UE and Automated Income are Irrelevant!
Y'all are worrying too much about these things!

I'll start with a few quick(ish) disclaimers:

1 - Yes, I was anti the recent changes to certain parts of the automated economy, and I did go and hassle the GMs on xhelp about it (sorry GMs and thank you for taking the time to talk out of your busy schedule!)

2 - I really don't know if this is the right place for this post (again, sorry GMs, if not) :/

3 - I'm not claiming to be any sort of authority on, or veteran of Sindome, or even to completely live up to what I'm preaching here, but I try :P

Now, this is aimed at everyone who's worried/concerned/upset/whatever by recent auto-economy changes, or who is worried that they're not progressing fast enough with UE gains... both of these things seem to me to have really blown up on the BGBB recently.

These things really aren't that important.

I won't try and tell you how to play Sindome, that's up to you. But if you want your character to make flash and be successful then *I don't think* you should waste your time fretting about UE and automated systems. They're there, and you should use them, but *I think* you'll enjoy yourself much more if these are just secondary considerations rather than driving factors.

We've all been new, and we've all done the bit where we watch the tutorials, etc, blah, blah, but go do it again!

I've watched a few of Slither's tutorials again, and I hope I've taken something away that's going to make me more enjoyable to interact with, and make my character better at what my character does.

That's all from me... go see Slither for some actual sage wisdom... here's my personal pick of the most relevant sermons from the video tutorials section:

Players Over NPCs

https://www.sindome.org/tutorials/players-over-npcs/

Running Plots For Other Players

https://www.sindome.org/tutorials/running-plots-for-players/

Plotting With No Money

https://www.sindome.org/tutorials/plotting-with-no-money/

Hope this was in some way useful to at least someone... go out and RP with people, you don't need money, or badass skills, or automated income to get stuff done.

As The Beatles song so wisely put it, all you need is chummers.

I think both sides of this argument have their points. The problem is when the importance of UE is discussed, most are not looking at it with an open mind and dive off of the deep end with extreme examples. What the conversation doesn't need is grandstanding "vets" who use it as an opportunity to tell people how to play Sindome with their self inflated tales or lecture them with the virtues of peer interactions, as you could see in OOC-chat, really gets nowhere fast. I'm sure these players asking in good faith about UE stuff are interacting with other people and trying to do the things they keep getting lectured on.

The thing is, UE is important, and you have to recognize that, and you have to accept that it is more important to some and less to others. UE is absolutely needed for coded progression. It is not a bad thing or a sign of a terrible player to want to codedly progress either. Many jobs, many actions, and many opportunities are definitely behind a UE wall.

The argument that you do not need UE is half true though. It is not required to interact with other players, build connections, get behind a cause, or get into some organizations or jobs.

The only thing I think that would help people process this is for the RP virtue signalers to hold their personal tales and talking down to these newer players like they are playing Sindome wrong or doing something in bad faith, and for the people who are complaining about the rate of progression speed to understand that the speed is there for you to learn and advance both oocly and icly, and appreciate it in that sense. You can tell someone all day how to do something but they are not going to be efficient with things until they try them out.

TLDR UE is important, but not required for the MAJORITY of RP in Sindome but totes required for coded systems progression and it would all be nice if both sides of the table appreciated that.

I've been here a few months and would still consider myself a very new player. There's a lot in the game I don't know, but as I've mentioned before, this is not my first rodeo with an in-depth RPI.

Personally, I find there is a balance between mechanics and story. I came here for the story, not the mechanics, which is why I tend to forget about things like UE and stats. I learned the hard way that they have their place, but I really believe it should be story first, mechanics second.

While Sindome certainly has it's PVP mechanics (which doesn't necessarily mean combat; most of the PVP I've seen has nothing to do with combat), it's a roleplaying game and I feel sad sometimes to see folks really bent out of shape about stats and UE, because that means the story is going missing. This is a blunt opinion of mine, but if I wanted to play a stats game, it wouldn't be Sindome. It would be a video game, with you know, video, and not text-based. Sindome fulfills my love of cyberpunk, of surviving the dark, and either doing really well or going face down in the dirt.

I like the advice that UE is important, because, as Grizzly said, there's coded systems here that affect our stories. But I really feel it's story first, coded systems second. I've always felt the coded systems support the RP, not the other way around, and I find I have a lot more fun that way.

I agree with everything Grizzly said, with the added caveat that I'm deeply embittered and somewhat insulted by the constant talking down, as a new player.

New characters are definitely not useless. Help power-level will give you some idea of IC expectations, but there's nothing stopping a new character from being successful on terms appropriate to that power level, and plenty of stories of smart or lucky immies getting away with all kinds of stuff.