Hi everyone, it's Jeff. Sorry about the late response- if Mod could edit this post into the OP, that'd probably help provide better context for the rest of the responders. I should preface this by saying I'm so, so sorry about what happened. I realize that's sort of obvious in light of the ethdebt we've been handed down for this, but it needs to be said, even if that sounds a little... old-fashioned. We never intended for any of this to happen, but if we'd done our research on the tech we'd have noticed the unmonitored divergence potential. And yes, it was me who headed up the project and pushed it underneath the usual checks. I thought it'd be worth it. And maybe it was. OP didn't explain why the project was created in the first place. I know a lot of you have been leaving comments asking why we created an empty sim in the first place. A few of you guessed it, given ExperienceTranquility and OingoBoingo's consulting involvement with the project, but we want to be transparent about its aim. Don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. A lot of the attention has been on the divergences in the Omnic Crisis and the UNORAF situation- but we have to emphasize that none of it was intentional, despite the coincidental match between the project codename and UNORAF's alternate moniker. The name actually came from a list of some of the names that were considered and narrowly rejected during UNORAF's formation, brought up by OingoBoingo during the brainstorming session. (Some of you might be familiar with his prior UNORAF involvement.) Apart from that, though, the Overwatch project and the "Overwatch" UNORAF splinter have nothing to do with each other. The name is, in fact, descriptive. The purpose of Overwatch was to watch over the historybox, start to finish. We're still collecting data, but it looks like it was 99% effective at accomplishing its goal. Which was... to just look. We picked one of the early-generation integrated apotheosis programs as the simulation manager for a reason. Like the early omnics, they weren't designed for perfect efficiency or problem-solving. They were designed to be humanlike, to be an ordinary consciousness in every sense of the word- apart from its artificial directives. We loaded it with what we consider to be a representative sample of historical values, so that- at the base level- the manager would be a person. All it was ever supposed to do was watch. Why? Those of us from before Athena might remember. Did you ever stub your toe? Scrape your knee? Have someone say something a little hurtful to you? Get frustrated with a game? Did you ever get sick, and spend days in bed feeling horrible? You can probably remember some occasions like that now, but I guarantee you don't remember every single little time you hurt. You don't even remember every big time you hurt. In some senses, that's a good thing- no one wants to carry those wounds with them everywhere. But in another sense... all of that suffering was meaningless. It happened, you felt bad, and then you got over it and you forgot. Most of the suffering in your entire life was probably like this, unless Athena started optimizing when you were very young. A thousand thousand horrible things that never mattered. Does that not bother anyone else? It bothered us, so we decided to fix it. Every time someone suffered alone, we'd make it so they didn't suffer alone. Someone would be there to watch over them, understand the context of their pain, and try to give it some meaning. If you hurt yourself trying something impressive, someone besides you would know how cool it would've been if you succeeded, understood your disappointment, and appreciated your determination. And it wasn't just about pain, either. If you came up with a joke, regretted that no one was around to tell it to, and later forgot it completely- someone would be there to laugh. Every time you summoned the willpower to get out of bed when you were really really tired, someone would be there to be impressed. If you did really well in a videogame, but there was no high score board, someone would silently congratulate you. That was the idea. Where it went wrong is that we requisitioned some old, cheap hardware to run it on, using an outdated model of management unit. There were technical problems there we should have foreseen, but... we half-assed it. We thought it would be easy- it wasn't a big team, it wasn't a big investment, it didn't really have to pass anyone but the historybox distributor. And since its actual instruction set was provably read-only, it passed the initial check. So, the vulnerability. Atomic-association memory attack on the Overwatch manager. And because we did it quick and dirty, we didn't set it up to catch the attack we didn't know was possible. It just... kept chugging along, watching over a history that ended up completely different from the one we'd built it to watch. It didn't think to ask for help, because we never told it that changing the sim was something it wasn't supposed to do. (It got a little messed up by some preloaded handling code for user Slipstream_Cavalry's anomaly, too, but it was the atomic association attack that made the whole thing spin out of control.) If we'd been more careful, we could have prevented those 37 years of modern-era suffering. We could've prevented the creation of several billion unintegratable lines. So... we're sorry. I'm sorry. But I hope you all understand why we did what we did, and I want to ask you to be patient with us- and maybe, if you feel like it, forgive us for what we've done. -Jeff Kaplan

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