The Mittani IS Goonswarm!

Around the end of YC119 (2017), New Eden saw an alarming increase in bounties and ore extracted from the Delve region. Earlier in the same year, we saw the culmination of World War Bee, a terrible hit on Goonswarm that severely diminished their numbers, if not completely leaving the MIttani on his own. So how could the implosion of Goonswarm—forcing a consolidation into Delve—result in a marked increase in activity? Certainly the Mittani couldn’t generate all this activity on his own.

Or could he?

By the end of Q1, YC120 (2018), the strip mining of Delve settled into a consistent and formidable pattern. Thousands of accounts were tirelessly mining and ratting like automatons on autopilot, relentlessly harvesting anything that didn’t get away. Automatons. Bots.

In that same quarter, CCP started cracking down on botting; it had become a plague on New Eden. Apparently, bots had become a scourge, with levels heretofore unknown. They finally decided something had to be done. Banning at various levels was something, and CCP was doing it.

On July 13, YC120, a mysterious post out of nowhere, Confession of a botmaker showed up. It is a cleverly worded diatribe of a botter who claims he has suddenly seen the light! He has forsaken his extensive botting ways and now claims to be a force against botting. Is it a coincidence that this happened only one week before the Mittani’s birthday? Was this an attempt to throw a “smokescreen” over the covert-op of botting and cloak the effort in misdirection? Obviously it was, and a successful one; the November 2018 MER shows Delve is still far outstripping other regions in mining and NPC bounties again by the trillions.

So, clearly the Mittani is now the only person left in Goonswarm, and he is funding his operation with bots. But to do this, he would need not just 30 or 40 accounts like the average Red Frog or player who’s pilot name rhymes with Kusion. Even a thousand wouldn’t do. He would need tens of thousands to make this happen. There’s no way he could figure out how to do this.

Or could he?

EVE Onion’s crack reporters are keen-eyed, astute masters of their domain. (Read: Paranoid conspiracy theorists.) Beginning February 15th, they’ve been noticing something unprecedented: Cloud service failures all over the map. Cloud computing services permit people to run any number of copies of computing tasks. They simply configure them and ask the service provider to fire up a new copy to run. In other words, it’s a bot farm service. Could the Mittani be using cloud computing services to run bot farms in the tens of thousands. Yes! And not just one service!

On Feb 15, 2018, Google announced issues with their service. The Mittani didn’t like the hit and diversified to Equinix and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The demand was too much and, on March 2nd, took them both down. The Mittani moved closer to CCP, using the iomart service in Scotland. That lasted until March 29. Microsoft’s service was next on the list and that made it all the way to April 6. Running out of options, the Mittani did a brilliant move by hiding in plain sight re-establishing his bot empire on AWS again, which went down May 31. Azure again in June; you get the idea. Where once the Mittani thought of all his little bees as little robots to do his bidding, they actually are now.

With the ability to spin up tens of thousands of undetectable bots, the Mittani has become a one-man juggernaut in New Eden. Cloud services usually expect tens of copies to be started up, not tens of thousands. The Drifters, Triglavians, Blood Raiders, ect., are really just CCP trying out new types of AI to detect and crush this threat. Until they figure it out, all the little bee bots will continue to romp in Mittani’s playground of Delve.

UPDATE: The Mittani bots have gone crazy! The bots have taken over all kinds of ships and have started killing each other instead of just NPC rats. Over 20 billion in losses and climbing. Is the Mittani himself a bot? Has he finally succumbed to the Three Rules and is killing himself in order to protect himself? More news as we investigate this horrific turn of events!