Disclaimer: Long winded, sorry.
I do agree with Whitey's assessment about the cities and op. A lot of them were north off two guys who jumped. I do want to point out that without counting anything owned by Warborn or Pete it was roughly 23 cities taken I think, not bad really. With them included its been 56 cities taken in a two day span. Considering they were taken with the expectation that this would mess up our core and do damage to us, i'd say things have gone well. There were different targets in mind before Pete and War jumped and I feel we would have taken many of them. But they quit on us and got their cities eaten so we'll never know how things would have turned out for that particular op otherwise. Its not unofficial, everyone is attacking you guys. I'm pretty cool with admitting it was planned. Mostly because of your founder...well I suppose former founder now, irked a lot of people. Me especially since he went far out of his way to try to get me to ghost and attempted to get his own set of allies to do it.
I do want to throw this out there though, we've actually begun taking towns southward too and not just in the north. It'll be slower since we just burned a good amount of slots on War and Pete. But we have gained ground to the south at this time. Also being fair, GOAT has tried to push back to the north. The players who did quit/VM were largely their more active players all in the top 100 attackers and their founder. This obviously isn't dead weight. I do also want to point out that GOAT tried to defend War and Pete or they asked Beer to do so or some combination of that. Either way, we killed a good amount of birs, hydra, and for some reason DLU (0 walls) in those cities. Its also clear that after awhile Pete and War gave up, they didn't try to reload or stop it once the support was gone and considering you guys plucked them off the front lines and swapped towns, its safe to assume that GOAT grew frustrated with that antic. Finally, I will say that players in GOAT seem to be annoyed/frustrated with how things went down. I won't comment on the longevity of GOAT, I will only say that a few people have started opening up their recruitment options.
Because of these reasons, I feel things have been successful so far. Obviously things can change. This is also more a knock at X than GOAT itself. Obviously GOAT has great players.