A Period of Cheating

Much excitement in EVE, as the russian player coalition Red Alliance, after weeks of trying to provoke a blue-on-blue incident from Ethereal Dawn and Intrepid Crossing, ambushed IRC and started a full-on throw-down, which they were steadily losing, after ED and IRC began a massive counterassault with the blessing and covert support of mutual ally GoonSwarm.

The above statement will surprise you if you’ve been tracking the event on CAOD, the official out-of-game forum for capsuleer alliance announcements and smacktalk. To listen to the Goonies on CAOD talk, IRC started their invasion after shooting blue-on-blue indiscriminately for months and were reset (for non-EVEers, the alliance was unilaterally dissolved) for attempting to sabotage the Goon war effort against BoB/KenZoku/Whatever they are this week.

But the first is a lot closer to the real truth. It galls me to let the lie pass, but the thing with winning a debate on CAOD is that you’re still a moron. It’s also remarkably annoying to win a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent who has too much pride or too little sense (or both) to know he’s been beat.

Recent developments are disturbing, and make this look a fair bit like a Goon double-cross: They encouraged us to fight Red Alliance, then gave us no overt support, ultimately (they claim) bringing us to heel with an ultimatum after stealing tens of billions of IRC assets through a highly-placed mole, who may or may not have been acting with official sanction.

We have ceased operations in the contested region, but it should be noted for the record that this is not an offensive defeat. We were willing enough to clean Red Alliance’s clock and take insmother from them when sufficiently provoked, but we didn’t go looking for this fight. This is a defensive victory: The skill and determination of ED and IRC pilots has (along with a Goon-coerced lack of support from their closest allies) forced Red Alliance to go through a mutual ally to broker a cease-fire. That is all that really happened here, no matter how much big-headed Goon smack-talk you read, and no matter who threatened or cheated who and whose feelings were hurt.

In a way, I like this resolution, since it proves that we’re a power, while still allowing ignorant onlookers to assume that we’re care-bear Goon pets who can’t stand on our own. The killboards tell the real story, Red managed to throw back our offensive but had no offensive victories of their own, and lost badly in the kill exchange.

Still, I had been looking forward to killing Angels again. *sigh*

 

 

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