ACS Top 03 Ex-Yildun - + Revenge Hit: [TOT: 7.626.746.000] neighborino [STAFF] & fyra [STAFF] & Gangster [STAFF] & Cassiopeia [STAFF] vs. Artist [G C] (A: 2.474.389.000, D: 5.152.357.000)

This will be a long one so I apologize in advance.
The TL;DR is Artist left his fleet sitting, we decided that it was worth getting revenge and rebalancing the universe a little, even if we just covered our losses.

Neighbor:
My thirst for GC blood started maybe in the 3rd week of Yildun, where they would try to crash my friends and after failing would message them threatening to force them into quitting. I started late and was small in comparison, and the insane amount of cheaters caused me to almost lose motivation.
This changed when Artist decided to defend a random stranger against one of our attacks post MD, just because he can. Not defending a friend or deut trader, literally just to make the game miserable for others. I was furious. '

Thankfully, this small band of brothers and sisters found each other more or less by chance, but the alliance and its teamwork reignited my desire to play. Artist and GC has since blocked us from big profits twice, doesn’t try to steal debris, doesn’t try to return hit, just OBlock us. A player on top should behave accordingly, not thinking he has the power to decide who gets or not to play in a uni and ruin their fun just because they have the power to.

Cassiopeia:
Personally, I’ve had issues with several members of GC since… well, before GC was formed, some reaching back to Eridanus and the alliance WaW.
Those of you who watched Nenad’s escapades on the forum before they were removed by admins may have an idea. Ex-friends, scam attempt, sat bashings, insults.
It’s kind of like a really dysfunctional family reunion.

With Artist, I’ve wanted to pay him back ever since he crashed small handful ships of mine very early in the universe.
It didn’t get better when he sat bashed me for spying him, and even worse when his one allymate tried to scam me out of my account, while the other was being his usual nasty threatening self in pms and on the forum.
Earlier tonight, another of Artist’s other allymates told me I shouldn’t be spying GCs because I “..didn’t have the boobs to do anything about it”.

Irony is Karma’s sexy sidekick.

About the hit:
We have all been keeping a fairly close eye on Artist’s movements, trying to get a sense of his comings and goings. It hasn’t been easy, the guy is great at disguising his tracks. However, we knew our best bet would probably be on a weekend, around reset.

Yesterday, Neighbor finds Artist’s moon sitting with timers, and no additional activity. We want to fly, but this is rebels against the Empire: the four of us online do not have near the needed fleet or recyclers. But we look at each other, decide it’s worth the rebalancing of the universe and revenge.
It’s a huge risk: our furthest away guy has to fly 28 mins to make it there, and we are only close with recs enough to juuuust cover our losses. Yikes! No room for error. We decide to go anyway. Either we slow Artist down some, or we go out with a bang, together.

We are flying 30 mins before reset, and suspect very strongly that Artist will come on when his smaller fleets come home at reset. It’s a tight window – even if he didn’t, he most certainly would get a call the moment ranking updated, and have more than a bn res to insta recyclers on the moon (since we knew it would be a draw).

In the end he ended up with a loss of about 2.5bn, minus wreck field. We broke about even, with a small crystal profit.

Dedications:
To our alliance, you rock.
To those who keep playing despite having the odds against them.
To those who play their own game and don’t get seduced by the temptation to cheat to keep up.
(Neighbor: And to Artist, who crossed me hard and gave me a reason to keep playing. Since he likes spending his deut defending strangers with full fleet for no sane reason, we gave him a little help, and now he has 300M deut to recover! All bow to Karma!)

PS by Cassiopeia:
Artist is mostly a good egg, just want to put that out there. He’s a hell of a player, and he is largely clean, I think. He congratulated everyone post-hit.
I would wish him very much FR, but I think he’s already pretty much rebuilt.