[emil0r]

Some further information regarding the allegations from someone inside RKK at the time and who was heavily involved in the practical running of the corp.

I was involved in RKK from late 2004 to 2007, the period when BoB became a true powerhouse in EVE and helped out with a lot of the more delicate stuff. The allegations I can remember were T2 BPOs, inside information regarding upcoming features which weren't fully disclosed and placement of goodies (particularly plexes) in Delve.

So the inside information regarding upcoming features is true to a certain extent. Before the CSM they bounced some ideas off players in the corps they were playing with. This was not BoB only. Also, sometimes things slipped from their mouths when speculation ran amok on TeamSpeak. Again, I cannot imagine it being BoB alone. The directorship also tried very hard to limit this information, so when the T20 incident broke out many were surprised.

Now... onto the T2 BPO:s. At the time RKK was setting up its industry for replacing all the ships in the expensive wars. Before it had been up to members, but we wanted to build up a model where we were somewhere half in between the pure communism that existed in Evolution and the pure capitalism that existed in ATUK/DICE (iirc they were the capitalist corp). What we borrowed from T20 were 2 or 3 T2 small ammo BPO:s (all of them pretty much useless) and one Interceptor BPO which was the Malediction. As anyone who played at the time remember the Malediction was near the bottom of the Interceptors (Ares was worse I think?) and so wasn't worth much. The corp allowed members to buy them for the ridiculously cheap price of 5 for 20 mill. That's how little they were wanted on the market. And that's it... nothing more was gotten. We did have a Deimos BPO, but that one we bought for a heavy price (range of 20B at the time I believe, and everyone in the corp pitched in to buy it) which had a terribly ROI and frankly... we should have bought that damn Vagabond BPO instead (money printer for 4-6 years maybe?).

Then the issue of Delve which turned out to be an incredibly good region. There were 3 reasons: Moon goo, plexes and easy to tank rats. But first... a bit of history. BoB, which at the time was not an alliance, but rather a loose collection of corporations, decided to attack FA (Fountain Alliance). We decided to do that through Delve which was a region FA claimed, but did not have a lot of presence there. At the time you had your three basic stations in the region (before you could build your own stations) and they were fairly awkardly placed. After having driven out FA we (RKK) started to scout the region, because at least 2 of the corporations in BoB wanted to set up place somewhere. At the time we were building up our industry to support our war efforts and had started to look into setting up an entire production chain, as well as selling stuff for that lovely ISK. We did an entire scout of all the moons (I was involved, and boy was it boring. DAMN YOU CCP), did an inventory of the minerals and what we found was that Delve was a fairly defensible place (1-SMEB was not yet connected to empire) and you could box yourself in at the bottom at one of the arms of Delve with a defendable station, there was a good distribution of all the minerals, the tunnel to the A2 system and the Y2 system would give us ample time to prepare for defence and we had an angry neighbour in the form of FIX which gave us fights and kept the rabble away. Pretty sweet deal. Then with the T2 production chain (moon goo... pure money printer) we discovered we had nearly all the important moons in Delve (and this distribution was given before T20 even had joined the corp). So... we settled down there, took out FA, had a ton of good fights with the germans in Cloud Ring (those tempest volleys were just wiped you out). Then we discovered that you could easily tank the 6/10 plexes by yourself and that they dropped incredibly valuable platings. This was eventually nerfed. Then they added 10/10 plexes for the blood raiders which gave even better loot (was needed, every pirate faction needed 10/10 plexes) and the Blood Raider stations (did not like those... and in the eventual war with GoonSwarm and all their friends they proved to be a crucial weak point). The important factor though is that Blood Raider space is very cramped compared to the other factions. It's only 3 regions, which means that by its very nature resources are more compact which makes for good 0.0 living.

And that's it... that's the defence I can give and I hope it will put some doubts to rest for the people who were involved in that amazing and time sucking game which have caused I don't know how many dubious real life legal activities just to gain insider information. I mean... that's just crazy when you think about it. Espionage and cracking servers, just to gain an in game advantage :D.

Random trivia: dmZ and Haze from RKK wrote the original killboard. When other killboards sprang up some enterprising individuals though it a good idea to scrape the original killboard for killmails. Haze did not like that and so set up a pollution system for the scrapers giving out fake killmails. It ran for years pollution all the popular open killboards. He was very proud of this fact ^^.

Finally... for all the people out there who did play the game during this time. All we ever wanted was to give drama to the game, give you someone to hate and above all... we wanted you to attack us so we could have good fights. And take over 0.0 as well... you gotta have goals in life. Kudos to the ones who finally brought us down, even though you had to backstab us to do it. Which shows how macho we were ;).

All Hail BoB and SirMolle, the evil mastermind :D

Edit: Sorry for wall of text