Requiem Eternal: The Alliance That Got BOBed (2017-2020)

Requiem Eternal: The Alliance That Got BOBed (2017-2020)

Requiem Eternal - ticker REQ, "RE" in conversation - spent most of its life as one of the most reliably mocked alliances on r/Eve. It was a large nullsec entity of roughly 1,800 to 2,000 pilots in TEST's Legacy Coalition, holding sovereignty deep in the Impass region, and it ran on a reputation for the kind of administrative incompetwnce that other nullsec players found genuinely funny: alliance operations broadcast by colourful evemail rather than Discord pings, permissions assigned by hand, a culture that talked more about mining tax and ratting income than about home defence. It was, in the cruel shorthand of its peers, a pseudo-renter kept around to hold uncontested sovereignty timers. And then, on Friday the thirteenth of November 2020, in the middle of the largest war EVE had ever fought, REQ died the most EVE death imaginable - disbanded from the inside by one of its own directors. The community had a word for it almost instantly: REQ got BOBed.

A reputation built on evemails

By 2017 Requiem Eternal was already a recurring joke. One thin r/Eve thread that January asked, half-seriously, why REQ did not have a propaganda video set to a musical Requiem; the running gag reply was that they were saving that one for the day they finally had a supercap fleet that could "adequately capture the despair." It was light mockery, but it captured the prevailing read: REQ lacked the capital fleet and the seriousness that a real nullsec alliance was supposed to have.

The reputation crystallised that November. The Milkmen, a PvP corp carrying the ticker FYAD and a long lineage in TEST and the SomethingAwful corner of EVE, joined REQ and quit inside a week - an evac call made, by the corp's own telling, only a day or two after they arrived. They left with a deliberately snarky rainbow-coloured departure evemail, then their CEO posted a long, detailed indictment on r/Eve. He did not hedge, calling REQ one of the worst alliances he had ever seen in thirteen years of playing and adding the line that stuck: "I'm legitimately ashamed that they're in my employment history."

The bill of particulars that followed became the canonical case against REQ. The corp described an 1,800-pilot alliance that assigned permissions by hand and broadcast its operations - including TEST stratops in Catch, with exact fits linked twelve-plus hours in advance - over alliance evemail rather than Discord, the way the rest of nullsec ran ops. The flagship anecdote did the work of the whole opsec charge: the corp said it had handed REQ an expired corp API on joining, and that REQ never noticed, meaning it had run no background check on the incoming corp at all. For a community that had spent fifteen years learning to fear the insider, that single detail was damning. None of this was neutral testimony - it was a departing partisan's account - but the thread piled on so hard that even Legacy peers joined in, one of them carefully noting that REQ "is not representative for the rest of Legacy."

A real but partial turnaround

The story did not end at the 2017 humiliation, and the honest version of REQ's arc has to account for what came next. In September 2018 the alliance anchored its own Keepstar in IRE-98, and a new CEO - who had taken over from a predecessor known as Arch - posted a turnaround narrative in his own voice. He said he had put serious effort into fixing the participation problems since taking over, and argued that after REQ's work in Providence and Tenerifis nobody made serious claims about the alliance not showing up anymore.

It was a genuine, if partial, rehabilitation. The thread that greeted the new Keepstar was dominated less by mockery than by a strategic-geography argument: critics scoffed that REQ had planted a Keepstar one jump from a Brave structure, while REQ-side posters defended IRE-98 as a routing link in a supercap highway running north from Esoteria. Crucially, REQ had not anchored the thing alone - Brave anchored the Keepstar and transferred it to REQ, and TEST supplied it - which critics read as proof REQ only managed it by being carried, and which REQ supporters read as ordinary coalition cooperation. By its own 2018 account REQ had stopped being a renter and become a solidly mid-range alliance. It was never going to be a frontline powerhouse, but it was no longer the punchline it had been a year before.

Where REQ sat when the war came

World War Bee 2 began in the summer of 2020 - the PAPI super-coalition of TEST, Legacy, PanFam and their allies massing against the Goonswarm-led Imperium. REQ was a Legacy alliance, which placed it firmly on the PAPI side, holding sovereignty in the coalition's deep southeast around Impass while the war's centre of gravity sat far to the west in Delve. That geography matters for the disband: REQ's space was, in the words of one poster, "four regions deep within Legacy blues," about as safe from direct assault as nullsec territory got.

The timing matters even more. In early November 2020 the Imperium executed its "Helm's Deep Plan," consolidating its capital and supercapital fleet into a cynojammed pocket of northern Delve - a defensive retreat that PAPI read as the beginning of the end for Goonswarm. The rip thread is shot through with this context, full of references to the Imperium decamping under the Helm's Deep banner and expectations that the night's events would be spun on the Goon-aligned Meta Show. A PAPI-side alliance dying in the middle of all that was, whatever its cause, a natural morale-war talking point for the side on the back foot.

Friday the thirteenth

On 13 November 2020 Requiem Eternal was disbanded from within. The mechanism was the oldest trap in the game: the alliance had handed big permissions to someone who should never have held them. A director holding roles in REQ's executor corp used them to dissolve the alliance, drop all of its sovereignty, and transfer a faction Fortizar to Goonswarm on his way out, taking the alliance wallet with him. The neutral chronicler Wilhelm Arcturus of The Ancient Gaming Noob summarised it days later: a disgruntled director defected to the Imperium with a Moreau faction Fortizar and the alliance's entire wallet, then disbanded the alliance as he left, an act that - in Arcturus's telling - destroyed all of REQ's ihubs, dropped its sovereignty, and left almost two thousand pilots without an alliance.

The community's running damage tally was characteristically terse: fifty REQ ihubs gone, one faction Fortizar handed over, and the wry trophy line "They made us form," the same brag PAPI liked to aim at Goons. The reaction was instant and unanimous on one point: this was a repeat of the 2009 Band of Brothers disband, the founding example of the genre, in which a director flipped to Goonswarm and dissolved the most dominant alliance of its era overnight. REQ, everyone agreed, had been BOBed - though, as the next section shows, the agreement was about the shape of the death, not about who was behind it.

What the damage tally did not settle was how much Goons actually gained. The flip dropped REQ's sov, but Legacy and Brave flash-formed within minutes and reclaimed the territory - reportedly within about two hours, by the Imperium side's own account - denying the Imperium any lasting beachhead in Impass. The net result, as the threads summarised it, was that Goons gained a single structure while PAPI kept all of the sov - and even that did not last: the faction Fortizar the director had handed to Goonswarm, in FR-B1H, was destroyed by Legacy forces without contest soon after, by the Brave Collective's own history.

Who actually did it

Here the card has to slow down, because the claim that recurs most across the threads is also the least settled. Three distinct positions coexisted in the same threads, and none of them ever won.

The first was the paid-defector theory, argued in one widely-shared comment: "this wasn't a spy inserted by goons. It was a disgruntled director who was paid off by goons to disband his alliance. Whether goons approached him or the other way around, it definitely wasn't some deep infiltration." On this reading it was a transaction, not an infiltration - a grievance for sale, with Goons the buyer.

The second position came, pointedly, from a Goon-side poster, which is what makes it load-bearing. "I don't think goons had anything to do with this, tbh," he put it. "They clearly weren't prepared for it; they just took credit." An admission that the Imperium had simply claimed an outcome it did not engineer is far heavier coming from someone arguing the Imperium's own side.

The third position conceded nothing about authorship but everything about execution: even if the Imperium were behind it, the argument ran, they took a single structure and watched PAPI retake the sov in an afternoon - a botched heist either way.

The ISK figure was no firmer than the authorship. One account put the bribe at roughly 400 billion to pay the flipped director. A widely-shared comment widened it: "Claims are between 500 billion and 2 trillion. They thought they were really gonna get a win, but the guy just took the money and ran without telling Goons anything lol." A third position held that the number was zero - that it was a free flip, with no payment at all. Later coverage only deepened the ambiguity. The New Eden Post, writing the following August, noted that the Imperium later claimed the director was a Black Hand agent - a reference to Goonswarm's internal intelligence wing - though the director himself refuted the claim, and the piece reported his own stated motive as personal grievance over unfair treatment. No named Goonswarm figure was ever sourced confirming a paid arrangement.

What the community supplied in place of proof was a punchline. "A mittens sends his regards," one poster quipped - invoking The Mittani and the 2009 Goon insider-heist legend, the calling-card riff that EVE players reach for whenever an alliance dies from within. It is genuinely funny, and it is genuinely reception, not evidence. The Mittani's name is attached to this event by the community's instinct for a good story, not by any source that places him in the room.

What "BOBed" means

To call something a BOBing is to invoke the deepest cut in EVE's institutional memory. In February 2009 a Band of Brothers director named Haargoth Agamar, holding director-level roles in BoB's holding corps, defected to Goonswarm and used those roles to disband the entire alliance, stripping its sovereignty overnight while Goons re-registered the now-vacant name to keep former members from reclaiming it. The Mittani, then running Goonswarm intelligence, became the face of that operation - the calling-card line that CCP's contemporaneous reporting recorded as a wallet-log entry reading "mittani says hi," later polished in retelling into "The Mittani sends his regards." That phrase, and the trope it stands for, is the template every later insider-disband gets measured against.

REQ's death sits squarely in that lineage, alongside the Karttoon and Remedial titan-fund walkouts from Goonswarm and the much later Jay Amazingness heist - the recurring EVE story of a trusted insider with too many roles deciding to burn it all down. The throughline is not Goonswarm. It is the single structural weakness EVE has never patched: there is no technical defence against a director who is willing to betray you, and an alliance is only ever as secure as the most disgruntled person holding executor roles. REQ had been warned about exactly this kind of failure in 2017, in public, in a departure mail it never lived down. Three years later the warning came true.

Aftermath

The honest coda is that Requiem Eternal did not simply end. Member corporations survive an alliance disband, and within the same day the alliance reformed - reborn under a transposed name, Eternal Requiem, with its territory handed back by Legacy. It came back diminished, though. The brief vacuum left holes in Legacy's travel infrastructure as jump gates went offline, and the morale cost outlasted the sovereignty loss. By the following spring REQ appeared in r/Eve only as one item on a list of southeast Legacy alliances facing eviction as the coalition abandoned Immensea, Catch, Tenerifis and Impass - the slow bleed one r/Eve poster captured in the line "while TEST flies high, the rest of Legacy slowly bleeds." Eternal Requiem wound down over the course of 2021. The scale of the bleed is still legible on zKillboard, which logs roughly 160 Upwell structures - citadels, engineering complexes and refineries - and more than 10,000 ships destroyed under the Eternal Requiem banner; a contemporaneous community tally had put the structure count at about 142. The alliance that got BOBed survived the disband itself; what it did not survive was the war it had been caught in the middle of.