The long march to Deklein: Lemmings, Marmite, POCOs

Despite very outdated and limited, the first post of GRR was the end of the dark years. While naive, inaccurate and ironically shy in goals, it contained everything that mattered:

• Measurable, objective outcome: Goon POCOs are either taken or not. Everything before was unmeasurable, opinionated or undefined, the opposites of meritocracy.
• Open condemnation of the social nonsense "it matters who you know". Everything before accepted the power of social groups even just temporarily. Here I openly claimed that the anti-meritocratic CFC structure is bad and must be broken and it will be done by using meritocratic measures and money.
• Not "selfish" goal If you want something for yourself or for your own group, kiss the ring, take advantages, lie, scam or grind. A political project cannot be selfish as it is aimed to the change of a system which is a selfless goal by definition. Letting a selfish part in means you will have to make crippling compromises. More about this.

The GRR project is accurately documented and it's funny to see how little money it had at the start and how many mistakes were made, how many unexpected obstacles it faced. I still tried to mimic the orignial Goonswarm by creating Darwin's Lemmings. I didn't stick to one group. I didn't check for intermediate benchmarks. And yet, only 3 months into the project, on March 22. 2014 the original goal was met. Goons abandoned their POCO empire, being evicted by the will of a single "highsec pubbie carebear."

Sure, the stars aligned for this to happen. Goons, living in nullsec, bad in small gang PvP were extraordinarily stupid to build a highsec POCO empire. They also overestimated its value, actually the POCOs aren't worth the cost of protecting them. Finally they were in the mop-up phase after B-R and had better things to do. Actually the POCO empire wasn't even a "Goon" project, it was a pet project of Miniluv, "just because we can" and "make pubbies cry". Well, done! Honestly, I was pretty exhausted after the dark years and if Powers (the dumbest Goon director) didn't provide such an easy target for me, I probably just silently quit EVE in early 2014 and then Goons would still have all their regions, rat peacefully and would have to wait just 3 more weeks to plant a pretty Palatine in Perimiter and win EVE forever. Bee guys, don't forget to send Powers a cake to when you lose your last system in Dek!

Happy about reaching the original goal, I set a much more ambitious: to defeat the largest coalition of EVE. This made me a laughing stock all over new Eden, especially among the bee guys. But I didn't care and guess what, the bee guys are now crying. The way to achieve it was wrong and did deserve laughter. I expanded the highsec campaign, paid more wars for Marmite and Lemmings. The idea was to cut off the reinforcement lines of Goons. I was blinded by the expensive freighter losses and considered the "you are just killing our stupid" as damage control. Which was, but it was still factually true. Even total highsec lockdown wouldn't have destroyed CFC. Sure, it was a huge thorn in their side and remains so until today, as the hilarious amount of kills Marmite racked up inspired all highsec wardeccers to keep Imperium (the new name of CFC) alliances perma-decced. I still smile when the top kills of the day are "successful evictions" by SMA and FCON.

The last remnant of "you need a group of friends" was let go June 5. 2014, when Lemmings were closed. Marmite had better numbers and back then I couldn't pay for two full sets of war. After that awful lot of CFC members died to Marmite camps and I was pretty smug at the end of 2014, as Marmite and Lemmings booked 2.4T dead CFC. Soon after that Tora lost his cool and ended the cooperation, but that was actually for the best as I could fully focus on the next step, the one which turned out to be much more than a big thorn in the side.

The success of Lemmings-Marmite-POCO part was more than blind luck. As you'll see tomorrow, Goons made themselves "unlucky". Also, why no one else did anything like it? Because I had the "unique" skill to ignore what everyone else said, ignore the stupid amount of mocking and trolling as the consensus opinion was that I'll never achieve anything and Goons will never ever lose. Tomorrow comes the crucial part!