Why do you hate the Virus?
Is there a version of the Virus that you could love?
I personally love the Virus. Instead, I hate what was done with it and why it was introduced.
Yeah, I'll be the first to admit the way the Virus works is really pretty hokey. Nilsen's attempt to half-explain how the Virus works then leave the rest to conjecture involving a lot of dodgy computer technology sort of bugs me at some level.
What I mean by half-explain is that the Cymbaline lifeforms are indeed 'silicon blanks' and they do 'etch' their programming onto the chips. They do use little discharges of static electricity to physically move around. Then he explains that the DEYO transponders use a 'lobotomized' version of the Cymbaline lifeform to function. However, he never explains if these weird traits that the Cymbaline lifeforms have are shared by "normal" computers in the Imperium but it is suggested that they do - in a few places (I think in Survival Margin in fact) it is stated that you can pick up the tiny "electric surges" as the Virus developing in a standard computer "cuts new circuitry" which is how the Cymbaline lifeform works, suggesting that Imperial computers do actually use similar mechanisms to the Cybaline lifeform; does that mean that if you open up the service panel a Model-2bis computer or something a bunch of silicon chips will come leaping out like sentient confetti and go hopping down the hall on sparking discharges of static electricity like some cattle drive to Frisco gone horribly wrong? Who knows, it's never explained how similar the Cybaline lifeform is to standard computer hardware.
However annoying that is, I'm willing to overlook it like the other "impossible" stuff in Traveller - how the virus works is pretty easy to change to suit a game to make it do the things it needs to do. After all, I overlook all kinds of other things in Traveller too. I'm willing to look over Jump Drives, because without those we don't have universe (the rule for me with 'hard sci-fi' is that they're allowed one blatant violation of the laws of physics as we know them, and Jump Drive is that violation I will give a pass to). Plasma and fusion guns would not work the way they're described but few players seem to be flipping tables over that. Similarly Mesons don't work that way (and neither would Meson guns therefore) and I don't see anyone demanding we all burn the Traveller books that introduced those over that, either. (However, before I sound too smug, I'll come out and admit I do have a book-throwing pet peeve that gets my irrational goat up like the Virus for many on this thread: Psionics.)
My biggest issue with the Virus is that it was ... a way to clean the plate instead of some legitimate thing on its own. To my understanding, GDW had a number of desires that led to the creation of the TNE. One, the issue with the Rebellion being a grinding civil war that the playerbase wanted to win and/or see resolved by their own power instead of simply grinding on in the background, was detailed by another poster. Another was that apparently GDW felt that Traveller was simply weighed down by its own "canon" and that it was difficult for new players to get into, so they wanted a fresh start that new players could get into the game with.
To clean the plate, they needed to not only eradicate the 3I, they needed to eradicate all the nations around the 3I ... flatten the entirety of Known Space in essence. They couldn't let the Imperium simply implode because that'd leave the Imperium's neighbors essentially untouched. But whatever it was, it needed to mostly remove itself when its job was done - like the story in the TNE rulebook, it needed to be like a forest fire, burning down the old and leaving fertile ground for the future instead of like some kudzu vine which overgrows everything, destroying the forest, but then sticks around. So they had the Virus flatten everything, then die off. (Of course, I'm curious to know when GDW decided to violate this idea and let the Spinward marches stick around.)
Then I feel that GDW / Nilsen blinked. They realized the Virus would not simply go away that completely. Unfortunately, I think they dropped the ball at that point. Instead of doing something with this new development, exploring it, making it interesting and a source of wonder that the OTU sorely lacks, Nilsen suggested we pidgeonhole the Virus into dragons in D&D - few and far between instead of game dominating (the RC Sourcebook on the Virus) as well as insane. No idea why they have to be insane. Alien? Sure. Insane? Err... (let's not even get into the idea of judging what is insane across species).
Unfortunately, he didn't follow his own advice -- perhaps because of himself, perhaps because of player pressure, he continued to focus on the Virus and became the Rebellion all over again. While products like the Gilded Lily were pretty good and intriguing, Path of Tears was simply the best RPG book I've ever bought because it really embodied TNE's original mission of making the players the movers and difference-makers and it was pretty open-ended. OFC, there was Smash and Grab that was terrible and cast the RC as a bunch of kill them all types - before then I had the impression that SAG raids were actually not all that common and very reluctantly used as a last resort. SAG the sourcebook basically led me to the conclusion, no, for many RC forces that's their first and last resort.
Then he introduced the Virus Fleets sourcebook and with it, the terrible ghost of an unwanted ancestor - the Sandman plot.
The Sandman plot was a Charted Space changing story, and the players are once again onlookers as Sandman
must make it to the RC to fulfill the next steps of Nilsen's vision for the TNE universe. Wasn't this what GDW wanted to get away from in TNE, forcing players to mostly be powerless spectators to the big events? Oh well. Maybe the result is worth it. No, no it wasn't. The Virus through Sandman transformed into this awful thing, sanctimonious and tacky at the same time, pretty much as bad as anything in the Hiver and Ithklur book in its own saccharin way.
(And the Princess Wave - that was Nilsen's solution because he wasn't happy with how psionics worked iirc. What a night terror that was.)
That and "Go My Little Ponies of Death!":devil:
