Anonymous

I refuse to conform to your arbitary labels. Anzaki built, Aetherean soul.

Welcome to DU. It is also equally plausible, in fact, highly likely in some cases, that it's Meta and one org may be a front for another, or prehaps both are the puppets of some greater power. Ignore those other explanations. I think you have uncovered a conspiracy and you should definately spend time unearthing it... ????

Cute chart. Some advice: * Size does not equal political power * Political power does not equal influence * Who isn't on a list can be as, if not more, important as who is. * The strongest alliances are rarely official or obvious. Take as you will. I don't appear on your lists or chart, even as a Legate, so you can probably ignore me. ????

So, in DU, there was a pre-SKiD online game called SE where people got so addicted to it they actually started worshipping the gods of that game in RL, and have bought thier beliefs to Alioth. Seems legit. Certainly no less believable than RaptorJesus.

Might I be the first to point out - one of the oldest groups in the game is the Aether. It *is*, by both your definition (and ours) a spiritual/philosophical/religious group with a rich in-game background and belief system drawn from RL 21st century religious and humanitarian organisations. *Continues to eat popcorn and be bemused*

No. Next question.

Like this but without breaching copyright http://larastock.com/shutterstock-photo-510777964/

Make it the greek symbol Psi (used essentially to denote quanta in real life - I know - not exact but close enough). Maybe it's like an open at the top O drawn counter clockwise with the top right then dropping down straight through. I'll edit later and show examples as I'm on my phone atm.)

Aye

And just a gentle reminder from your local... me. If you can make it in HTML and CSS, someone smart can probably work out all sorts of tricks they can play with your DOM/UI/CSS/HTML/script (and in game / within the ToS. Immersion.) Before you all get too carried away Just saying. As you were.

Well met Nadie I personally am well aware of that in the Lore but find people tire of me pointing out stuff like that. /shrug. So to clarify - which city-states rose and dominated, in that sense. I have a personal and professional interest in spending time working that sort of fine detail no one ever sees but it's not always shared It would seem we misundertood the OP however. And in that context - yeah - just Players is fine. We don't need a label for each other beyond that, and externally it just makes us sound cultish, like EvEers or WoWers or any other social media tribe. In my mind - if DU us teh awesome, we don't need to label ourselves - only everyone else as we are the "normal" in terms of relative comparisons. (And I may have spent too much of today buried in semantic modelling so also feel free to ignore me )

This is quite simple. Those who were alive pre-leaving would refer to themselves by the identifier they previously used. Terran, Martian, Belter, Titan. Those who are born on Alioth, or are so "native" as to having lost all previous connection - Aliothan (or Aliothi) would be appropriate. Arkers, Novarkers etc etc would not likely be used since most people were on them less than a day or two really, in terms of "awake" time - mentally, most would likely feel the Ark was a bit like 'a very short bus trip where you fall asleep and have a vivid dream before being waken before you are ready because we're at your stop.' HOWEVER - there is little chance that the countries which exist now would exist then, and a range of new "countries" would exist in some places, and have been dissolved in most, replaced with single world governments, or corporate powers. It's why I call my character an Terran (where I live) Anzaki (my cultural/genetic stock), not an Australian, and he politically is an Aetherean (as opposed to an Etherean, Alpha etc). A more salient question would be "what are the countries of the world when we leave", or "what does a UMF'er call themselves", or "what languages are still spoken (and thus - what cultures still exist).

+1 - I asked OP in discord to add "Alien" as an option. Could easily be "Alien/Hostile" - spacesuits/helmets mandatory, stuff we don't have on Earth. Flying jellyfish trees and ammonia seas etc.

Other: Mix of biomes. Singular biome planets are a silly idea - no planet has that outside Star Wars etc, and even minecraft was doing it over a decade ago. Why limit ourselves?

Congratulations all. Well done.

Great idea. As a RPer, I support this.

To add to this: Speaking as someone involved in the creation of such financial systems - what one sees today in the stock market is an evolution driven system based on needs - namely volume and the 24 hour trading cycle. DU, for a long time, won't have the first, and well, unless we are talking planets to scale and time zones and rotation, we will never need to over come the second. So we will never need anything so complex as the real world. As for my 2 cents on this topic - FWIW I agree with NQ on development priorities - this isn't a huge one. Of course, I would love to see these sorts of things IN-GAME so we can build constructs that display information to people, because, emergent game play etc. I think in that spirit it should be firmly limited to providing the means (read-only basically) for players to record local observations about the game world, and then it is up to us as developer-players to build our own in-game solutions which provide services to players. NQ should not have to do our work for us. Think of them as Platform-as-a-Service. You've got to do the SaaS side yourself. (Upon reflection - really what we should be asking for is permission to create API's in game, and for NQ to provide a very simple GET "web-service" that lets us grab only the limited basic game data which is relevant - namely some location information (where am I in the game world), Org names/ids, Character id number (not names - that's our job), Object ID. Really, anything else is something we, the players, could observe and track ourselves, including making connections and relationships between those things.) While we are at it - ideally, we'd make the market mechanisms for the game, not NQ - they should provide the simple mechanism of being able to exchange things between two people. It should be up to us to build trading systems to handle stuff once the Alioth colony grows beyond what basic barter and coin exchange can provide. That's half the fun of an emergent sandbox game - like real life, working out innovative solutions to problems using the tools at your disposal).

OOC: Sorry - didn't realise this thread was here as it would logically live in Archives (being "live" fan fic) rather than Agora (ideas). I can shut mine down over there - didn't mean to compete.

Aiken regards you with the baleful glare that only annoyed bartenders can muster and leans over the bar and looks down at the large man out cold on the floor. "Should make you pay for that ya tool." he mumbles before straightening. "Oi! Charlene. Grab a mop. N' tell sunshine over there to do his fuckin' job while you're at it. Mick's come a cropper." The young lady in question (lady being a generous label) is already moving, the altercation not having gone unnoticed, despite the noise of the bar starting up again as any show that was on offer is obviously not forthcoming. She drops a little yellow "wet floor" A-frame sign next to the man and starts picking up the remnants of the mug carefully. At the same time another figure appears through the press of patrons. The man is of average build and from a distance he is what springs to mind when looking for a definition of "nondescript" other than the darkened welders goggles he wears, not an uncommon piece of street wear in a place like Port Drum. To the trained eye, he is someone who is otherwise practiced at not drawing attention to himself. His build belies his strength as he lifts the unconscious Mick from the floor and into a fireman's carry with seemingly no effort, and carries him off to a corner booth where the poor drunk can sleep off his misery. The man, obviously a bouncer of some description, pointedly returns, and taking a seat at the far end of the bar where he can keep an eye on you as much as the rest of the room, picks up a new tablet and starts flicking through it. Aiken finally acknowledges you. "Ya choice is what's on tap, or basic spirits." he states, seemingly unimpressed, or unsuprised at the incident. Customer service is obviously not a strong point with him.

"Day 617 - Things aren't going quite as well as we hoped."

Hi all. Ok - this is simple, old school, forum based roleplay. Play nice, give people chances to take actions, don't power play, all that type of thing. I've deliberately set it over 100 years ago so people can play whatever character they like without having in-game character issues etc. It's all for fun. Please only post in-character - any out-of-character questions etc, start a new related thread please. Anon. <<Datetime: 24240124-19360000Z11>> <<Location: geo:-31.2,136.816667>> Over one hundred years ago... It is a dark and stormy night when you arrive at Port Drum. If you are a regular of the three day trip to or from from Armstrong Crater, you know this is always the case, a side effect of some 20 moon-shots and returns a day. Port Drum is one of the world's busiest lunar transit sites, handling most of the non-commercial traffic bound to or from in-system. As a transport hub, it is intensely busy, and one would be forgiven for not realising that not even a kilometre away was the end of a teeming transient populace and the start of desert for as far as the eye could see, until one eventually hit Perth some 2500 kilometres (around 1600 miles) away. Originally it was a military testing range, this sprawling space port covering an area larger than England named Woomera by the original inhabitants – now gone centuries past when the Australian mainland had become too damaged by climate change to sustain human settlement. Perth, the closest real urban centre, was now the most isolated (and subterranean) city in the world – a last stubborn holdout against a Southern Hemisphere summer which would kill an exposed man in under an hour. People finding themselves in Port Drum aren't like the huddled masses scratching out an existence in the camps around the Arks - people here have stories to tell. Aiken’s Bar is typical of the drinking holes one finds in places which people never really call home. Dark, smoke filled and possessed with the quiet murmur of people who don’t like or trust the general patronage, and prefer to huddle in their own small cliques, talking amongst themselves. You pause at the top of the steps, wondering if you are making the right choice entering. This was not your place, not your world. Your mianzi – your social standing and reputation, mean nothing here. But it doesn't look at first glance that those within give a tinker’s cuss about saving, or losing, face, or indeed, what level of social influence they exert at all. These people are Belters for the most part – miners and spacers who provide much of the raw materials required by a high technology society, let alone the Project Rebirth, which can not be sourced natively on Earth. As you descend into the darkness, the details of the bar become clearer. Behind the bar stands the bartender, a short, skinny and mostly toothless Latino who you take took to be the bar owning Aiken in question, (by simple virtue of his black tool-jock’s shirt with his name stitched in cursive white over the pocket). He nods at you uninterestedly. Scattered throughout the crowd are the obvious Alphas, easily spotted – off duty ship-security types, mercenaries, one or two off duty UMF officers, some escort pilots and more than a few of what you are pretty sure are pirates of various shades. Violence has remained, despite the calm of the world, surprisingly common place once one leaves atmosphere. In other corners you spot Ethereans, discussing art, philosophy and politics, Emporeans cutting deals and more than one drunken Luminous academic debating with their peers, and every other representation of humanity one can think of.

I just can't get why people think "Alpha" testing is the same as being in the "Alpha" teams that are first on Alioth in game (which really, is Beta). I think you should all be really clear - these CCP's are about Beta onwards, when game persistence matters. Scenarios you can reasonably expect from Alpha testing based on extensive experience: Expect the server to be wiped and reset daily. The concept of "starting level" - expect that you'll be able to create OP characters at, in some cases, max level cap. Expect that they will want at least a couple of load tests where everyone gets on at once and goes to the same location. Expect that they will want to do the same thing, but with combat. Expect that they will want to do the same thing but with building / construction. Expect that if you are in Alpha, it's not about fun, but hard work, breaking the server and/or pushing it to it's limits. Expect that in Alpha, they may also want to test the Org system, which may involved people making, joining and disbanding orgs to test Legate/Role mechanisms, trading, permissions etc. If you are in a real Alpha test, you are by extension, essentially an NQ employee, so in game orgs and loyalty to same is pointless. (To put it another way - people may look a bit silly going to all this effort only to find Alpha is actually "everyone is in the same org and makes characters that don't last longer than 12 hours..." ) tl;dr - Make this all about Beta, and remove references to Alpha testing. Trust me.

Yeah - it's pretty lonely here in the future.

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