RRF/Malton Herald & Sun/Text/Text0310right

On Strike

• Taken from an account by Papa Petro himself

The strike was something that had been percolating as an idea for a while. Barcoded of the Pwotters had gone so far as to enter a suggestion into the wiki to the effect of 'Just get rid of zombies', both as a protest of how the game was going and for the trenchie-mindset of a lot of voters at the wiki. It had been months since we'd gotten an update, while survivors had gotten various buffs and tweaks, all the while our population numbers declined. The revive search buff at Caiger was the final nail in the coffin, and proved how deceptive our October campaign had been- while we were beating everyone we met in the field, we were facing an enemy with both qualitiative and quantitative superiority, and it was only by virtue of local superiority that we were winning fights.

And then came the update. While we admitted at the time that it was better than XP headshot, it was, at the time, it was the difference between getting kicked in the teeth and getting kicked in the nuts. The fact was that survivors were built with force multipliers designed for fighting against foes that outnumbered them. When they were given the numerical edge, those force multipliers were killers. Toss in the supply crates, and it was the final straw. The IRC essentially mutinied, and the die was cast.

The concept I had for the strike was two-fold. One, it was not to be in any way an attempt to 'force' Kevan Davis to do anything. His game, his choices. However, it was our feeling at the time that he was not aware of just how unhappy a significant portion of his player base was. (In a zombie 'apocalypse' game, no zombies equals no apocalypse, and that was the state we were heading for.)

Secondly, it was to have as little acrimony as possible, by drawing on as much goodwill as we had earned from our mutual respect garnered at Caiger. The result was a goodly number of survivor players who joined us in calling for some form of enhancements to gameplay.

The strike itself is kind of hazy for me. I was about to go to bed when the news came in, and spent the next thirty-odd hours overseeing the creation of the strike, the various debates about the strike, and finally what I'd hoped was the resolution of the strike, when Kevan answered us directly on the On Strike wiki page. With that, the RRF officially withdrew from striking, though several prominent members (including Grim) stayed with it.

As I took my leave of the strike, I did say that if Kevan didn't follow through with his promise of enhancements for zombie play, we were going to leave the game (something we'd agreed on in the War Council.) The plan from there was to take as many people as would follow us, and rebuild the RRF in some other game. With that in mind, as the strike went on, we began coming up with what might be our final war plan, one last huzzah to wave goodbye to Malton.

What came of that was March to the Sea, as well as operations Field Trip and Dinner out, which were recently paid off on by EXCURSION, while the Group 2 portion of March to the Sea is culminating in our latest strike on Calvert.

Because hey, the RRF always keeps its promises.

Memories of the Strike

• Taken from an account by Paddy Fitzgerald

Ah the Strike. I still treasure that one. Ah whole lot of zombies and harmans alike came to Whetcombe Park [53, 50] to show their support and even with so many enemies combined the deathtoll kept to a minimum. As a side effect the Strike also led to an unexpected change in the game.

With hundreds of zombies and humans, standing in one single square and having a lot of xp with nothing to do, deathrattle and speeches ran rampant. At that time every word spoken would be passed on to every single person present and standing. There were songs, jokes, poems, cries of joy and protest. It was too much for the server and the game was slowing down for everyone playing. This wasn't exactly a new thing, but I don't believe it happened that bad before. We actually had to ask people to stop chattering and to spread out over the bordering squares to prevent the server from dying for everyone because we didn't want to ruin the game for those not supporting us in such a way.

On December21th we received a new update, that still affects everyone today.

21st December 2005 The unprecedented and conversational gathering in Whetcombe Park has thrown up some serious server load issues we've never met before; this is why the game's been lagging so badly over the past day or so. There are now a couple of restrictions if you're in a block with more than fifty citizens - you won't see all of their names (or be able to interact with them all) without clicking "list names" first, and if you speak, your words will only be audible to the "nearest" fifty players, meaning the fifty most recently active ones.

Now I know someone posted about two days worth of chatter somewhere. Fess up the link lads!