The Poco Wars: the epilogue and the butterfly effect

It seems that my "best day in eve" was covered by Themittani.com!  

Tale of Wormhole Woe

This article is written from the No-Ho perspective, and is pretty entertaining.

Another article of note covers something I was going to write about but was beaten to the punch - how RvB found Gevlon's WH.  In brief, it seems that Gevlon ganked a miner a while back who got even by passing on information about Gevlon's WH to us :)

The Goblin and The Butterfly   (you should go to the site just to see the *hilarious* image :D )

But what lead to all this?  What lead to such a clash? 

It started with POCOs.  When the , the CFC and RvB decided to split the POCOs instead of compete for them, that way it would be more efficient.  We then would form a mutual defence pact to protect them.  When the great highsec POCO rush of Rubicon started this agreement paid off.  No one else was really ready for it, met little if no opposition, and we were quite successful: the CFC took control of a few dozens while RvB has *hundreds*. 

For the CFC, the POCO income was trivial.  I think they did this mostly to show that they could.  FOr RvB however, since we have no income, this was a boon.  We are now using the revenue for our loyalty point program, ship replacements and other fun activities.  This also has provided a good service to high sec industrialists.  Our POCOs (and so do the CFC's) have a very reasonable tax rate and are stable (ie not changing hand ever other week). 

Now here is where Gevlon Goblin comes in.  He has a *very* strong dislike of the goons, and he realized that their high-sec POCOs were a vulnerable target.  He started blogging about this and formed an alliance to strike back at the goon menace.  But when Gevlon attacked the CFC POCOs, the mutual defence pact was activated and RvB stepped up to the plate to defend them.  Gevlon was stunned - we were an unexpected obstacle between him and his goal.
 
At this point, Gevlon could have tried a "businesslike" diplomatic approach, basically treating RvB as oponents and not enemies.  Instead, he embarked on a propaganda campaigns with dozens of verbal attacks against RvB.  We were goon pets, no we were slaves!  No, we were a secret high-sec arm of goonswarm!  RvB is a scam!  etc etc etc.

This included a lot of dubious use of "statistics".  For example, Gevlon divided our losses by the number of players, and concluded that we were very risk adverse since the average RvB pilot lost only 30 million a month.  But Gevlon never bothered to do research to find out the context behind the numbers: RvB never, ever purges members (we are casual - if you want to pvp once every 2 months, we are fine with that).  So using the total member base as a denominator didn't make any sense!  For example, I'm a moderately active member and I lost 2.7 billion in one year...

Gevlon also hired Marmite to perma-dec the goons and us, and also hired Noir (a competent group of mercenaries) at times.

This "reverse diplomacy" is why RvB felt very motivated to go in Gevlon's WH and burn it to the ground.  We never would have bothered if he wasn't so antagonistic.

How does all this story end?  Well an end may be at hand. The CFC have grown tired of this nonsense, and transferred their POCOs to us (we purchased them basically, so they are ours, end of story).  At this point, Gevlon can declare victory, although it was one at tremendous cost (over 40 billions).  On top of that, he also lost his alliance (Darwin's Lemmings), which as far as I can tell has now become a sort of farm alliance for Marmite (I may be wrong).  

I hope that Gevlon will move on to goals in Eve that may be more suited to his talents.  One can only hope that he hasn't bought too much into his own propaganda... because if Gevlon decided that the best way to strike at the goons is to keep shooting our POCOs, that would be very silly indeed.