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People film themselves doing it and put it on YouTube!! Disgraceful behaviour. I am gutted there is no peaceful option when interacting with them.
Imperial Slaves - A Proposition
- Thread starter furiouslog
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Engage in PowerPlay and push the Imperial factions back into their home systems and you can seriously reduce the amount of imperial slavery going on. For plain old slavery, work the BGS, flip every anarchy you come across to virtually anything else and you make the trade of illegal slaves much more difficult.
I suppose it goes without saying, that I would prefer people keep their real life mores and politics out of my video games and other works of fantasy as well. They are where I go to get away from the real world, not ponder someone else's IRL political/moral outrage.
I suppose it goes without saying, that I would prefer people keep their real life mores and politics out of my video games and other works of fantasy as well. They are where I go to get away from the real world, not ponder someone else's IRL political/moral outrage.
If im not mistaken, passive thargoids can still be found outside of areas where they are warring with human factions and be given meta alloys as a peace offering, and they will leave you be afterwards. But that seems to be the extent of any peace that can be accomplished currently
The Guardians tried to make contact with them many many times before resorting to warfare. I don't think us not attacking them first would've made a difference, tbh.
Source: Codex entries.
Really? I did not know this. I must investigate. Thank you.
Filthy propaganda.
So the same propaganda which some say is xenophobic is also seen showing the Guardians in a relatively positive and fair light?
The guardian codex's arent a reliable source of information as
1: they used mind control technology to enslave thargoids
2: they were just as bad as humanity having racsim and classism. They actually looked upon their own kind as lesser for refusing to get biomods installed almost to a similar degree as nazis
3: thargoids acted in similar manner in the first war 200 years ago with humanity still attacking first.
They probably altered the actual facts just like the federation has been in regards to the human/thargoid war.
The Federation is guilty of experimenting on the thargoids just like the guardians and then trying to sweep it all under the rug.
And who used the anti xeno weapons first?
The federation.
Who did the thargoids then exclusively retaliate against ignoring pretty much all other human factions?
The Federation
The thargoids never attacked anyone unless
1. Provoked
2. They were associated with anti-thargoid operations
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It's in the game.
Someone makes a post about it being in the game.
It all kicks off, debate on a minor forum.
People get educated.
Works for me.
Source: https://youtu.be/gp5JCrSXkJY
Someone makes a post about it being in the game.
It all kicks off, debate on a minor forum.
People get educated.
Works for me.
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So you had a workplace diversity training and came to the realisation only then that you have an issue with slavery in a game.
Honestly if I had a come to woke moment I'd probably want to use my new insights to deal with honest to god problems outside the realms of a middling space sim game.
Silver linings indeed!It's in the game.
Someone makes a post about it being in the game.
It all kicks off, debate on a minor forum.
People get educated.
Works for me.
The thing is, the game has attempted to represent the reality of what humans would be up to in the 3300s. When you consider slavery exists today, just as it has done since humans had the ability to engage in the practice, it is realistic to think we'll be doing the same things 1000 years in the future as we did a thousand
years ago and are still doing now. Many videos games set in the future have slavery, however it's never glorified. Even in Elite, the description of slaves is as follows:
Bonded men and women. Almost universally illegal and shunned by most civilized nations. Great efforts have been made to stamp out this trade in misery, however a few markets remain open.
That's not something that good characters will be rushing to be involved in.
I'll pass by your point about the difference between Imperial slavery and non-Imperial slavery as it does appear we're talking about the latter anyway. However murder is murder in this game- you kill a clean NPC, you are given a bounty explicitly for murder. Sometimes factions will pay you to specifically ask you to kill civilians as an act of terror. I think there's parallels we can find there. However, if you're not really killing anyone, you're not really engaging in the slave trade as both are mechanics within a game. It's also worth noting that battle weapons and narcotics are not always illegal, so you can't talk about these as being explicitly to do with smuggling illegal goods. Sometimes you are just arming civilians with weapons of war whilst simultaneously getting them high.
As for using AI as slaves, if you can judge a race, species etc. as intelligent and sentient then it it is slavery, plain and simple. Otherwise you put yourself in the same position as the slavers of 200 years ago in your judgement of who is considered lesser and therefore fit to be enslaved. There is no grey area in this. If an AI is not sufficiently advanced to truly be intelligent or sentient (the term used in the Mass Effect games of 'Virtual Intelligence' applying here), they are no more slaves than cows, sheep or calculators and term doesn't apply. They would just be listed in game as robotic servants, or similar. However with a hard ban on AI in the game's universe, such a scenario can't happen.
Sometimes things are not in the game purely as enjoyment. They are there because it poses a moral question for our characters of what sort of person do we want them to be. It is that moral challenge that makes the game interesting. You could call for such a thing to be sanitised and kept out of sight because it is distasteful, or you can accept it as a likely realistic future, because this is what we do when it can be hidden from law enforcement. It is the role of any art form to hold a mirror up to reality and sometimes we don't like what is reflected back. You can't argue with that reflection though.
1. It's not absurd or myopic. Here's the logic: I can choose between two space simulation games that offer the same exact exploration, combat, and economic features, but one incorporates the presence of buying and selling human slaves as an option, and the other does not. I find the idea of human slavery distasteful, ergo I choose the game without it. If you prefer having the ability to trade in humans as commodities in the game, you will choose that game instead. What are the motivations for that choice? A. You like that it's there because it aligns with your preferences for the flavor of a particular immersive experience but don't want to actually do it, or B. you want to do it, or C. Elite did it back in 1984 and breaking continuity by writing it out would ruin your immersion and/or sense of nostalgia. Your position that it provides a baseline for conflict is not relevant, because there are a multitude of fictional premises that have the potential to provide a baseline for conflict that would provide equally diverse and interesting options, unless it is specifically slavery that attracts you, either because you prefer its existence as immersion, or because you want to participate in it. If I've missed a motivation in there somewhere, feel free to point it out. I'll acknowledge that my conclusion is flawed if I missed something, but I don't think it reaches the level of myopia or absurdity.
2. There might be squadrons or other groups of players that find the prospect of fighting the slave trade of interest, but the BGS is designed in a way such that it is glacially slow and no meaningful progress can be made, and the option to actively be a slave trader will always be present as a result. If the intent is to provide a meaningful dialogue about "imaginary future space slavery", what's the purpose of promoting that dialogue? Are we meant to wear hats and argue it out? It seems like an issue that's already been settled.
3. I didn't say "universally accepted", I said that it was acceptable to a plurality. For a frame of reference, I was mentally cross referencing super powers and power play as units, also considering anarchy systems, then basically estimating the number of stations that sell/buy either Slaves or Imperial Slaves. However, plurality is probably not right either and I really don't want to do the exact math, so I'll just say that it's a significant and representative percentage, which is what I was trying to say in the first place when I used the world "plurality". I'm not sure how you took that to mean "universal".
4. I don't have recent statistics on the relative economic power inherent to the slave trade after all of the adjustments they've made in their rebalancing efforts (if you have such data feel free to share, I'm happy to admit defeat in the face of actual facts), but I know that there are a whole lot of Youtube videos on how to get rich quick in the slave trade in ED, so I'm letting the wisdom of crowds supply my information here. Tangential to that fact - if you search for "slave trading" in Youtube, a number of informative scholastic lectures come up on the topic. If you scroll down the list for a bit, these ED "how to get rich" videos start to show up, listed as higher in relevance to academic videos on the actual subject in human history. Even if nothing else, if I were a marketing professional at Frontier, that would make me think about how my brand was being represented in online media. If I were one of the people who posted their academic lecture video about historical slave trading that had been calculated to be less relevant than a how to video about a space game allowing fantasy slave trading, I'd probably be depressed.
For those of you who are just telling me to stop playing if I don't like the game, unfortunately, my voice as a consumer is equal to yours. Customer feedback is a necessary part of any product's life. Frontier has provided a suggestion forum in which customers can provide feedback. I have provided it. Just because I am confronting this topic does not invalidate my value to Frontier as an individual consumer and backer of their product. They might come back and say "get stuffed", or be silent, or maybe offer a reasonable and convincing explanation of the value of slavery as a concept in the game. And then I'll have to decide if it's a deal breaker. Obviously I have played for two months and kept at it, so it's probably not entirely, but perhaps my mind will change if I get tired of seeing slaves on commodity boards when I travel to a station that I have to get to to unlock an engineer or something, because to me, it's just as bad as seeing <snip> in the market. It makes me cringe to think that we're letting people simulate that behavior without adequate consequence or sensitivity to the topic.
Honestly, I'm trying to help. The fact that there is a public vault of knowledge on how to take advantage of slave trading as a mechanic in this game would probably keep me up at night if I worked for Frontier, due to a number of imaginable unintended consequences that could conceivably lead to a public relations nightmare. I didn't see a lot of posts on the topic outside of in-lore discussions, so I chimed in to start a conversation, but with the primary motivation that I just didn't like that participating in slave trading was a part of my favorite space game and wouldn't it be nice to change that somehow.
Many of you are taking a different position, most of which either offer no supporting rationale or have twisted/misunderstood my words to undermine my position. A few have given me the impression that it's tied to realism and the fictional lore of Elite, which are positions I can respect - and to those folks, I don't have a problem with having a game where slavery is present in the universe given appropriate context, I have a problem with the way its portrayed in the game as a mechanic in such a way that you can fantasize about being a space-faring slave trader with complete moral ambiguity. There has been no attempt to convince me why that should not be affecting my perception of the underlying morality of the game. I'm evidently flying solo on this issue.
I don't have much else to say beyond what I already posted, so if you actually want to continue the conversation with the intent of changing my mind, feel free to PM me or maybe just come kill me in game to make your point, because I don't see this thread as being super productive with respect to objectively examining the issue, a regrettable outcome I acknowledged as possible when I first posted it. At least Frontier knows how one of their customers feels about it.
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Its probably in the game because when it was written in 1984 they just used 3 'bad' things Narcotics, Weapons & Slaves and of the 3, Narcotics would have been seen as the worst especially in USA.
2012-2015 - Same again but a bit of reflection and updating and trying to have 3 distinct cultures at odds with each other means some slaves are modified into a new slave class and added partially to cause conflict in-game
2020 -21 - BLM, the statues, Sharpton's epitaph for GF broadcast across the world.....and now it is much more of an issue than it was at conception or even in 2019.
If you could influence Frontier in-game through PP or RP a slave mass-breakout its more likely to have an in-game outcome
FWIW I agree with you, I quite liked the synth idea even though you are Fallout's Institute
2012-2015 - Same again but a bit of reflection and updating and trying to have 3 distinct cultures at odds with each other means some slaves are modified into a new slave class and added partially to cause conflict in-game
2020 -21 - BLM, the statues, Sharpton's epitaph for GF broadcast across the world.....and now it is much more of an issue than it was at conception or even in 2019.
Would your in-game character 'know'? Or are they so involved in the culture they dont actually realise its wrong? How evil are the Jedi who save Darth Vader as a child but leave his mother in slavery when they could easily buy her freedom or just kill the slaver? (all it takes for evil to suceed is for good people to do nothing)
If you could influence Frontier in-game through PP or RP a slave mass-breakout its more likely to have an in-game outcome
FWIW I agree with you, I quite liked the synth idea even though you are Fallout's Institute
....Then I just said 'Good night kids' and turned the lights out
um, no. I like it just the way it is thanks.
I suppose you could add a "donation" mission where you can buy out their contracts.
Or, role play it, you are being paid by said slaves to take them somewhere and release them, they pay you for the journey in your cargo hold at their destination. What you pay for them in the first place is the food, water and amenities required for the journey.
You could also just ignore them as part of your gameplay, stay in fed space and not pick anarchy systems. Then you'll never have to see them at all.
Or, role play it, you are being paid by said slaves to take them somewhere and release them, they pay you for the journey in your cargo hold at their destination. What you pay for them in the first place is the food, water and amenities required for the journey.
You could also just ignore them as part of your gameplay, stay in fed space and not pick anarchy systems. Then you'll never have to see them at all.
"I don't like this idea so lets retcon 37 years of lore" not going to happen
not going to happen
It's not going to happen. David Braben himself said in one of the old videos (I'm sure the video-hunters can find it faster than me) that he deliberately added slavery and drug use to the original Elite, and to its sequels including ED, specifically because it would stimulate debate both internal and external as to the ethics of what you're doing.
Modern 21st century western civilization regards slavery as some kind of paramount absolute evil. Most human civilizations, for most of human history, have disagreed with that assessment. Even today, there are people who would disagree. I recall someone posting on the forum about the debates they used to have with their vegetarian brother while they played Elite FE2; the vegetarian had no qualms carrying slaves, but refused to have anything to do with trading in animal meat or live animals.
Modern 21st century western civilization regards slavery as some kind of paramount absolute evil. Most human civilizations, for most of human history, have disagreed with that assessment. Even today, there are people who would disagree. I recall someone posting on the forum about the debates they used to have with their vegetarian brother while they played Elite FE2; the vegetarian had no qualms carrying slaves, but refused to have anything to do with trading in animal meat or live animals.
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