Pack Alignments: Apparently Evil ≠ Cool

You know how your parents constantly disapprove of almost everything you do? Or, at least, they did back when you lived with them? They could disapprove of anything and everything. Unfortunately, your parents aren't always there to disapprove of you. Fortunately, there's an easy way for you to get all the disapproval you need - Disapproving Rabbits, where it's all disapproval, all the time. Because everyone needs a healthy dose of disapproval in their life.

In other news, Coren seems to have conquered the top 5, going from #3 to #1 in about 3 days. Considering that this is around 30 million XP, some people seem suspicious. Of course, the general population of W-H is suspicious about just about everything these days.

On a completely unrelated note, you know how the TOS used to forbid bot and macro programs? Somewhere along the way it lost that part. Whether this is simple oversight or direct approval of cheating is for you to decide. Although whether or not it's cheating if the rules don't forbid it is also debatable.

On another topic, I finished Terry Goodkind's Confessor lately. I'd give it a 10/10 rating as far as fantasy books go. If you're into adult fantasy material, you definitely should read the series; go find the first book, Wizard's First Rule, at your library or something.

Anyway, on to the main entry... I'm thinking maybe roasted duck. Oh, wait, wrong type of entry. Oops...

So, I'm here to discuss pack alignments, and what role they play in reality W-H. I've been around a while, and I've found some interesting patterns...

First off, we all know the alignments. Good, neutral, and evil. They've been around basically forever, and haven't had any changes. There have been a few suggestions to change them to the more well-known D&D alignment system (you know, lawful/neutral/chaotic variants), but they've never really gone anywhere. The entire thing is rather neglected.

Now, there's no gameplay reason to choose one or the other. So it all comes down to what the leader wants, and what really fits the theme of their pack. Packs existing for RP (yeah, there are a few... somewhere) will choose based on story, for example.

Of course, this is discounting noob packs. Noob packs are just irrelevant - either the creator was too lazy to change the alignment from neutral, they think evil is really cool, or they want to be the good, perfect savior of reality. As I said, irrelevant. I'm concerning myself with major packs.

Since alignment can change at any time, packs are hardly restricted to one, but the majority of packs tend to stick with one most of the time. And of the choices, neutral is the most popular, probably because there are a few people who would object to having their evil character in a good pack, and vice versa.

So, as I said, most major packs end up neutral. In fact, all of the top 5 packs are neutral, or have been for the majority of their time up there, although they probably didn't start as neutral (BM was originally good, for example).

Of course, there is occasionally a significant good pack or two, although they don't last long and/or convert to neutral. But evil packs... powerful evil packs really don't exist. In fact, the only consistently evil pack to make it onto the top 5 and hold the position for a while was Malice; unfortunately the hack and Phoe conveniently disappearing basically destroyed them. Still, it was a nice accomplishment.

But for the rest of the evil packs, they don't really go anywhere. Why this is, I'm not sure. After all, in my expectation, I'd kinda think people would want to join the evil packs, thinking evil is badass or something. That just hasn't been the case, though. Nobody seems to have a justifiable reason to not join evil packs - they just don't do it.

Of course, the entire alignment system is kinda pointless. I mean, aside from RP packs, it hardly makes a difference. And nobody cares about RP packs. So why even have it at all?

For example, what if the alignment system was removed and instead packs were allowed to put up a short message/motto/whatever of their own? I think most packs would agree to that, and it'd certainly be more convenient than the bypasses I had to use to change BM's alignment to Chaotic Awesome.

The system is outdated and irrelevant - we should just replace it. In the mean time, though, I personally advise you to use a neutral alignment. Whether or not we can find any reason to justify it, the fact remains neutral packs have consistently outperformed good and evil packs. Heck, there's never been anything but a neutral pack at #1 at any point in W-H's history.

But, for those of you who are evil, heartless bastards, don't worry - there's still hope for you. All you have to do is stalk all the good and neutral pack leaders until you find their addresses, then go to their houses and kill them in a gruesome fashion after torturing their passwords out of them. Then just disband their packs, and you'll be #1! No hassles at all...