The Imperium unveiled

It's been an interesting last few weeks in the Eve meta game.

Hot on the heels of Eve Vegas, Mittani Media  announced a new project, a book about the Test-CFC Fountain War of 2013. This initially met widespread acclaim from a range of science fiction and gaming celebrities. Even the leader of Test alliance, Sapporo Jones, supported the project.

The project then received a Kickstarter page which was, frankly, tacky.

Then /r/eve started to rail against the project. There was much to point at. It was clearly a vanity project for the then CFC, now the Imperium's, famously narcissistic leader, The Mittani. It was likely to slant towards the CFC side even if it tried not to be biased and with the Goons publishing the book many in the community didn't trust it not to be biased. It was garishly and greedily monetarised.

People brought up The Mittani's past sins and the dull state of nullsec, with the concern that the bloated coalition is being kept bloated against the good of the game so that its members can be monetised, the captive audience kept captive by a policy of deliberate stagnation. The case was, perhaps, not helped by an insurge of Imperium Eve players posting for their first time or after long absences about how much the Eve reddit community should support the book, a community which the day before they hadn't particularly been a part of. Jabber pings were leaked amidst allegations of "brigading."

The project faltered. After a healthy first 24 hours people supporting the kickstarter dried up almost completely.

More scandals emerged. Endie and Xander has a conversation which accidentally fell into public hands where Endie spoke of RMT. Due to diligent journalism by Gevlon it now looks as though that was faked at least in part, with Endie perhaps playing the famously leaky Xander to reach his audience indirectly. Nonetheless there have been genuine rifts within The Imperium and the current direction - for real world profit - is not universally supported.

Possibly the greatest embarrassment has been to the leadership of Goons concerning their relationship with author Jeff Edwards. Mr Edwards is an enthusiastic author, well respected in the literary community with admirers like household name Clive Cussler, and a distinguished former US Navy officer who consults for the Department of Defence. I imagine that in recruiting him, Mittens and the others bigged up Eve. It's a unique game where great empires clash in high stakes conflicts that can destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual assets. It's an emergent dynamic economy that is studied by academics who draw parallels to real life, etc etc.

Then Mr Edwards met some very civilised and charming people at Eve Vegas and developed more enthusiasm for the project.

Then he met /r/eve and discovered hundreds of jibbering monkeys hurling poo at him.

For Mittens and his friends it must have been as if a young man meets a charming young woman, a refined and distinguished person with impeccable manners and taste, nervously brings her home to meet the family hoping they won't show him up, leaves her alone for 5 minutes then finds her outside in the back garden where his hick cousin has his zipper down and is proudly showing her his genital warts. An earth open up and swallow me moment.

This used to happen with roleplaying games back in the 80s. For a while they became in some circles very pretentious. So some young man would try to impress a non-gamer girl with a description of a kind of immersive interactive unscripted improvisational theatre then when she actually got to meet other gamers they'd say things like "watch me stick my d20 up my nose."

The Mittani is not, it seems, inclined to handle disappointment meekly. He gave an emotional and angry speech to "His People" and led them forth to.... well, not much as his intended opponents, Pandemic Horde, melted away under the masterful misdirection of Gobbins, who has cheekily taken to calling them "The Emporium."

The vast armada invaded Cloud Ring and pushed from there into low sec. In low sec they conquered a number of money moons.

Then last night a group of players naively arranged a charity event, involving sacrificing a titan only to have it obliterated by a massive Imperium force.

Well you didn't really think they were nice guys, did you?