Yeah, I Screwed You Over, You Bastards
[A photo of a hand flipped around, two fingers raised in an unmistakable flip-off]
To every last one of you who just kept spinning bait — 🖕🖕
Watching the users who'd just realized that anonymous poster's claim was true suddenly pull the whole innocent woodland-creature act and bail out of the thread left me with a thoroughly complicated mix of feelings.
We're neutral.
Meanwhile, scrolling through the gallery, I spotted something separate from the current hot bait — talk that the clan I'd fought had taken a massive hit to their reputation with the Pirate Coalition, and that hiring mercenaries was going to be a nightmare for them.
[A message detailing the clan's current situation, this and that]
Their rep with the Pirate Coalition got absolutely torched, so not just the clan but every user in it is getting massively overcharged on merc hires until they claw that reputation back.
Exactly the tanked-reputation mess I'd expected. I nodded to myself, thoroughly satisfied — only for Jessica, who was reading the gallery's featured posts right alongside me, to tilt her head with a puzzled look.
"Hmm? Commander, something about this seems a little off."
"What does?"
"We have a Kaiju princess living at this base, of all things. So why hasn't our reputation with the Kaiju side dropped at all?"
"With the Kaiju?"
"Yes. You even fought alongside Oxianor and deployed Kaiju forces in the battle."
"…Interesting question, but the answer's pretty obvious."
Maybe it was how completely unbothered I sounded, because Jessica's face twisted into a look of pure incomprehension — the kind that practically spawned dozens of little question marks spinning over her head.
I pulled my eyes off the gallery and turned to her, deciding to give a rough rundown of how the whole thing worked.
"Oxianor signed a contract to help if our base got invaded, so the system handles that automatically… but our Princess Luka is a different story."
"Huh?"
"Ah, how do I even explain this? It's going to get pretty complicated."
Even as I said it, trying to lay the whole thing out cleanly and quickly felt like a genuinely nightmarish prospect. Still, once I'd sorted it out in my head as best I could, I opened my mouth again.
"You already know this, but basically every faction takes a neutral stance on conflicts between commanders."
"Uh… even when the base they're sitting in is under attack?"
"The base is under attack. They aren't."
"Oh."
I pulled up a live view of the base exterior — still under repair thanks to those idiots hammering our defensive installations for all they were worth — and pointed out the Kaiju neural network, which didn't have so much as a single scorch mark on it.
"If the commander of the base they're staying at gets attacked, but they themselves take zero damage, of course their reaction is going to be 'and what exactly do you want me to do about it?'"
"Ohh…"
"Now, if the other side were something like Humanity — completely drunk on Earth-supremacist nonsense — the story might go a little differently, but…"
"But…?"
"Even then, unless Princess Luka takes direct damage while she's sitting safe inside the Nest — as opposed to Oxianor fighting under contract, or the regular Kaiju units that players are free to throw into battle — you're not going to see anything like what our pissed-off Marianne just did, torching reputations left and right."
Even after all that, Jessica pressed on with a distinctly aggrieved look.
"But what if the Commander's faction affiliation suddenly changes? Wouldn't that risk dissolving the secret alliance between the Kaiju side and the Pirate Coalition, and cause all kinds of problems?"
"Mm, well… I can see how you'd worry about that."
"Right?!"
"Except that won't happen either."
"Huh?"
Rather than explain this part myself, I just pulled up a wiki entry and showed it to her.
[Faction map image]
Basically, NPCs = factions take a neutral stance on disputes between commanders.
Why? Because even if Commander A gets wrecked by Commander B and the base falls, the faction itself takes zero damage, so… what exactly are they supposed to do about it?
Beating a commander doesn't let you forcibly change their faction affiliation either.
And players don't generally try to drag whole factions into fights between regular users that aren't even faction wars, so the factions just leave it alone.
Which is how you end up with a full-blown siege raging around a base while the "envoy" living there just sits back munching popcorn and watching the show.
Separately from all that, faction detachments will deploy whenever the base commander requests them — but those are system-designated "forces" that players are supposed to use freely, so they don't count.
And if you actually go after a faction while you're trying to gank one commander?
You start harassing the envoy? Congrats, you're about to get curb-stomped by a very, very angry faction fleet.
From the factions' point of view, player-vs-player scraps are just too small-scale to bother with.
Don't forget: even the Space Elves — the faction with the fewest ships — have a combined fleet count in the tens of millions.
"Hooooh… so there's a whole tangled mess of backstory behind it after all."
"Tell me about it."
Of course, contrary to what that wiki entry and the other users' analysis claimed, the rage wasn't really about us sending "reinforcements." It was the fury of a thoroughly pissed-off Marianne, aimed at the people who'd dogpiled me… but whatever. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
And more importantly, it wasn't just the Unity-whatever clan that had invaded me dealing with this kind of fallout…
[Image of a "Your reputation has decreased, scrub~" notification]
Why is this happening
I just fought some nearby player and my rep starts freefalling??
I ran so many goddamn quests to build that up, what the hell
[A message stating that Earth Federation reputation has decreased]
I haven't done anything. No idea why this is happening.