Advanced Technology Prevention Society

There's been a fair amount of confusion regarding this group's objective so allow me to clear some things up...

ATP Society's Goals

The Advanced Technology Prevention Society's goal is not actually to prevent all advanced technology. It's very specific things. I know, the name can be slightly misleading in that regard.

You can basically ask yourself:

• "Does this go against the spirit of the game?"
• "Will this ruin the game for players?"

The answers to these can be subjective and even polarizing, but they're the best we have.

The only things I think have been categorized like that so far are guns & gunpowder. The other things are so far off that they're probably not even possible.

I mean let's be real here... automobiles, airplanes, computers, they're not going to happen. They just aren't.

OOC / IC?

I've said before that the ATP Society exists wholly as an OOC organization. That, isn't necessarily true. But it is true for me personally.

My character would not agree with me as a player and as such, I can't make any decisions or actions for the ATP Society in-character.

That said, if any of you want to roleplay or develop in-character reasons for why your character would want to be a part of this, then that's up to every individual member.

For me, the thing is... Even if I were to say that my character doesn't want guns in the world because she considers guns to be a dishonorable skilless form of combat... How does she even know that guns are possible? Does she have some kind of supernatural ESP that allows her to see potential futures? See, if we prevent the invention of gunpowder, along with any components to create guns, then how can we even know in-character that guns could be a thing? For me, that's the hardest thing to come to terms with. Frankly I don't think it's something my character could know. It's player knowledge.

Likelihood of success

Frankly, I don't think there's a huge change that we're going to succeed in our goals. Not forever, and I don't expect to be able to. Here's why:

Every player in the game, essentially, can research something. That means that we, as an organization, need to find out what everyone is researching to vet it. To do that would require a massive spy/informant network. And players aren't stupid, they aren't necessarily going to make it easy for us, especially if they know that they could be targeted for what they're researching.

How are we going to find out about that one old hermit that lives hidden in the mountains? We may not if nobody even knows they live there.

So that brings us to what we do once the research is in-game, which in my opinion, is inevitable at some point. We can try to delay it for as long as possible but I think it's something that we'll need to address eventually. So when we do get to this point we will have to shift from assassinating researchers and destroying research to destroying blueprints, destroying any such technologies created by them (i.e. the actual gunpowder or guns, or components thereof), and assassinating anyone working on them.

Having said that... There does exist a counter movement to prevent the preventing, so to speak. I am not worried about them in the slightest.

While we have an incredibly difficult task, they have an impossible one. Our true difficulty is cultivating, or rather someone cultivating a spy/informant network good enough to give us the intel needed to perform our actions. But them... They need to protect every single researcher and their research 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is not enough human player manpower for that to ever be possible, not when you account for the fact that every human player is capable of research. You would have to double the number of players to protect every player but then you would need double that number again and again, ad infinitum. It is possible that they could use NPC's instead of players for protection but do we really think an NPC will be able to stop a player? I'd certainly hope an NPC couldn't stop an assassin worth their salt.

With that said, there are ways for both sides to reduce the numbers required all around. Rather than checking everyone maybe we only check people that have professions that we know are able to achieve some piece of an undesired research technology. There may be hundreds of thousands of players, but how many of those players will be alchemists?

But if we do that the possibility arises that someone that isn't of one of those professions and just picked it up as a side hobby could come up with "bad" research.

So there are pros & cons to both methods.

Are we the baddies..?

Frankly something I've been thinking about for some time is do we really need to assassinate people? I mean, if the goal is to destroy their research then what is the point of assassinating them?

The initial justification is that so there's some form of punishment, so to say, for their actions. Loss of spark time is one way to do that. It's also certainly true that if such an organization really existed killing a researcher would be more effective than just destroying their research since they could just create that research again.

And yet... in Elyria that is wholly irrelevant because even if a player loses spark time, they don't really die (at least not for quite some time). So they'll be able to start their research back up whether we assassinate them or not.

So then maybe we keep monitoring them and if they do start it back up we assassinate them again, and more spark is lost. How much spark does someone lose before they feel a real monetary effect from their actions? Will that be enough to make them consider stopping their actions?

I don't know, and at this point I don't even know if it's right.

So before Exposition we're going to have to have a discussion, as an organization, about whether or not we actually want to assassinate people or if just destroying their research is enough.

your group and I are going to clash. Going to be a traveling merchant that will see every technological advance as a chance to make a massive profit. Once the technology starts getting developed we're going to have one hell of a race to see whether you or people like me find the creator first

Technology and Research are a good thing D:

I believe that the technologies in this world will progress slowly and steadily, and unless we see someone jump straight from rowboat to batmobile, if they earned their gunpowder let them have it. If one civilization gets steam engines and the others haven't figured out sails yet, I might as a devout tifa understand a little balancing. But if everyone has crossbows, and someone figures out how to make a repeater, good for them for getting ahead.

Bunch of no-good Luddites, I dare you to try and stop my researchers from inventing the steam engine week 1 of release!!