Chapter 4
August 2009, that was when I assumed the title of Pilot. Salithus retired from active duty citing real life issues. He made the
announcement. The announcement was a slight nod to the old GOONS shark week policy, where they would shark attack bad OWF posters. (A practice we will resume, one day). I became pilot, though in reality salithus still had significant power as the forum owner. The government was shifted around significantly. I gave Mert a shot at filling the vacant secretariat position but he was never able to get into it for what I assume was real life issues. Regardless, this was a new start for GOONS.
Later in August we announced
our first EoG I forget the exact circumstances, but he was utterly clueless, unable to do the simplest task to secure peace on the mercy board. I remember him being extremely rude to us, and he was put on the list as a consequence. This would set precedent for future mercy board proceedings.
In September we crossed the 1m NS marker, fully ditched our protectorate, and signed a full MDoAP with NpO. One which would not last the test of time. NpO had been very generous protectors, and they gave us a large amount of money with no strings attached to build up. Of course a lot of this goodwill would be overturned later, but that was unforeseeable at the time.
Also in September we had one of our most effective OWF trolls ever. We spotted a shitty alliance posting an announcement bemoaning tech raiding and pledging economic support to the raided to help them, and to secure peace for them. Of course,
our policy was nothing of the sort. We parodied the announcement and started one of the longest tech raiding debate threads I've ever seen. It reached a ripe old age of 47 pages, which by OWF standards, is pretty big. It seemed unfathomable that a 5 minute parody could spawn so many pages of dialogue, but it was worth it. Policy trolling is one of the greatest things we can do.
In December our oppression began. Kronos and us (independently of each other) raided a shit-teir alliance named RLMMO, which was some gay invasion microalliance from an offsite forum.
The War started small, but attracted the attention of some microalliance of TOP breakaways, ZDP. They were few, but they had very high NS nations. We had to call in help from our allies to keep them from hurting what few upper tier nations we had back then. Eventually
peace was reached with ZDP, and we got some money for our troubles. This was our first (and certainly not our last) victory. We remain at war with RLMMO to this day, or whatever is left of them.
Following the successes of the year, especially the last few months, we were riding high, and things looked bright. Of course, this was merely the beginning.
