Hey everybody!

Hope your weekend was great. This week, we're going to talk about what it means to be a Neutral player and also a bit of what Criminal Players can expect. These sort of playstyle paths won't be easy to follow, but they won't be impossible either. That said, let's find out some more details now...

In a world torn by impending conflict, Neutrality is a touchy subject. This week, we finally come to shred some light over what Neutral players can expect from keeping themselves distant from the Faction conflict. Also, we know would-be criminals among our player base have questions of their own.
 
Q: Will there be a totally neutral NPC-faction,  that provides services like cloning for everyone? I.e. will it be possible to be hostile towards every NPC-faction, without loosing the ability to be cloned again?
 
A: Aside from Continoma and Noir as major Factions, there are 10 smaller political groups (called Organizations), and 4 of them will be Neutral and will provide neutral players with quests that allow them to build their Reputation and unlock rewards that cater to their political standings. Cloning is currently independent of standings towards each Faction with the exception of several important resurrection points and teleporters that are meant to allow access only to Affiliated characters. We want to make sure that players won't get caught in a situation where important gameplay elements such as being cloned back to life is being denied or too heavily restricted to them.
 
Q: Who clones criminals? Insures their goods? Provides them a market? Offers them production facilities? Is the Autonomy the criminal version of Sal Vitas or the Noir Base? Or do criminals, unless they've built their own base, sacrifice some or all of these services when they decide to live by their own rules?
 
A: In order to operate on the island of Enterra, Criminals have been hard pressed to unite and fight back for survival leading to establishing their own settlement, operating under their own laws and authority. Hackers from the criminal establishment have been capable of hacking into the main grid, allowing criminals to be cloned back to life. The settlement will also provide criminals with market capable of buying back stolen goods, vendors, access to specific Factories for criminal crafters, and more. This criminal location is not part of the Autonomy but hidden away in a distant location where players will have to reach at least a mid-point of their character development to access without excessive risk. This is intended to discourage (but not prohibit) characters from going criminal from the very start of the game. Instead, once players understand the social mechanics of the game and the consequences of criminal life, they can access that distant location as a starting point of their underground life.

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Last week's Earthrise Fun Fact was as follows:
Earthrise is the name given to a photograph of the Earth taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission.

Curious for more?
You can see the photograph available here at the NASA website. NASA tells us a little bit about the holiday mission, and you can also see a picture of the "Christmas tree" the Skylab 4 crew made (the next crew up in space) and read the inspiring Christmas Eve broadcast the Apollo 8 crew made.

This beautiful photograph inspires all of us, and we hope it inspires all of you as well. Now while it is true no one from the Masthead Studios team has actually been to the moon, who knows, it might happen one day.

As always, each Wednesday we've got another Earthrise Fun Fact for you. Come follow us on Twitter to get the exclusive Fun Fact before it appears in the forums, but be sure to read QOTW to get more information.

We've got more interesting things in store for this week, so stay tuned!

~ m.

Oooh criminals! I'll eat you all! Great QOTW.

About the name of the game.... I loved Earth Rises Again more. It had more sense.

Yes, perhaps we could use a little clarification as to what our incentive is for not going criminal if criminals can spawn normally and get everything we need off of the market.

Sounding like criminals will be permanently prohibited from any settlement aside from their own.  Normally this wouldn't be THAT bad, but since it takes until around mid-game to reach your own city, it could become troublesome.

More info would greatly be appreciated.

GO CRIMINALS !!!

I really like the fact, that I don't have to rely 100% on my Alts.

By the sounds of it:
1) no insurance, only the more expensive buy-back option for retaining goods after death.
2) fewer spawn/teleport locations than everyone else (I assume Neutral players will have more)

More of a stretch (but totally believable):
1) far more limited factories/ potentially lower quality machines.
2) "Black market" pricing from the vendors, and or limited quantities.

Really I do hope they do make it difficult to be a criminal, but do it in a way that doesn't result in Alt reliance (my ideal would be to lock out alt help entirely so you are really stuck living with that choice, but leave it viable).

Thats an easy fix, Just make it so you can only have 1 person logged on an account at a time. You can always buy a 2nd account but im not going to do that and pay another monthly sub just to be a criminal.

If the had a bounty system or bonus for killing criminals that would make getting around tough.

Oh sorry... ofc I'm speaking of multiple accounts logged in. Logging in multiple characters on a single account is totally out of the question here.

Insurance doesn't even need to be possible for me as a criminal. I can absolutely live without it, as I'll never wear any fancy stuff as a criminal anyways.