The universe at war

I was actually part of that fleet. It was an awesome sight: several hundred people in the same Teamspeak channel, as well as dozens of capital ships heading out from a single station. The fireworks were spectacular. Watching a dozen dreadnoughts arriving to pound on a single tower was an astounding sight. But we lost. After a weekend of fighting at the ‘siege of C-J6’ my alliance withdrew. The game mechanics, they argued, made their losses too great to continue. The lag and disconnects produced by a massively multiplayer game desperately trying to keep up with the movement of so many players took too much of a toll.

The coalition designed to drive Red Alliance from the game had failed. Now the hard-working Russians capitalized. GoonSwarm had joined them, and the experienced and hardened Something Awful forumites were growing into a force to be feared. The alliances that had previously been aligned against both groups soon began to fall. By Christmas 2006 RedSwarm had found their stride and valuable station systems were being captured weekly. Station by station, their enemies faltered and then fell. Once-great alliances such as Veritas Immortalis and Lokta Volterra were stripped of their territories and forced to retreat. RedSwarm’s borders were expanding, toward the fringes of BoB space.

Band of Brothers were preoccupied. They’d begun roaming around, preparing for their next action. EVE watchers have suggested that this is the point at which BoB could have saved themselves. If they had joined the fight against RedSwarm immediately, there’s a good chance they could have beaten them back. But it wasn’t until RedSwarm began to actively encroach on the territories BoB had taken from Ascendant Frontier that BoB decided to counter-attack. The war had begun.

To understand why BoB eventually lost, you have to understand how other EVE players felt about them. This alliance, supremely assured in its talents, had come to be seen as arrogant and worth fighting simply because it was in a position of power. What started as a small independent opposition, with GoonSwarm and Red Alliance mounting resistance, turned into a snowball of uprisings. At the height of the war, more than half of EVE’s PvP players were allied against Band of Brothers. It’s estimated over ten thousand pilots were fighting BoB in skirmishes across the galaxy. Yet, vastly outnumbered, BoB held.

When the Northern Alliances opened a second front in the spring of 2007, led by the powerful D2 corporation, Band of Brothers shrugged. Their pilots decamped, moved homewards, and took them on. And won. D2 deployed their Titan and lost it. They fragmented and retreated back into the north. It took months, and the exhaustion of BoB’s fighting troops, before they returned. Nevertheless, soon RedSwarm were to see some success. They began to press their attack, and stations began to fall. The BoB blue began to disappear from maps.