News Awakening - Coronation

[Deleted member 22]

Outwardly antagonistic is a good counter-balanced to the current Union getup of the Civil Authority, allowing the players to be the real complicated grey area people. I don't see anything wrong with having the clear bad guys being 'event people', leaving room for the players to place themselves on the spectrum as they see fit, which also gives them a good enough reason to be more overtly pro-humanity.

CAB = Complicated bad guy
Union itself/Overwatch = Clearly bad guys

When you put children in camps, you can't really be 'secretly evil', you're just evil.

when you keep childchars from existing you're explicitly good

 

[Angel]

Because clear bad is just boring

It's not boring if the existence of these 'clear bad' things allows for the players a bigger array of choice imo

 

[cns - he/him/his]

It's not boring if the existence of these 'clear bad' things allows for the players a bigger array of choice.

I don't know man a 'clear bad' makes it feel likes its some disney movie where their is a definitive right anwser

 

[Angel]

I don't know man a 'clear bad' makes it feel likes its some disney movie where their is a definitive right anwser

There *is* a definitive answer, morally. There has always been one, no one ever woke up and went "perhaps the union is actually good, enslaving all of us". The thing is, that's a moral choice. Personal gain, greed, lesser of two evils, etc all plays a part in it. Players get to create their ambiguity for themselves and others, while ultimately, every Human knows the Union is 'worse' than what the World used to be, morally speaking.

 

[cns - he/him/his]

There *is* a definitive answer, morally. There has always been one, no one ever woke up and went "perhaps the union is actually good, enslaving all of us". The thing is, that's a moral choice. Personal gain, greed, lesser of two evils, etc all plays a part in it. Players get to create their ambiguity for themselves and others, while ultimately, every Human knows the Union is 'worse' than what the World used to be, morally speaking.

And that decision really doesn't matter when an evil exists

 

['77 East]

It's not boring if the existence of these 'clear bad' things allows for the players a bigger array of choice imo

But it doesn't.

Having the new Hitler around doesn't give any room, it becomes "well fuck that person is too extreme, i must choose the other side" instead of nuances of who's ultimately in the right. It's a lot more rewarded to have shades of extremism/"good goal, bad execution" over "nwaahaha time to kill all citizens 4 advisor fame".

General Cooper springs to mind.
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Players get to create their ambiguity for themselves and others, while ultimately, every Human knows the Union is 'worse' than what the World used to be, morally speaking.

Is it?

To play devil's advocate, if you were looking at the situation from a dictatorship-esque/"authoritarian" perspective, it is good. The problem is humanity is helmed by another species.

Remove them, keep the genocidal shit to shore up the ivory towers.

This is just one of a dozen, sure the regime is shitty, flawed and morally rehensible (and corrupt), but there are viewpoints that brush those aside or try to insert their own solutions for these problems.

Having someone come up and act like Breen 2 just means the development you could gain by having borderline-"what should I do" influence is thrown out because the big bad evil guy acts like a bond villain instead of someone torn by ideology and their methods.

 

[Rabid]

Most of the concern stems from the idea that this is being used to push back several changes that've been made, which is frankly baseless assumption and goes against not only how these sorts of things have been done and used before but also goes against the fact that the person heading the event was literally the one who allowed these changes and helped write the lore to begin with.

To suggest he'd turn around and use this as an excuse to wipe it all away when he could have just, y'know, not allowed it to begin with makes my head spin.

There was always the intention to bring back "The Combine" as an external force for the Universal Union to work against. This was in the earliest drafts of the lore and actually was a thing right up until Hoovie left, at which point we obviously never got to finish plotting for it but it was mentioned many months ago and I distinctly remember getting a fuckload of nebs for the memes I made regarding it with everyone supporting the idea of CAB and everyone else having to push back against the Combine and work out the means to fully throw them back off-world.

Flatly, I'm sure a lot of these concerns were voiced by @Dallas when he spoke to BQ and I can't imagine it wasn't thoroughly spoken about.

There's also the fact that one of the only actually antagonistic and selfless people in CAB right now who is actively milking the citizenry for their own good and who's methods will eventually start to impact their lives negatively to show its not all sunshine and roses is Ravoux and by extension Huxley because I can imagine him doing batshit stuff if it means saving his species (also East for his stuff). Everyone else is fighting strictly for humanity or their own platform and there's no... bite there.

 

[Dallas]

i would give bq the benefit of the doubt here

from what ive been told his intention is not to overtake events on the main server and take them out of the hands of players and faction leads - he just wants to give the server a continued arc that will build somewhere

he's not wanting spaceslug-hegemony-replace-cab so we can all chill

id reserve judgement until we've actually played it

 

[Angel]

I think you're making too many assumptions about "Breen 2", and what his role might be in all of this.
While I don't have any specific information on the matter either (we'll have to wait for the event series to unfold), to me the current narrative, from what I heard and from what I read around the forums is this:

The Union has become more lax overtime, which has heightened rebellious activity. It is the job of the Union side to squash the rebellious activity to avoid awakening the "new hitler", which opens room for a lot of grey area.

If you were a member of CAB and you knew that while having those people shot is incredibly evil, they didn't do something so bad, but if you do not have them shot there is a chance they will ramp up and eventually get out of hand, at which point the final solution arrives, in the form of the combine.

It's the whole dilema - Should the Americans have bombed the concentration camps, killed thousands of civilians, but stopped the Nazi machinery from continuing the Holocaust at the pace it was? Was them killing all those innocents morally justifiable to perhaps save many more?

The existence of a true evil forces everyone into extremely difficult moral dilemas, it's interesting, it's complicated and it's a constant struggle about who is really acting in whose best interest.


Look at the old Lore. In the final event, the remaining CAB that were still alive, weren't trying to 'save their position' or 'trying to keep their status'. It became apparent as things progressed that if rebels kept pushing closer and closer to victory it would spell doom for Earth. There was no visible way for "Humanity" to win.

Were they true evil for trying to stop the rebels from doing what they were trying, or were they stuck between an extremely difficult choice? I'd say the latter. It was one of the things that made that last event for me.
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There's also the fact that one of the only actually antagonistic and selfless people in CAB right now who is actively milking the citizenry for their own good and who's methods will eventually start to impact their lives negatively to show its not all sunshine and roses is Ravoux and by extension Huxley because I can imagine him doing batshit stuff if it means saving his species. Everyone else is fighting strictly for humanity or their own platform and there's no... bite there.

I spoke to @Snook about this like.. 5 months ago, and the lack of a more antagonistic face/person for the civil authority. I'm glad it is happening now, so actual conflict can erupt.

 

[Dallas]

my major dislike with most event is that they try to tell an overarching narrative but it always falls flat because of how many interconnecting peices and factions their are. i just want an event where it only focus on one set of dudes and not everyone

the funny thing is that large events like this aren't actually one event, they should be 5 or 6 events spread among the factions individually

the individual quests work in concert with a larger intention so that, when viewed altogether, they form something of a coherent story

the problem comes when people try to tell a top-down story the usually is led by one faction (cab or cops or rebels) and the rest of the server is an afterthought

 

[PilotBland]

replace-cab

hopefully

 

[Dr Heckyll]

It just seems to me that Union itself(as a human institution) is ambivalent and space slugs evil
Business as usual dont even know what the sudden outrage is directed at let's just see what happens eh

 

[Deleted member 1435]

I don't know man a 'clear bad' makes it feel likes its some disney movie where their is a definitive right anwser

I would define "morally reprehensible and bankrupt", if you assume murder, especially on industrial scale, and abuse of children is morally reprehensible, and if you don't then lmao, as 'clear bad'.

I don't get this 'complicated bad' vs 'clearly bad guy'. I know Godwin's law and all but it's a good analogy, would you call the Nazi party "complicated bad guy" while the SS/Gestapo 'clearly bad guy' ? lol.

Membership in either CAB or Overwatch entails moral bankrupcy, be it through committment and being complicit or reluctant to change said moral bankrupcy (which entails death/punishment as it's clearly against Advisors will/Overwatch, so you wouldn't last long).

Just like you can lie through comission or omission, you can be evil through action and inaction, especially in this context.
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It just seems to me that Union itself(as a human institution) is ambivalent and space slugs evil
Business as usual dont even know what the sudden outrage is directed at let's just see what happens eh

Union is an amalgation of outright evil (some CPs, some CAB, OTA), collaborative / permissive of evil (CAB, UM, UIL, CWU, Loyalists) while space slugs outright are evil.

 

[Rabid]

The slugs aren't even "evil" beyond the scope of our morality, just alien. They're evil in regards to the fact that they expect things to be ran a 'certain way' which utterly contradicts the inherently selfish and self-serving ideas of the current regime.

Which I think is where a huge part of the conflict is going to lie.

 

[Luft]

all this trying to explain why x is doing y is gonna ruin the anticipation

lets just have it be a mystery D:

 

[Rabid]

Anyway yes, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes honestly, especially given the scope for smaller events this opens up.

Personally I wanna see Ravoux assassinate a band of slug loyalists to take power of their assets.....

 

[Deleted member 1435]

The slugs aren't even "evil" beyond the scope of our morality, just alien. They're evil in regards to the fact that they expect things to be ran a 'certain way' which utterly contradicts the inherently selfish and self-serving ideas of the current regime.

Which I think is where a huge part of the conflict is going to lie.

If you assume average morality of a Human being, things we find acceptable, they are, as they are essentially prioritising material gain over self-concious life.

 

[Dr Heckyll]

Maybe giving the aliens hovering over some gravity could be rp beneficial, especially regarding the conflict in CAB currently. I dont know if it will carry over to day to day but it seems ok to me

 

[PilotBland]

im just against new lores direction, but accept it's at least a functional lore people'll work with than* what we've been dealing with

which isn't erkor/hoovie's fault that it didn't work, either. just it was completely mishandled and done in by other factors.

 

[Deleted member 1435]

im just against new lores direction, but accept it's at least a functional lore people'll work with than* what we've been dealing with

which isn't erkor/hoovie's fault that it didn't work, either. just it was completely mishandled and done in by other factors.

I disagree. I hate current lore, like where BQ is taking us and think its more fitting, better balanced and will breathe some life and order into server dynamics.

Or, in translation, muh dystopia.