Best Of

I am super bummed that this event is getting the axe prematurely due to negative feedback.

Just going to go out and say this from an uncursed person's perspective - it really sucks not being able to go out and do milestones for fear that someone may be lurking in phase or come wandering by to clap Sryaen on the shoulder and say, "Hey, long time no see!" while passing on the curse. It's anxiety-inducing. The paranoia is real and it's maddening that I can really only rely on my own intel I've gathered on y'all and to keep an accurate headcount of who is showing symptoms and who is suspected. But you know what? I'm having an absolute blast with this event. I love that I was able to provide some thrill of the hunt for some of y'all that were chasing down Sryaen (mad props at @Fezzix who got me with a touch but the curse didn't take).

So while the majority of the playerbase has this 'curse' and they're able to be out and about, bashing, doing PVP, literally being out in the open; I, on the other hand, have taken a vastly different approach in that Sryaen really hasn't left his house for longer than 5-10 min the past almost real-life week. There is a way to opt out of this event, but why would I? These volunteers and staff members create events for us, and I'll be damned if I'm not gonna be along for the ENTIRE ride. I'm not saying things are perfect - I have some of my own gripes and issues with certain things not being addressed, but this post is specifically about the curse event and my feedback on it.

Pros:

- Love the way this event has made me work on my spying tactics more. There's way more relics and means of detection nowadays than there ever used to be, so I had to be VERY careful sometimes in the early days of this curse.
- The sheer unknowns were great. I shadowed Valeria for over an hour before she showed a symptom tick, so it really ramped up the internal question of: "Do I wait a little longer to make sure they're clear or should I just call it?" Had I left 10 min earlier like I'd planned to, she would've had at least another 1-2 RL days before Sryaen caught wind of her actually being cursed.
- The level of organization the cursed people came to display was really fantastic. I applaud you guys. Some of the traps y'all set for Valorie were just downright diabolical - trapping her in the mines? Oof. After I heard about that, I was determined that if I ever got caught while doing my mine daily, I'd necrosis in there before I ever let y'all get a touch off on me.
- The level of hush-hush displayed in the early and middle days of this curse event. Y'all really remembered the first rule of Fight Club and I am so proud to say I have never seen such secrecy in all the years I've been playing Aetolia, especially when it came to both tethers coming together for a common goal.
- Gonna give a big shoutout here to @Saltz for really sticking with this curse RP, because I know he is still going through the growing pains of finding his feet as a city leader but he's poured himself into the role of a Vanguard who got got early on. He made some unpopular decisions and we'll see where the fallout from that lands, but I just want to say I appreciate you sticking with it and I have absolutely no hard feelings towards you from one player to another.
- This has really solidified some friendships ICly in some ways. I can only speak from the perspective of an uncursed person, but those few of us that are still healthy have really been leaning heavily on one another to keep us sane while staying locked inside.

Cons:

- I wish CURSEWHO was not a thing because I would have loved the challenge of being able to masquerade and lie my way to survival by trying to fool the cursed people into thinking I was with them.
- From the beginning this seemed like the narrative was to get as many people as cursed as possible. Like, obviously, now we know that's the case because of this announce post was meant to directly influence the mob strength. However, the uncursed people were left with very little to do except just.. avoid being touched. So that's why I decided to start keeping a list of people who had started to show the symptoms - and this list was admittedly TINY at first. Maybe 5-8 people. At one point near the end (I haven't updated this list in days because there's really no point now), the number of names on my list went from 39 confirmed/suspected to 62 practically overnight. So, glad that I was able to give myself something to do during this because I seemed to be getting dead-ended with trying to talk to Shahina or Lord Sammonward.
- This has been mentioned before, but I disliked the idea of cursemotes being unavoidable and they seemed to promote godmodding. Literally, someone could walk in and go "cursemote runs up and drags his/her hands all over $Sryaen's face and then runs away before $Sryaen_he has a chance to react." like.. bro, really? That's just really scummy and I'm glad that the cursemotes went to the pools for review, but this event really should have never boiled down to some of the crappier tactics I heard about some people using.
- The idea that killing people was meant to remove curse levels. While this might be good in theory because the XP loss from player deaths was completely nixed, it became an impossible task because since the curse has a chance to be spread via PVP, why would the healthy even risk it if being cured wasn't a guaranteed thing? Also, near the middle and end of this event, the amount of cursed people vastly outnumbered the healthy so even if we put together a Cure Goon Squad to go around the realm icing people left and right, I doubt we'd get far before the Cursed wisened up and got organized to retaliate. Which also begs the other question - since people aren't supposed to be booted from orgs for stuff they do, how would say.. Sryaen justify himself to the city for walking in and murdering the Vanguard in cold blood? Since the Cursed are supposed to deny the existence of the curse, wouldn't they just assume that Sry had gone totally psycho and kick him out/enemy him to the city? Again, in theory it was a good idea and if I had enough time and interest from other parties, I would have loved the idea of assembling a group of resistance fighters who planned to pick off the Cursed one by one, maybe do some torture/interrogation RP. There was just so much potential here and I'm sad to see it cut short.

BUT let me end this huge post with the following: I loved what part I was able to be involved in this and I hope this doesn't deter the volunteers from trying to run events in the future. You'll never be able to please your fans or playerbase 100%, but I appreciated the effort put into this so, so much. Thank you for taking the time out of your lives to brighten ours, you magnificent kings and queens.