I was a member of Goonswarm for a year, joining in its first few months when it was still Goonfleet. It started as a way for goons to get a foothold in the Eve universe, which is notoriously hostile to solo players.
A poster above asked if it was possible to stay out of all the subterfuge; it is, but it means staying in the tutorial zone where the markets for everything are saturated and there are few real opportunities to accomplish anything. Still, some people manage to make it big in 1.0 space, mostly by providing meta-services such as escrow and gambling. Look up Chribba sometime. He's the best player in Eve; he's become rich and famous without lying, scamming, or stooping to politics.
But I digress. Goonfleet started out in the system SU-8A4, which is unusual in that it is open PVP but unlike most of the open PVP systems it has indestructible NPC stations you can hide inside. So if someone came to fight us we could choose whether to fight or just log off for a bit. Most of the people who could seriously crush us didn't want to occupy our system long-term, because it wasn't worth much compared to their other holdings (which also needed protection).
We were lead into SU by Remedial, who was a very funny man but also a huge tosser. Once he and FNLN (another tosser notorious for his ADHD) re-enacted the RL death in a traffic accident of another Eve player in front of the station where his father was docked. Don't ask me what was wrong with those two because I don't know. This came back to haunt us later, and rightly so, as BoB put us in the position of having to defend the indefensible on the forums.
Anyway, early on Goonfleet was like a little frontier community. Everyone did their own thing. Some mined, some ratted, some ran missions, some came up with elaborate investment schemes. I went into manufacturing, specifically large scale manufacture of cheap, necessary items. I was the Wal*Mart of SU. Eventually keeping track of everything I was selling became too much for me, and I hired five employees to watch the market and update prices. I compartmentalised everything so that at worst somebody could steal a few million units of minerals from me if they decided to go rogue. By the time I left I had two employees manufacturing goods for me as well, and in theory I could have quit the game and continued to run my business empire entirely via email if such had been my wont.
Again I digress. We had this nice little community going. We went on mining ops with the directors. We laughed at the other corps with their obsession with being popular and their strict rules. We were getting rich, we were free, and most of all we were untouchable. We could have spread out across the Eve cluster in this way, a spider's web of non-conquerable systems connected by jumpclones and carriers.
Things changed with the infamous 'Not Just a Game' speech by the CEO. Our success had largely come because goons are cynical jokers who don't take things seriously; we realised Eve was just a game, and played it for fun. We didn't get too upset at anything and we didn't overextend ourselves. Most corps in Eve treat it as an extension of real life. If you wrong the corp in the game, you get shunned as a person, not just as a character.
In this speech Remedial weighed up the question of whether Eve was 'just a game'. He concluded that because he had hundreds of goons counting on him, it wasn't. This was the wrong conclusion. Football, for instance, is still just a game even if your team is counting on you. So from then on Goonfleet gradually turned into just another alliance on the map, with people being ordered here or there depending on who the directors want to make war on today. This is a great deal of fun for the directors like the Mittani, who get to effectively play Galactic Civilisations with real people. For the individual player... Well it's good if you like being gangwarped places.
I remember one incident where some prick we were allied with blew up a hauler full of valuable blueprints belonging to some people who had been our allies much longer. This prick was named Starbuck77 or 78 or something equally unimaginative. I don't want to get into the details but basically our old allies were leaving the alliance to move elsewhere so they weren't flagged as 'friend' on the HUD, and Starbuck69 considered this to be adequate reason to kill them, even though he knew well that they were not hostile.
The general consensus was that Starbuck13 ought to eat a bowl of dicks, but the directors were terrified of offending our faithless allies and bade us not speak of it. So I waited until they weren't watching and stoked the discontent in the alliance channel. Soon we had fashioned a bowl of dicks out of a shuttle full of creatively named bookmarks and put it up on escrow for Starbuck. The Mittanni and the other directors, to my delight, were furious, and pre-emptively began grovelling before Starbuck's Directors. They also fined the guy who sent the bookmarks 15 million isk, which I had made sure wasn't me. I then paid this guy 20 million isk (pocket change for me) to cover his costs and conveyed my thanks. I was later vindicated when our faithless allies joined our enemy of the month and started shooting goons in earnest.
It was just a token 'fuck you, told you so' to the Directors, but it made me realise I could have torn the fleet apart if I'd wanted to. I had the resources, and the discontent was there to be exploited. (There were, in fact, splinter groups, such as The Greater Goon run by Hoegaarden.) I could have been the Tom Zarek of Goonfleet, but I wasn't interested in political power. I was a businessman and I really wanted to someone else to handle all that governmental bullshit.
The Mittanni sucks, although he does have an awesome Dr Strangelove icon on the boards (or used to anyway.) When he arrived Goonfleet became obsessed with spying and scamming other corps; in his position as spymaster he glorified this sort of activity as the most devastating form of PVP in Eve, which it is. The trouble is, if you glorify scamming and infiltration then you're basically glorifying Istvaan.
Scamming isn't hard, it's just boring. All scamming requires is spending a lot of time socialising with people you don't like. Given that it's a game and specifically a social game, why would you do that, whatever the rewards? It's only an attractive proposition for a player with something to prove. Like a certain pink-haired merchant-banker, for example.
So I'm rather glad to hear BoB got theirs, they were pricks. The scale of the accomplishment is truly impressive, and it's been four years in coming. But we should not lose sight of what the accomplishment actually consists of: Talking some guy into changing guilds in a MMOG. It's not something to put on your resume, although it says a lot about Eve that the results can be so world-changing.
It's a good game, but it's a sandbox - you get out what you put in. During my time there I was a tycoon, a low budget pirate, and even an explorer. I'll never forget the heartpounding tension of my first one-on-one fights, or the tone of dismay in the admiral's voice when he realised I'd turned up to a battle fleet in an EW hauler of my own design. Once I even flew from a planet to its moon for charity using only sublight drives. It took three realtime days of constant flying. I was convinced someone was going to shoot me down in the last hour for the lulz.
In the end I left to spend more time with the girl who was helping me through an unpleasant breakup and who I'd been obnoxiously talkative about on the forums (thought I had the decency to confine it to Spacetime FYAD where obnoxiousity was par for the course). When Goonswarm moved to Red Alliance territory (a move I never approved of - RA were exploiters obsessed with winning at any cost, and our alliance with them seemed emblematic of the loss of the more light hearted and enjoyable attitude to the game we started out with) I couldn't spare the time to move all my minerals and blueprints and inventory and start over in the new system. I handed all my assets over to someone I trusted and bade him sell them off and divide the proceeds amongst my shareholders.
Thus ended my adventure in Eve. It's a huge time sink. I would recommend it to anyone who needs to escape from their lives for a time. There are more productive things to do with your time, but I was in a bad way when I joined up and it gave me some good memories and something to pass the time with until I was ready to rise again.