The Darker side of planetarion - Wrath

The Darker Side of Planetarion - Wrath - Posted by Zhil

The dark side is quoted as being "seductive" within the space fantasy known as Star Wars. Sources state that the light side embodies peace, knowledge, and serenity whilst the dark side encompasses fear, anger, and aggression. From this very basic definition it is all to easy to attribute the dark side to Wrath, but that is mere image for a war game. To truely attribute Wrath or any other alliance to the 'dark side' you would have to reflect its actions into the general sphere of things. Naturally the dark side must be evil, but was Wrath evil? Many within it were just members who proved to be loyal and complete orders without question which is not necessarily evil.

Evil is not always easy to recognise. An innocent act may ultimately result in great suffering. An act of revenge may save countless of lives and the pure of heart can lash out in anger. Evil may lurk beneath a mask of virture. Whether an act is evil or not often boils down to a question of motivation and motivations can be hard to identify. Hatred, vengeance, pride, envy, jealousy and cruelty are all possible motives that can be attributed to the dark side but again simply feeling these emotions does not necessarily make them part of the dark side. So how can we determine whether someone or indeed, an alliance in this game is truely evil? You hear about it all the time, it is a tool to demonize an alliance as it can surely help keep the attention of your own alliance in return. Fury and Legion were often targetted especially by Xanadu who had their knightly virtue image - and an image that it was to 'save the game'.

I however will not attempt to categorize alliances into good or evil, black or white or any such definition. Such is not my right, but I can share some thoughts upon Wrath, an entity I partly created and thus come to a conclusion upon Wrath itself and indeed myself.

Let's begin as I share totally biased and zealous thoughts upon this subject. I won't ask for your patience for me to reach a conclusion because I may not reach one that is satisfactory to you but it may help reveal part of my character and my portrayle of things. I do not claim that everything written is 100% correct and true in context of the game, but since I perceive things in a roleplay light I generally attribute things to such an 'acting environment'. So if you wish to read my ramblings, then read on...

Rapier

Ah, the humble beginnings of what was the best ever recruitment wing ever under the Fury alliance were not something I look back upon regulary. The pain to think about what had happened too Fury during r4 is a stain upon my memory, an ink blot upon my belief in Fury being the best alliance in this games history but alas, it is needed to figure out Wrath's creation.

Fury after r4 was a mess, there was no doubt about it. It has already been mentioned on these boards, but many don't truely appreciate how much of a mess Fury really was. To give a true extent to the problem a seperate channel was originally set up just for the 'core' of Fury incase the main alliance collapsed, but in general activity was at an all time low and Fury membership numbers were not great. We however, did survive r4 and Sid in his shrewd manner had managed to secure Fury's place in the political ladder. I find it amazing to this day in how he pulled that off, but he did. Fury Provisional had failed but in all fairness it never received enough attention from command - many of Fury's greatest players for the latter rounds came from this recruitment project, but on all command related accounts it was a failure. Thus a new project was to be set up - a seperate recruitment alliance in something akin to the earlier CpV, Dominion or Sith. Meth was the first to hear of this and to be involved in the project which many people have found shocking. I already stated before that when I was asked by him to help out I was not exactly fond of the idea. I was a Fury Officer then and thought I was much more use to Fury where I was. To set up something away from the Fury community scared and repulsed me.

This is where the first sign of the 'Dark Side' comes in. It was hinted that there would be a higher rank available if I was to be involved in Wrath. This was quite interesting for me - power is seductive, and I wished to help out Fury. Fury needed a good recruitment drive to rebuild after r4 and with Meth being so keen to do things without the necessary red tape that had plagued Fury during r4, I was becoming convinced. I wanted to work with Meth again since we had been a good team during the last round. So the project began.

With a rough command drawn out, we first needed an identity. A name suggested by Lokken was used, a breach of Fury security in revealing the project details to someone not Fury, but he had experience with Sith so it was a necessary breach.

Project Rapier was born. Now, this was the birth of what is known today as Wrath. Was it in any way evil? No. The recruitment alliance was needed by Fury to rebuild thus the motivations were clearly nothing to do with negative emotions. The only slight sign of the Dark Side was in my acceptance as I was made a Fury Executive (although Meth was not). I gained a position of power and I liked that.

Anger

It is pointless for me to describe the entire setup phase. It is obvious that Rapier was changed to Wrath before recruitment of members began and a core was formed. The core were built upon and Wrath became operational. Nothing within that hints at anything dark or evil, Wrath made no pacts or deals to gain members bar the obvious requirements for Wrath to be in a Fury controlled galaxy or for Wrath to have control of the galaxy. (There were quite a few of 'Wrath galaxies' during r5.) Zilch relevance to the topic at hand so I will move swiftly on to a considerable way through Wrath's history. (Note this is still in r5 however.)

Anger is symptomatic of frustration. Stress without a suitable means of release will result in tension. Tension can result in violent behaviour, aimed at relieving the frustration all at once. Funnily enough a quote from Star Wars about anger is the following:

Quote:
Originally said by Yoda
"...fear leads to anger..."

And Yoda was quite right in saying this. Fear is a common factor that brings on anger. The fear of failure can create huge surges of anger within people.

What does this have to do with Wrath? Everything. For Wrath to fail would have meant to fail Fury and thus fail those who had trusted to give you that position of power. To say this did not create stress upon me would be a total lie, but Wrath looked so professional and so organized didn't it? How on earth could it fail?

Wrath command was small. Really small. For an alliance that would rival some of the major alliances in terms of strength and power it was way understaffed. Wrath had 3 Executives, 1 Communication Officer, 1 Admin Officer, 3 or so Military Officers and that was it. There were no recruitment officers - all recruitment was done through myself and Meth in a rather archaic system of two email inboxes and an utterly ridicolous admin system I devised that had a code in two parts - one was the code for wrath r5 known only to the Executive whilst the second part was a unique number to that applicant. Now imagine taking away Meth from this along with the Military Officers being unable to cope and in general military having no direction. The threat of failure looms closure just creating more stress.

Then take away some of the Military Officers and you can see how extremely short staffed Wrath was becoming. Needless to say more officers were promoted and a new Executive was made (the rather unknown but brilliant guy who went under the nick known as WonderBra and was one of the original Esthar in Fury.)

Now imagine me delegating my tasks to the only original Executive that remains, a guy known as Borric, so I could take a needed break. Then imagine my horror when Borric quit Wrath upon the day my break was to begin. Anger set in. The fear of failure was rife. I felt betrayed and the possibility of Wrath crashing down was a real possibility.

This leads me nicely onto...

Hatred

The target of hatred is quite clearly an enemy. They become the source of all the things he despises and of all the ills that plague him. To his thinking, the object of their hatred conciously attempts to thwart him. But it is not a personal vendetta; he has a right and even a duty to destroy him and is thus accompanied by a sense of righteousness.

This all perfectly fits my opinion of Borric around the time of his betrayel and 'alliance hop' to Legion. I despised Borric so much during that time of my career - there was nothing more that I wanted than to ruin him and his life within Planetarion. I made attempts to sabotage his acceptance into Legion, and even tried to gain support within the Fury command to make a move to stop Borric's admittance into Legion. It would make it so much easier to get rid of him for good then. My efforts failed, but it spurred me on. I was not going to fail Fury over some traitorous scumbag. The oh so precious ally called Legion could have him. I would get my revenge when Wrath had fulfilled its duty to Fury. When Fury was strong enough again I would have ample opportunity to wipe Borric's planet in every round thereafter in petty revenge for his actions.

His betrayel of me would never be forgotten and so my grip upon Wrath tightened. It had now become much more personal for me to succeed.

Suffering

The war had been won. Wrath was in a safe and prosperous position. The drilled Fury hopefuls were forced to work together to take down large targets and grind our enemies to dust. Wrath's victims were depersonalized - a planet was nolonger goverened by a player. There was no 'need' or 'requirement' for me to remotely consider that my ruthless actions were affecting people and their ability to love the game. They were mere objects. Tools - to be used or destroyed as I liked.

In this case, it was simply to create a tighter bond within Wrath and formulate groups of people working together with little personal gain. It was for the greater glory. Fleet catches, wave attacks etc became much more common. Most of the 'public Wrath attacks', those given out in the member channel, were kill missions with very little roids to gain. This was to secure our dominance for Fury and its allies but it was also a tool to simply monitor activity.

It was still not enough however, I needed a better test for Wrath and its members. A fairly new high ranking alliance existed that held no bonds to Fury and would provide such entertainment. Although I could easily place it here I will give a new section for it. NFU like all other planets - was simply an object to me. It's fate was unimportant.

I wanted to flex the military muscle of Wrath and flex I did...

Aggression

To act out a desire simply to see blood is definately a trait of the dark side. The war upon NFU was definately aggression. Probably the quickest ever victory between two alliances, NFU were informed in a declaration of war given by myself to some Officer in their public channel. It was received and everything seemed to proceed as planned. I retained a sense of honour in informing NFU and giving them time to prepare defenses. Fury knew of this political movement and generally was not to take any part in the war. (Although some of its members would inevitably be involved in defending fellow Wrath galaxy mates and I did have to seek permission to do so from Sid. Fury could have easily denied such a war.)

NFU surrendered before Wrath launched a single attack, but I would not call it off. Wrath launched as planned and I ordered the complete slaughter of NFU without mercy or regret.

Most definately evil. I had no wish to cause suffering, but my motivation was simply to use NFU as a test for Wrath's capabilities and to provide better activity data. However, this was not the only reason that NFU was chosen...

Vengeance

Borric's betrayel still rested within me, and it did fuel my decision to target NFU in particular. There were reports of some Fury members, most notably Sakera and Pies being involved in NFU more than they had let on to Sid. After Borric, my tolerance for any sort of traitors or treasonous acts was non-existant.

The inner and probably most darkest reason to target NFU was to expose them as traitors to Fury. The destruction of NFU was icing on the cake. Not only had I given ample proof for Cayl to remove them, but their 'new home' had been ravaged.

A fitting event for Wrath to live up to it's name, if rather short-lived.

Greed

However this was not enough. Activity data was still unsatisfactory and stagnation was ripe. I wanted more. I wanted something else to test Wrath with.

Deep down, I wished to test Wrath against three opponents. These were: Thieves&Pirates, VeA and Legion itself. Not all at once naturally, but in a slow evolution. It would have been more beneficial to remove the threat of VeA and accidently catch Legion offguard before moving finally onto T&P itself.

Why those three? Simple. Hatred. Vengeance. Pride and obviously Greed. VeA would have been easy pickings - I simply wanted to bring to rest talk that VeA was equal to Wrath. Needless to say my joke request for a 'friendly' war between the two was denied. Legion would thus never be approved without full Fury backing, so it all went onto the backburner - but I was very willing to do it. I wished to give some payback to Legion for r4 and prove once more why Fury was 'better'. My hatred had to fester however, although I would like to point out that this was to do with the Legion alliance and image itself - not people. (I consider Rampage one of the best HC I got to work with ever.)

Thieves & Pirates was a different matter entirely. They attempted to use their influence within Fury to have their members promoted into Fury regardless of Wrath command. I found most T&P members admitted into Wrath unwilling to help out Wrath itself. They did defense to other T&P members without reporting to Wrath and it was the same in attacks. Wrath received criticism for its system being unable to adopt reports of members doing external run attacks, but I believed and still do that all members of Wrath should have been involved in its internal attacks and defenses. This is what led to the rather amusing remark from Focht to myself being a "Legion puppet", something we joke about today.

Still, none of these actually happened. I am unsure to the lengths I took to try and have them conducted so cannot give an accurate account of which were denied by whom.

Love

Although love is not in itself part of the dark side, it can create an opening for it to insinuate itself into someones heart. Love is delicate and can be upset by the slightest touch of doubt, anger or jealousy.

During r6 I handed over Wrath to Germania whilst I took command of Fury's military along with Meth. The introduction of races put me offguard totally so I made myself more tactical. Operation Barghest was Meth's work and was essentially a plan to destroy Deus first. When the plan was originally accepted and then declined my enthusiasm was quickly lost for the war as I took on a pessimistic viewpoint of the entire conflict. I fell into inactivity, but still I was unhappy in the way Wrath was being run by Germania. r6 Wrath have fond memories and in time I came to realize that the situations for r5 Wrath and r6 Wrath were different, but at the time I felt as though Germania was ruining the Wrath name so to speak and was quite vocal in my opinions of such.

Where does it fit in? In watching Wrath unable to produce the same results as r5 it caused me pain. It was almost watching a repeat of r4 (although the bounceback for Fury during r6 was most impressive and things never got 'that bad'). The fulfillment of having Wrath was gone and in its place was an aching emptiness.

I made plans to retake Wrath for myself once again, specifically r7 Wrath. To cut that short, my bid was going to be declined by Sid but with Sid not being around and Cryptic placed in charge I got Wrath back for r7.

Although r7 Wrath was hardly as successful as r5 it was not a total disaster and was still better than its competitor. Iliad. That was all that counted.

Jealousy

Noticing the success of Wrath, Legion wanted to recreate such a thing for the latter rounds. Legion needed good recruits, but also needed to clean up the image of VeA being inferior to Wrath. r5 Wrath command was asked questions but I personally did not believe Legion could pull it off. I felt the Wrath structure at the time was only suited to integrate with Fury and would take alot of work to fit into Legion.

But still, there was that niggling doubt that perhaps Legion could it off. This was a threat to Fury and in essence, Wrath. I made attempts to find out as much information about Iliad as possible - I did not wish for it to succeed and if neccessary I would have acted in attempts to sabotage. However, I and many others were correct. Iliad was plagued by many problems and didn't live up to the same success as Wrath. Not that Legion really required it with their success of Dominion, but it was something for me to be proud and smug at.

Final Say

So was Wrath evil? I will leave that up to the readers to decide. I personally do not think so. Whilst many of its acts were ruthless, the majority of its members and command did so without any negative fuelled thoughts. The question should perhaps be changed to whether I am evil? Perhaps. I believe I did things necessary to Wrath's survival and well-being.

I do however believe that the power corrupted me to some extent. I can easily blast into the emotions given above when Fury or Wrath is spoken ill off and my activity since has waned. The sheer effort of Wrath was a major burn out for me which leads me to believe all that raw emotion I put into the project not only made it succeed but came with a price to shatter my future prospects within the game. Ironically enough, this is in parallel to the 'price' of the Dark Side within Star Wars - I 'withered' away after my quick rise to power.

For once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny...