The Goonswarm Intelligence Agency (GIA), which in more modern terms is colloquially known as the Black Hand, and their allis within The Imperium have gone through a lot of changes over the years, but they’re as dangerous as ever to their enemies. It’s this particular lesson that the Guardians of the Galaxy (GoTG) coalition recently learned the hard way.
For a bit of background, GoTG is one of the many coalitions that alongside Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition. invaded the now-former northern stronghold of the Imperium during World War Bee. The sociopolitical developments before, during and after WWB are way too complex to get into here. Just for the sake of brevity, it was Goons and friends vs. PL/NC./GoTG and friends. Here’s a snap shot of player-controlled space during the war, and here’s one taken towards the end to show the change in control in the north of New Eden. Well, it appears that WWB didn’t manage the blunt the blade of Goons for long, as they just sheathed it hilt-deep in their enemies.
Imperium operatives have been carrying out meta-game hijinks for years now, and GoTG are just the latest victim. If you’d like to hear more about the history Goons have developed with the meta-game in EVE Online, check out the Mittani’s presentation from a few years ago on the topic, featured below.
This particular theft was announced by GSF member Asher Elias on April 19. The region of Deklein, which was once home to The Imperium, but is now under the control of GoTG, was the site of our story.
Assets stolen include a Keepstar Citadel and all Deklein Fortizar Citadels owned by Kenshin, who are a member corporation of the DARKNESS. alliance. This means that Goons managed to flip someone with sufficient Director roles within the corporation. According to a source within the Imperium who spoke to INN, they had the following to say:
“We had a darkness guy come over and bait on his hel for us, we didnt manage to get a super escalation out of gotg, but we killed a lot, regardless. One of his friends was a full director in Kenshin, who are pretty much the pvp backbone of Darkness. He approached us via the guy who had already joined, and we came to agreeable terms.
“As of right now, Kenshin has lost a corp Keepstar and Fortizars, they’ve had their corp hangars emptied and wallet drained and other random disruptive things done. We didn’t think we’d be able to get the Keepstar because it was on the ceo’s alt. Luckily, someone accidentally put the Keepstar in the corp delivery hangar instead of the CEO’s.”
In addition to the theft of citadels, all supercapital and titan build runs in progress were canceled and assets from corporate hangars stolen. The total value of assets stolen is not known due to there being a horde of BPOs and BPCs in the stash, but it’s easily in the tens of billions of ISK in just raw materials and modules. And the final tally will be exponentially more than that.
Imperium spies also terminated clone contracts within the structures they have gained control of. This means that GoTG members can no longer teleport into the structures to gain access to their assets through the in-game clone system. This itself is just another middle finger from Goons to GoTG.
The leader of GoTG, and its most powerful member alliance DARKNESS., Sort Dragon was not happy as one would expect. But at least they attempted to save face in a public message on an internal Discord server for the coalition.
As anyone in the EVE community would expect, Reddit is having a field day with these developments.
It will be interesting to see if DARKNESS. and their allies can manage to hang on to their territory after being dealt such a serious blow to economic might and morale. Plenty of alliances and coalitions have imploded after falling victim to a heist like this in the history of EVE Online. Heck, Goons have taken down their major enemies before with attacks like this.
Do you think that GoTG can bounce back from this?
