Your experience with Syndicate

[Booterror]

Hello folks, its recently come to my attention that certain people feel that the Syndicate is the one true problem that is preventing Hazeron from being successful.

Now, I'll admit that the image of the Syndicate holding a gun to the head of this game, safety off, finger on the trigger ready to kill it the second its successful is HILARIOUS to me... But I would say its rather far from the truth.

I suppose it could just be my viewpoint at fault here, So I've created this poll and thread to get to the bottom of things here! 

Thank you for your time!

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I know, being the first reply to your own thread is seen as a faux pas, But I'm a Syndicate OG   I do as I please.

Anyway our glorious leader Staines wrote a wonderful summary of us in another thread, so I'm quoting it here as its rather relevant to the thread:

Going to be 100% open here as a member of Syndicate here.

Very rarely were we just outright horrible to people.


When we played as Syndicate in U3, most of what we did was stop noobstompers, or fight in Pan-Galactic War 2 with our allies, and then recruit all parties in the war after we'd intervened to stop it - this resulted in a very interesting playerbase because almost every player had been at war with each other in the past couple of years. It was a great melting pot of all kinds of players.

When we played as Harvesters in U3, we straight up roleplayed the light PVP and tried to cause as much drama and excitement as possible with the minimum of damage. The entire purpose was simply to get an exploit fixed as fast as possible by inflicting it on the galaxy in a silly, exciting way (the mothership) as emergent content. Virtually the minute the bug was fixed we stopped. It was entirely kayfabe except for a couple of people who were abnormally prideful, that we did kick a couple of times due to being nasty in chat to our members.

When we played as Exiles in U4, it was pretty brutal. We did our regular action of sweeping/recruiting the systems within 2 hours lightspeed around us so we could utilise the full economic yield of everything within a sector range of the capital. Fun fact, when syndicate used to claim the 15 parsec zone around our spawn capital, we'd actually recruit the people who spawned in near us, or we'd supply them with a colony ship with enough supplies to flatpack an entire planet and a moonbase, plus a couple of players to assist). Unfortunately due to the anonymous empire name (people's morale dropped immediately if they found out they were at war with syndicate), we ended up in an immediate war with the french, which resulted in a few small empires getting trampled after aligning with our enemies during the very violent fighting. None of it was out of malice, it was just a very full scale war that ended up with a few people getting very battered due to their positions on the wormhole network, and their faction alignment. Overall, fantastic war, very high intensity.

When we played as Syndicate at the start of U5, "the box", we never actually destroyed anyone in a particularly unjustifiable way? We declared war on the entire galaxy at once, with the option of "vassal or die" (something that was essentially meaningless in gameplay terms)... that was literally an inbuilt out-button to disengage from any PVP with Syndicate.  Eventually, the only people we actually fought were the rebel alliance and a few players who were literally too prideful to exist in a multiplayer environment. I don't regret that at all, and on the contrary, I think it created really one of the absolute high points of Hazeron, where people on both sides had great memories of the interactions and the fun. There was very little real drama in that time that wasn't just a bit of kayfabe fun.


Basically...
Syndicate has always been a rational, reasonable, merciful, and inexorable force for fun in Hazeron. If someone harbors genuine ire for Syndicate, it's because either they don't understand the true nature of Syndicate, or they were mad about Pan-Galactic War 2 upending the power balance in U3, mad at being stopped from noobstomping, or they were too prideful to simply hit the "PVP-OFF" button during U5. The only other time we've shot at people is when they've been genuinely nasty, bitter, isolationist hermit weirdos, that abused our members. Oddly, encountering those people was more common than I would have liked, maybe Hazeron attracts them.


Even Syndicates odd catchphrase, "Sieg Syndicate, I guess?" is generally confusion, and entertained acceptance, of the fact that people considered us violent thugs, despite being one of the few legitimate real cultures in a universe of one-man-empires.

[Zarok]

Who exactly are these Simp?icates?

[Neils Iyssada]

Well I never had any problem with Syndicate, but I'm quite the one-man empire that started too late to really know the said wars.
I started just before the first blackout, I had surveyed my system and finally done a small ship design when the game shut down. Then I forgot the game for some time and discovered it again during the second half of U5.
Had no problem during U5 but during U6 I encountered the syndicate anonymous empire and made the mistake of trying to scan one of their city close to my empire -> war declaration -> I got destroyed overnight some days after that. It wasn't rage inducing, I could have asked peace but I prefered gathering all my warships up my capital and wait. You even answered when I tried a kind of RP congrat message, "make sajuuk to bear" or something like that :D

[Xantheose]

I had 2 solo empire in U3 (maybe U4?) having few systems and no contacts.

Both were claimed by the Syndicate during the Syndicate Era and I had to self destruct it, according to the scorched-earth policy.

Then yes, my opinion is "mostly agressive".

[Ripticus]

I'm french and member of French Empire, well...

[Deantwo]

My only interaction with Syndicate was during The Box. When they showed up in my system and asked my to vassal or die.

I had no intention of fighting, so I just vassaled and suggested that others just do the same. Since back then, and even now, being the vassal of another empire doesn't matter all that much. At most being a vassal means that you can't restrict export of commodities to the overlord, and the overlord show up as blue on the starmap.

[NUMBERZero1032]

I had 2 solo empire in U3 (maybe U4?) having few systems and no contacts.

Both were claimed by the Syndicate during the Syndicate Era and I had to self destruct it, according to the scorched-earth policy.

Then yes, my opinion is "mostly agressive".

Of course we were aggressive! You didn't vassal 

[jakbruce2012]

I found that being in Syndicate was great. With almost everyone wanting to fight us I had the chance to push my designs to the absolute limit, back in the triangle based era at least.
Nowadays the layout of the ships don't matter quite as much as they once did.
Having enough players to put 2-3 on every ship in combat was also a plus. The controls in Hazeron are so much more powerful in the hands of a player than even the best trained AI.

[Dragonly]

I really thought this was gonna be a thread about reforming the antics of a massively disrupting group, you know, because the game they existed in disappeared and now is coming back. But then it revealed itself to be a brag discussion, lame.

[Duane]

Two perspectives. "I was in syndicate, we had protection, it was great and we were invincible." and "We got wiped by Syndicate and stopped playing."

For what it's worth, I don't even blame The Syndicate itself. There's always going to be a group like it, even if nobody from the group ever plays again. I think the problem is that such subjugation is even possible, not 'that you guys are just dicks.'

The claim that nobody got scorched earth'd without provocation is laughable, tho. If Staines can claim that, he clearly had no bearing/knowledge of all of the group member's actions. I never took a hostile action against people, especially not the syndicate, and got wiped all the same. I talk about this game to people all the time, but any time they ask if they should play it/we should play as a group, I tell them no, and that's definitely why.