Eve Online: Audience With The King Of Space
Eve Online player The Mittani is the CEO of Goon Fleet, the single largest corporation in Eve Online, both loved and reviled for its practices which include teaching new recruits to scam other players. As of two weeks ago The Mittani was also voted in as the new Chairman of the Council of Stellar Management, the player-run and player-elected body that CCP liases with with the aim of improving the game. Prior to the announcement of the election results, I caught up with him at the Eve Fanfest for a mammoth interview. Click on through for talk of warfare, intrigue, hatred, propaganda, and why he says Eve Online is a terrible game.
RPS: You referred to yourself as ”a pretentious douchebag” twice during your presentation yesterday. For anyone who doesn’t know anything about Goonswarm or its leadership, could you explain why?
The Mittani: I refer to myself as a pretentious douchebag because I have a reasonable self perception. [laughs] No, it’s because I’m quite arrogant and people make fun of me for it, so it’s easier than trying to deny it.
RPS: How does somebody who’s arrogant end up leading a group that’s known for being irreverent?
MT: Well, I’m only arrogant about things that we’ve accomplished or things that I’ve done over the years. And we don’t have much of a hierarchy, so even though I lead a large alliance, even non-members can take me to task or call me a silly larping metrosexual. It’s just all in good fun.
RPS: You also mentioned in the same talk that Goonswarm is an autocracy. Is that just a preventative method against espionage?
MT: Autocracy is the most effective form of government in null sec [the enormous sections of space within Eve Online with no AI police, where players rule themselves]. Council systems don’t work very well. Goonswarm is very lucky in that we have one large corporation, Goonwaffe, which used to be Goonfleet, which is mostly Something Awful members and has over 2,000 people. Since I’m the CEO of that corporation all the other ancillary corporations in the alliance are relatively powerless, and that works towards an autocracy. Council-based alliances typically have corporations of roughly the same size.
RPS: And that’s problematic because... ?
MT: Democracy is death. In a situation where you need to be able to respond quickly and with force to strategic problems, invasions or what have you, you can’t wait for a vote.
RPS: Could you not divide those duties up?
MT: It doesn’t work in practice. In theory though, all of Eve is a democracy because there’s no way of forcing someone to log on and play the game, and they can always leave the corporation if they don’t like it.
RPS: I want to give a little background as to how Goonswarm came to be reviled by a certain chunk of Eve’s playerbase. Could you provide a potted history?
MT: In late 2005 and early 2006 we entered into the game from the SomethingAwful.com forums. There are SA members in most MMOs. But at the time, Eve was structured in such a way that rewarded “old guard” players. Because Eve has a skill point system rather than an experience point point system, you can’t just grind to get powerful. You have to wait.
That really institutionalises a new player vs. old player divide. We got into trouble almost immediately because despite the fact that we had no skills and no money, we were able to leverage the size of our community – and I say no skills because we had no skill points, which isn’t to say that we weren’t skilled players – we were able to get around these ancient veterans and disrupt the social order of the game. But in order to do that, we had to ignore some of the social mores that had developed in the game, or “e-honour”, as I sort of disparagingly refer to it. This “I’m an honourable space-samurai and we’re going to joust on the field of battle” thing. These people who focus on their kill/death ratios, and fret about ethics, and all this sort of silly bullshit.
Anyway, it wasn’t honourable to use what they call “blobbing” tactics. When you’re using frigates [the smallest ship class in Eve] to blow up heavy assault cruisers, and you lose 50 frigates in the attack but the cruiser costs 400 times as much as a frigate, they’re gonna get really mad and say that you’re being dishonourable.
RPS: Did those Eve players know that that was even possible?
MT: No, we took them by surprise. They thought we wouldn’t amount to anything, and when we did start amounting to anything we were vilified immediately.
RPS: And what was your role in the corporation back then?
MT: I was sort of a shadow chancellor. I ran the espionage program. We probably have the single best spy network in Eve, because in order to succeed we had to metagame. It was just one of the ways that we’d level the playing field with older players. We’d do whatever it took to win. So I was the spy guy, and that was how I made a name for myself. When the time came for a new CEO, it was just a really good fit because I’d just retired from my law practice.
RPS: What stands out as something you’re particularly proud of?
MT: The central narrative of Goonswarm is always “The Great War”, which was a conflict between us and a now defunct alliance called Band of Brothers which was implicated in a developer corruption scandal. They were also one of the first organisations to come after us when we arrived and referred to us as “a cancer on the Eve community”.
At first, when we arrived, we’d tried to play nice. We’d reached out to respected members of the Eve community, we didn’t scam, we didn’t grief, we didn’t pirate, we didn’t spy, and it was only after we invaded our first conquerable region and started destroying capital fleets and punching well above our weight that Band of Brothers started taking an interest. They resurrected the fact that our CEO at the time – who was a tremendous douchebag, to be fair – had mocked the real-life death of an Eve player more than two years before. All of a sudden now that these capital fleets were being destroyed, NOW they were really offended by that, never mind the fact that two months prior they’d been cheering on us cute newbies who were invading the Cloud Ring.
RPS: This is the same CEO who you mentioned was facing some massive real-life financial scandal?
MT: Yes. Dan Dargon, aka Remedial, was the founder of Goonfleet and he was a lawyer who was running this mortgage modification business in New Hampshire without a license, and is now facing twenty-five million dollars in fines from the New Hampshire banking department. I wish I was making that up, but it’s true.
Remedial’s certainly a character. But yes, some people think that Goonfleet’s always been made up of scammers and griefers, but we tried to play nice originally. Then we decided to become the monster that they made us out to be.
RPS: Hearing you tell it, it sounds like you guys were the ultimate underdogs. That can’t have been all there was to it.
MT: What I feel is an issue here is the inherent hypocrisies in the mores of the Eve community. Many people who are not in Goonswarm – who are our enemies - really do think of themselves as honourable space samurai, when in practice most of the things that happen in null sec are based upon ugly realpolitik. We just don’t feel the need to lie about it. Everybody spies in nullsec.
RPS: I thought that was a given?
MT: Some people didn’t use to. We did it because we had to, in order to survive. The fact that everybody does it is one consequence of us winning the Great War and becoming one of the dominant powers in the galaxy.
RPS: So what happened to Band of Brothers?
MT: I, uh, disbanded them.
RPS: What? How was that even your choice?
MT: At the beginning of the second stage of the Great War we had a defector from the executor corporation of Band of Brothers who thought that we were cooler guys. Basically he thought that his alliance was full of assholes, because their leadership structure was full of guys who wanted to be in “the most elite alliance in Eve”. Whereas Goonswarm, a lot of the time, were bad. We had a lot of newbies and no pretentions.
The disbanding itself was covered by the BBC. Ordinarily when you have a defector you do smash and grabs, just getting the other guy to steal everything that’s not nailed down and come over to your side. Now, I was still just the spymaster at this point, and I was sitting there in my office and I had this brain fart – with the access that this guy had, he had the authority to kick out every single corporation in the alliance and then shut down his own corporation, thus disbanding the alliance, which has the impact of disabling all the sovereignty defenses in their region. This had never been done before. All of a sudden I was like, “Holy shit! I can do this!”
Also, at the time Goonswarm owned half the galaxy. We controlled all of these regions, but as soon as we disbanded Band of Brothers we abandoned everything and all moved into what had been their territory. Over the course of two very bloody months we purged them and took all their space.
RPS: You hated them that much?
MT: Well, this goes back to the T20 scandal and these people declaring us a cancer on Eve. The entire Great War took four years, so yeah, maybe we were a little vengeful.
RPS: How loyal are most Goonswarm pilots?
MT: Extremely loyal. Most Eve pilots spend some time playing alone, in Empire space, and they eventually find a corporation and join up. Something Awful forum members start playing and they go straight into null sec. They know no other world. Which is great, because high sec and low sec are hideously boring places.
RPS: Are you guys bound together by your history?
MT: We do have a culture and an ideology. One of the reasons why we’re no longer as vilified as we used to be is that that culture has spread. We won the culture war. The fact that the defector left to join us is an indicator of that, but ther
