when i first played eve back in 2005 or so, i luckliy within 5 minutes or starting found a nice group of guys who'd just started playing 3 days prior. we had a nice little corp in a backwater system and decided we all needed to be in battleships fast. so we spent a month group mining for 4 battleships. each battleship increased the rate of mining speed by adding more lasers. Apocaylpse battleships with full spreads of mining lasers anyone?
anyway we were dedicated and started doing manufacturing etc and caught the eye of a decently sized corporation that was part of an alliance out in 0.0. the corporation we joined was called VentureCorp. and within weeks we'd worked our way up to officers of the corp, and started making waves in the alliance.
then a big war broke out. our alliance was the Fade Union. a tiny insignificant spec sandwiched between Fountain (then fountain alliance) and the might of the original BoB. we had a non agression pact with Fountain and they quite rightly saw us as a backstop that would hold bob up from consuming them for a while. So theres a group of 4 of us that about 2 months prior were mining ore in battleships now fully engaged with the toughest fighting alliance Eve had at the time.
So what does a forward thinking crafty twat like myself decide to do? well i knew we could never beat BoB. we didnt have the resources, our path back to safespace was fraught with danger from pirates to sell and make money to keep us in ships. so i worked out we had a couple of weeks at most to find an "out" i was friends with a few PVPers at the time who were all loitering around the north, and there was talk of making a new alliance that could stake a claim, it was experienced enough to do so but had no land. it needed a vacuum to appear.
So i helped formulate a little talked about but hugely landscape changing plan at time time, we were to bring down the Curse Alliance from the inside. the plan was to offer them a series of conflicting deals and ideas from different parties enough that would sew discord of their current situation and what they wanted to do, bigged up the threat of their immenent attack by other alliances and this blind information war was enough to sew discontent. one evening i ended up in a teamspeak call with about 500 people bullshitting my way through the formation of a new alliance that only wanted the best curse had to offer. this had the backing of at least a third of curses members at this point (it clearly didnt, but i wasnt naming names) . the plan was never meant to succeed, but to show a better place, then pull the offer of formation and leave them reeling.
it worked. they had a massive infight mostly down to the "you saying im shit bruv?" between them. this allowed my true alliance forming plan and "out" to happen. The Imperial Republic of the North" - IRON swooped in amongst the discord and settled in space that they had in the north east of curse space.
i helped get our assets out to IRON space, then sailed off into the sunset thinking i'd never be able to personally top that achievement in game, it was quite liberating, especially as desperate times propelled my stature of battleship miner to infowar spymaster to such an extent that when i quit, i did it with so little fanfare, even Iron didnt really know what had happened or how their plan had worked with such relative ease and i wasn't about to tell anyone.
