And yeah, goons tended to suck at games, though one anomaly I discovered was their private TF2 server where I got annihilated the few times I ever played there. I didn't play it that much but could hold my own well enough on random public servers, but on the SA server, I was completely useless. Go figure.
I'd be down to hear more stories about gaming goons and what went on with them.
I could write pages, but here is some deep-ish goonswarm (EVE) lore folks may find interesting.
Goons kind of came relatively late to the EVE scene, and EVE really is the perfect game for them: it is a game that directly reward mass numbers, and skill really doesn't matter. Critical mass and you win.
The first foray into EVE was lead by DARIUS JOHNSON, a MMO HMO poster who lead the group for about a year with very limited success. When DARIUS JOHNSON quit, poster NumisMancer took over, and took the handle "The Mittani" in EVE. (real life: Alex Gianturco) Mittani was some kind of quasi-lawyer from Utah, and quickly became a prolific figure. Like Lowtax, Mittens (as he was known) saw goons as a way to make some cash above anything else, and set out on one of the longest and most convoluted plans for doing so before failing spectacularly.
For those that don't know, EVE is a game where espionage is wildly rewarded. EVE breeds a special kind of paranoia, and the first thing mittens had to do was purge out the "goonfuckers" and traitors out of the organization. In comes another goon, Digi, who basically just doxxes people, full time, for playing an internet spaceship game. Digi would scrape together any information he could about a poster, create a dossier, then report it to the other EVE directors detailing the lives of the people who played. Digi did this almost full time for a decade. This would serve two purposes: First, it rooted out spies, because he would find if someone had hidden characters or other accounts, or membership in rival forums outside of SA. Second, it was used as dirt. Having someone's real life info on hand that could be "accidentally" leaked at any time ensured utmost loyalty.
Around 2011, a player in goonswarm and a prolific SA poster, BobFromMarketing, was outed as a probable paedophile. Supposedly, a teenage Icelandic girl he was grooming found the goonswarm forums, and posted a very vague accusatory post there. They quickly banned him, purged his posts, and banned and purged him on SA as well. There was never any proof of what happened, it was just a coincidence that BFM began to hold sway in the organization, of course.
Fast forward a couple years later, and mittani goes to EVE Fanfest, an annual convention put on my the game developers, CCP, where he is giving a keynote speech on running a large, successful alliance in EVE. During this keynote, livestreamed, he mentions a rival player by name, and tells them to kill themselves. CCP responds by banning mittens from the game for a year. Unfettered, mittani begins an EVE news website, themittani.com, meant to become a propaganda arm for the goon organization, which by this point had swelled to 30,000+ members. For this to work though, he had to bring in outside writers and help.
Because of this, a lot of the more hidden elements of the goonswarm culture began to emerge. Their main tool for out of game communication was pidgin. Around the same time TGRS was created on SA, a pidgin channel "niggertown" was created on the goonswarm pidgin network, and became an eve-goon centric posting area for FYAD type content. The existence of this channel was known to anyone who joined, and was long defended by the people in charge as an "inside joke."
themittani.com (TMC) generated some cashflow for Mittani, but he wanted more. Mittani then put up a kickstarter for a book that cataloged one of their main campaigns in EVE, known as the "Fountain War." It failed spectacularly, and Mittani was furious, because he had essentially ordered the active EVE goons to donate and foot the bill for the book. His ask for publishing? $150,000. Another kickstarter would be successful...more on that later.
Mittani blamed the failure of the kickstarter and dwindling traffic on TMC to a branding problem -- it wasn't that he was generally unlikable, or that the game was super niche and few people cared about it, it was an image issue. Hence, they re-branded away from Goonswarm/Goonwaffe and became "The Imperium." Goons by this point had enough pull with CCP to even get a custom character portrait background put in game for them. By this point, it was January 2015.
Mittani's first move was to use a connection he had at Sony Online Entertainment (Daybreak Games) to get them to pay him money to shill the soon-to-be released H1Z1 to his community. He flooded his website and forums with banners, and bought hundreds of dollars in advertising slots at SA to drive traffic to them. His plan was to use the SOE money to influence goons on SA and EVE to take The Imperium cross platform and shed their SA roots for good. This failed, of course.
Goons themselves, the handful that were left form SA, were at this point over his shit, and the culture on the site had begun to shift radically starting in 2015. the "niggertown" channel on pidgin was finally deleted, and once Discord launched in May of 2015, the platform was essentially abandoned. Discord itself caused another culture shift in The Imperium community -- players really didn't need the forums (be it SA or goonswarm forums) to communicate anymore, and if they didn't like a policy they would create their own server. When the Goon Discord Network launched (a story for another time), it allowed fragments to basically create their own communities while still tethering to SA at large.
Digi resigned in 2017 from his doxxing position, finally acknowledging publicly what everyone already knew. The Imperium tried to branch out into Archeage (another tale for another post) seeing it as another game they could swarm be successful in, and also failed. The same for Star Citizen, and so on and so forth.
The irony of it all is by 2014, almost no members of goonswarm were from SA. the policy they had kept that "all members of goonswarm must have an active SA account" was long abandoned, yet goonswarm "goons" still commonly referred to everyone as J4Gs (joined for guild), even those people who actually had SA accounts.
At this point, EVE Online itself is in decline, and the goonswarm community along with it. Their success in the game is without dispute, but because of bad leadership, and the inability to shift with their host culture, they've not been successful elsewhere. Mittani had long banned anyone else who could help take up the mantle, and the failed monetization schemes basically sealed their fate.
Goonswarm is just one spinoff of SA, but definitely the largest. Like SA, their rise was meteoric, and their death long and drawn out.
Other organizations have risen during their tenure, battling for their place, but... that too is a post for another time.
