Preamble:

• We tell the story of how we came to Illyriad, and what our beginnings were like (much different from the face of the game today).
• Harmless is at war with White and their allies.
• Toothless (newbie/training alliance) is not involved in any way, save being under our protection from any aggression.
• This war began in many ways before White ever existed.
• Asylum may be granted for enemy combatants depending upon past level of participation and leadership, and losses already sustained in war.
• Recent peace talks were used only as a delay tactic--White as an alliance has burned all bridges.

Greetings to all,

First off, let me say that assembling all this information has been sheer drudgery of the most monotonous sort. As such, I sincerely hope that my effort proves more useful than as spark for a flame war between Harmless and White (and friends). There are statements I will be making as to what Harmless believes is the situation outside our borders, and no doubt White players will wish to offer a counter viewpoint. I do hope however that we can skip complaints which do not provide new or alternate information with this blanket recognition: We know. You disagree and happily stand by your leadership. Noted and understood. To all neutral parties, you would likely be accurate should you assume that is the stance of most White and many Black/MK members. I do not claim to be in any way unbiased nor presenting a wholly impartial perspective. Rather, I'm just sharing Harmless's perspective and what factual information we have.

As many curious UK1 players will know, Harmless's profile page rather extensively describes our play style, who we think we are, and how we'd like to interact with other players--we generally strive to be a diplomatically open and reasonably transparent alliance. It does not, however, say anything about how we're /actually/ interacting with other players, nor anything about the previously unofficial war we have with White. Diplomats of Harmless have been directly asked what the war is about, and we typically say something to the effect of "it's a long story" along with a few odd snippets of information. It's just too much work to tell the whole story at once (and sift through our own records for the relevant facts) just for the sake of one conversation. But when even players within White and its partner alliances start asking us why this war was such a zealous, fervent war to the death, it behooves us to render due diligence to this matter. In some ways, this will be the entire story of Harmless's inception and growth, as Diablito has personally managed to hold a minor spotlight throughout our life on this server. Whatever talents he possesses or lacks, he has been quite successful at gathering attention.

Our story starts before White existed, and before we knew Diablito by that name. In Eve he's known as Jonny 101 and we heard that he was coming to Illyriad to make some waves. His reputation was that of a master manipulator who had brought down a large corporation in Eve, and his moral compass did not align well with ours at all. We were properly impressed and expected a challenge. We further encountered Jonny's online recruitment drive, at a URL I know I've seen floating around elsewhere in these forums now as well [http://www.eve-ivy.com/forums/viewtopic.php?...].

So, like I said before, we were diametrically opposed from the beginning--but not necessarily to the extent that we couldn't coexist at arm's length. We operated as something transitioning from an oligarchy to a republic, with (eventually) every position subject to public election, and loose but morally-centered guidelines for members, balancing freedom against integrity. This guy clearly ran an egotistical dictatorship (the kind where "networking" with eve players like himself was actually offered as a carrot¹). While dictatorships aren't all bad, the alignment of this one wasn't in question. DiggIK--now Harmless in Illyriad--prided itself in playing the good guy and prospering despite the vitriol and scheming of alliances who see us as a barrier against their unscrupulous play style. It is in some ways easier, in others, harder. Sure we can't pick on soft targets, exploit the defenseless, and just schmooze anyone else who might be a threat otherwise--we have to choose our allies contientiously. But our allies tend to be more loyal and trusting because our relationship has roots in a common (unshifting) foundation. Of course we do have to spend that much more time demonstrating our honor and integrity...and then be sure people aren't spending more time listening to slander. We generally only align ourselves with parties wise enough to do their own fact checking and cross-referencing (as well as demonstrating similar moral persuasion), but it's still nice when the rest of the server doesn't blindly hate us. Being the top alliance, our dastardliness is presumed. Particular default crimes include policing the server because we harbor some newbies and protect our allies, and general treachery predicated on the assumption that honesty is not a viable strategy for success.

[1] Maybe it's just me, but I've never met anyone in business or professional circles who used "networking" as a reward or bargaining tool and wasn't one himself.

We weren't too worried overall. We didn't like what this guy and his croonies stood for, but we figured we'd probably outnumber him in human participation and in-game stats. We figured he'd probably not pick a fight until he could win it, and we generally let our enemies pick us, unless they attack one of our allies. By all accounts this Jonny 101 was a lover of psy-ops and subtle manipulation, and we weren't sussed by that faff either. Loyalty and strong bonds would reduce our vulnerability to spies. However...We didn't actually take that many of "the old crew" with us to Illirad. IK was basically a dead game...abandoned by its developer even by the time we (DiggIK) came around several years prior. Alliance headcount limits in Illyriad meant we couldn't take on a large number of players and then purge the chaff, either. We'd have to maintain regular turnover to build our core, and could not form such long-term bonds as tightly...score one Jonny. We were also too understaffed to properly scrutinize new recruits and establish a training regimen plus advancement policy...score two. Nor was the game wasn't expanding all that quickly yet. We elected not to stuff the ballot with sympathizers by promoting the game on Digg.com. The game itself wasn't really ready for the exacting standards of that fickle crowd, and we expected that most new players from Digg would either join us or quit. We had plenty of applicants who were active and growing, but not that many who met our other standards of maturity and character. As it was, we spent our first month or two trying to adapt our internal rules and standards to Illyriad when we'd have liked to be developing more leadership and tactical structure. Ultimately, our new players grew to emulate our attitudes before we ever did really manage to codify anything more specific than "don't farm inactives" and "don't be a [redacted]." Most of our IK rules were rather specific to ediquette formed around that game's own mechanics, and we didn't really know what specific rules we needed yet. One last point: we were annoyed that everyone in an alliance could see each other's online activity. Accustomed to only friends and leaders seeing it in a game that paid way less attention to meta-game concerns, it seemed really out of place for us to have no control over the security of this valuable intel outside of having no spies (an unlikely and potentially not even desirable condition). Sadly, we never really bothered to deal with that problem in the early days, and as a result our most casual players were the first to suffer for our negligence.

As it turned out, Diablito was gunning for us from day one. He wanted number one position and wasn't very patient in seeking it--he had his first spy in our alliance before White was formed. (We removed this spy and Diablito's alt when it became clear they knew his presence was useless, and they offered his identity as a bargaining chip to their recent delay tactics.) Less to his credit, he pretty well showed us each and every one of his feathers long before he could actually fly. In early March, Diablito was a member of Danger (then the number 2 alliance) and his true alliance mates were in hiding. We were assessing whether Danger was a threat to us (based largely on his presence in it) when--after some friendly/roudy banter in IRC--LauraChristine of DA declared war on us and proceed to spy and thieve nearby Harmless players en masse. This was never a very serious matter, and had no real outcome beyond threads like this [http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/...] mockery of inter-alliance politics. (We didn't really bother with the public forums for a while after that...they were 90% stacked with White players, and no one had anything useful to say.) It wasn't even possible to really hurt each other, as this was well before even one-shot siege attacks, or even advanced resource stockpiles beyond what vaults can protect. Diablito saw differently:

Just to give you a broader, non-hedging-our-bets version of how we felt about his offer, here are some of the responses that we had (internally):

Diablito did not take kindly to our reticence. He had no scapegoat, no gratuitous symbolic entrance, and bad PR from the start. Even worse, we eased off and kept open channels for peace talks. DA was not destroyed. A week later, Diablito planted his alt account in Harmless, and LauraChristine began hammering Harmless players with thieves.

Following that, White began an era marked by maneuvers meant to exploit now altered game mechanics. Back then, alliances could only attack each other after war had been declared for 24 hours, so he dropped affiliation before launching attacks. At this point we decided to pre-emptively strike against an obvious problem on our doorstep. While our armies were already en route attacking Gay Paris, Diablito joined White. Our first attacks cleared his city but plundered little; much to our surprise, subsequent attacks bounced without effect because we were not at war with White, despite the attacks having already been launched against an unaligned player. After that, he and other White players took habit of using commanders as scouts because they didn't get killed by runes or die in raids (a tactic which some of my alliance mates sadly chose to copy) as well as other quirky tactics apparently not important enough for me to recall. Diablito also maneuvered himself to defend against attacks anywhere as often as possible, and the yet incomplete war mechanics rather heavily favored any stacked defense, producing optimal yield of kills and commander experience vs. losses. This was also before experience was actually divided amongst participants instead of being awarded to each commander in full. In fairness, I will note that while this worked out very well for him, it is marginally consistent with the operation of a true mercenary alliance, which is what he claimed to want from the start. He did play the beta, but there's no knowing whether he realized how this mechanic would work out for him at that time. However, when the liberal use of game rule loopholes ceased, so to did the defense in favor of raids on small players.

Even believing by now that Diablito was an inevitable enemy and probably had been even before first introductions--he'd have used us for sure, but never leave us standing in the end--we made a conscious decision to to boom our economy, at least until vault levels could no longer protect our resources. Our top players grew significantly faster than most of theirs, as the majority of White focused on military and small skirmishes with unaligned players to level up their commanders. (This was before NPC armies were introduced.) And so we had a short period of cold war, each side pursuing a different strategy. I'll assume Diablito' MMO background is what led him to value experience over infrastructure. I'm more of an RTS guy, personally.

But the time that Diablito's attitude toward us turned truly hostile would be March 25th:

Diablito began exchanging thieving attacks with an alt of one of our leaders, Naive. The alt, Mars², was not in Harmless, but the afiliation wasn't a secret...it was openly published in our lowest access level forums. As it turns out, Diablito got a few hundred stone, and the victim's response gained him 5k gold. Diablito launched again and lost his thieves, the other responded with a taunting email (which we don't have, so I've no idea how unsporting it might have been). At the same time, Naive spoke with Diablito in IRC, regarding whether White might burn one our players that wasn't working out well and causing trouble on both sides. Particularly, this young chap was a little impatient and stirring up hostilities by waging war against LauraChristine, who had gotten him rather badly with thieves; he would not wait for more goal-oriented operations. This topic was semi-serious, but also a premise to read Diablito's reaction to the Mars altercation, further prompted by Naive "complaining" about Mars' settlement in our home cluster. Chatlog after the footnote:

[2] You may have noticed that for a while Mars was in Black. Mars was openly discussed as an alt of Naive well before being actively recruited into Black. We're fairly certain his recruitment was a weak attempt to feed us disinformation such as the utterly transparent attempt soon after to burn Waylander when he joined us. They--and I kid you not--sent an alliance-wide email bragging about being able to keep Waylander's spying accomplishments secret, and implied he fed them information he couldn't even access. Now it's possible that the message was a double blind, but that would imply a level of counterintelligence expertise way beyond anything Diablito has even aspired to emulate. Was this really a cover to encourage us to trust him? Maybe, but we've been disappointed so many times before when we thought shoddy spy work was a ruse to lull us, and I personally have been very happy to have Waylander as an alliance mate. Many other alliance members may have more talent in Daes Dae'mar, but Diablito doesn't let them play, either hoarding the good intel or only pretending to have it. Either way, they kicked Mars back out when they couldn't figure out any use for him, or come up with believable disinformation dissemination tactics.

This was still before siege was a possibility; the mention of siege in these records refers to simply one-shot attacks with siege enginges (limited siege). To summarize, what Diablito was proposing--though we initiated the conversation, apparently while drunk--was systematic harrassment of this player until he quit. Diablito further offered to frame the player for espionage, and produced screenshots of messages bawling out Harmless's restrictions (no hitting active players, don't waste yourself on inconclusive fooling around) and asking admittance into White so he could have "a little fun." We don't know whether those screenshots were genuine, but bear no grudge either way. As I mentioned earlier, we were swamped and no one was talking to this guy or explaining the big picture. We were all too busy with other aspects of the game. It actually didn't take much to bring about harmony. After he saw a little more of our operation--and also that White wasn't "a little fun" but a real problem we would be stuck with for a long time, if made into enemies--he settled down and became a productive member. And, assuming the applications were real, Diablito was apparently less patient or forgiving than we.

Anyway, we never burned the player nor kicked him, nor even "put him in his place." What did happen is Diablito read in our initiate-level forums that Naive == Mars. At this point Diablito was most cross, and has been ever since. Presumably, this other player was a sleeper agent of ours, and the whole thing was an attempt to humiliate him personally. I suppose I can see how one might be embarassed at being "played" so, after the rather excessive bragging above. And if that's not it, we're not sure what offended him so badly, but from then on all reports of him were consistent: he was unshakably committed to burning every last Harmless city to the ground. (I suppose recognizing that we would never provide him with any interesting or fruitful socio-political interaction might also have sealed our fate. We had already delved more deeply down his path than we normally would, and by this point were certain that he had nothing useful to offer, nor even any real sense of subtlety, guile, or perception.)

I did manage to locate an email from Diablito dated 4 days later. In it he plays around with the details, such as accusing Naive of schmoozing him up in IRC (It looks more to me like Diablito was doing the schmoozing) while flaming him via the alt. He declares great offense at the "attempted humiliation and robbing," attempts to burn one of our largest players for a spy, etc., and accuses us of breaking our own "don't be a [redacted]" rule. He concludes by declaring undying emnity on behalf of both himself and White. I'd repost the email, but it's far too loaded with profanity to be worth the effort of cleaning up. I will however share his closing statement, in which I must admit finding great amusement:

From then on, even in public his attitude toward us scaled down the bragging in favor of vitriol, now also peppered with the time-honored declarations that we were bad for the server, caused stagnation, policed other players, etc. He always took particular offense to statements declaring that Harmless judges players and alliances by their actions and stated intent (kind of a no-[redacted]-Sherlock thing, that), and made a point of twisting it into claims that we force other people to match our standards. I suppose in part, he's right, if failure to uphold those standards comes in the form of hostility against Harmless or its allies (again, Sherlock not required). And in a case as obvious as White, the threat alone did have us covering our backs and not waiting for the dagger.

Had Diablito never attacked us, or tried to involve us in his backstabbing, there would likely have still been conflict, but in a different and predictable way (history repeats itself, and we always find ourselves playing opposite people of the same disposition and political persuasions--showing we're predictable too): White would have made many small enemies, and we would have sheltered the ones who met our standards of initial and potential character and maturity. Over time, animosity toward White would have slowly risen within our ranks through these refugees, and those ranks would also have steadily expanded and matured, and White would have found allies much like they have now, except more committed to a common goal. At a time both sides are reaching or passing equality (we were previously much smaller than White in player count as well as combined White/Black population), they decide enough is enough and declare war. We, being a large yet tightly-knit, well-organized and logistically directed alliance (by then at least) would likely win against this coalition of alliances that lack cohesion between them or sufficient logistical cooperation. After that, options diverge somewhat. Usually, most of the other alliance's members find somewhere else to be, and those that fought us most strongly stir up new alliances against us, eventually bringing together a larger but even less effective coalition against us. Others switch sides. A very few will find deep cover with anyone who favors us, and relentlessly seek to discredit us by subterfuge, public accusations, or even false flag operations. Sometimes, the whole alliance sues for peace and doesn't bother us again. Rarer still (but it has happened) alliances may reform themselves around new leaders and standards, or old leaders with new outlook, and coexist not only peacfully but harmoniously (with us that is...there's always /other/ enemies to fight; humanity is quite reliable that way).

All this considered, Diablito's choice of direct and early hostility was probably his best strategy. Had he actually thought along these lines and got us all figured out? eh...maybe.

It was only a matter of waiting for real (limited) siege then. Well, almost. We orchestrated a steady stream of unrelenting blights to further hamper their already lagged economy. Not that there was any real question who was behind it, but we also promoted Diablito's non-alt-account spy to a level of access that could see some of our coordination efforts.

I don't know who had engines first--we both had them for a little while before opportunity arose--but it is they who struck first. On April 20th, Diablito and James (wherever) launched full-scale diplomatic and military missions against my main city. This was not the start of real hostilities however. Remember our complaint about online activity? White first started systematically farming our inactives and waited for a long weekend, where they also heavily raided some of our mid-sized players whom they were able to verify were away on holiday, and for a predictable duration. (Account sitting was not yet implemented.) Through these raids they gained much equipment, and right when people would start returning is when they struck against my capital, The Brooken Rooster. I don't recall the outcome for certain, but I believe I shipped away any valuable resources and dodged the attack. At some point I "fleetsaved" a siege attack whose speed I misread, and lost a couple building levels. However, as I noted previously, Harmless had focused on economic growth. The resource cost of my lost building levels equated to roughly an few hour's output. The unit losses by White were significantly more costly, though mostly in James (wherever)'s diplomats, I think. Unfortunately, we assumed we would get to keep attack reports in our mailbox, but they actually expired eventually, and much record was lost for lack of knowing it wasn't safely recorded, nor wanting to deal with extracting the information into a still human-readable format elsewhere.

Right about the same time, other players started reporting the losses they had taken. At the time we were really quite stirred up about it, but we do have to admit that this maneuver was well played. And we had to start preaching some things that some of us had previously presumed was common sense within our circle--stay logged in 24/7 to hide your active times, always tick "covert" if you have it researched, don't stockpile equipment but spend it, etc. After that is when White started systematically targeting and oppressing our smallest and most isolated players in attempt to discredit Harmless and intimidate our members. There is an existing thread here discussing that, but contains nothing useful and some have found its content and especially the role-playing metaphors that were used offensive, so I will not link to it. For at least a couple weeks they had a hey-day with our newbies while we started doling out instructions and advice we needed to have been giving for the past 2-3 weeks before. Much to their credit, many of these players were not intimidated but rather galvanized, and quite patient besides. We did our best to prevent our economic output from filtering into White hands, and also did our best to coordinate "strike defenses" so that we could crush attacking armies without leaving our forces stranded with no-longer-threatened players. (This was before messengers, though that wouldn't have mattered--we worked hard and kept our troops on the move until we had produced enough to provide long-term protection starting with the most harassed players.) Also during this time, many of White and now Black as well came forward and openly declared for Diablito following his public manifesto against us [http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/...], clarifying that they were happy participants in these aggressions and essentially waiving any consideration of future assylum. You'll also again see there Naive being portrayed as having come offering peace and not a theoretically potential job. Perhaps Diablito really saw things that way, and perhaps we should have just ignored Diablito completely from the start. All I know is that for better or worse, we approached him, and in a manner according to his reputation--cautious, from multiple perspectives, and expecting to be double-crossed. Yet being treated according to the very way he portrayed himself lead to all this.

Somewhere around this time, players started reaching assassin diplomats for the first time as well. I was one of the first, and I was also looking for an opening. Some attacks against a very heavily stacked defense at Gay Paris ensued...I'm not sure if we ever sent military or just diplomatic attacks. Perhaps we blockaded him. After that I answered a call for defense of one of our players from some distance away, during the middle of the time when both Diablito and one of his spies was typically online. I intentionally sent all forces from my capital without checking "covert" and prepared the debut launch of a now sizable army from my second city several tiles away. I may have sent in two parts and had the one component occupy a nearby square and return at a predetermined time as well...I can't recall for sure. Either way, I screwed up the timing, as I forgot about Diablito's siege army moving faster than 3 t/s (full commander boost) and his first siege attack landed before my army. I think this time he hit a more expensive building and more of them, causing an economic setback of about a day. Luckily, he launched again, and only then did I erect my killing rune. Between the rune and my army, Diablito's fully army and siege were destroyed, and soon after Harmless landed, the successful siege that destroyed Gay Paris (Diablito's original capital) and with it the notorious "Scoutsploit" and various other ~lvl 60 commanders. To date³, this remains probably the most noteworthy accomplishment from either side, though in truth it's really not much of one. Diablito never built up his cities much, and relied on funding from other players to keep his barracks queue busy which is quite mathematically inefficient, and never even built troops anywhere but his capital. White's tactics also improved right around the time that Wuzzel became much more active (and serious).

[3] With the destruction of LauraChristine's capital, I guess this really isn't the case anymore.

After this comes a continuing litany of skirishes, the occasional sparring of words, slander, and ultimately the questions from Diablito's own followsers: "Why does he hate you so much? He won't explain it to us." Hopefully, to those of you who were asking, this is your answer. Embarassment, difficulty handling loss, frustration at accomplishing nothing with his spies or weak counterintelligence maneuvers...maybe not actually any of those things. But here at least is, as far as we can gather, what has actually transpired, and what WE were thinking and why. We don't claim a pristine record, and White shuns the very act of record keeping or public discourse. The real question, however, lies not with Diablito but with those who continue to fight under his banner even as their borders recede.

We judge each individual based not solely on their affiliation, but how they have upheld that affiliation, to what degree they have held it in opposition to us, and how honorably and maturely they have behaved as a whole. For example, LauraChristine hounded and abused many players relentlessly when she had diplomatic units that few others had yet, gaining little but the frustration of others. She also lost her capital, counting for more than half of her account's population, and by this her justice has been served. If she wanted peace, she could leave for Switzerland today and with a small exchange of words clarifying intent be done with us. Wuzzel, on the other hand, has filled a key role in leading and directing these alliances against us for months, and personally held Sho'Nuff's account hostage for weeks. Yet he has lost nothing for it. Black members like Tor Odin and Crank were particularly proliferous in harassing our newbies and casual players. But the fate of White lies in the hands of these players. They will not be allowed to hide behind their alliance tags. We demand justice be meted out to the /people/ who opposed us, not a faceless alliance. At the same time, reserving harsh punishment for only the most abhorent of war criminals means most of White's membership could escape unscathed if their leadership cared for any but themselves. But that ambiguous speculation is their concern, not ours.

The end result of this endless crusade against us is not nearly so ambiguous. Harmless has shown its mettle and stands unscathed while White ever so slowly erodes until no one will be left to shield the true war criminals. Yet rather than admit defeat, White reasserted their cowardice even in the absence of their vocal figurehead. Over this past couple weeks, a member of White approached us requesting temporary ceasefire and seeking terms for their surrender. He pleaded for mercy, claiming White was disintegrating from the inside and players were going inactive. Not wanting to drive players out of the game, we tempered our thirst for justice and granted temporary ceasefire. We limited any retribution to only the few who acted truly shamefully in war. We provided reasonable terms of surrender that protected us from double-crossing while allowing White to revive itself, and patiently awaited their response. But instead of answering to our terms truthfully, White chose to delay while they and their allies slowly remounted covert hostilities against us and any who have supported us at any time or in any way. Our intel indicated renewed efforts seeking direct military aid against us. We poured every last shred of mercy and magnamity we could muster into allowing them to thrive respectably in UK1, and White's leaders chose to burn this last bridge lest they face actual injury for their crimes. When finally they answered, it was that they (the leadership) would rather disband White and Black than experience losses proportionally comparable to those they inflicted on others. Losing 1 out of 8 cities was deemed to "extreme" a punishment for completely freezing entire accounts that had never so much as looked at them crossways.

White will never relent except in public display and continued lies and slander. And now, Harmless is no less intractable. At this juncture and for the forseable future, we stand in opposition to any alliance which is led in full or part (officially or otherwise) by any of White's ringleaders, or militarily aligned with any such alliance. Nor shall they be granted clemency who protect these miscreants--scoundrels who have cavalierly and personally empowered Diablito's crusade against us and have exercised their position by suppressing and exploiting the weak. Every man who faces our might can thank their leaders for sacrificing the many to the pride of a few who could not bear to own their mistakes. We have been too gentle by far, but no longer shall any man who stands with White be granted an hair's breadth of clemency.