I have a PlanetMan. I am less than psyched to write to you today in what will go down in history as a fairly ineffective demonstration for justice in the history of PlanetMans. About a half score months ago, a great American, in whose literal shadow we sit and breathe heavily in today, created stats.dasanfall.com. This momentous document came as a great beacon of light to hope to tens of non-bads who had been seared in the flames of withering incompetence. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of RP nerds talking about tactics. But a year later, the stat-conscious is still not free. Twelve months later, the life of the skilled is still sadly crippled by the manacles of zergs and the chain pulling of maxes. Fifty-two weeks later, the competent player lives on a lonely island of sanity in the midst of a vast ocean of mediocrity. Three hundred and sixty-five days later, the talented PS2 player is still languished in the corners of Recursion and finds himself an exile in his own game. And so we've come here today to probably not change much about this shameful condition. In a sense we've come to stats.dasanfall.com to cash a check. When the developers of PlanetMans wrote the coding for the directives system and their backend logs, they were signing a promissory note to which every space warrior was to fall heir. This note was a promise to all players — yes, bad players as well as relevant ones — would be guaranteed the opportunity to trade hours of their life for shiny armor they can't see in first person. It is obvious today that Higby has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as his most devoted directive hunters are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, SOE has given the violated players a 24 hour boost, a boost that has come back marked " this isn't what I wanted. " But we refuse to believe that the bank of Smedley is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient developer resources in the great office space of the PS2 HQ. And so we've come to cash this note, a note that will give us upon demand the riches of hours of work and the shiniest of directive rewards. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind SOE Customer Support of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of telling players to fuck off. Now is the time to make real the promises of directives. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of " We don't have any way to recover that data " to the sunlit path of " here's video evidence of what I'm telling you." Now is the time to lift our community from the quicksands of getting screwed by developer error to the solid rock of "maybe fix this?" Now is the time to make justice a reality for all honorable PlanetSide warriors. It would be fatal for the PlanetMans game to overlook the urgency of the moment. This temperate summer day of Cobalt's Great stat wipe will not pass until there is a well-heated autumn of directive awards and not getting snowed by SOE Customer Support™. 2014 is not an end but a beginning, maybe. Those customer support representatives who hoped that the cheated future samurais of Auraxis needed to blow off steam and will now be totes cool with a 24 hour boost will have a rude awakening if SOE returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility on reddit until the unjustly "zeroed out" is granted his full Shiny™ shit. The modest breeze of revolt will continue to slightly shake the foundations of our community until the bright day of "being reasonable" emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who sit on their cheap OfficeMax chairs before their glowing box of recently-leaked celebrity nudes. In the process of gaining our digital artifacts we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for justice by drinking from the cup of bitching and moaning. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our self-interested protest to degenerate to whiny reddit threads and threats of internet violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting insulting appeasements with polite resolution. The marvelous levels of QQ which has engulfed the PlanetMans community must not lead us to a distrust of all SOE employees, for many SOE developers, as evidenced by their presence in social media, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize their success is inextricably bound to our shiny guns and shit. We cannot sit alone. As we sit, we must make the pledge that we shall always sit leaning forward. We cannot lean backwards. There are those who are asking the devotees of directives, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the directive counters are the victim of unspeakable horrors of poor server infrastructure and lack of backups. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of playing PlanetMans far longer than is healthy, cannot exult in the sensation of having glowing armor no one else has. We cannot be satisfied as long as the sperg's basic earning ability is from 200 infiltrator kills back to 0. We can never be satisfied as long as our fellow outfit members are strippped of their stats and robbed of their time by servers calling for "necessary restarts". We cannot be satisfied as long as a player on Cobalt cannot earn anything, and a player on Emerald doesn't receive what he has earned. No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until tier 4 awards roll down like waters and recovered directive progress like a mighty stream. I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you come fresh from Cobalt. Some of you come from areas where your quest for glowing armor plates left you battered by form e-mails consisting of "sorry about those 3000 kills" and "here's a boost you don't want." You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is part of the PS2 experience. Go back to Emerald, go back to Cobalt, go back to Connery, go back to Briggs, go back to Miller, go back to the slums and ghettos of Northern Indar, knowing that somehow this situation will probably be the same tomorrow but hey someone made a passive aggressive internet post. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends — so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this game will rise up and live out the true meaning of its marketing: "The game challenges the skill and grit of the most seasoned soldier through intense infantry, air, and ground vehicle gameplay." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Indar outfits with former players from The Enclave and NUC will be able to sit down and farm a spawn room together with the prowler of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the server of Cobalt, a server sweltering with the heat of getting screwed for being EU, will be transformed into an Oasis of a North American server. I have a dream that my outfit brother SentientOne will once again fly in his galaxy and will not be judged by the bullshit auto-detect false positives on something that isn't a hack, but by the content of his stats. (Really guys? Sentient?) I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down in the SOE Customer Service department, with it's vicious mods, with its rhetoric dripping with the words of pacification and "they don't really care about their imaginary numbers, right?" — one day right there in SOE HQ developers and the spergiest of us players will be able to join hands as reluctantly codependent. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every base shall be exalted, and every hill and spawn point shall be made balanced, the rough player experience will be made fun, and the broken player experience made tolerable, and the glory of imaginary internet points shall be revealed as the One True Thing and all peasants shall strive for IvI together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to Teamspeak with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of "this is retarded" a stone of "but at least they fixed it." With this faith we will be able to transform the bitter salt of 50 shadow into a beautiful glowing armor forged with the blood of thousands of less than BR50s. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to ridicule max users together, to stand up for skill-centric design together, knowing that one day the "immersion" people will go away. This will be the day, this will be the day when all of PlanetMan's PlanetMen will be able to sing with new meaning, "Now tell me, who that, who that? That do that, do that? Put that paper over all, I thought you knew that, knew that. I be the I-G-G-Y, put my name in bold. I been working, I'm up in here with some change to throw." And if Auraxis is to be a great environment, this must become true. And so let justice ring from the e-mail accounts of the cheated. Let righteous salt pour from the twitter feeds of those unjustly banned by robots (Sentient? 4500 hours. Like, did a real human person even actually look at this?) Let tired exasperation ring quietly on reddit (not the OF — they think the BRRT is bad). Let mild discontent ring from the snow-capped mountains of Esamir before you get banshee'd (which is still a thing in the game when Sentient isn't — like what?). But not only that; let confused frustration ring from the bug reports of the in-game UI. Let salt shake from every twitter and instagram of the weirdos that make up our community — from every Bensam and Sinist. Let customer satisfaction ring. And when this happens, and when we allow customer satisfaction to ring — when we let it ring from every basement and every bedroom, from every continent and every server, we will be able to speed up that day when all of Planetside 2's userbase — baddies and people that don't zerg with maxes, infantry players and the lesser, the stat-aware and the farmed — we will be able to join FaceTime and sing in the words of the old spiritual: "Happy feet. Wombo combo. That ain't Falco. Where you at? Where you at? Where you at? Oh. Oh my God. Wombo Combo. Oh. Get yo ass whooped. What the FUCK man. Wombo COMBO." I have a dream today.