I would like to draw a comparison between our movement and the closest event I can think of in MMO history, so that it's more clear just how awesome this community is.
Last year, in EVE Online, a series of events drew the ire of the playerbase. CCP, the 400 plus employee strong developer and publisher of the game had spent over a year developing an amazing new character animation system for the game, so that players could leave their ships and walk around among eachother. The product was
absolutely breathtaking. The problem was that they had spent all that time doing ONLY that - and nothing else for the existing game. In addition to this, they were attempting to transition to a microtransaction based system which was handled extremely poorly. Finally, a leaked memo speaking about the profits to be had from microtransactions, as well as a leaked email from the CEO stating that he did not care what players thought of the game's direction, were the straws that broke the camel's back, sparking the
Jita Riots.
The Jita star system is one of the game's trading hubs... hundreds of people are there, twenty four hours a day, every day. It has its own dedicated server group.
In EVE, the logical thing to do when you want to get someone's attention is to shoot things, so that is exactly what they did. Thousands of players converged on Jita, and managed to overwhelm a server group specifically designed for that kind of load, to shoot at an invulnerable statue. When that system would no longer accept incoming traffic, people were redirected to other systems... where they shot more statues.
The result? CCP, a company easily the size of NCSoft, completely stopped its development path. Entire departmental budgets were reassigned, updates in development were shelved, and new ones planned in their place. They saw... they listened... and they responded. The CEO issued a
formal letter of apology.
Why is this important to us, you ask?
Because not only was our saturday Unity Riot - by all accounts I can find - physically significantly larger than the entire Jita Riots event... but we're not just in the game. We're in the blogosphere... we're on Twitter, we're on Facebook... we have the devs, we have celebrities, and we're about to have traditional media coverage.
And that is all because of ALL OF YOU - an absolutely amazing group of people.
So log into our game... and know that we have a real and honest chance to save it, if we keep doing what we're doing now. Because of you, a longshot has turned into a reasonable expectation. Know that we outdid the Jita Riots with 1/4 of the active peak playerbase, because YOU have more dedication and perserverance than any who have walked this path before. Know that no matter what happens, we are making history, and what we are doing will forever change the face of online gaming.
Know this, stand proud, and /em holdtorch.