Snuff Box – Shadow Cartel Conflict: Their Perspectives

Lowsec alliances Snuffed Out and Shadow Cartel have reset their +10 blue standings after Phantomite, a member of Snuffed Out offlined a shared starbase forcefield and bridged in a fleet which caused the loss of two supers and a titan belonging to Shadow Cartel totalling over 190 billion ISK lost. Since not much of the information regarding the loss of these supercapitals was revealed beyond some Reddit posts, and public details were hazy at best, I sat down with Paquito of Shadow Cartel and D0nnieDark0 of Snuffed Out to gather a better idea of what happened on this fateful morning.

D0nnieDarko:

Q: Can you give us a point of view from the Snuff Box perspective of what happened?

A: Shadow Cartel was using our POS network to ‘safely’ move supercapitals home from the ‘war’.  They asked for somebody to setup pos passwords so they could use the network, unfortunately they asked a really greasy guy we have in corp known as Phantomite to setup the passwords. He formed guys up with the help of Tyler Bourbon, not telling people what the plan was. When the SC supercapitals jumped in, he switched off the shield, lit the cyno and we all just sort of went with it when he started broadcasting targets.

Q: So this wasn’t an executive command of Snuffed Out and infact the work of one person?

A: Yes. They asked the wrong dude to set up passwords basically.

Q: Is Phantomite going to be punished?

A: We call him Phantomite ‘the snake’ for his less than legit ways he makes money through members of the alliance, but he’s a tech god and keeps services running so we generally look the other way. Working killboard, Jabber etc. are all done by him. We jumped in and went with it so we’re all to blame.

Q: Do you think snuffed out relation with Shadow Cartel will be severed because of this?

A: Most of SC are great bunch of guys we have drank with them at EVE meets etc. but they have a member who has a long standing hatred for us, Paquito.

Paquito:

Q: Can you give us a point of view from the Shadow Cartel perspective of what happened?

A: One TL;DR is that we’ve been using B B C towers to move up latecomers to the warzone because they handily own POS’ in the right systems, and we’re apparently lazy. We’ve moved several ships this way previously. However the big fights are basically over it seems, so we took bigger assets home. Just the day before, we took 4 titans back through the very same POS that we got awox’d in and nothing untoward happened. So this one started off the same as all previous, I convo’d Hy Wanto Destroyer and asked if there was anyone around to set us a PW.  The normal guy wasn’t online, so he got some other SNUFD member to burn over and do it for us. When the guy gets into system, they start saying that something is wrong, he doesn’t have roles and Hy Wanto says they’re getting D0nnie online to fix it. Few minutes later, Hy tells me Phant[omite] is just on his way over to do it. So after like 10mins they finally get a PW set for us and we cyno our guys in and they get into the POS and start refitting/capping up. I guess around 5 minutes later, Phantomite (who was still sat in the pos) offlined the shield and they started bridging in their shit. All 4 of the snuff guys that had open convos with me dropped them without saying anything.

Q: Have they reached out to you since yesterday morning when this happened?

A: Nope.

Q: Is there any plans to pursue any sort of reparation from them?

A: To be honest, basically the answer is no. They put alot into this big lowsec rivalry dream that they project between us. But it’s always been just one way, we’re just playing lowsec, shooting whoever comes along, having our fun.  We have no serious hate or animosity towards them, though there’s certainly no fans after this event and it’s certainly not the first time they’ve done something similar.

Q: Are you planning to reimburse the lost supers?

A: Already done, Lenny [Lenny Kravitz2, a successful mogul who sources his money from I WANT ISK, also currently funding a majority of the alliances involved in World War Bee] was kind enough to SRP us 100% within a few hours. He’s a pretty damn legit bro.

This could have massive repercussions for Snuffed Out and also the MBC as a whole

As you can see, both sides of the story show that the two groups are on friendly terms to each other, despite being at war in lowsec on and off for the past several years, but this event has left a sour taste in Shadow Cartel’s mouth. Alliances actively involved in the Money Badger Coalition, including Mercenary Coalition, have reset Snuff Box alongside Shadow Cartel in the recent days due to the actions of Phantomite. This could have massive repercussions for Snuffed Out and also the MBC as a whole, as their “lowsec arm” have now pitted themselves against each other and infighting could well ensue. A “morale post” written by D0nnieDark0 states that this was initially meant to be “a fuck you for the SC/OSS DDoS campaign during the Placid war”. The original intent, it seems, was to kill Paquito’s titan due to his dislike and bitterness towards Snuff,  stemming from previous bad blood between the two groups and some long-standing anger from the Snuffed Out side. Dirty jabs like this between the two groups are not uncommon, and they have been nipping at each other’s heels for close to a decade now, fighting off and on.