You know. From my point of view this is not correct. I was talking to so many people during the last days. For years we were able to enjoy so many great moments in the Matrix that none of us will ever forget. Those memories make it kinda immortal. At least for me.

Okay one last thing (again)... I am in some curious mood tonight :s
What was this whole 'Rose' thing about? Did you try convince us all that Merv is the only way of life? I never got it... Maybe there was nothing to understand at all. Still think that this was one of the best events. Like the other one when you catched some lowbie and ran that event with just him. I never understood why you didn't do more events like that. Getting surprised by some official character out of the blue getting part of the storyline is probably the best expirience a player can have.

You mean the several events I ran as the neighborhood contact Rose? She isn't a Merv, she's one of the Spectrum...so maybe you meant something else. Anyway if you did mean Rose, well, those were just to explore types of events and interaction that I usually didn't do--playing with clothes, doing some sight-seeing, maybe getting to interact with some people who don't usually catch events.

I think early on I got in more "surprise" events, but later my event time was more structured through LESIG and hooking up with liaison-led groups, or just due to having things I needed to get done for the main story; the real problem in doing surprise lowbie events though was that the group of players who stalked me from event to event got so good at finding me that it was really hard to stage an event where I'd be able to interact with some lowbies without getting jumped by a group of hardcore 50's after a few minutes. Eh also I guess it was just getting harder and harder to find actual lowbies, as opposed to some vets' alts. Usually I'd need characters in a particular org, and it could just be real tough to find new people on their own that fit the bill.

Or I'd need players who were prepared for a lot of combat against pretty tough NPCs--this was the case more often than not for "main story" events--and for that I'd need at least some high level players along. So really the ones where I could hang with *just* lowbies were usually nearly pure RP events, and as scarce as lowbies or event-newbies were, lowbies/event-noobs interested in RPing with me were even more rare!

I was always overjoyed when I managed to get to some actual newbies in an event, though, or even veterans who I'd never really got to mess with in an event before. Those were some of the events I remember best, because often you get great individual interaction when you're with an individual or a very small group, and they aren't there just trying to "game" the event, because they might not even realize it's an "event":

- Halborn killing the Oracle with a few relatively lowbie characters trying to stop him in Debir. I was terrified that some vet would show up and pop a Terminator Bit in the split second where the Oracle would be vulnerable so that I could kill her as Beirn (this was what I got for not thinking it through completely in the previous update period and making a custom vulnerability ability for her...), so I ran that one *really* late at night in the "dead" time between subchapters, and the two players who showed were great, and their responses seemed very honest.



- Persephone sending a few people who I don't think I'd seen at events much before (and I'm pretty sure one was an actual newbie...) down into the dungeon to get the Black Widow, and then having Persephone tell BW in front of those players (and some vets who had found me by that time) that she pretty much wanted to kill herself. As you can see from Widow's greeting to those two players



this was another one that I ran really late at night in order to have a better chance of avoiding the event hunters and getting in some actual new player interaction.

- Veil getting a new player to help her go meet the Morpheus sim in Westview--that was when the Morph sim was making those odd appearances there, shortly before the Oracle disappeared. Another difficulty about trying to get an even in with lowbies is that lowbies usually had their heads down, just running missions, and wouldn't notice or respond to tells. So to get this guy--I think this was after a few failed attempts with him and another lowbie--I finally had to break into his mission space and jump right in front of him so he couldn't miss me!



I didn't usually like to interrupt players forcibly like that, but I was running out of time and I really wanted to partner with a lone and fairly unknown Cyph (or Machinist in a pinch) player for that one.

- Ookami taking a couple Mervs I hadn't seen around much before to Ashencourte and telling them about the good ol' days



Always had to work fast when grabbing players in a public area, because you never knew when some huge crowd might show up. This one was before the event hunters had really cottoned on to me hiding in archives (or at least before they had alts in all orgs at all level ranges), so once I got these two into the archive, I was relatively safe from having the event crashed by others.

- Ookami hunting and killing Unlimit NPCs in Westview with a single Merv player she took to calling "little bird"; oh hmm I was so stealth on that one that I didn't even post the dialogue

- Playing an unknown "redpill" and hiring a dude on Vector to kill a guy who'd taken his place--was tough to find a player I didn't know who would pay attention! But the guy I finally got was great, and blew Griffin a lot of smoke in ways that event vets generally wouldn't have; like, he was really interacting with Griffin almost like he'd have done with a regular RP player, rather than trying to guess what was needed to "win" the event or whatnot. I also liked that one because I thought it was an interesting twist for the character of the cryptic pony-tailed Agent Griffin--that he might not be a program: how would you know? This was part of what I was thinking of writing an MXO story about. ;)



Took a not inconsiderable effort to get at least one of this team of players to play with me; I offered outright bribery, and even then it was tough to get organized with someone.



I really loved the player's reactions to the unusual Agent Griffin:





So much that I stalked him afterwards to see if he'd say anything about it to his faction mates.



I had disappeared and he was still in the story/interaction we had created. Man that was fantastic.

(That Griffin one reminds me of another counter-example: here, where I spent a lot of time tracking down players and sending them tells to try to get a Machinist posse organized on the sly--difficult, at least when trying to do it with players who weren't used to events!







Oh yeah and also when I'd do sneaky events like that, hardcore event players players would often be kind of ticked that I'd snuck below their radar. :/ Or someone would be ticked that I'd done something with faction X, even if many of the players there hadn't had many chances to be in events--as was the case in this one, where I eventually had to give up on tells to individual players since they weren't responding, and just had to shout to the whole faction because by that time I had already spent too much time trying unsuccessfully to contact new individuals.





Or they'd flame the newbies I'd found for not knowing every single detail of the current story. >_< Often event vets would make fun of event noobs for not staying "IC" and all that, but players not RPing when talking to event characters never really bothered me as long as the player was actually being straightforward about it.)

Sometimes people would even think I was a super-scripted NPC or just a regular player, that was always funny, too; like hm there was a guy who found me lurking on top of the Mara church as Beirn, just staring down at the hardline; he asked me if level 70 (Beirn's level) was the highest now; I had Beirn say "nah there's bigger." That satisfied his curiosity, and he just jumped away.



It was funny because usually I'd have had vets tracking me down almost immediately, but nobody else found me up there, even though I was in view of the Mara C hardline, and just hanging up there for a long time, so eventually I just had to jump down and strut up to the hardline. There were even a few times where I was hanging in Debir as the Oracle, just waiting for whoever would come along, and a casual player would find me, and either talk to me OOC (tricky for her to respond to! I think I posted one of those once), or just run right past.

Actually come to think of it, the "surprise" events were part of what caused the event-hunter group to form, I think, because for a while I was doing a lot of surprise events, where I'd just show up somewhere unannounced and try to get spotted by nearby players. What happened was that casual players would just go right by me without batting an eye, so it was sometimes hard to get those events started, because the players wouldn't necessarily realize it *was* an event; and then some veterans started realizing I was doing these surprise events with whoever would show, and they started developing ways to find me wherever I went so they could get in on those events--so eventually it was just the same group of hardcore event hunters at all those events, because they'd always find me before I could get something going with people who *weren't* looking for me. It got pretty bad--the event in the warehouse next to Camon where Silver gave some clues about the General (6.3.3, Feb 1st 2007) was finally the turning point for me with those events, because I'd waited there in easy /who range of that busy hardline with plenty of players for a long time, including lots of vets, but none of them came looking for me, until finally the event hunters showed, and I found myself doing yet another event with the same exact people who'd tracked me down to like the last umpteenth other such events (including others where I was easier to find or had just gone and grabbed some people) and I had to drop the "surprise" method for the most part, and switch to a more structured system of spreading events across servers and orgs via regular liaison-organized events, except for once in a blue moon, and usually at a really unusual (for me) time of the day, because the hardcore event people would come along and crowd the other people out; not that they did it maliciously (for the most part...>_>) but they were just way more into being in an event than the players who hadn't really been in one like that before and weren't really sure what was going on.

This wouldn't have been such a problem back with say the old LET who could do multiple events on multiple servers simultaneously; but when I was there it was just me in one spot, so everyone who was into it would track me down there, and so the chance to do a lowbie/newbie thing would vanish after a few minutes. I even tried running some in low-level constructs, but once the vets figured *that* out, I started to get found pretty fast even in there by vet lowbie alts. So yeah, hardcore event players + just one event dev with limited time = hard to get and keep the element of surprise! I could manage it once in a while, but it wasn't a sure thing, and trying to set it up usually took extra prep time and planning, and sometimes a *lot* of waiting. You know, to catch...the human reaction.



Say is that Wright's normal "skin" in a few of those screens you posted, or is it altered somehow?

Wow, detailed reply is detailed. Thanks a lot for that. It's great to get some insight. Sounds quite logical that it was nearly impossible to do small surprise events.
Oh my. That last screenshot of Jul1a was actually the reason for posting this since it was my second favourite moment in The Matrix. That was actually quite close to being caught btw. I sent a tell to a faction mate after I spotted you. She was meeting with Stanten at that moment and said something like 'jul1a just spotted the architect in lamar' (or was it Hampton?) in area chat. Of course Othinn was nearby and already on his way over there :p
I never played around with 'The Guide' so all screenshots are not edited - well, except for this signature.

EDIT: Just went through the thread again. Forgot to mention that sending tells to Korthex and Stanislava, getting an afk auto-reply then stalking them to screenshot them in-game was kinda priceless :D

It's right next to that HL by the subway and big intersection; I was thinking it was Hampton but now you've made me uncertain! Close to Lamar, anyway, could've been in there.



Hey, someone do me a favor and tell TasteeWheat that the Architect's post with these images is missing from his mirror of the thread on the impressive mxoforums.com:

http://www.mxoforums.com/Thread.aspx?po ... 6300022893

I lol'd reading your long post Rare, that must've been annoying yet ironically funny to wanting to do more unannounced events but unable to find participants. Just: lol - And the reactions of those players were even better haha - thanks for posting that. I've spoken so many times with people that events shouldn't even be announced and that we loved the way of LET doing events, that we could log in and there was a chance we'd run in on an event, or we'd get a tell from someone who found an event.

But now I understand why and it's actually quite obvious, like you said; you can't make such things happen just by yourself. Need moar people.

I've also mailed TasteeWheat :)



I don't know if you're aware of this but for many people you've became pretty much the God of the Matrix ;) You were the one controlling the strings on pretty much every side of the game. Regardless if I liked your doings or not, I hope you don't think it's not been appreciated. Without you/with someone else, everything would've been different and by that logic, I think you did an amazing job. Daily events, content, learning how to add new stuff and for a good while you even took the time to answer all our questions regarding...anything, because you did pretty much everything! That was the fuel that kept MXO running during all those years.

My personal biggest disappointment was when Gray told Cryptos that reinsertion was a lie (actual words: "We never reinserted someone"?). That felt completely unnecessary to publicly make that statement. I could honestly find myself in the 'thinking of a machine', that it'd be more logical to kill a human than to reinsert. That explains everything about the memory-whipe I guess. It does make a lot of sense. So much, that I think the lack of confirmation on the issue was more fun than knowing the truth.

What I wondered though, because I found some odd coincedences with discussions on DN1 and the Live Events: Did you ever plan a live event to like 'stop' the discussion? For instance, our Cypherite faction on Syntax had some RP going on with EPN, after the Truce broke. It was all about stopping awakenings. Our event recaps on DN1 ended up in heavy discussions about how blue pills work, opposed to red pills. EPN mostly found them to be gimmicks, because everyone would take the red pill anyway... and obviously, we Cypherites felt that the blue pill does work! Just no one would know how they work, what they do. =(
But no side could say who was right about the issue about blue pills, so our RP died a bit... until you logged in to Veil on Syntax, contacted Merron in our faction and we got a kick ass (unannounced! yay!) event that explained how blue pills stop the tracer signal of the red pill. Was that in regards to our RP, because it sure was a most welcome coincedence if it wasn't. :D

So this also made me think: Pyraci once opened a discussion on DN1 regarding the feasability of reinsertion. Was the revelation from Gray 'we never reinserted someone before' a sort of comfirmation on that thread? Because in a way, that was also quite welcome. It never crossed my mind before that the machines would kill a human instead of reinserting them.
Playing as a Cypherite, it was a disappointment to realise this. Even though after a while I accepted this, this is one of the few things that I never really understood. Hope I am not bothering you with asking this.

Oh, thanks for contacting TW! :)

The pill thing was on my mind--and maybe yours--because that was right around the time where Zion had found that the Machines had cracked the red pill program, so there was that whole thing with getting Danielle Wright to make a new, secure version of it. So I was or had been thinking a lot about how the red pill program would work, and that led to thinking about the blue pill program, too. We had always just sort of glossed over what they did, but since at that point their functions were pivotal to the story, it was necessary to establish some specifics.

I think what Gray said was more along the lines of "There is no such procedure."

Oh, yeah, here it is:

http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/post ... 6300012974



It seemed necessary for me because I was having a hard time (this event was at the end of 7.2) carving out an independent identity for the Cypherites; they had been conceived and written as patsies of the Machines--a way to have Machine aggression functioning under the Truce. The Truce was going to end at the end of one more subchapter, and if the Cypherites were going to carry on, they needed to break that dependence on the Machines, and have their own independent point of view.

The idea of reinsertion was also a weakness at the center of the Cypherite's own conception of their purpose; this became apparent to me after having played their org leaders in events for a while, and having so many discussions end or trail off in people discussing the notion of wanting to finish their job (getting rid of red pills, rebellious redpills, and all that, I suppose) and go "back to sleep" by being reinserted; there was always this sense that they didn't really want to be there, and that they would off themselves as soon as possible. That's interesting, but when forced up against more life-affirming or independent arguments, it always seemed weaker--an argument for self-extinction. As long as "let's get out of here as soon as possible" was the backbone of their motivation, it was very hard to come up with ways to make them feel like a vital organization.

The third main reason for doing it was that there was no mechanism established for it at all: not in what the Wachowskis had written, not in what Paul had written, and not in anything actually supported by the game's art or code. If reinsertion was supposed to be part of what Cypherites do, then sooner or later, we'd have to show it, and I simply didn't have a way to do it. I could have done something in RP, of course--/takepill, /sit, /mood drunk or whatnot--but that didn't seem to me to hold enough water for something as fundamental as reinsertion would be. And I sure as heck couldn't actually reinsert a player character just through RP, because I'd have no guarantee that they wouldn't decide to come back at some point; and I didn't want to get into deleting characters.

Besides which, the more I thought about it, and as you've mentioned, reinsertion didn't really seem to fit into how the Machines operated, and if I had tried to create an RP reinsertion procedure, I would also have had to retrofit that into all of the previous story, which had never dealt with reinsertion in a concrete manner. There's that one mention in one Machine intro mission or whatever it is, but those missions were not written by Paul; they were written by a mission designer like I was back before the game launched, and the suggestion of reinsertion in that one wasn't really written as part of a larger, cohesive scheme. On the other hand, you had the way the Machines treated Cypher, and the deceptive way they'd been treating the Cypherites all along, not to mention the considerations of what Machine efficiency would actually mean for something like reinsertion.

So that was more or less why, I think. When Cryptos and Gray had that confrontation, the Machines were pretty much preparing to write the Cypherites off as a botched experiment: Cryptos had never been fully under control, and had then been even further brain-fried by Seraph, and it was becoming clear to the Machines that their shadow efforts to penetrate and hamper Zion through the Cypherites had failed to prevent or even adequately detect some sort of far-reaching Zion scheme. In that sense the Cypherite discovery of New Zion in chapter 8.0 redeemed them to a certain extent in the eyes of the Machines, but it also rendered their previous purpose obsolete, and if the Cypherites by that time had not had something to fight for beyond going back into the pods, then there would have been no point in keeping them around. A few people argued that they and EPN should have been removed at that point, but while that would have made my workload easier, I think losing the orgs entirely would have been much less fair to the players in those orgs, and it also would have pretty much removed four story characters by making the leaders of those orgs redundant; the story characters were some of the most unique resources/content/art that was available to me, and I didn't want to lose them by rendering them obsolete like that.

That explains a lot. I see why it was better to get the reinsertion out of the way.
I always thought that no player should ever be reinserted, not through their own stories but definitely not 'officially'. Cypherites were labeled often as bad guys and for a bad guy to get away, well let's say that ending a story like that isn't very cinematic. Cypher died, obviously. I've also seen a few player stories about failing to get to reinserted. I guess it simply comes down to good vs. bad; good wins. Exept when the movie is about cracking large vaults. :P

To accompany that, our faction wrote out something like an oath for our service, way before we learned that no procedure for reinsertion existed. We wouldn't reinsert ourselves before we could 100% guarantee we'd never be awakened again. Impossible requirements, like a bug-free Matrix, extinction of redpills, I am not going to bore you with the details but we had it pretty tight. The reason we come up with that was because, as you say, Cypherites had a weakness. And it showed so many times during roleplay, that we wanted to get the issue out of the way as well.
I guess that was part of the disappointment for me as it was for many people who had reinsertion related to their own story.

Doesn't matter, playing as a Cypherite, the live event wasn't very effective regarding our motivation but from a players perspective, such big plot twists were always exciting. Especially because they happen on a less frequent base than general twists. Even movies usually end good instead of bad. I was never bothered with the Machine introduction comics, or the mention in the Matrix comics about reinsertion. I always thought it made sense, from whatever perspective I looked at it, Machine reasoning or simply good vs. bad and I see why it was a sort of necessity to get this out of the way to forward the organisation too. Reinsertion became more of an excuse rather than a deserved reward.

Thanks for the answer sir :)

I dunno if in a perfect world it was better to get it out of the way, but for me in my MXO work it seemed like something I had to do, given what I had to work with. Your faction's reinsertion approach was a pretty clever way of handling things. I knew it would conflict with the backstories some people had come up with for themselves, but I felt it was a necessary step, and eh well the Machine lie (if it WAS a lie...dun-dun-dun! Eh nah mostly kidding. :P) was at least convincing I guess.

Cypherites might have been conceived as bad guys--they were certainly cast that way early on, what with "The Masked" and the deception and cloak and dagger stuff and all that--but I always felt that I couldn't really make any of the orgs out to be "bad guys" permanently; everyone wants to live, everyone has their own motivations and goals, but however different they were, it seemed to me that I needed to avoid casting any org as irretrievably good or evil. A lot of Cyph players clearly liked the dance with the dark side, wearing masks, pulling jacks and all that, and Veil appealed to that aspect in certain of her public moods and actions, and was certainly "evil" if you don't accept any of the argument that ends justify the means, but if you do, well, then maybe she had a good reason for killing Shimada, for instance, or thought she did, at least; and Cryptos and his personality alteration was maybe even more hard to follow, but there was always a certain intent of nobility about him, I think.

And then of course the real "bad guys" strictly from watching the movies should have been the Machines--and they were the ones behind the Cyphs after all--but then there was the Truce and they weren't supposed to be bad guys any more, just guys who had a hard time expressing their feelings, maybe. So it was complicated. MXO usually compensated for all that when it needed a bad guy by inventing a villain of the month or so who wasn't in one of the player orgs. That gets pretty old and predictable, of course... If the Oligarch thing had continued, for instance, it would have emerged that there were different factions within that group, and even though most were pretty amoral, they might not have been downright "evil" all the time, etc--but I certainly could have had good and bad people in there, which is a nice option to have, sort of like how Anome's lieutenants varied in their motivations and degrees of downright evilness. I felt like it was necessary to have people who seemed like bad guys now and then to stir things up--and game-mechanically speaking I needed big bad guys that everyone could fight at least once in a while--but for the story the goal was to find ways to keep moving player orgs into different combinations of conflicts and alliances due to their particular outlooks and what was happening around them, rather than resorting to casting side a as evil and side b as good or whatever.

Hm... You know again "ideal world" speaking we'd have been able to generate sort of individual bad/good guys for separate orgs on a regular basis, so instead of having to have say a Danielle Wright everyone beats up on (she, of course, thought she was doing the right thing in her own way, alas), Zion might have had a particular NPC target to foil, Cyphs might have had their own, etc, and there would be all kinds of new bosses and quests or whatnot for each org on a regular basis, and if you had those things you could do separately for the orgs it would have been easier for instance to present the feeling of an ongoing and active man/machine war, etc. All that stuff would'a been doable given the systems we had, but eh, just wasn't the scale of what I could do by myself. The breaking the Truce, for that matter, was a similar issue for me to breaking reinsertion, something that was necessary for progress. Well I need to stop rambling and get some more drawing done. :P