Of course not, since there must be a nefarious reason why we like it, as opposed to the pure and altruistic motives of those who tear it down.
The Modiphius books present the setting in a much better way than the Infinity books. They should hire those guys.
The setting, at it's core, has some interesting ideas, but it frustrates me that they backtracked on the idea that the US, Russia, and especially EU are not the movers and shakers of the world anymore, with PanO becoming the de facto Euro-Catholic faction. Gaia from Aristeia is supposed to be from Varuna - why isn't she Southeast Asian? What about Patsy? I'm guessing that they determined that white girls were more marketable or something, and if Bipandra had been made today she wouldn't be brown. And what happened to all the Muslims in SEA when PanO formed, because there's a lot of them? Then there's the whole Yu Jing issue.
@Ten Thousand Arrows I am sure it was not the intent to accuse CB of been malicious, but assuming they went out of their way to purposefully insult the customer base is nothing but a malicious act. I feel here is the problem, I read the criticism, outside of mechanical criticism, from fluff perspective I see two categories, one were peoples perception for Yu Jing was different from what the books described, or more accurately they perceive the imperial part of Yu Jing to behave like the state part of Yu Jing and the other is a denial of the internal logic (or in universe) in favour of a more realistic logic. I do understand the argument but if one assumes Consilium is not powerful enouph to stop PanO and Yu Jing and force them to accept their degrees (begrudgingly or not) then you open a huge problem of internal consistency. @Hecaton and who do you think makes sure all the Modifius books are internally consistent and in line with the Infinity universe?
Again, can you tell me how can you reconcile the established fact about YJ being the foil to PanO power and the fact that every written piece of fluff shows YJ being useless and stupid and PanO doing whatever they want? Do I have to go and get my books to get pictures from YJ description saying they are the eternal rival and very close to PanO? Not being confrontational, just curious because, in my mind, it is one or the other, either PanO is all powerful and can do whatever they want with no fear or the premise about YJ being their counterpoint is correct, but you can't have both. Also, every time you say "Internal logic instead of realistic logic" you are hurting your own argument, because I sounds like "it doesn't matter it makes no sense, Gutier just said it is this way even if it's not consistent" And it seems you are not understanding the criticism here when you say we don't differentiate between Imperial YJ VS State YJ: we are not talking about YJ being cruel or authoritarian, we are talking about YJ being effective enough and having enough of a political foothold so they can act as a counterweight to PanO so PanO can't do anything it wants, WHICH IS HOW IT IS DESCRIBED IN THE BOOKS UNTIL THEY STARTED TRYING TO WRITE. This goes on hand with your Modiphius comment: Gutier got a coherent universe as a starts, then was unable to develop it in a coherent manner, so he undermined the very starting premises he built the world in. So he has good ideas, but the development is awful; maybe Modiphius has better writers to develop that ideas? Also, you don't have to go out of your way to insult people in a interviw, you only need to have thin skin and a really low threshold for people validly criticizing your work. It's quite explainable psychologically, to be honest. And if "read my things so you can learn new words, pleb" is not kinda insulting for you, I don't know what to tell you besides maybe "read some decent fiction so you learn what good writing is?" you don't find that insulting at all neither?
You do recognize that the Pano Fluff is propaganda and not narrative lore in some portions, right? Sent from my SM-G973U using Tapatalk
The reverse opens up more problems of internal consistency, however, because it undermines the idea of national sovereignty that's been more or less the status quo since Westphalia. There's also the idea of why the narrative focus is on factions that are in thrall to Concilium/O-12, when if O-12 is in fact the prime mover of the setting they should be more heavily featured. That's a very small part of the actual process of writing the book. I'm talking about the organization, the layout, the way it presents that information in a way that is actually informative, rather than a series of quotes and interviews that are selectively ignored and thus result in a setting canon, as presented in the CB material, that is ultimately mercurial, ephemeral, and without substance. CB could learn a thing or two from Modiphius in this regard (The same way GW could have learned quite a bit from FFG.)
Even the Yu Jing "propaganda" portrays them in a negative light. It's pretty clear that Yu Jing is meant to be a mix of "fail" and "evil" in the setting. It's a serious problem with the way the Infinity fluff is presented by CB, however, that so much of it relies on in-universe sources that are of questionable veracity, because it becomes impossible to get a feel for a faction or character when any incongruous action can be explained away with "Oh that other stuff was just propaganda."
PanO blockading Yu Jing airspace and sovereign territory with impunity is propaganda? also the fact that Uprising happened while all of Yu Jing was sitting on their asses and got completely blindsided because reasons is propaganda? How the fuckity fuck has Yu Jing managed to get to their position on the fluff being that incompetent ? Again, a wizard did it
Seen worse in real life history to be honest and while I will accept the planning of the uprising needed perfect timing and opportunity, but again, its not something not seen before.
That would work. I've long been complaining that the "Strategic Calculus" introduced in N1 and carried forward unchanged to N3 was that PanO = YJ + Haqq + Nomads (with Ariadna generally voting against both PanO and YJ). But in the Uprising, that changed to PanO + JSA + Haqq + Nomads > YJ. Haqq and Nomads were acting as if the loss of JSA from YJ was a negligible change in the balance of power, while PanO was acting as if the loss of JSA from YJ was crippling. And given that PanO was able to deploy the Steel Wall over YJ territory (something that is an act of war today!), it's pretty obvious that PanO was correct that YJ was effectively crippled by the loss of the Japanese. Which brings us back to 'how did Haqq and Nomads come to the conclusion that YJ wasn't crippled by the loss of the Japanese?' That was never explained or even explored. China literally wrote the book on how to run an insurrection and win, which means they know what actions NOT to take to prevent an insurrection from succeeding. Yu Jing's actions during the Uprising only made it worse, guaranteed that every Nihonjin would fight to the death against YJ. And that's basically what they got, every Nihonjin fighting to the death. There is a massive difference between stomping a political protest (Tibet, Tienanmen Square, Uyghur, etc, or even the G8 protests in western countries) and shutting down an armed, violent insurgency. It's well documented and known that the way to win against an insurgency is to make the noncombatants fear the insurgents more than they fear the government troops. Liking the government and/or it's troops would be better, but that isn't always possible. There was literally a single point of contact arranging all the mercenary support for the Uprising. It was not detected by either the Yanjing (YJ's intelligence agency) or the Kanren Counterinsurgency Group (part of the Imperial Service) nor was it even accidentally impeded by other actions. That, to me, suggests that Aleph itself was actively supporting the Japanese for some reason not explained anywhere. How else would that data not come to someone's attention? Shasvasti? If it is Shas impersonators, the Human Sphere has already been defeated. The only time I've seen YJ being really competent is in Outrage, where a YJ diplomat acknowledges that wars are not waged by starcruisers and armored soldiers, but on Maya, in the court of public opinion. (pp24-25ish, since the pages aren't numbered in my book) It was YJ actions that kicked off the second half of the Outrage story. And even then, YJ got caught. It was just decided that keeping this quiet served everyone's interests more than letting it go public. But I really like that YJ Ambassador, his parting comment from getting caught was that "if I had a hundred soldiers like you I wouldn't need to bother with this diplomatic knavery," which sounds to me like "well played, Emily."
Being a good editor and being a good writer are two different things. Up until HSN3 CB has been adequate to poor in even presenting the lore, let alone writing it out. And while I liked Uprising, I still think the lore as written by Modiphius is more interesting, easy to digest and paints a better overall picture of the Infinity setting as a whole. So much that I have recommended the RPG books to pretty much everyone who asks me about the game lore, because I know they will have a better picture from those books than the ones for the wargame. From reading the discussions I often get the idea CB knows what it *wants* for the game setting, but not how to *present* it. Uprising was a good example. It was supposed to be a shades of grey thing and it makes sense to be, but it ended up coming off as 'Yu Jing bad' and 'JSA good'. This is a show of how the presentation needs some work. Don't get me wrong, I like it that the company is going through some growing pains and I really hope it comes out better at the other side, but I felt it really needed to be said.
Ok, let's just take that statement for a moment. The Imperial Service were previously noted as being the finest intelligence service in the sphere and required Pan O to re-invent it's own services to keep up. In particular, the Imperial Service essentially wrote the manual on dealing with a counter insurgency. For them to miss the Uprising from people they were explicitly watching would be the equivalent of an NA2 merc faction taking on the Pan O military (by your own description of the Pan O military and their power level earlier in this thread). Even with help that merc faction is dust. So, to your description, no one is expecting the Imperial Service to act like the State, they are expecting it to act as it has been described in the rest of the fiction. Now, if you were to argue that people expected the State to act like the Imperials, that I guess I can understand. Send in Invincibles and they have a habit of killing everything as that's what they're being trained to do vs CA. But that situation only arose because of the earlier backtracking/inconsistency. As to the second point, it's not a denial of logic, it's taking different points that have been written to the ones you have chosen. For your view that everything makes sense you've chosen to disregard the fluff around the Imperial Service and their competence at what they do. I don't attribute any malice to that as every faction is going to appeal to different people for different reasons (and as @LaughinGod said, ultimately the purpose is to sell miniatures so the fiction is designed to appeal to different groups). The fiction is even written so that there are multiple truths for readers to align with. The difficulty arises when one group feels that the truths/identity of their faction is being changed beneath them and individuals representing the company, whether that's Bostria, Gutier or yourself were not acknowledging that might be an issue. That's taken from the Infinity website. One could infer from that that Yu Jing is just below Pan O on the overall power scale. Pan O has the economy and a slight tech edge plus diplomatic/political connections while Yu Jing is making up for it with its industry and growing economy (not at Pan O levels but closing the gap would be the implication). Interestingly, its "perpetual opponent" implies the contest has been going on a while and combined with the economic growth thing may actually put Yu Jing on a more even footing than previously. Either way, if either one of those powers attacks the other in an act of direct aggression (such as the invasion of sovereign airspace) that escalates real fast with serious consequences for both. If the only way that doesn't escalate into direct warfare is the intervention of O12 then maybe the story should've been written with PanO pulling some political strings to get O12 to just turn up and for Yu Jing to stand down without the Pan O military ever getting involved. It keeps O12 as the actual hyperpower and avoids all the narrative gymnastics of what was written. Also, can you acknowledge how reading that Yu Jing description above players, some of whom will have invested hundreds of hours into identifying with that quote and the faction it represents, might feel like something significant has been taken away from them? Perpetual opponent/other great power - Not any more United under one banner - Not any more Blooming industrial sector - Not any more State of the art technology - Not any more (researchers in JSA) But it's ok because in other fiction we still had the following: Best intelligence service - Not any more Top of the line mechanised army - Not any more Every reason for identifying with the faction was undermined or attacked through the course of that fiction... and that's ok (ish) if you give players something to engage with to replace it. But there was nothing but denial and insults. I'm not saying there was malice in those insults as I don't believe there was and some of it was down to poorly timed attempts at humour but when you are taking all those things away from players a degree of empathy to their situation rather than trying to deflect attention/apportion blame would've gone a long way. And the longer that was left unsaid, the less trust remained and the more work that would need to be done down the line to repair that relationship. As was previously noted, the purpose of the fiction is to sell miniatures. I haven't purchased any IA figures despite having almost every N3 YJ model before that. For one player at least that trust has been lost and I doubt I'm the only one.
Granted, but the story was approved by CB, with a whole lot of control over the finished product. It is considered canon. Yes, it would be great if we could get someone who really knows how to write stories to write some Infinity fluff. Shame that I managed to chase Larry Correia away...
I didn't mention anything about anybody liking fluff. You can like the fluff and not attempt to execute some weird defensive apologist action when Gutier is to everyone else present here, pretty clearly making an insult in response to criticism. What you're doing is kinda like what some people do when a certain orange man insults people over Twitter.
One can say Uprising was a mess. One can say Uprising was not a mess. One cannot say someone to stop calling it a mess and say 'git gud'.
