What awaited the coalition was a territory absolutely littered with
pets,
renters who had paid BoB for the right to mine and rat in stations they
had not conquered for themselves. BoB had farmed out control of
Feythabolis and Esoteria to such illustrious forces as Gods of Night
and Day (GONAD - no, really, they actually chose that alliance
abbreviation of their own volition), Confederation of the Red Moon
(CoRM), Southern Connection (SoCo), Anzac Alliance (ANZAC), Digital
Renegades (DFC), Executive Outcomes (EXE), Interstellar Starbase
Syndicate (ISS), and - the largest of the lot - R i s e (RISE).
Of these renters, RISE had the best constellation in the region, but
was only allowed to rat and mine within those seven systems; to do
otherwise would violate their contract with BoB. RISE also had the
advantage of holding three stations, where the other pets only were
able to rent one or two per pet; this meant that RISE would benefit
from constellation sovereignty, rendering their 'RIT Triangle' much
more defensible from hostile invasion than the other pet
systems. The invading coalition opted to leave RISE for last,
the final pet targeted for destruction in Feythabolis, after snapping
up the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
But that timetable did not sit well with RoyofCA. Roy was a member of
Goonswarm's Black Ops group, famous for using cloaking recon ships to
lock down hostile systems. Goonswarm deployed Black Ops to erode RISE's
morale and soften them up while the coalition focused on other pets.
Untraceable due to their cloaks, and willing to go afk yet remain
logged into the game for days at a time, the enemy could never be
certain if a Black Ops fleet was active or not. Bottled up in a single
constellation with only one exit, RISE quickly found itself unable to
mine or rat, and their alliance income plummeted. As one RISE member
put it, after the war:
Cloaking gangs "
...prevent[ed] RISE
members from being able to easily make isk to replace ship losses with.
Also brought a halt to most ratting/mining in the area severely
hampering RISE's ability to generate positive cashflow. This caused an
elimination of the 'ship reimbursement' program that had previously
allowed RISE to quickly replace lost ships for it's pilots. While this
didn't really affect the more hard-core pvp pilots in the alliance it
did put an almost immediate stop to the more care-bear oriented pilots
dotting up, thus severely depleting fleet sizes when called."