Care Bears With Guns

## Discord Information

It would be impossible to tell the story of CBWG without telling the story of FREE first. FREE was the seed that sprouted CBWG and in the process sacrificed itself to create a lot of the wonderful programs and processes we have at the alliance level. After playing the EVE echoes open beta in the winter of 2019-2020, I got the itch to create my own organization for launch. FREE was officially founded in May of 2020 with the help of Cpt Kidd and the Dead Pirates of Nassau(A gaming group/alliance in Second Galaxy). We started with 6 members and spent the next month building the discord and recruiting. We joined the OP4S alliance a few weeks later.  By the start of tbe closed beta in early July, we had grown to 30 members, most of which never showed up when the game launched. When the game officially launched in August, we quickly got the corp made in game and  began the process of sifting through thousands of applications. In the course of a few hours we went from 42 members to almost 300. Some of those pilots disappeared within the week, others would stick around and help change FREE from a rinky dink operation into the powerhouse of OP4S, leadership in OP4S/OP4I, and help found CBWG. Listed below are some of those individuals that joined at launch and would go on to influence  FREE and CBWG in ways we never could have imagined:

Rafforz

Thrisk

Calkin

Kirch

Gradius

Kaelic

Pez D Stroyer

Fukov

Josh

Gradius

Zorhe

Rinon

Itsricky

Nullspacejase

Impirial

Amalar

Quadzi

Kaiser Sosa

James LaCroff

While some of these players are still here, most no longer play. A lot of them represent the original post-launch leadership of FREE. They used their time and RL skills to build our processes and many of those processed went on to become the foundation of what we use in CBWG.

FREE took up residence in G-0 in Curse shortly after the game launched.  We built a bustling industrial hub there and began recruitment for our own special industry OP4S alliance. Once we outgrew the area, we moved into the NPC stations in V2-VC2 in Catch. We evicted several corps and solo players and made it home. Our stay there would be short, a week or two at most. I'll get into more detail in the next chapter on OP4s.

[6:30 AM]

By early September 2020, OP4S's commanf structure was beginning to feel the weight of its rapid growth. Rapid growth combined with both executors addressing RL issues gave way to open rebellion of sorts. Another issue that plagued OP4S was that most of its leadership team signed on and committed during the games beta stages, some as far back as the alpha. A good chunk of them were transplants from EO, here in EE for a fresh start to make a name for themselves. Most would find out that playing echoes just intensified the itch to play EO and would leave quietly.

As a result, with no structure or programs to hold the alliance to standards, corps tended to do whatever they felt like. The Russians of RedSky sparked a war with Death Phantom, at the time the largest Chinese bloc in the game, over an accidental blue on blue incident. When DP wouldn't pay for the 1.5b Russian Rupture, Zez and Bretonec of RedSky formed 400 stabbers, took them into Omist and started killing everything they could find. DP Responded by sending 300 caracals to Impass(they all died).

To give perspective, OP4S had been at war with Genfed since the final beta. Genfed had pushed them out of Esoteria during the first few weeks. DP has been neutral/blue to both parties, but now both Genfed and DP had reason to work together against OP4S.

It's also worth saying that OP4S had already created the first mega-coalition prior to launch. Elysium, which lived in Period Basis to start, by this point was adding new members by the day. While OP4S was a single alliance, Elysium was made up of a handful of alliance, free corps and other coalitions. Elysium was densely packed into Period Basis, Querious, Stain and Paragon Soul. While OP4S took a beating from DP almost daily in Impass, Genfed was hammering on Elysium in PS and PB. While all of this was going on, Querious coalition and Tri-Mark alliance were almost forgotten about. They quietly built while the rest of the coalition fought. In early September they even set OP4S red and launched a lightning offensive into Catch to annex a single constellation. Although it was resolved diplomatically, this event set the stage for further issues between Op4S and QC with Elysium stuck in the middle trying to keep the peace. What made matters worst was that on the op4s discord there was a channel setup for coalition leadership, which amounted to all of the CEO's from the entire coalition regardless of their position in the coalition.

It was around this time when the OP4S executors started becoming harder and harder to find. After a few emergency meetings that accomplished little, Ragnar and I decided to pick up the leadership reigns.

Our first step was consolidation, we brought every corp in OP4S back to Impass. We started getting pvp organized and setting up alliance programs like SRP. Vacant officer positions were replaced with proven officers from FREE, in fact, 16/19 officers were officers in FREE at the time or would become officers in CBWG. For about 3 weeks we pushed hard at reorganization, and it was working. Ragnar and I got rid of the democratic systems and shifted to an authoritarian model. Programs began to work and the tide in the war with DP began to turn, but things were heating up with QC.

[6:31 AM]

If FREE was the mother of bears, 6BPS-T was the absentee sperm donor father that ejaculated and evacuated. Politically and organizationally, the overreach and eventual fights over this system set the stage for FREE to break away and form CBWG.

Late September 2021, REDSky, the Russian wing of OP4S had completed it's first POS in secret and had planned  to place it in 6BPS-T in Catch. They told no one of their plan, not even Me and Ragnar. One afternoon a roam fleet of 300 RED pilots asked for backup in Catch for an escort, no mention of destination or cargo. The rest of OP4S flash formed what it could and assisted in the maneuver. We got to 6BPS-T to find an anchoring POS. Funny enough Bretonec forgot about the Indy module and rather than having a fully functioning POS after 24h, we had to guard it for a full 16 hours until the Indy module came out of audit. Which would have been fine if we weren't already at war with DP, and hadn't dropped a POS in 6BPS-T, which was technically QC space. Needless to say, nobody was happy. I was able to talk QC out of attacking the station when vulnerable, but the peace only lasted a week. Once again QC set OP4S red and tried to attack the Russians. RED responded by camping FAT6-P NPC station where the QC alliances lived. The following day they stripped the shields, and 24 hours later QC followed up to strip the armor with a 150 man fleet, but were met with 200 RED pilots and another 150 OP4S and Terran federation pilots. Not a single QC ship escaped. We spent the next week playing games over armor and shield timers until they finally knocked the station into hull. On the day of the hull timer, a combined QC and Genfed fleet fielded almost 800 pilots. At this point in the game TiDi wasn't implemented and the fight was shit. The station was lost and OP4S moral was in the gutter.

The Monday evening following the Saturday battle, I met with the officers of FREE to decide where to commit. It's worth mentioning at this point that OP4S Alliance was a product of OP4S Gaming Community. While me and Ragnar ran the show in the alliance, it wasn't ours. We still had to answer to Op4S Gaming leadership.

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[6:31 AM]

Up until this point, I had a strange relationship with GoBananas of happy bees/pantheon. We did the diplo dance plenty, me asking for help with OP4S wars, him being too busy fighting his own war with PIBC. When I was ready to cave and help him, he didn't want it and vice versa. With the advent of CBWG we had originally cut a deal with Keltan of Terran Federation, we'd hold the Hophib gate into fountain, reside in low sec to keep our mobility but have access to a handful of nullsec systems one jump into null. The day we dropped the news that CBWG was a thing, Keltan left for boot camp and his successor was a giant asshole that changed his mind on the deal. When Banana heard about it, he started pushing me to get us to join pantheon. It's also worth mentioning that I reached out to Benzie to crash on his couch and he politely told me to fuck myself.

The problem was, I wanted a casual friends with benefits relationship with Pantheon. CBWG was too young to marry off. I knew we needed time to screw around, have our own experiences, and most importantly forge our own identity. Me and Ragnar ended up making a deal for a 2 week trial in Delve, with no claims to realestate. We agreed to help fight PIBC and handle some of the chores in good faith. A day or two later we announced the move and started regrouping in Sahkt to first setup in 319(Later we decided one of the other npc delve systems was a better fit) and the members of CBWG were told to travel light, a pvp ship, a ratting ship/mining ship were all they would need in Delve.

The first week on Bananas couch was uneventful. We camped some gates with MC and chased PIBC around. We camped PIBC's stations and ganked their bots and stole their PI. Pantheon was in awe of the number of killmails we were collecting, however we were never invited to any of the ops, communication was minimal. Eventually we were told to blue QC, we declined. A few days later we were begged to blue Genfed, which we did because it was funny, unfortunately genfed wasn't happy to blue us and didn't.

Finally we had our first real conflict with Pantheon. Some guys from TCOS alliance didn't appreciate how good we were at ratting. Usually we would claim 4 or 5 systems and divide up 30 pilots between them, Gimlet's lootmaster program became a nationalized service and carebucks could be exchanged for ratting loot. Around this time the Halloween event happened and we mercilessly slaughtered low sec players in Aridia and camped all of QC's routes to empire. We piled up a shitload of kills and generally pissed off a lot of people.

Especially TCOS. Ratting drama escalated, they'd come into our deds and wed tell them to gtfo and lock them, then the local shit talk started and banana would throw a temper tantrum in the diplo channel.

In order to ease tensions and line up some backup plans, Kirch spent 30 days negotiating with PayToWin of Silent to allow us a new place to deploy to. We started fucking up VVV in fade for our first deployment. We also deployed to low sec near Scalding Pass to roam with SOON/CC and help them when we could. For the first roam we built and outfit 40 ships on site in a low sec staging system next to scalding pass in 4 days, then managed to lose all of them to some Russians that lived in wicked creek, and I think we killed Benzie cuz fuck that guy.

[6:33 AM]

Over the next few days/weeks, the TCOS bullshit really escalated. At one point Angrypills mouthed off to them in local and GoBananas told me I had to kick him. My response was to tell Banana to go fuck himself, and that if he wanted to he could set Angry red, but angry was a good cloaky camper and he'd have a field day in 319 shooting fake goons. He immediately forgot the issue existed in the first place.

After that, I think like half of CBWG players had TCOS set red, and we kept accidentally killing them. Kaelic did it like 3 times, 2 times he killed them, the third he realized and backed off. At this point shit was really heating up in Fade. We moved most of our combat and ratting pilots out there after a week or two of GIST shitting all over them. Star Hobo once again made an entire alliance fleet up to collect their PI. We made some sick fucking money in Fade while simultaneously ganking the hell out of VVV.

On the weekends we'd setup station camps in Fade and camp VVV in and mine out their t9 belts, then use the mineral yields to build ships to camp them with. It was a ton of fun, they really didn't like us, I'd say VVV became our second historical blood feud. They totally deserved it.

Back on the Delve front, out of the blue Chillmatica told me that the fake bees were going to reset standings, so we started moving stuff out. Surprisingly we had a pretty easy move for the majority of our stuff, but we saved the best for last.

Once standings were finalized with the fake bees, and me and ragnar talked hella shit to them in the diplo channel, we were able to secure a modest fleet of like 90 dudes between us and silent, and set a course for Delve to bust out our remaining assets. The second we broke through 1-SMEB, Bananas was going fucking nuts in the diplo chat, bees everywhere were screaming. We got the following from pantheon discord:

'There's 100 Carebears camping us in our stations."

We finished extracting our stuff and pantheon didn't have the balls to fight us, but they nipped at our heals. Ragnar made Banana look like an idiot in the diplo channels, and I got a solo pvp kill on a dictor. Probably one of the most entertaining situations I've experienced in this game.

In the end, our time in delve was super profitable, getting chased out kinda sucked, but whatever. At that point we had a new home in the making, and it would forever shape the alliance as a whole. Overall Silent ended up being a great partner, and we clicked well almost immediately. We earned our respect in the north in the early days by murdering VVV faction battleships and generally melding well into coalition fleets. It was around this time that Rafforz started getting super paranoid about Pez being a spy, but the reality is that Raff was really bad at logi and didn't pay attention to where the fleet was moving. Regardless of all the positives, we will always go out of our way to Fuck TCOS

[6:34 AM]

Shortly after the Delve Debacle(RIP Pantheon), OBS; which was a chief partner of SHH decided to go fucksilent and endeavored to build their own, separate, empire in Deklein at odds with Silent, CBWG, and BNI.

When we went north we were promised Fade, and offered in exchange to shit on VVV at every opportunity. We knew we couldn't do much as an alliance numbering less than 200 players, but we knew that our limited numbers would serve as a chief avenue for embarrassing VVV(which was figures of magnitude bigger) by choosing the fights we could win.  We didn't even really need to win. Like the Vietcong, we just had to make the bigger power look like total morons. Spoiler Alert: We did, wholesale, make VVV look like impotent idiots. So much so that in the numerous iterations of VVV that came later, they still hold a grudge. We stole POS's, killed their shiny shit and kept them limited to their capital system in a region they supposedly owned.

Back to OBS, when the war kicked off things were quiet, but it wouldn't stay that way. Pay and TB were itching to evict them, but it was damn near impossible with them living in the VFK NPC station. Nykrs earned his fame early on using his 5 million alts to cloaky camp all of the NPC stations in deklein. He was a fucking terror. On our side, we had a couple people harassing VFK, but it mostly amounted to clever, trolly nonsense. Like shittalking in local and fleeting up random OBS members on the undock and fleet warping them to the anom base at 0.

Then things changed. CBWG secretly setup a federation Psyops team. I personally started leveraging some of my contacts to get a solid spy network up and running.  A week or two later we controlled the messaging on reddit, and it coincided with OBS making the dumbest move they ever could; The E-FIC0 POS. It was super weird. They seemed to be unstoppable at that point. Getting better every day. Then all of a sudden, just like Charlie and Algernon, their competence started rapidly deteriorating.

First fight on the E-FIC0 POS was bad for us. TB and Pay decided we needed better firepower, so merc contracts started and FBS doctrines were introduced. Someone managed to grab the shield timer on the OBS POS, and another group popped the armor. On the hull timer, OBS brought in all their friends, and it was a complete disaster for them. The ECLA fleet on the gate got demolished by a combined CBWG/SHH/BNI fleet while MC logged on in the target system and paused the timer. It ended up being an almost complete loss for OBS, losing both the POS and all the fleets they brought to save it.

As a gesture of good faith, 2 days after OBS's POS exploded, we dropped the outpost we stole from VVV in E-FIC0 and began using it as forward staging to hit VFK. Fish wasn't happy, and Nomx was throwing tantrums about it. We successfully defended several timers on that POS.  A few weeks later we dropped our first citadel there, and were forced to defend several timers for this one as well. This time on one of the hull timers we faced a combine FF/OBS/VVV/the rest of the north fleet, which they stupidly jumped into us and we had a fun turkey shoot. Legend says that you can still hear Nomx foaming at the mouth in the halls of the Bear Cave and that OBS ghost fleets still occasionally turn up to feed themselves on the Bear Cave undock.

After the big defeats, TB managed to suck off and poach half the OB leadership cadre and the rest of the group left to join MC and embarked on a quest destined for obscurity. Peace talks were hilarious with Patone being generally disruptive and TB trying to negociate territory while not knowing how to read sec status on dotlan. Fun times. Transcripts exist.

[6:36 AM]

This chapter is a bit anachronistic, as these events took place over the course of about 6 months. There were other things going on that I'll get into in detail in future chapters, but I thought it important to focus in detail on some of the cultural origins of cbwg that would otherwise probably be glossed over.

By the end of the OBS war, CBWG had really passed it's time of being a coming of age group. We had a solid group of vets, decent numbers, low sec representation in ccwg and were alarmingly wealthy for a group numbering a few hundred nullsec players. Our slow burn recruitment procedures were finally starting to yield results and the establishment of a home in E-Fico on the grave of OBS really changed public perception of us from 'scrappy upstart' to 'established bittervets'. I think overall the fed was experiencing the same sort of advancement in maturity. The OBS conflict really galvanized the group; a lot of people don't really know how close SHH really was to a complete implosion at the outbreak of that war. OBS turning, tahini leaving, ect. All while SHH was in the process of a leadership change had things looking pretty grim. If it wasn't for Pay and Christian, things could have ended up wildly different. Anyway, OBS was the feds first taste of blood as a working organization, and it lead to a ton of need based improvements and imprinted a set of values on the group.

It was during this period of time that CBWG saw some serious growth and gained our reputation for recruiting out of the trash, and seeing the blacklist as commendation list.

The first instance was TheRealBeck. At the time I was running fed Intel and when I saw that Beck had shamelessly robbed his corp hangar like 30 seconds after getting an officer promotion, I saw a redemption story. I ended up cutting a deal with TB and Loki that would send Beck out to spy on HONK and earn his way back into the loving arms of the fed. The whole thing worked out great and it ended up having way more impact than I could have ever expected. Beck rubbing shoulders with HONK forged some of the relationships that ended up being the core of Gulag and the insight gained from Beck basically copying their discord server helped bring TB to believe that HONK would make a good friend. End of the day it all worked out and was a mission accomplished worthy of a speech on an aircraft carrier.

Next one, was Casting Couch. Out of the blue Sylia hit me up, he got booted from SHH by TB for being generally obnoxious and asking too many questions. I got an earful about it from TB and Pay, I thought the entire thing was ridiculous. The whole thing boiled down to SHH not allowing individual corps to drop sov and Sylia being Sylia. 24 hours later CC was a proud member of CBWG. The future would see Sylia get banned and kicked from the SHH discord numerous times, each time being hilarious, and each time getting back in.

[6:36 AM]

The last, and favorite new addition was Shield. A member of BNI at the time, their alliance leadership changed and the new guy was trying to pull some weird Machiavellian bullshit where he was kicking and blacklisting corps as a means of consolidation. Shield was the first of those corps. Kicked and blacklisted for "being annoying". Not only did I see it as morally shitty, but impractical to throw away corps when the game was basically dead and new players were scarce. What happened next was a total fucking circus. Initially I tried to unblacklist, but TB didn't want to set a precedent of being able to overrule blacklist decisions. From there I waged a war of attrition that would have made Raymond Poincare blush. By the end, BNI and TB alike were Happy to remove shield from the blacklist if it meant me leaving them alone. Shield would go on to be a longstanding institution and raging pain in the ass to HOGS for all eternity(a feud that would lead to the creation of an HR complaint system).

All in all we saw an explosion in numbers. We almost doubled in size with the additions of Shie and CC. We had some fun moments recruiting and expanding the ccwg program. At one point me and Kirch sat in an interview with DrFrozenFire where he played Seinfled-esqu bass riffs to backdrop the conversation. It was also around this time that SOON moved up here to join us, thanks to Sylia mostly