VS and the religious element

Faith is belief independent of evidence, axioms need to be accepted or else thinking about things is impossible.

Except where subjective experience differs, especially where those experiences are empirically verifiable. Just by different methods.

It isn't because they rationally chose to become religious zealots. Contact with the Vanu technology turned them into religious zealots.

Go read up on what happened to the first guy to interact with Vanu technology. Complete personality change.

Also, that's unfair. It's not the evidence that's lacking, just the verifiability.

I question your assumption that VS technology actually is superior to other factions' technology. I mean even in the game we can compare them, and ignoring the "Orion OP" calls it's hard to say that the VS have better weapons than the TR or NC. NC railguns hit harder than VS plasma, and TR bullets shoot faster.

Therefore the rest of your reasoning falls apart, because VS weapons are not demonstrably better than TR or NC counterparts, and thus the VS don't "need" to be numerically inferior.

I hate the art. But their reasoning makes sense. I mean either you're a postmodernist, or you're a dinosaur.

Hardly... Unless we're talking about wild hypothesis such as that we're all subjects of some greater minds self delusion and none of this is real...

in which case, I question the mind of any being that would dream up Forumside.

LORE WISE the VS ARE lower population with superior tech.

GAMEPLAY WISE VS are overpopped with roughly equal tech, BECAUSE BALANCE (and SOE can't control faction pops)


If the gameplay was to be balanced around lore, VS WOULD be more powerful, and they'd have to restrict VS faction to a very select few somehow, likely making the game P2W in the process or some ****.

Not really. It sounds like he is using definition 1. Definition #2 is generally known as "blind faith". Both are accepted definitions of faith with the amount of "blindness" involved being inversely proportional to the amount of evidence.

Actual science is build on a ton of assumptions like. In fact even a statement like "Science is the best method for exploring the physical world" is a statement of faith, because you cannot use science to prove that statement.

I can have faith that I will jump off a cliff and land safely at the bottom. My faith can be blind because I have no evidence that it will happen, or my faith can be well grounded because I am wearing a parachute, and I have done it many times before.

(positive truth value) Empirical observations and facts never contradict each other by definition. There is one objective truth, subjective experience is an irrelevant red herring.

Am I a man dreaming that I am making a Forumside post, or a Forumside post dreaming that a man is making me?

So...the side with the better technology always wins?

Sir - exhibit A; The Vietnam War.

Thank you come again

We're playing a game, we're not watching a movie about the lore. Gameplay comes ahead of lore in a game like this.

Think about it like this; if the alien weapons made by painstaking reverse engineering were no better than the ones they were using before, why would they bother making them?

No it isn't, and everything else you say is wrong if you accept this as your basis.

Scientists only unconditionally accept a handful of axioms.

Except when they do. All the time. A good deal of data is either thrown out or held back for further verification specifically because it does not fit within our current worldview. That's not to say that it isn't the right thing to do, simply because much of the data is beyond any firm conclusion. It's just too inconvenient to fit in with the current way of looking at things, and is put on the back burner until either it fits, or until it can be proven that it does not.

My heart wasn't ready for this thread.

You're confusing "not knowing how to reconcile something" and "throwing something away". In the history of the world, there has never been a situation where two things known to be true necessarily have contradicted each other.

Quantum mechanics and general relativity are both confirmed to be correct on the micro and macro scale, respectively. Unfortunately they predict different things in the others' domain of usefulness, and both are known to be only approximations of the truth, what will be known as the "theory of everything". That doesn't mean the theories are wrong, it just means we don't know enough.

No doubt, but there is a larger corpus of science beyond physics, quantum or otherwise.

Really? Show me in the lore where it says that the VS have superior technology that allows them to handily win any engagement they come into.

The VS have technology that stems from ancient alien technology, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the technology is better than whatever the NC or TR use. There could be plenty of reasons why VS technology doesn't immediately trump NC or TR equivalents... that they have an incomplete understanding on how to use Vanu weapons, that they lack the proper manufacturing facilities, that the NC and TR have developed effective counters, etc. Or maybe the Vanu were just really bad at fighting after living in a happy hippy commune and just sucked balls at weapon development. Perhaps all they had were our equivalent to Tasers, and that's what the VS have been trying to use to make weapons.

And there could be many reasons why VS numbers are significant. Religious conversion for starters. VS missionaries seeking out those poor NC and mistreated TR who want to fight for something "greater". We've been doing it for thousands of years that way; heck right this second there are humans who are still fighting for those very causes and recruited through those very mechanisms. Hardly seems easy to assume that what has existed for thousands of years will disappear in 400.

In the end, the most logical way to handle it is to try and unite the lore and what happens in-game. Instead of treating the two differently.

Yep, and none of it contradicts.

If you can find something that contradicts something else, the consensus of science will change to accommodate that fact until there is no longer a contradiction.