The Fountain War (2013): The Land Grab That Built a Grudge, and the Book That Never Got Written

The Fountain War (2013): The Land Grab That Built a Grudge, and the Book That Never Got Written

In the summer of 2013 the most powerful coalition in EVE Online went to war over money. The Goonswarm-led ClusterFuck Coalition invaded the Fountain region to take it from TEST Alliance Please Ignore, and the two months of fighting that followed produced the largest battle the game had ever seen, a flood of mainstream press, and a grudge that would take three more years to come due. The war's single climactic engagement, the Battle of 6VDT-H, has its own story told elsewhere in this archive. This is the story of the war around it - why it happened, how it was fought and won, and the strange afterlife it had in 2015 when somebody tried to turn it into a novel.

Odyssey, and a coalition gone broke

The war had an economic root, and the Goons said so out loud. For years the CFC had funded a lifestyle that was the envy of nullsec: a peacetime ship-reimbursement program, carrier giveaways, and galaxy-shaking stunts like Burn Jita and the Ice Interdictions. All of it ran on moon mining, and in particular on technetium, the rare moon material that underwrote the coalition's wealth. The Odyssey expansion, which launched on 4 June 2013, reshuffled where the valuable moons sat. It enriched the southwest of the map - including TEST's Fountain - and it left the CFC, in The Mittani's own framing, destitute. A coalition that had grown used to being rich was suddenly facing a future where it would run out of money. The choice in front of Goon leadership was stark: start renting out space to make ends meet, or invade somewhere wealthy and take the moons by force.

The full mechanics of the Odyssey moon shock - which materials moved where, and why technetium mattered so much - belong to the Battle of 6VDT-H entry, which opens on exactly this economic crisis. What matters here is the decision it forced. The richest space in the game now belonged to one of the most politically isolated alliances in the game, and the CFC decided to take it.

"Tonight we are invading Fountain"

On 6 June 2013 The Mittani delivered a State of the Goonion address to more than two thousand pilots on the coalition's Mumble voice server, and declared the war. It was an unusual declaration, because he refused to dress it up. Wars in EVE, he noted, usually begin with a grievance - the enemy did a bad thing, and now justice demands a reckoning - but he was not going to bother:

Tonight we are invading Fountain. But we are not going to bother with stating a grievance or demonizing the defender - we are doing it because we need the region and its moons for our people and our friends.

His pitch to his own people was pure realpolitik. TEST had managed to isolate itself diplomatically, he argued, so if the CFC did not take Fountain, someone else would, and the Goons would be left wallowing in poverty while a rival enjoyed the wealth that had once been theirs. He warned them it might be a long war, that they had grown soft from too much peace, and that there would be no questions taken. The fleets were already moving toward the staging system on Fountain's border before the speech was over.

TEST's response was hampered by a piece of bad luck that read, to a paranoid community, like sabotage: shortly before the announcement, TEST's voice-comms platform was knocked offline by a denial-of-service attack, leaving the alliance unable to organise on Mumble. So TEST's leaders rallied where they could, in Reddit threads. Military Director Beffah took the measured line, promising the now-destitute Goons would bleed for every step into TEST space. The alliance's young CEO, BoodaBooda - a leader raised by Reddit who governed by summoning waves of emotion rather than issuing orders - took the other:

WE ARE GOING TO KILL THE FUCK OUT OF THESE NERDS IN FOUNTAIN, AND THEN WE'RE GOING TO KILL THE FUCK OUT OF THESE NERDS IN DEKLEIN.

The two-month grind: J5A-IX, betrayals, and a hired gun

The war that followed was not a single battle but a months-long siege, and for weeks it was genuinely contested. The CFC's first objective was J5A-IX, the single border system that connected Fountain to Goon home territory; hold it, and the CFC had a beachhead, lose it, and the invasion stalled at the door. The fight there swung back and forth. On 9 June, Sort Dragon - who still controlled five systems deep inside Fountain through a paperwork holdover from the collapsed HoneyBadger Coalition, and who bore TEST ill will - abandoned those systems, tipping off The Mittani first so the CFC could grab four of them within hours. The betrayal backfired in the short term: outrage galvanised TEST, BoodaBooda finally got the avalanche of pilots he had been trying to start, and the combined TEST, Nulli Secunda, Northern Coalition. and Pandemic Legion fleet chased the CFC clean out of J5A-IX. But the enthusiasm did not last. After about five days the strain of holding the chokepoint while recapturing the lost systems broke the defence, J5A-IX fell, and the CFC surged into the breach.

The defenders were a coalition. TEST was backed by N3 - Nulli Secunda, Northern Coalition. and allies - who saw the strike on TEST as an attack on every anti-Goon power at a moment of weakness. Pandemic Legion joined too, but characteristically refused to call itself an ally, declaring it was in Fountain only as an "unaffiliated third party" exploiting a loophole in a non-aggression treaty. The real value N3 and PL brought was not raw numbers but their supercapital fleet, which often won battles simply by sitting in position and making the CFC unwilling to commit.

Opportunists piled onto both sides. TEST's southern income moons came under attack from a group called Confederation of xXPIZZAXx, while the CFC's own rich northern moons were raided by Black Legion under the veteran fleet commander Elo Knight, one of the few third-party forces in the game that could strike the big blocs wirh capital ships and survive. Rather than defend its north, the CFC did something that told you everything about the war's real currency: it hired Black Legion. A large payment - the exact figure was held so closely that Goon leadership joked only about ten people knew it - flipped Elo Knight's mercenaries from raiding the CFC to harassing TEST, freeing the coalition to focus everything on Fountain. Even then, the Goon deputy Sion Kumitomo later admitted, the CFC was still outnumbered in Fountain and losing ground.

The stroke that actually decided the war was not a battle at all. In late June, a director inside Nulli Secunda's rental shell alliance, S2N Citizens, came to The Mittani with an offer that was practically a Goon tradition: steal, disband, defect. The CFC called in Haargoth Agamar - the Traitor of BoB, the only player who had ever pulled off a disband heist on this scale - to walk the spy through the precise sequence of actions, and on 1 July the holding alliance was destroyed. Overnight, N3 lost sovereignty in more than two hundred star systems and its rental empire, worth hundreds of billions of ISK a month, simply ceased to exist. N3 and PL had no choice but to pull their supercapital fleet off the Fountain front to go home and recapture their own space. TEST was left to fight alone, and from that point the slow grind tipped permanently toward the CFC.

The propaganda war

What people who lived through the Fountain War remember most is not the sov map. It is the noise. The war was fought on Reddit, on the Goonswarm and Kugutsumen forums, on themittani.com, and on EVE's own Facebook page as ferociously as it was fought in space, and both sides spent the whole campaign declaring total victory in duelling daily updates that cited nothing. The definitive joke of the war was an EVE-Onion-style satire post headlined "THIS JUST IN: Both sides winning war in Fountain," in which a parody Mittani, asked how the other side could possibly be winning too, replies that it is impossible because the CFC does not provide sources to back up its information, so how could anyone check them.

The other defining meme cast the war as the Second World War in space, with the CFC as the Axis - "Mittens is Hitler," the joke ran, spawning the running nickname "Mittler" - TEST as a steamrolled France, N3 as the United States arriving from across the galaxy, and PL as an inscrutable USSR. None of it was meant seriously, and that was the point: the whole war was, as its later chronicler put it, fought by everyone involved "for the lulz." TEST's own internal calls leaned into it, with Military Director Beffah ending a fleet rally by simply demanding more and better propaganda from the membership. The most-retold moment of the entire campaign was a friendly-fire disaster: TEST's Silent Majority bomber wing flew a bombing run straight into its own allied Pandemic Legion battleship fleet and wiped out a chunk of it, a blunder so complete it became durable lore - "Yeah, that was awesome. They were on our side. Oh....."

The bleed, and the quiet end

The war was expensive, and the bill was contested from the moment it was tallied. After the fighting, a Dreddit member named Enrico Banzai compiled the ISK cost from war-period killmails; converted at the going GTC rate of roughly thirty-one dollars and fifty cents per billion ISK, the community read the chart as around 130,000 US dollars of destruction across both sides combined. It was a killmail-only floor, and everyone knew it, because it captured none of the thefts, ransoms, abandoned assets, and mercenary payments that defined this war - critics put the true TEST-and-allies losses several times higher once the S2N theft and the evacuation losses were folded in, while the largest single cost on the CFC's side, the fee that bought Black Legion, never showed up on a killmail at all. Both sides immediately called the chart propaganda. There has never been an official figure.

What is not in doubt is that the bleed broke TEST first. After a near-decisive mid-war fight at Z9PP-H ended in a fluke - a server operator, trying to ease the load on the overstrained battle node, whitelisted "Q9PP-H" instead of "Z9PP-H" and accidentally removed TEST's nearly-destroyed capital fleet from space entirely, a fluke the community christened the Miracle at Z9PP-H - TEST's finances collapsed and BoodaBooda had to ask his own pilots for personal donations to keep the alliance flying. His tone had gone from kill-the-nerds bravado to a sober plea for total commitment. The alliance's leadership ruptured, too: Beffah defected to Pandemic Legion citing a "cult of personality" around the twenty-year-old CEO, and her replacement, Ingen Kerr, came in and judged that Fountain could not be saved.

So TEST chose to lose on its own terms. Rather than fade out, its leaders cancelled all operations and called every pilot to a deliberate last stand at 6VDT-H - the symbolic home system where the alliance's nullsec story had begun, its station chyron rechristened "BoodaBoodagrad" - for Sunday 28 July 2013. The battle that followed set the all-time record for the largest fight in EVE and made headlines on the BBC, The Verge and beyond; it is told in full in this archive's Battle of 6VDT-H entry, and there is no need to re-fight it here. What matters for the war is what came after. TEST held the field for a day, then declared it would not contest the region further and undeployed to NOL-M9 in Delve. The CFC spent the next week grinding out the last of TEST's sovereignty while dodging the occasional N3 capital drop, and just after midnight EVE time on 4 August 2013 it claimed the final Fountain system. A Goonswarm alliance-wide broadcast marked the end with the flat finality of a victory ping:

IT IS DONE, THE TEST SOV HAS FALLEN. NOTHING REMAINS, NOTHING REMAINS.

For all the months of vicious shitposting, the war closed on a note of genuine respect, with CFC and TEST pilots trading "good fight" messages. TEST was not destroyed; it retreated to Delve and lived on for nearly another decade. But it had lost its home, and the loss would not be forgotten.

Act II: the book that was never written

The Fountain War had a second life two years later, and it is almost as well remembered as the war itself.

At EVE Vegas in October 2015, The Mittani Media announced it had signed the published military-thriller novelist Jeff Edwards - a retired US Navy anti-submarine-warfare specialist and award-winning author - to write a book about the Fountain War, fully licensed and supported by CCP. It would be the first printed EVE fiction since Tony Gonzales's Templar One in 2012, and the first to retell events that had actually happened in the game rather than the published lore. On 3 November 2015 a Kickstarter went live to fund it, seeking 150,000 US dollars by 7 December.

The backlash was immediate, and it came from several directions at once. The headline charge was about whose war it was. The Mittani Media marketed the book as covering the conflict "from all perspectives," but the non-CFC participants - TEST, N3, PL - said they had never been contacted. A TEST recon member who had fought in the war put it bluntly: they had found out about the book from Twitter. The Kickstarter page routed reader submissions of war stories to a Mittani Media email address rather than to the author directly, which only deepened the fear that the "all perspectives" framing was a CFC retelling wearing a neutral coat. The author did publish a direct contact address and, in a Reddit AMA, pledged to interview each faction and run their chapters past them - but the damage was already set.

It got worse when a sample of the prose leaked. The single most-cited red flag was a period error that, to anyone who had fought the war, falsified its history outright: the sample called the Goonswarm-led coalition "the Imperium," a name that did not exist in 2013 - it was the ClusterFuck Coalition during the Fountain War, and the rebrand to Imperium came a year or more later. As one player put it, it was like writing a book about the Vietnam War and calling both sides "Vietnam." The prose itself drew ridicule for its purple, over-described style; the line about a pilot's launchers that "spat out four Heavy Assault Missiles," and a description of enemy drones as "angry metallic wasps with death-dealing stings," became shorthand for the whole project. Players responded by writing their own deliberately terrible parody fiction, which they cheerfully agreed was better than the real thing.

Then there was the money. Andrew Groen's Empires of EVE Kickstarter, the genuinely beloved history project, had asked for around 12,500 dollars and raised more than 95,000; the Fountain War book was asking for twelve times Groen's ask, and a published funding breakdown showed sixty percent of the 150,000 going to "author expenses." To a community that already owed The Mittani no goodwill - this was a man who had been banned from Something Awful for directing harassment at an in-game enemy - it read as a cash grab.

The defence made things worse. Sion Kumitomo, The Mittani's deputy, published an article on themittani.com titled "Shake It Off," which reframed the criticism as community toxicity and warned of the stakes:

Here's what happens if the Kickstarter fails and the screeching minority drives Jeff and any other prospective authors off. CCP loses its ability to ever secure another author to write player stories.

Reddit read this not as a defence but as the problem itself - an attempt to guilt-trip a community into funding the book by suggesting that any criticism at all was toxic and that EVE's literary future depended on their wallets. The top-voted response said as much, calling the article a good example of how The Mittani Media was becoming hostile toward the very community it was trying to win over.

Not everyone on the losing side was against the book. Sapporo Jones, a TEST veteran who had fought in and lost the war, publicly defended it, arguing the metagame - the spies, the spreadsheets, the internal strife - was a genuinely great story and that the book could rescue EVE from its bittervet circlejerk. His thread was downvoted below threshold. The dominant sentiment was the opposite, crystallised in a thread sarcastically titled "Am I alone in not caring about the Fountain War?" Even on the winning side, figures conceded the war made a poor book subject because its ending was never in doubt; as the Goonswarm diplomat EndiePosts put it, the book would basically have been a yarn about how the far larger and better-organised side won handily after paying one of the two most effective groups on the other side to fight for them.

The Kickstarter never recovered. It was cancelled by its creator at 39,016 dollars, around twenty-six percent of its goal. A re-launch was floated for March 2016 but never materialised, and the novel was never written. The war's actual written history arrived instead in the second volume of Empires of EVE - the outcome the chronicler Wilhelm Arcturus, looking back ten years later, summed up by calling the Kickstarter "a disaster from day one" and noting, of the book that did get written, "op success there."

Legacy: the grudge that became a war

The deepest thing the Fountain War left behind was not a region or a book. It was a grudge. The war was the moment the long Goon-TEST relationship curdled from estrangement into outright enmity, and it left an alliance full of pilots who had lost their home and wanted it back. The men who had commanded TEST's fleets in Fountain, and the alliance's memory of being ground down by a richer enemy, fed directly into the anti-Goon bloc that finally formed in 2016 and broke the Goon empire in the Casino War - the reckoning that EVE players would come to call World War Bee. The Fountain War was the largest battle in gaming history, the war that nearly became a novel, and the spark of the rivalry that would define the next decade of nullsec all at once. TEST did not lose Fountain quietly. It lost it loudly, and it never let go.