Its not whether you win or lose, its how you play the game

A few weeks ago the Minmatar found out we were going to be changing our strategy.  The general consensus among the Minmatar was that for us, this strategy meant joining Caldari.  I don't blame them for thinking this as there had been a few Amarr groups had started doing this.  Even Imperial Outlaws had fun trolling the Minmatar into thinking this was the plan.  The truth is, about a week before it became public, we had found out that Nulli Secunda was planning on joining the Amarr militia with the intent of blitzing Tier 5.  The timing coincided with our growing realization that warzone control and taking systems under the current PVE-favored game mechanics was not a battle we could win, despite solidly throuncing the Minnies almost daily in PVP.

As Amarr systems fell, many Minmatar were too busy patting themselves on the back and talking about the medals they would get to even consider they might be getting used.  The truth is, Amarr leadership realized that our previous efforts at holding systems under the current game mechanics were futile and with Nulli Secunda coming, accelerating the Minmatar's ability to get into Tier 5 was in our best interests for several reasons.

1) Killing the Minmatar on our mains while we simultaneously farm massive amounts of LP on an alt and cash out on their "hard work".  This one should go without saying.
2) We could spend time defensively plexing for no benefit, offensively plexing to give Minmatar another system to farm LP in, or farm ridiculous amounts of Minmatar LP and make ISK to kill Minmatar with.  Hmm, another hard decision to make here.
3) Since holding non-staging systems for us is useless it makes more sense for us to let the Minmatar take our systems and then plex them up to a vulnerable state, but not flip would put us in a better starting position for when Nulli arrives than holding 10-15 systems all on the verge of being lost.
4) The easier it is for the Minmatar to hit Tier 5 the less amount of perceieved dependance the people who are in FW only for the ISK feel towards groups like Late Night and Iron Oxide.

The first of our efforts were realized this Monday as the Minmatar hit Tier 5.  Many of us wanted to cash out this weekend, however, Iron Oxide went around blurting in militia chat all Sunday that they weren't going to push for Tier 5 until they take Kamela as a victory celebration in an attempt to manipulate their general militia into doing their dirty work for them.  So Monday morning, before any Iron Oxide or Late Night alliance had logged on we decided to get the ball rolling on a Tier 5 push.  Many general militia members were disappointed that the expected weekend cashout had never happened and had lots of LP in reserve.  Truth be told, it didn't take much pushing.  On a few of our alts we pointed out how easily we could get into Tier 5 on our own and used roughly 500k seed LP pushing level 0 systems up to level 2, which pushed the Tier itself hard with minimal investment.  It was hilarious watching the Minmatar literally become our slaves and even more hilarious watching them pat each other on the back about getting into Tier 5 on their own.  The push snowballed as fear over the realization that Tier 5 might become a thing of the past was all that we needed as panicked Minmatar began linking forum threads about Nulli Secunda joining in militia chat.

On a benevolent note, our unannounced Tier 5 push gave general militia the chance to cash out without the market manipulations of Late Night and Iron Oxide.  Most militias prefer unannounced tier pushes to minimize the ability for farming alts to cash in, however, Late Night and Iron Oxide in particular prefer to manipulate the markets in Rens, raising the prices of items like Stabbers and Nexus chips as well as putting up lowball buy orders on FW items so they can profit off of their own militia.  How is that for inter-militia loyalty and kindness.

Here is a picture of our one of our member's results from the cash out.  This was all farmed on an alt whilst blowing up Minmatars on a main over the course of a week.

As it stands now, we control the warzone from a PVP standpoint, we have the ability to control when the Minmatar get into Tier 5, and we are able to make immense profits off of all of the systems the blitzed Pre-Inferno.  The Minmatar still seem to think that a medal for taking all the Amarr systems is in their future, and I can safely say despite "losing" most of our systems we're far from losing the war as a whole. At the time of this writing Fortress Kamela is currently stable despite Iron Oxide announcing that Kamela would be taken sometime this week.  We might have lost the plexing battle, but as far as i'm concerned we're winning the war.