On it...

You know, I thought I'd covered the free forum software out there when I was looking into which to use for this site, but MyBB is new to me (I kinda liked your custom black & green job, too). Looks pretty decent. What made you choose it?

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

and yes, it was always awkward when those players who we had RP'd being reinserted decided to come back....

Oh man, I bet!

(there was some fairly clear cut quote on this somewhere in the early chapters, I think? can't remember now)