Heirs of OE

By Amianne Sanserre

The factional warfare low security space where the Gallente Federation and Caldari State touch has long been one of the most active loci of PvP in New Eden. Placid and Black Rise, along with bits of Essence and the Citadel, call both to the loyal soldiers of the empires and to the bloodthirsty space arsonists and murderers of lowsec pirate entities.

Late 2014 and early 2015 saw the rise of perhaps the single most impressive group to call Placid home in New Eden history to that point. Known as the Shekel Coalition, alliances Overload Everything and Psychotic Tendencies claimed the allegiance of hundreds of active players and easily fielded scores of Slowcats and dozens of supercarriers between them. Led by charismatic alliance CEOs Doomchinchilla and Lex Arson, the dynamic duo of OE and TISHU seemed destined to overthrow the traditional big bads of Gallente/Caldari lowsec, Snuffed Out and Shadow Cartel.

Why did Shekel fail? Both its alliances comprised mostly high SP pilots, enjoyed great alliance and personal wealth among members thanks to moon and level V mission income, and unquestionably dominated North American primetime in particular with great strength in the antipodean timezone as well.

It was Wanderlust that pulled TISHU away; interpersonal disagreements sundered OE from its antipodean contingent; and in the end the still powerful North American core of OE was overcome by alliances of convenience between all the major entities of the region, a combination of fear that the 8URNT juggernaut would destroy them all in detail and of indignation that an upstart offshoot of Shadow Cartel largely populated by Americans could rise to challenge the power of the old guard.

Abandoned by allies and beset by foes, Doomchinchilla struggled valiantly throughout March and April of 2015 to cut the gordian knot of politically convenient blueships that strove to strangle his beloved alliance. But in the end even his noble heart gave out, and he took his corp, Collapsed Out, the largest in OE, off to Pandemic Legion. OE's already departed antipodean contingent, comprising corps What Could Go Wrong and Cosmic Cimmerians, were already working towards their own alliance level entity on the other side of Placid, and other former OE corps quickly assimilated into Snuffed Out or spiralled off into irrelevance.

Much of New Eden quickly forgot OE, another alliance risen and fallen, but not everyone did.

In June of 2015 whispers of hope began to coalesce around OE's old capital at Ostingele, minds upon whom the significance of OE's grand strategies and achievements and struggles were not lost, voices willing to raise the cry anew and reignite the firestorm of revolution to tear down the old order of Snuffed Out and Shadow Cartel.

At the centre of two hundred strong thundering hearts gathering to fight the power in Placid is Cercis Inoatari of Cruis3rs Cr3w alliance, a CEO and fleet commander of charisma and cunning with an established record as both a successful warleader in entities to which he has belonged and as a prodigious provider of public PvP content via his NPSI community.

What he is building in Ostingele now is a direct spiritual successor to Overload Everything, a wealthy and high SP largely North American alliance with a strong focus on armour Tech III cruisers, command ships, and capital forces.

Initial fears from both Shadow Cartel and Snuffed Out that Cruis3rs Cr3w intended to blue one of them and kill the other have quickly given way to mutual blind terror in these entities that Cercis and his alliance, in coalition with other former OE forces in the persons of What Could Go Wrong's alliance Lethal Intent, intend to grind the old order to dust and don't much care for the friendship of either rival.

The initial misunderstanding regarding Cercis' disposition and intentions seems to have risen from Snuffed Out's and Shadow Cartel's early mischaracterisations of Cercis as "an NPSI FC" and his alliance as an inseparable entity from the rabble of his public fleets. This illusion becomes harder and harder to maintain as Cruis3rs Cr3w alliance easily field a wing's worth of T3s from among their own numbers on an almost daily basis and are more than happy to casually drop dozens of their own capital ships on their foes even in suboptimal timezones.

A dusty and ailing Shadow Cartel, now famous for batphoning everyone in their little black book from pets like Cynosural Field Theory and Dead Terrorists to volatile and unpredictable third parties like Pandemic Legion to even Cruis3rs Cr3w itself, now appear willing to put aside their traditional rivalry with the still vital and growing Snuffed Out in the hope that together these two entites can contend with Cruis3rs Cr3w in North American primetime. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Heydieles on 4 August when Cruis3rs Cr3w engaged a Shadow Cartel super fleet with dreadnoughts and subcapitals but were unable to safely deploy their own supercarriers due to the threat of Snuff's own available North American super forces standing by to assist.

Like OE before it, Cruis3rs Cr3w will face significant hurdles in the coming months as they easily dominate their timezone as a single entity against other single entities but must manage carefully the growing threat of a Shadow/Snuff partnership to suppress their, from these entities' perspectives, affrontery in their will and ability to challenge the status quo in the region; and coping with Shadow Cartel and Snuff in their own stronger European timezone should prove an even more interesting challenge.