The Karttoon Disbandment: Half a Trillion ISK and an Alliance Walked Out of Goonswarm (2010)

The Karttoon Disbandment: Half a Trillion ISK and an Alliance Walked Out of Goonswarm (2010)

Background: Karttoon as Goonswarm's accidental peacetime CEO

By late 2009 the Goonswarm leadership pipeline had thinned. The Great War against Band of Brothers had ended in early February 2009 with Haargoth Agamar's defection and the BoB disbandment; the alliance had taken Delve and was sitting on the wealthiest region in New Eden with nobody quite sure what to do with it. Darius JOHNSON retired. His successor Zapawork, an old-school SomethingAwful Goon who believed there would never be another war, closed the alliance's War Room sub-forum and halted war spending. After a few months of budget-cutting Zapawork stepped down too.

The obvious choice was The Mittani, director of the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency, but his previous stint as CEO during the 2007 Remedial era had gone badly enough that he was passed over. So the alliance picked Karttoon, the GIA spy-manager who had been running operations against carebear targets through Jihadswarm. He was, in Andrew Groen's framing in Empires of EVE chapter 019, "an outsider to the Goons, and the first leader who didn't have a history in their motherland, the SomethingAwful.com community." DaBigRedBoat, one of the alliance's senior fleet commanders, framed Karttoon's temperament directly: "Karttoon's passion was attacking high-sec and having fun." His passion was not running a 10,000-pilot territorial alliance.

What Karttoon and Zapawork had together failed to notice was that peace had a way of making alliances bored. Senior pilots were logging in less; sub-bureaucracies were going understaffed; the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency was Karttoon's own former command and continued to function, but the rest of the alliance machinery had started to drift.

The sov-bill cascade, 26 January 2010

In late January 2010 Karttoon went on his honeymoon to Mexico. By coincidence his Chief Financial Officer was burned out and had not logged into EVE in roughly a month. Neither of them noticed the increasingly urgent DED warning mails the EVE server was sending about the alliance's sovereignty-payment wallet.

The Dominion 1.1 patch had silently changed the warning chain. The new auto-pay system would attempt to debit two days before each bill was due, fail quietly if the wallet was short, and send DED warning mails to a list of directors whose forum mailboxes were already overflowing. The new CFO, posting later on the EVE markets forum under the handle Kalrand, would describe the mechanism with a clarity that surprised outsiders: "Dominion mechanics have autopay fail on many sov payments two days before they are due, and for the next two days send DED mails to various directors. Directors receive hundreds of these each day, and their mailboxes are eternally full, so no one sees them and raises the alarm."

On 26 January 2010 the sovereignty bill came due and the Goonswarm corporate wallet was approximately 7 billion ISK short. At 11pm Eastern time, in the last third of the US prime that most of the alliance was on for, sovereignty dropped across most of Goonswarm's Delve and Querious station systems simultaneously. The same mechanism caught two of Goonswarm's neighbours, Legion of xXDEATHXx and Wildly Inappropriate, at almost the same time; multiple alliances had been quietly running under the new auto-pay logic without noticing.

IT Alliance, Against ALL Authorities and Systematic Chaos had been positioning for an invasion. They moved within hours. The Mittani called an emergency State of the Goonion address from the corner of the alliance leadership Karttoon could not be reached on, announcing the loss of the staging outpost NOL-M9 and the capital hangar at J-LPX7. Evacuation operations ran 27-29 January under former CEO Darius JOHNSON, pulled out of retirement to lead the remnant out of Delve while Karttoon was still in Mexico.

The honeymoon return and the directorate Jabber log

Karttoon returned in the first days of February to find the alliance in open disarray. He logged into the directorate's Jabber channel. The conversation that followed was preserved by the directorate scribes and reads, in part:

karttoon: What happened?

knar: sup karttoon

knar: we lost delve

karttoon: Yeah I saw

karttoon: How'd it happen?

Darius_johnson: Wasn't enough money in the wallet to cover the bill

[...]

karttoon: Jesus

[...]

knar: then bob took NOL-M9 and J-LPX7

karttoon: Welp

knar: trapped all our shit

knar: so how was your honeymoon

The alliance forums were less amused. A membership poll opened immediately asking whether Karttoon should resign; it ran 2:1 in favour. The new CFO Kalrand, writing later, recalled that Karttoon "logs into the forums and makes a handful of posts, half dealing with his vacation, and half trying to downplay how bad everything is. Almost every response is a post telling him to resign."

This treacherous night: the disbandment action, 2-3 February

At 23:00 EVE time the night of 2-3 February 2010, Karttoon logged in to EVE Online and said nothing in Jabber. He kicked every corporation out of Goonswarm in sequence, then revoked hangar access for every former member, then revoked starbase access. The starbase revocation triggered an EVE permissions-conflict resolution that fires unauthorised ships out of the shield bubble at tens of thousands of metres per second into open space; Goonswarm-held space turned overnight into "a madcap, ridiculous scene as ships shot out of their stations at ludicrous speed the instant their pilots logged back in after downtime."

Karttoon then drained the alliance coffers. He walked off with what later catalogues recorded as "approximately 60 Dreadnoughts (worth hundreds of billions of ISK) and thousands of smaller battleships and logistics vessels," moved to the holding alliance "Band of Brothers" (the trophy name Goonswarm had registered after Haargoth's 2009 BoB disband to prevent reclamation), and locked The Goony Hand Social Club banking corp and Tolons Sister Whorehouse supercapital corp under his own loyalists so the membership could not eject themselves. DaBigRedBoat summarised the inventory: "If it was in his access, he grabbed it all. He stole everything that wasn't nailed down."

One community estimate of the total damage put it at "approximately 1 trillion ISK, a virtually unheard of sum even eight years later" with a real-money parallel ("At the time it could've been worth as much as 40,000 Euros"). The figure was never independently audited; the directorate's own accounting was unavailable in the chaos that followed; CCP's Interstellar Correspondents reaction piece, twelve days later, was conspicuously vague on the aggregate ("tens of billions" from the NOL-M9 logistics cache plus the alliance wallet, with no total stated). The trillion-ISK figure has the same provenance as Remedial's 2007 35-billion claim: directorate-attributed, never independently audited, canonical because no rival accounting ever surfaced.

The rumour that Karttoon self-destructed the dreadnought fleet for insurance payouts spread inside 24 hours. Karttoon himself, speaking to CCP's Interstellar Correspondents on 2010-02-15, amusedly denied the legend: "I've been told the dreads that self destructed were from a Goonswarm producer, and was funny as hell. The cache I hold was not touched. All assets/isk is in my possession, yes. I was the only one with access to the majority of them in the first place."

Karttoon's tell-all and the euthanasia framing, 4 February

The day after the disbandment Karttoon published his official tell-all on the SomethingAwful forums. The post, attributed at the foot to "Karttoon, Traitor, Goonswarm - Feb 4, 2010," framed the disbandment as a deliberate act of mercy on a community that no longer wanted to be in EVE:

I'll try to keep this short since I've never been one for long boring stories.

I was originally planning to do this about a month ago. I prepped everything one evening with a post at hand, and moved my characters into our major cache locations. I noticed that NOL had a large logistics ship cache worth of 10's of billions in [...] ships, so I spent about two hours moving them to lowsec. By the time I was finished it was getting late, so I decided to get some sleep and mash buttons the following night. The next day I received intel that SirMolle was going to move IT alliance to work with AAA [to] invade our space, and decided to let things continue since the idea of them alarm clocking until 5AM for weeks at a time made me [giddy] inside. [...]

So I've been looking a lot over the past month at Goonswarm, and the Goons and pubbies that reside in the alliance. The majority of Goons for the most part are disinterested in eve online at this point (with good reason) [...] So few real Goons actually play this game anymore in comparison to the number [of members] required to hold space. I'm doing what I feel is the best thing I can do right now before leaving this game. Euthanasia.

I've already kicked every single corp out of Goonswarm. I've also removed all of our standings with everybody. Feel free to spend the next few days blowing everyone up, or whatever. Additionally I've set GoonFleet into self destruct mode.

Tl;dr: Fuck pubbies, fuck eve, and :fuckgoons:.

Amusingly enough when I returned from a 1.5 [week] vacation to discover that most of what I was going to do was already done... by accident. I don't think I have ever laughed so hard and long in my entire life.

The CCP IC piece elaborated on the prepared-in-advance claim, taking Karttoon's euthanasia framing largely at face value. Karttoon told CCP he had drafted the announcement a month earlier, had pre-staged the NOL-M9 logistics cache out to low-sec over a single evening, and had been waiting for an opportunity to ship the move when the sov-drop coincidence handed him one.

Brendan Drain's Engadget/Massively syndication, published 4 February under the byline "Brendan Drain, @nyphur," carried Darius JOHNSON's flat rebuttal of the grand-plot framing:

Firstly I don't believe for a second it was "planned for a while". The organizational structure of Goonfleet is such that the CEO wields supreme power. Therefore the CEO has the capability to choose to or not to disband at any time. Karttoon was a terrible CEO. He made some bad decisions. Goons called him on those decisions and he chose to be a giant baby and "punish" them by disbanding the alliance.

The interpretive split (grand plot vs incompetence rationalised into a story) is core to the historiography. The retrospective verdict landed as "many in EVE think of Karttoon as a 'puppetmaster' - diminutive slang for everyday EVE players who pretend to be shadow manipulators behind galactic events, but are more often writing fan fiction about themselves to cover up their own very human mundanity." The euthanasia framing is, on this reading, Karttoon preferring to be remembered as the villain who orchestrated the largest betrayal in EVE rather than as the buffoon whose absentee leadership lost Delve.

Aftermath: Darius returns, SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSO, the Mittani's blank canvas

Darius JOHNSON returned from retirement, kicked Goonwaffe loose from the disbanded Goonfleet and started salvaging what remained. On 5 February 2010 (the YC112 in-game date 05.02.112), pilot Lena Russeu created the new alliance SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSO [LODRA] as the formal home for the former Goonswarm corporations. Darius led the remnant out of Delve entirely; Tau Ceti Federation, the French-speaking alliance who had been part of the old Red Swarm Federation, invited them to couch-surf in Deklein.

DaBigRedBoat described the handoff as quietly clean: "Darius goes back into retirement, he quits. The leadership role passed to The Mittani." Sort Dragon, then a member of IT Alliance and watching the collapse from across the border, framed what The Mittani had been handed: "When Mittani took over after Karttoon disbanded he kind of had a blank canvas to recreate Goons how he wanted to."

The Mittani took the role in May 2010 after a few weeks of Darius transition leadership. His own first column in the role, "Advice for a New CEO" published in Sins of a Solar Spymaster #45 on 30 May 2010, framed the inheritance in unromantic terms: "Many years ago, Remedial, the founder of Goonfleet, stepped down and left me as the CEO during an era when I was not only lacking the time to play the game, but when I actively didn't want the job. [...] Given my previous performance, the bar for 'success' as CEO amounts to 'Don't flame out inside of a month'. Start the countdown!" One of the column's eight pieces of advice was the structural lesson of January 2010 distilled to a single line: "No CEO should be without a Wallet Corp for securing financial assets and locking down critical bpos. There's absolutely no reason to have vast sums of isk floating around with more than one person having access to it." Karttoon had had access. The post-Karttoon Goonswarm would not run that risk again.

Goonswarm Federation as it exists today was formally founded on 1 June 2010 from the LODRA wreckage, with The Mittani as CEO. His tenure ran twelve years through to his July 2022 resignation. Every Goon-led campaign in the corpus that follows (Burn Jita in 2012, the Fountain War of 2013, the Casino War of 2016, Casinos Banned later that year, World War Bee II) descends causally from the alliance The Mittani built on the blank canvas Karttoon left him.

Goonswarm's own community wiki snapshot from 1 March 2010, four weeks after the disbandment, included a frank section titled "Karttoons Breakdown" in its chronological narrative: "Karttoon, the CEO of Goonfleet and executor of the Goonswarm kicked all corporations except the ones he controlled. He then moved Goonfleet to the Band of Brothers alliance." A "Spiritual Successor" section followed describing the LODRA reformation. The contrast with the same wiki's treatment of Remedial's 2007 titan-fund theft is striking: that earlier event was simply omitted from the chronological history. By 2010 the alliance was willing to write its own embarrassments into the record; three years earlier it had not been.

The 2010 disbandment closed the heist-cycle Remedial had opened three years earlier and reset the cieling of what one charismatic insider could walk off with. The pattern continued through Bad Bobby's Titans4U scam later in 2010, Phaser Inc's trillion-ISK Ponzi in 2011, and Judge's 1.5-trillion-ISK Circle of Two disbandment in 2017, each inheriting Karttoon's lesson that one director with enough access can liquidate an alliance's trust faster than the membership can rebuild it.