The End of the Zurg

The end of the Zurg, my thoughts.

The storyline update we had yesterday was such a cop out! Months and months of Zurg related plot and this is what we get. People devoutly involved, spending hours in towns waiting for NPC's to show up, PMing and talking in their respective forum threads, and all they say is "we have no use for you, we're leaving, GOODBYE. The end."

And of course this type of ending has caused significant drama.

There were two camps with this plot, some people were really really involved with this plot and then some people found it very challenging to learn about what was going on in the plot. Obviously the latter group is much larger than the first, and guess what? There's a reason the plot was hard to learn about! Turns out The groups that were involved in the plot didn't share very well with the rest of Gaia.

So basically the users who did happen to be really involved in the plot are simply crushed that this is the way they ended it. It seems like such a let down, all that for nothing? And they're right, it's like an abrupt crash landing. Anti-climactic FTW. And there was apparently some movement within the groups like GIB and the Believers to better share the information so it's even more of a let down to them.

Even myself, I still feel mildly disappointed with the ending. I was only mildly interested, and because I found it very very difficult to find out what was going on, I didn't know all the details of the plot. But it's still such a cop out. It doesn't make any sense -- to me it wasn't leading up to that. I can't believe they killed off 02! He was seemingly the only NICE Zurg, and he was shot by Flarn?? I know he was diseased or something.. by the Darkngry or whatever. But that's crazy.

But a lot of people really wanted to be done with the Zurg, There was a vocal crowd in the GCD saying it had gone on too long. They had a point. People who didn't get involved in the plot in October were feeling very disenfranchised by this point because the groups are all firmly entrenched. Many felt that it was too late to get involved so a lot of people had just given up trying to know what was going on. And it is surprising that they kept a plot from Halloween going all through Christmas and New Years and Valentine's day and beyond. We all know that they are the one's behind the NPC's avi. Maybe they were just having fun with it themselves.
Even if it did go on for too long, the ending is not fitting and that's what people are surprised by.

In my opinion, they should have run this event like S-Corp with a guild, so everyone could read it. Instead the ran this event in towns, for the large part, and in some user run threads that were full of spam and very hard to actually find important posts in, and whose first pages were horribly organized. Giving user's the responsibility to disseminate information is a bad idea. The S-Corp plot line from Christmas 2k5 was very well run and everyone knew what was going on because the information was given in the guild. Manga updates and Guild posts are the best way to do this. Users being involved with the plot is a good idea. But control of information should be in the hands of the admins!

I hope that the bitterness and disappointment some users feel on both sides of the divide will go away with time. At least we GOT an ending this time, right?