The Fall of PanFam (2025)

The Fall of PanFam (2025)

For close to nine years, one coalition owned the north of nullsec. The Pandemic Family - PanFam - was Pandemic Horde, Pandemic Legion, Northern Coalition. and a rotating cast of allies, and at its 2021 high-water mark it had been the spearhead of a campaign that drove the Imperium all the way back to a single system. In November 2025 it ceased to exist. Not in a B-R5RB-style set-piece, not after a months-long siege, but in a few days, triggered by a single broadcast from its own most powerful leader. By the time the killboards were tallied, the community had recorded - over a region-wide month, not in any one battle - more ISK destroyed than at B-R5RB itself, and most of it was wiped out without a real fight.

The blue donut and PanFam's north

To understand the fall you have to understand how far PanFam had climbed. Pandemic Legion was the old-guard supercapital alliance that, years earlier, had spun up a newbie-friendly sub-alliance called Pandemic Horde. Horde grew past its founder until it was one of the largest player organisations in the game. In October 2016, Pandemic Horde - alongside Northern Coalition. and Pandemic Legion as PanFam - took the Tribute region from Circle-of-Two, with stations like UMI-KK falling in the campaign. That was PanFam first taking the north, the inverse of the retreat that ends this story.

By 2021 PanFam was strong enough to go on the offensive against the Imperium itself. In the campaign returning players know as World War Bee 2, an allied bloc that included Horde, Legion and NC. besieged Goonswarm Federation's home in Delve and ground down to the famous M2-XFE titan slaughter. The Imperium survived, dug in, and rebuilt - but PanFam came out of that war as the dominant power of the north, sitting behind a Dronelands fortress that Horde itself had once described to its enemies as the place where defenders have all the advantages. For years it looked permanent.

Goons move to the south-east to say hi

The grievance that became this war is older than the war. As early as January 2024, neutral alliance leaders in the south-east reported that Gobbins had approached them with a polite ultimatum: never help Goons, never set blue with any Imperium group, and let Horde build a jump-bridge network through their space. Imperium leadership, speaking through Eve_Asher, declined to take a side and rejected the underlying idea outright. "I don't believe in a bipolar nullsec, I don't think there should be only two powers," Asher told them. "If Panfam wants to control the entire map I wish them good luck, we tried it a long time ago. It was very unfun. It's also bad for the game."

Through 2024 and into 2025 the two camps drifted into direct opposition. By early 2025 The Initiative. had reset the Imperium and PanFam had reset Winter Coalition - the so-called WinterCo - splitting the north into two big maximum-form coalitions that now shot each other directly. The first full-form Imperium-versus-PanFam brawl came at a structure timer in H-93YV in January 2025; it was a close, honourable fight that PanFam actually won on points, and both sides typed the customary "gf." Nobody watching it had any idea what was coming.

The formal declaration landed at the State of the Goonion address on 24 May 2025, where the Imperium publicly named PanFam as its target. The community shrugged it off as the next great shitpost war. Goons began deploying in earnest, settling space, building dread projection toward the Dronelands, and applying the slow Goon pressure - roaming fleets making timers, whaling fleets, and relentless propaganda - that they have used to grind down enemies for fifteen years, escalating the skirmishing that had already begun at structure timers like H-93YV in January.

The first fracture: Pandemic Legion walks

The first crack opened in August 2025. Around the ninth of the month, word spread that Pandemic Legion was leaving - or being pushed out of - PanFam over participation that had shrunk too small to justify a seat. Whether PL was removed or left of its own accord is contested in the sources, but the practical effect was the same: PL began evacuating its supers and titans, with much of it reported moving toward Fraternity, and ex-Legion corporations in Horde and NC. quietly told members to get their assets behind safe structures.

This was the alliance that had founded Horde in the first place, now packing up its big toys on the eve of a Goon offensive. The community read it correctly, asking openly why anyone would doubt the incoming fall of Pandemic Horde when its founding alliance was already evacuating every super and titan it owned to Fraternity. Gobbins, in his next Weekly War Update, framed the very week PL departed as a relatively quiet one. It was the kind of line that gets a leader compared to Baghdad Bob, and the Imperium side treated it as exactly that: misdirection while the fortress quietly lost its heaviest defender.

The most destructive broadcast in New Eden

Then, at 19:00 EVE time on 5 November 2025, Gobbins sent the ping that every later write-up would treat as hour zero. Pandemic Horde was leaving PanFam. The coalition, as a coalition, no longer existed. Horde would abandon the Dronelands, move north through Venal to fight Fraternity and WinterCo alongside The Initiative., and Gobbins would resign once the move was done. One Goonswarm commenter would later dub it "the most destructive '@everyone' in the history of New Eden."

What made it catastrophic was not the decision but the execution. There was no anchored escape route, no planned defence fleets, no staged evac. A KarmaFleet pilot drew the contrast that stuck: when Goons left Delve they had spent a long time planning, whereas "Horde appears to have spent 20 minutes on writing the ping and hoping we wouldn't read it." Leadership had already pulled its own assets; the line members had not. Morale collapsed into instant mass move-ops, with Horde pilots scattered across three keepstars - the old stager, a midpoint, and the regional escape point. The staging keepstar at MJ-5F8 had been unanchored weeks earlier; assets that ended up in asset safety there, several pilots noted, had been sent there by Horde leadership, not by any Goon.

The reasons are debated. Eve_Asher believed the Imperium's invasion launch date had leaked to Horde - he had shared it with more than seventy people - and that Gobbins jumped rather than risk a defeat on his record. Others read plain burnout handled badly; as one Goon saw it, the new ownership wanted to focus on Horde Vanguard while Gobbins had checked out and prepared nobody to take over. A third strand, the harshest, called it a self-inflicted collapse under zero pressure. One stunned line member summed up that reading bluntly: "This is full failscade under 0 fucking pressure," with no brutal time-dilation fight, no trigger, just an unanchored keepstar. The comparison everyone reached for was the same: The Mittani's old fail-cascade theory, where one bad decision snowballs the rest, and the TEST leadership exit at the end of WWB2. As one commenter framed the inversion of going down with the ship, "The captain blows a hole in the hull then is first to the lifeboats."

The glassing of the Dronelands

The Imperium war machine, in one pilot's phrase, woke up. Goons gated capitals into the Dronelands, declared the region home for the week, and told members to bubble everything and shoot anything that moved. The day after the ping, Horde threw together an all-hands "gold pen" fleet to defend an anchoring keepstar in Venal that was meant to open a road to new space. The Initiative. formed big, but Fraternity won the fight, killed the keepstar, and took away the escape route. Horde comms fell apart. Goons settled into a 24/7 bubble hellcamp of the Horde staging keepstar in R-AG7W.

Then they erased the region. Over the following weeks the Imperium methodically bashed every PanFam structure in the Dronelands, the campaign the community simply called the glassing. A zKillboard saved search put the structures destroyed at roughly 22.77 trillion ISK, with an estimated further six trillion killed in ships during the hellcamp. One widely-shared image showed Goons anchoring a keepstar on the cleared grid with a giant LOL spelled out in interdictor bubbles. CCP marked the rout in fiction too: its in-universe news service, The Scope, ran a broadcast headlined "PanFam Collapse in R-AG7W." And the collapse handed the war its breakout meme when Gobbins's successor, Johnny Trousersnake, became, in one widely-quoted line, "now in EVE lore." Horde lost so many of its line members trying to get onto a single killmail that the abandonment became its own genre of post - pilots openly admitting they had been fucked over by their own leadership and wanting only to put the PH name on that keepstar "to remind how stupid i was by trusting them."

Bigger than B-R5RB

The scale only became clear when the spreadsheets came out. A first-ten-days tally found PanFam's four biggest alliances down 12.86 trillion ISK across more than thirty-one thousand killmails, with Horde alone past ten trillion before the structure glassing was even counted - and Horde membership already cut roughly in half, from 49,170 to 25,041. The definitive first-month post, published in early December, put total PanFam losses near 33.5 trillion ISK across some fifty thousand killmails. Inside that figure were 1,255 structures worth 15.12 trillion - including 25 Keepstars worth 5.73 trillion - and 198 capital ships worth 4.17 trillion, of which seven were Titans worth 1.4 trillion. PanFam's sovereignty fell from 708 systems to 148; Horde's from 414 to 41, every one of the survivors penned inside the Dronelands.

Both tallies carried the same headline, not adjusted for inflation: the losses topped the roughly eleven trillion ISK destroyed at B-R5RB, the long-standing record-holder - though that comparison weighs a region-wide month-long aggregate against B-R5RB's single-battle total, so it is a measure of a whole bloc's collapse, not of one fight. The author reached for the biggest comparison he could find and called it "the Eve equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall." And every figure was understood to be a floor. As one Goon put it, "22T is just the top of the iceberg" - it counted none of the asset-safety fees, the deleted jump clones and industry jobs from erased structures, the fuel burned in failed evacs, or the players who simply never logged in again. Community guesses at the true total ran from fifty trillion to several hundred. What no list could capture was the human cost. For one ex-Horde pilot it was "by FAR the worst period in my EVE life," constantly watching friends leave the discord and everything they had worked and fought for fall apart with no big last stand and no epic battles.

Aftermath: refugees, INIT, and the road to 2026

What was left of PanFam scattered. The non-Horde alliances - NC., Slyce, the smaller members and Pandemic Legion - mostly flowed into WinterCo, which quietly came out of the collapse as the biggest winner and EVE's clear number-two bloc. Northern Coalition., far from dying, actually grew through the disaster, gaining members and bringing its rental empire along. Pandemic Horde's core was a different story: under its new director, Johnny Trousersnake, it limped to Cloud Ring to, in one ex-member's phrase, crash on INIT's couch and rebuild - but within a few weeks it was clear there were not enough people left to hold space, and the remaining core corporations folded directly into The Initiative. as an alliance, not a coalition. A line member's careful correction became part of the record: this was no "INIT Horde" partnership, it was the core of Horde simply ceasing to be Horde.

The Dronelands, meanwhile, did not stay empty. Within a month the region was already rejuvenating, with roughly two dozen lowsec gangs, wormholers and smaller alliances moving in to contest the freshly cleared space the Imperium had no intention of holding long-term. By early 2026 the survivors had reorganised and the next war - between the Imperium and a WinterCo that now held much of PanFam's old strength - was already brewing in the south. But the coalition that ruled EVE's north for the better part of a decade was gone, undone less by an enemy fleet than by one broadcast from its own leader. As the running joke had it once Horde and Legion had both walked, with only the rump alliances left: without the Pandemic in it, what was even left to call Fam? It is a question the survivors are still anwering.