion approximately 3,250. As these were the two alliances who had to abandon Vale of the Silent back in April, and the two alliances who had to evacuate not once but twice (after the retreat of Deklein), I believe it is fair to say that these events had a significant impact in the membership and participation numbers we see above, and that this trend may likely continue until they lose combat effectiveness entirely; projecting forward at current rate of member loss, LAWN would only have another 50 days until the Alliance lost all members (assuming no changes in rate of loss, either positive or negative, which is, of course, unlikely), and Bastion (with the same assumption) would only have approximately 55 days before complete shut down. This is obviously not going to be the case, as there is a core of PvP orientated players in each alliance who relish the opportunity at undocking to instant content, who will likely fight to the last unless the alliance they are loyal to pulls out of the war, which would seem unlikely in the case of The Bastion as they were essentially created by CFC and the Mittani, though this change in the Alliance description currently has Reddit members speculating:
The obvious point to make is that there were many member characters in both alliances for whom the war was not interesting, and with the loss of all sovereignty (and the increasingly long length of time between losing and the promised reclaiming of sovereign space), this could show a loss of faith in the Imperium Leadership, who have rallied the troops based on the idea that Fozzie Sov mechanics are so biased towards the attackers that it made more sense to abandon territory to the enemy and then take it back as attackers than to defend it in the first place, a chant that has been repeated every week since the loss of territory in Fade and Tribute (yet to date has only seen the Territorial Claim Unit in EWOK-K and the control of the system EC-P8R in Pure Blind fall into their hands on the 25th of May, the latter of which was lost to the Pure Blind Cartel, two days later, and the former has, at the time of writing, just became reinforced).
Perhaps the Alliance level leadership also has a part to play with these retention levels, but I cannot comment on their internal communications and morale except from what I see in the data, which strikes me as possibly a cripplingly low level of both. RAZOR and The Initiative. both chose to live without sovereignty in Venal, and perhaps this coupled with their current presence away from the bulk of the Imperium forces staging in Saranen (having set up shop in Syndicate) has buffered them from the losses associated with this war by allowing their members who are not PvP focussed (or who simply do not wish to fight endless undock camps) to find a semblance of their normal way of life in a new region, however it’s important to note that RAZOR had 3,400 members in January and lost half that number in the last six months, leveling out at their current level over a month ago. A similar trend is apparent in TNT and LAWN. The three most stable membership bases in the Imperium belong to Executive Outcomes and The Initiative., and the Goonswarm themselves, and while GSF have lost all of Deklein and their ratting/mining pockets, Initiative never held territory under Fozzie Sov and Executive only ever held sovereignty in 14 systems in Pure Blind, and are one of the oldest, most established alliances in the Imperium, giving them an advantage of a small member base of some very experienced members, who have been through big wars before and are not ‘summer children’ (as the Mittani refers to the vast majority of Pandemic Horde’s new players, who have never seen the CFC war machine in action). The Bastion, merely two years old, is filled with members who were new to null sec when they joined and have only heard tales of the Fountain War, and the Defeat of Band of Brothers, and all the other exploits of the Goons, most likely from the Goons themselves. Many never experienced the Burn Jita campaigns (which the Mittani has promised will be making a return this year, along with Burn Amarr). It also has a lot of very experienced pilots, but if there is a lack of support for the newer members, the complete loss of territory and retreat into Low Sec may have caused them to lose all faith and abandon the cause, despite the Mittani’s insistence every week that the war is going swimmingly.
And while, yes – it could be argued that these member losses are just the Null Sec ‘Care Bears’, who focus on industry, mining and ratting jumping ship for better prospects, it strikes me that the exodus of the Imperium’s industrials and capitalists would have happened earlier in the war, when they lost the ability to engage in the activities they enjoyed (but this is merely my opinion). I wonder how the data would look had the Bastion and LAWN fought to hold Vale of the Silent until Citadels were released, instead of pulling out, perhaps consolidating in TVN-FM or a new staging system within their territory that was more defensible, and striking out from there. We’ll never know if this would have made a difference in the war, and perhaps it would have remained an untenable position after the Circle of Two reset, but it still interests me that the alliances who have had to evacuate the most have been the most affected.
The coming weeks will prove if the Bastion and Get Off My Lawn Alliances plateau their losses in membership and remain effective fighting forces, or if the escalating state of the war is spelling the end of their current incarnation as we know it. In his recent Fireside, The Mittani stated that the movement of MBC forces to reinforce Pandemic Legion in Saranen has left the Goons’ old home of Deklein ripe for the taking, but at the time of writing, little progress has been made to this lofty goal. While reclaiming the lost homeland would be a massive boost to morale across the Imperium, but as the member base of these alliances in particular continue to decline, I have to wonder if it will come too late for the other Alliances in the Imperium.
