The Rise of The Mittani: From Karttoon's Wreckage to the Wizard's Hat (2010-2012)

The Rise of The Mittani: From Karttoon's Wreckage to the Wizard's Hat (2010-2012)

Background: Karttoon's wreckage and the GIA spymaster who inherited it

The Mittani took over the Goonfleet/GoonWaffe CEO chair in May 2010, a few weeks after Darius JOHNSON had stepped down to absorb the alliance-leadership shock of the Karttoon disbandment. The Karttoon February 2010 wallet drain plus alliance permissions revocation had reduced Goonswarm to what Sort Dragon had called "a blank canvas to recreate Goons how he wanted to" - thousands of demoralised line members, ~1 trillion ISK in cash and ~60 dreadnoughts walked off with by a director nobody had seen coming, no sovereignty, and the public reputation of the alliance that had ascended on the Haargoth BoB-disband heist in 2009 now restated as the alliance that could be unwound by a single director.

This was not The Mittani's first time in the seat. As GoonFleet's spymaster through 2007-2009 he had run the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency that supplied the Haargoth defection, and an earlier failed CEO stint going back to Remedial's 2007 retreat had ended in his own walking off the role in disgust during the T20 BPO-leak scandal. By May 2010 the institutional memory inside GoonWaffe was clear: there was nobody else with the combination of name-recognition, time, and willingness to do the unglamorous director-and-diplomat work that the post-Karttoon Goonswarm needed.

His first column in the role - Sins of a Solar Spymaster #45, "Advice for a New CEO", published on 30 May 2010 - opened with the wallet-corp lesson Karttoon had taught the alliance and laid out eight pieces of post-Karttoon institutional policy. Among them: hire teams of directors rather than single ones to remove single-person dependencies; secure assets in dedicated wallet corps with strict separation between bpo holdings and operational ISK; "wave the flag" with regular public presence rather than ruling from the shadows. The column read as a quiet declaration that the new Goonswarm would not be vulnerable to the same single-director attack surface again. Goonswarm Federation was formally founded on 1 June 2010 from the LODRA wreckage two days after the column ran.

2010-2011: Goonswarm Federation, the Coalition, and the SoaSS public voice

Through 2010 and into 2011 The Mittani built two things in parallel: the alliance's in-game footprint and his own public voice. The Sins of a Solar Spymaster column had been running on Ten Ton Hammer since February 2009, more than a year before he formally returned to the CEO role. By the time Goonswarm Federation was founded the column was already established as one of the most-read EVE-political columns in the press, alongside Brendan Drain's "EVE Evolved" at Massively-Joystiq.

The SoaSS voice was a deliberate construct. Across early columns The Mittani laid out the propaganda thesis the column would return to for years ("Propaganda, when properly directed and executed, is in many ways more effective than the in-game tools at your disposal", from "The Propaganda War" on 3 April 2009), documented the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency's out-of-game intel-gathering technique in deliberate enough detail that target alliances rewrote their own opsec protocols ("Hacking New Eden", 6 July 2009), and taxonomised the alliance-leader personality archetypes - Dear Leader, Promoted FC, Grey Eminence, Compromise Candidate, One of the Boys - in a vocabulary the EVE press used to discuss alliance leadership for the next decade ("The Five Types of Alliance Leader", 15 September 2009). His own 2012 commentary on that taxonomy was unusually self-disclosing:

"I once was a Grey Eminence, but then I learned a few things about human nature (none of them terribly pleasant) and abandoned the shadows to become a completely dictatorial Dear Leader."

This was the persona he constructed in public through 2010 and 2011. The in-game ClusterFuck Coalition built itself out from underneath the persona: the post-Northern-Coalition nullsec realignment of 2010-2011 saw Goonswarm Federation, TEST Alliance, Razor, and several smaller alliances coalesce into the CFC umbrella with The Mittani as its political centre. By the time of the Summer of Rage 2011 - the playerbase revolt over the Monocle / Incarna controversy that had CCP backing off its microtransaction monetisation plan inside a month - The Mittani was the CSM 6 chairman, the SoaSS column was carrying the institutional voice of the largest coalition in nullsec, and his closest collaborator on alliance diplomacy was Vile Rat.

CSM 6 (2011) + CSM 7 (2012): the record-setting election

The CSM is the Council of Stellar Management - the elected player-representative body that meets with CCP twice a year in Reykjavik to discuss the game's direction. The Mittani had been elected to CSM 6 in March 2011 (CSM6 election results published by CCP on 26 March 2011) and ascended to the chairman role in the CSM6 internal vote shortly after, captured in the CCP-archived "A Letter From The CSM 6" published 11 April 2011. CSM 6 ran from April 2011 through March 2012 - the season that included the Summer of Rage and the Crucible expansion launch, both of which CSM 6 had material input into CCP's response on.

The CSM 7 election cycle ran across early 2012: candidacy opened 7 February, candidates finalised 22 February, candidate debates ran in early March, voting closed 20 March. The Mittani ran for re-election as the incumbent chairman, with Goonswarm Federation and the wider CFC backing him through coordinated voting drives that the playerbase had been openly discussing for weeks on Reddit and the EVE Online forums.

Results were announced at Fanfest 2012, on the Saturday morning of 24 March 2012. The Mittani came first with 10,058 votes - more than the next three candidates combined. Wilhelm Arcturus's TAGN post that same day captured the top of the table:

The Mittani (Alex Gianturco): 10,058 Two Step: 4,150 Elise Randolph: 3,714 Greene Lee: 3,329

This was the most-voted-for CSM candidate to that date in CSM history. CCP's "Fanfest 2012 Breaking News: CSM 7" Svarthol piece going live that morning confirmed Mittani as chairman of CSM 7 for the upcoming term. Within 24 hours of that announcement the chairmanship would no longer be his.

Fanfest 2012: the wizard's hat alliance panel

Fanfest 2012 ran 22-24 March 2012 at Harpa in Reykjavik. The Thursday-evening alliance panel had six alliance leaders on stage for a long 75-minute panel; Goonswarm's presentation was last after a long evening of Jagermeister and Redbull. The panel was a standing Fanfest tradition: high-profile CEO presentations that veered between deliberately juvenile self-mockery and earnest first-person community storytelling, frequently lubricated by Icelandic-tradition-grade alcohol. Darius JOHNSON had given a structurally similar presentation at Fanfest 2009 - Andrew Groen's later phrasing in Empires of EVE was "a pretty similar speech with a pretty similar blood alcohol content".

The wizard's hat itself was a large purple hat emblazoned with gold stars. The Mittani wore it for the ten-minute presentation. The crux of the speech was a half-sarcastic thesis that Goonswarm truly does love the rest of the EVE community - the kind of inversion-by-saying-the-opposite that the audience had been trained by years of GoonWaffe public-facing material to parse as deep mockery. Several case studies followed: a Firmus Ixion player who had posted a literal prayer to God to deliver his alliance from hard times; two intercepted messages from players Goon scammers had taken.

The most revealing anecdote was about a Mackinaw miner - a high-security-space player whom Goon bombers had discovered flying 22 mining ships solo during the ICE Interdiction (the 2011 Goonswarm high-sec ice-destruction campaign that had deliberately driven the per-unit ice product price by suppressing mining at one of the most heavily-mined New Eden bottlenecks). The bomber crew had ganked the miner repeatedly, then suckered him into purchasing a fake "protection program," then blew him up again anyway. As The Mittani read the miner's impassioned plea aloud in a tone of deep mockery, the audience often chuckled along and the co-presenters egged him on by handing him more drinks. Others were aghast. The miner's letter read in full:

“So now it looks like you will still gank me, and I work hard to keep going in this game. Sorry I am very mad [I was going to sell those minerals to buy subscription time] for my guys. Yes I can make that back easily mining if I could mine. Now I will just get popped by you guys no matter what. […] Now I feel that I have been suckered into giving away 1.3 billion ISK. Since my divorce, all I want to do is die, and I’ve been doing that a lot in this game.

I am sorry I did not understand. I am just sick and tired of sitting here alone and having to play with myself. Everyone that I have helped out in this game and in real life just takes what you have and that’s it. Never to hear from them again. I am getting tired of everything. It was nice mining ICE while it lasted, took my mind off everything. Even though some people may say I’m a bot, I am not. I run all 22 accounts myself. It is not easy, but it keeps me sane.

Sorry for making you mad at me. I will leave you alone now and never enter your space again. I will be off looking for a nice quiet corner somewhere.”

The recording of the panel ran live to Twitch via CCP's Fanfest broadcast feed. The Q&A at the end of the presentation moved the moment into territory that has no defence:

“Incidentally, if you want to make the guy kill himself, his [in-game] name is [name].”

Within hours the story was being picked up by the gaming press who were covering Fanfest. The community split: some on the panel and in the audience had laughed along; others were furious; the recording rapidly broke containment beyond the EVE-specific press.

Crime and punishment: Kotaku, the CCP statement, the 30-day ban

The mainstream-press fallout was hours-fast. Kotaku ran the headline "EVE Online Suicide Taunter"; Cracked.com would eventually rank the incident among the most impressive dick moves in online gaming history. Rock Paper Shotgun published a 29 March 2012 long-form analysis titled "The Mittani's Crime & Punishment In Eve Online" that took the high-road framing CCP could not. Massively-Joystiq's Brendan Drain published the formal-apology piece on 27 March 2012, surfacing the apology text in full.

CCP issued a Terms of Service statement within 72 hours of the panel, dated 27 March 2012 (Svarthol byline, "The Mittani Faces Outcry"). The core of the statement reads:

“I want to reassure you that CCP in no way condones the harassment of players, especially those who suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts, as we understand the possible consequences of such abhorrent behaviour.

Our Terms of Service (TOS) mirror our company’s stance on this matter.

While the content of online interactions between players cannot realistically be gated within our game worlds, we do take very seriously accusations of such behaviour between our players.

[...] We appreciate you voicing your concerns on this level, and CCP will be very vigilant in monitoring any behaviour directed towards the individual named in the presentation.

We are undertaking a full internal review of this panel as well as the process used for vetting the panel’s materials. Even though this panel was billed as unfiltered by CCP, we expect public presentations to be courteous and professional towards others.”

The structural problem CCP faced was unavoidable: CCP had been advertising EVE for years as a cold, dark, harsh space where anything can happen and the cruelty of players to other players is part of the deal. The contradiction the wizard's hat created became the structural question Andrew Groen would later draw out at length in Empires of EVE: were The Mittani and Alex Gianturco two distinct people, and if so where was the line? On the flight back from Reykjavik to the US, Alex Gianturco wrote what would become the structural pivot of the entire arc - the formal apology that ran on 27 March 2012, archived in full by Massively-Joystiq:

“I feel absolutely ashamed of my behavior at the Alliance Panel. It’s one thing to play a villain in an online roleplaying game—when I post on these forums or on Twitter, I usually do so as ‘The Mittani,’ and do my level best to convince everyone that I’m an unrepentant space villain, as that kind of facade provides an in-game advantage to me and my alliance. But I am not that character in real life, as anyone who has met me can attest. I went way, way, /way/ past the line on Thursday night by mocking the Mackinaw miner at a real-life event. I, as a person, am not the entity that I play in EVE; I am not actually a sociopath or a sadist, and I certainly don’t want people to kill themselves in real life over an internet spaceship game, no matter what I may say or do within the game itself. CCP may say ‘EVE is Real’, but EVE is not real—and the line between the game and reality should not be overstepped.

I’m relieved to discover that the Mackinaw miner is doing fine and mining away, despite being blown up by Goonswarm in-game. He deserves, and he has, my heartfelt apologies—here in public as well as a private apology. There’s no excuse for what I did [...] the guilt of that is entirely mine."

The Mittani voluntarily resigned the CSM 6 chairmanship before CCP formally ruled, in a tweet from his Boston layover on the flight home. The CCP ruling itself came on 29 March 2012: a 30-day ban from EVE Online and forfeiture of the CSM 7 chairmanship Mittani had won 5 days earlier with the record-setting 10,058 votes. Seleene was elected to fill the CSM 7 chairmanship on 4 April 2012.

The ban was a slap on the virtual wrist - CCP genuinely had no way to ban a person who ran a 5,000-pilot alliance through Mumble and Jabber outside the game, and the act of banning him from EVE Online itself was largely symbolic. CCP's hand had been forced by the structural impossibility of being seen to allow what the wizard's-hat moment had crossed into.

State of the Goonion: the 29 March 2012 Mumble address

On the same day the ban was announced, Mittani called a State of the Goonion address on Mumble. More than 2000 Goonswarm members logged onto the alliance Mumble server to hear it. The speech oscillated between a genuinely conciliatory tone and intense anger that popped the microphone audio. It is the most rhetorically dense ten minutes The Mittani ever delivered in EVE, and it is the moment the rise survived.

The structural reframe Mittani delivered across the speech had five beats. The first was that the apology was real, not a troll - unusual to need to say of his own work, given the SoaSS-built public villain persona. The second was that the CSM 7 chairmanship loss was inevitable on his analysis because the chairman of the CSM and the CEO of Goonswarm were structurally incompatible roles - which was a smoke screen, given that Mittani had just boasted weeks earlier about how productive his first year on the CSM had been "in the right hands". The third reframe was the rhetorical heart of the speech: that CCP had changed because of Sony's DUST 514 launch and the corporate-interest scrutiny the new console-game launch was bringing to Fanfest:

"Why did this happen? There have been many things said and done at many Fanfests before. This Fanfest was different from ones in the past, and I’m trying to interpret what has happened. It is true, I said a terrible thing, and I did apologize for it. This Fanfest had a whole host of media people who were brought here for Sony’s major [Dust 514] launch. They weren’t EVE reporters, they were FPS/Sony reporters. The entire crew shipped in more than 70 of them.

The intent that CCP has in working with Sony is clearly to grow the size of EVE and [Dust 514] by bringing millions of console players into the game world. This means that there was a lot of scrutiny at this Fanfest that simply wasn’t there in the past as well as corporate interests that didn’t exist previously."

The fourth beat was the historical reframe via the 2007 T20 BPO-leak scandal - the moment CCP had been caught cheating on behalf of Band of Brothers and Mittani himself had led a "threadnought" on the EVE Online forums that had ended his earlier CEO stint:

"I know that after we have had conflicts in the past with CCP—with the T20 business, with the Threadnought—and in the past, my own reaction in 2007 had been extremely unreasonable. I started a raging threadnought against CCP because T20 was of course giving [Blueprint Originals] to Band of Brothers, [he] was in Band of Brothers, and we basically went to war with CCP. It was a disaster."

Mittani conflated the T20 scandal (which CCP was caught in) with the slightly later Threadnought (a separate scandal CCP was largely cleared of), fusing the two into a single narrative that let him present the SotG as "this time I will be wiser". This was deliberate craft. The fifth and final beat was the punitive future-project announcement: Burn Jita, on 28 April 2012, the day Mittani would be unbanned:

"April 28th is the day that I will be unbanned. A month is a suitable amount of time to prepare, and to ensure that we have absolutely enough supplies and material to be able to burn Jita to the ground. And then we are going to do exactly that. We are going to annihilate Jita. We are going to go to the heart of high-sec, the beating heart of EVE Online and we are going to stab it repeatedly."

And in the meantime, the alliance was to be kept busy with the Tenal conquest against Raiden. The closing rhetoric was deliberately ungentle:

"So I know. I know you're mad. I understand you want to point at CCP. I understand that I have been fucked. And I understand that it is shitty.

But we have work to do. And that work is in Tenal.”

One contemporary verdict on the speech:

"It’s a brilliant speech by any measure, delivered with dramatic timing and with tints of anger and defiance at all the right points."

The Sins of a Solar Spymaster column itself ended at #78, "Jita Burns", published 29 April 2012 - the day after Mittani's unban, the eve of Burn Jita. The State of the Goonion's promise to "annihilate Jita" was the column's own valediction. The wizard's-hat week broke not just the chairmanship arc but the SoaSS-era arc structurally; Mittani would continue writing through TheMittani.com (founded August 2012) and Imperium News (founded January 2017), but never again under the SoaSS branding.

This was the moment the rise survived. The ban was about to start, the chairmanship was lost, the press cycle was at peak intensity - and the State of the Goonion address reframed all of it inside the same week. The post-ban operation, Burn Jita, ran on schedule one month later and became one of the most-covered player events in EVE's history. The post-Burn-Jita Mittani would go on to run the CFC through Asakai, through the Fountain War, through HED-GP and B-R5RB - the consolidation of the ClusterFuck Coalition into what would be informally called the Imperium era. The first version of that Imperium was built on the blank canvas Karttoon had left; the second version was buit on the wreckage Mittani himself had made of his own public reputation, and then walked out of inside one week.

In September 2012, six months after the wizard's hat, the Vile Rat memorial fleet would form up across nullsec to honour the death in Benghazi of the Foreign Service Officer who had been Mittani's closest in-game collaborator. The Mittani would resign the CEO role ten years later in 2022 (The Mittani Resigns from Goonswarm); 17 months after that the Jay Amazingness heist would close the modern bookend of the EVE-heist lineage that the post-Karttoon Goonswarm of 2010 had been forged to survive. All of it traces back to the canvas this card opens on, and the wizard's-hat week is the test that proves the canvas could survive its own author.