Whaf if they nerfed humans

Two players met on the Scandinavian server of the Europe server cluster. They were preparing
for a raid, as would be expected. This is what players did. As it was, both of them were playing
humans, and both of them had spent a few evolutionary points to re-enable old neanderthal features.
This was their badge, as it were. Both of them had been playing since alpha, and knew the game. Neither of
them played the PvP aspect much, though today was a good day. Something was different.

We'll never know their real names; the faction knew each other by badge but only a few by name.

u1472471: I've got a bad problem. My kid's low intelligence. Like animal level low.
u897991: Have you been on the game forums these last few days. It's everywhere.
u1472471: I've been kinda busy with the new kid on the way, what'd I miss?
u877991: Looks like the devs nerfed humans. We think they're trying to get more diverse playstyles.
u1472471: Oh no.  That's not good. Humans without intelligence won't last long. I checked my
lineage ages ago; the best thing I can respawn as other than a human is a rodent. The dino ban
really hurts now.
u877991: That's why I called you on the subchannel today. The old neanderthal faction has always
been far-seeing. We want you back.
u1472471: lul; you guys said I was traiter; looks like you turned traitor too.
u877991: Can't we move past that incident countless respawns ago?

The game rules allowed a player to respawn if any of their descendants still lived. Normally
this wasn't a problem for experienced players, but the Neanderthal faction had been on the
losing side of too many wars. It was pure envy; the Neanderthal players had been the best
players and everybody else wanted a piece of what they got.

A subchannel exploit allowed one client to communicate with another client on the same server.
In ages past there had been subchannel exploits that permitted taking control of other clients;
the devs had in wrath blocked them as fast as they appeared, but since the forums existed, they
never really fought too hard against the communications exploit. At the present time, no long
range subchannel exploits were known, but they could be readily used by nearby players.

u1472471: We can as soon as you stop blaming tribe Isaac for the spectre of destruction.
u1472471: It was never us.
u877991: Who else had the power to attack the servers themselves?
u1472471: It was Bacon who lead first efforts to determine how the server itself worked, and
Isaac who got the first real breakthrough
u1472471: but certain griefers who are unworthy of naming stole our tech and used it for their
own shortsighted plans.
u1472471: No matter. For that was our cloak. While they threatened the integrity of the servers
themselves
u1472471: and forced the devs to spin up a new server for the moon
u877991: the moon? You joking!
u1472471: No joke. The mask was very good.
u1472471: The Neanderthals have been busy. We knew this day would come.
u877991: come on man
u1472471: Neanderthal hasn't played power for ages. Did you hear? An alpha-level creature from
the Jurrasic as been unbanned.
u899771: Why man. Just why?
u1472471: So that u77937471 can spawn in again.
u1472471: While we have delved into the plans of the devs, u77937471 has delved into the inner
workings of the game itself. He's going to help us.
u899771: An alpha-class ally is useless. Yeah sure twenty billion of them can kill a man, but
one player, one organism. You know that.
u1472471: Two reasons. One, we need him back on the server so we can talk to him through the
subchannel.
u1472471: It doesn't matter what precisely he spawns in as to do that. If he can spawn in at all
u1472471: he can talk to us.
u1472471: And two, he has a weapon unheard of in our time.
u1472471: A kind of venom that attacks not only the the target, but the target's descendants.
u899771: That's so broken.
u899771: Good for griefing though.
u1472471: That's why it was banned. But no matter.

Two hours later, they were outside the research facility. Some of the touchier research facilities
had been located on the Scandavanian server, with the hope that the cold would control any outbreak
long enough to go clean it up with power.

u1472471: Today we're going to burn a subchannel attack. The guard isn't in on our little game.
u1472471: I'm sending you in. Walk past the guard, through the inner doors, down the hall,
u1472471: through the first door on the right, and take the slide carelessly left on the microscope,
u1472471: and return. I'll disable the guard.

A little misdirection is not a bad thing. The devs were used to players not playing for eons,
and so wouldn't notice if a player respawned for the first time since the Jurrasic; especially
since their little patch was expected to change the meta so much. Undoubtedly they would see the
subchannel attack even if they blew off the guard's complaint on the forum, but here the hope was
they would focus on that rather than the banned weapon being reactivated. This would seem to be
a foolish hope, because in any normal game the weapons are direct coded and as soon as such an
attack lands it could be noticed. But this is not a normal game, and the weapon is not a normal
weapon, but u79771 did not know this yet.

Of course crowbaring off the front door and stealing the slide worked. It's easy to steal when
you know the guard's immobilized. u1472471 wasn't taking any risks though. He sent u899771 in
alone so he could split if it all went wrong. He'd be back later of course.

Since u77937471 was playing an alpha class; all communications with him had to be over a subchannel.
Thank goodness for hacked clients.

<sub>u77937471: Duuude. Radical. Awesome. Lets kill some n00bs.
<sub>u899771: You mean like u1472471?
<sub>u77837471: He here man? We go way back.
<sub>u899771: Yeah right outside. Let's go get him.
<sub>u1472471: Duude. You still got your banned venom?
<sub>u77937471: Banned, as in never intended.
<sub>u77937471: You see, there's a reason why no knockoff of this game has ever been any good.
<sub>u77937471: The builds are not specified with minor variations in the game code.
<sub>u77937471: The game is still a chemistry simulator. All the way at the bottom the script
that defines each organism runs for each organism as it develops. The possibilities are
enormous.
<sub>u77937471: I'm still bummed about the dino ban. Was hoping they'd unban a T-Rex for me.
<sub>u899771: I'd love it. We'd devour some noobs in no time.
<sub>u77937471: I've been watching the forums. Having been out since the Cretaceous it's not like I had
<sub>u77937471: anything better to do.
<sub>u1472471: Welcome back. We need your help. We wanna unnerf the human builds.
<sub>u77937471: You know what, I'm sore for being spawnbanned for so long. Anything we can do to get back at the devs
<sub>u77937471: I'm all for. Especially if it means altering the game itself to their despite.
<sub>u899771: Was there really a moon server?
<sub>u77937471: It was all over the forums. I applaud the shaming of the devs by opening a server on our terms rather than theirs.
<sub>u899771: You too.
<sub>u77937471: Now to business. All we gotta do is get me to 899771's kid.
<sub>u1472471: You really have been out awhile. If you think you can take any mammal by infection you've got surprise coming.
<sub>u77937471: Not a problem. Just use half the slide. All I've gotta do is see what the devs patch is.

Thirty minutes later

<sub>u899771: How's it going.
<sub>u77937471: Working on it.

Sixty minutes later

u899771: Is he actually hacking the server?
u1472471: Don't think so. There hasn't been a confirmed hack of the server itself since before the public beta.
u899771: What's with the unbanning then.
u1472471: This knowledge is high, and you didn't get it from me.
<sub>u1472471: u77937471 is correct. The biology isn't hardcoded but rather scripted out. The server farms must be enormous. That scripting engine's insane man.
<sub>u1472471: Must take a whole core per player. No way around it I can think of.
u899771: Duude. No wonder he talk like that.

Ninety minutes later

<sub>u77937471: I got it. They patched something about the brain's connectivity. Just a few nucleotides. Should be easy to reverse.
<sub>u77937471: I can't fix your kid, but I can tell you how to fix your next kid. All we need is an ingame tech with subchannel hacks.
u899771: Is he outta it?
u1472471: He hasn't played since the Jurrasic, remember? He doesn't know what it's called in game.
<sub>u77937471: The patch is really clever; if you change it, it changes itself back. No real challenge though.

The in-game news broadcasts were talking about all the newborns not showing the right amount of intelligence.
The talking heads were talking about mostly the difficulty of caring for these as they just wouldn't fit into
society anymore. A few of them started talking directly about the meta and switching to new builds. This was
unheard of. Players normally kept the broadcasts clean of any trace that there was something outside of
the game. But this day, they just didn't. Mostly they didn't care for decorum when their word was about to
come crashing down. Somebody complained that the noobs couldn't switch because they hadn't been around long
enough. With multiple billions of players, the devs didn't seem to worry about losing a few.

Some people started swearing about enjoying their time while they had it. Not a bad plan if you can't do anything
about it anyway. Little did they know, somebody was going to do something about it.

Next day

u899771: Hey u1846231349884, check the subchannel
u1846241349884: What's that man?
u899771: Hax. Dude, read the forums.
u1846241349884: All I see on the forums is humans getting nerfed but good.
u899771: Try harder. Search the forum for subchannel; just because your character has low int doesn't mean you do.
u1846241349884: Got it. Give me five minutes.
<sub>u77937471: They patched the direct load with the 1.3.1 patch. But I think the tool use feat has some unintended consequences.
<sub>u77937471: Ever since the human factions lashed out at the servers themselves, I've been wondering what we can do.
u899771: What's he talking about.
u1846231349884: I think he means the event that ended the inter-server wars.
u1846231349884: I think it's what's brought the devs down on us.
<sub>u146231349884: I like this plan. It's subtle.
<sub>u77937471: Open up the gene editor; select the HTT gene, 30 bases before the repeating CAG sequence, change the T
<sub>back to a G, but put a new intron immediately before it or your change will be undone.
<sub>My own script contains the CAS-9 gene cluster, which can be used to splice any gene anywhere. You'll need to extract
<sub>it from my slide and make a weapon of it.
<sub>u1846231349884: We're going to wage biological warfare. Me like.
<sub>u1846231349884: Incidentally we have the CAS-9 gene already in the lab.
<sub>u77937471: No you don't. You have the single gene. If you take the whole cluster, it will work right the first time.
<sub>u77937471: It's mine own tech. Somebody ripped half of it off the forum without knowing what it does.
<sub>u77937471: After that I didn't post any more of my stuff to the forums.

It was an easy plan. u77937471 was an alpha-class griefer, and nobody had realized it earlier. He had a
CAS-9 plasmid ready to go and needed only an appropriate target site to permanently alter this victim.
This was of course seriously poor roleplay, but on a server this big, it was bound to happen. All of this
outside intelligence was being channeled through a very low-int build that never acted anything like
the low-int build it was.

Nobody told u1846231349884 that u77937471 wasn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart. The game server
has its respawn rules, and the rule from the alpha game was still in force; any descent inheriting his plasmid
would count as his descendant so he would be able to spawn in again even if his slide were destroyed.

<sub>u77937471: The devs are so lazy.
<sub>u77937471: They never remove the banned content. It's still there; all the code that supports it.
<sub>u899771: What you talking bout man?
<sub>u77937471: What I say man. It's all still there. They just layer new content on top of it like sediment.
<sub>u899771: You blowin' my mind.
<sub>u77937471: Radical.
<sub>u1846231349884: How we plan to distribute this counter-patch.
<sub>u77937471: Got an airborne virus?
<sub>u1846231349884: You mad bro?
<sub>u1472471: He is. That's why we keep him around.

About three weeks later, the news was talking about this strange new cold that came suddenly out of Norway.
It didn't make any sense, they said. How could a cold possibly originate there. After one too many false
claims, it never dawned on anybody to presume deliberate release. A few of the Neanderthal faction knew
better, but everybody else thought "They're Neanderthal, what do they know?"

The nerfed humans only spawned for eight and a half months.

Two years later, u77937471 had respanwed as a human, but wasn't bothering to pretend to be a toddler.
He was, after all, still power-hungry and didn't care who knew it.

u77937471: We haven't won yet. Homo is still OP. The devs will try it again.
u1846231349884: You got any tricks up your sleeve?
u77937471: Oh yes. It's high time we started directing our own development pathways.
u1846231349884: We already do that.
u77937471: Kinda, through the main quest. It's high time we sped that up a million-fold.
<sub>u77937471: Hey u1472471 can we get some supercomputer power?
<sub>u1472471: What you got in mind.
<sub>u77937471: We're gonna need variants of CAS-9 before the devs think to block it.
u77937471: We're gonna need a distraction to keep the devs busy.
u77937471: u899771, are you up for trying a Mars colony. It ought to keep the devs busy a lot longer than
u77937471: that moon jaunt did. Maybe take faction Tardigrade along just to annoy the devs.
u899771: I don't think the devs care about faction Tardigrade.
u77937471: They will if you start terraforming Mars.
u77937471: Besides, Tardigrade is due for a free stat boost CAS-9 style.
u899771: Talk about kicking a horse when he's down.
u77937471: Nah. This time I really do mean stat boost. I've got bigger fish to fry than an old noob faction.
u77937471: They took meteor resistance. Gotta admire that dedication. This is gonna be like taking candy from a baby.
u899771: Have you looked in a mirror?