Grid War
| ❗ This article covers an event which is ongoing |
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The Grid/Swarm Conflict, commonly referred to as The Grid War was a war between a coalition of numerous small factions, notably GRID and Re:struct, against Neuro-sama's Swarm on Canvas 81.
Origins
osu! earlier encountered tensions with Slavborea, a Re:struct provincial faction dedicated to the creation of Slavic artwork. Re:struct's lattice, a vast extension of their bird's yellow tail, was rapidly colored in and reduced to the original rectangle by the purple osu! lattice. osu! argued that the Slavborean lattice was a bad example of virgin abuse, or the deliberate avoidance of using non-default background colors. Slavboreans were unhappy with the divide between their lattice and half of their artwork, fearing a wipe of their artwork by osu!. Ultimately, they retreated, trusting the osu! lattice with handling their artwork.
Later, Neuro Sama's Swarm joined C81 after Sinder Canvas ended, consisting of a small number of their most dedicated or enthusiastic new players wishing to learn more about the game. As they joined 2 weeks after the latest canvas reset, the canvas was too full for large arts and thus The Swarm focussed on small arts instead. After quickly finishing all of their small arts, they were told of a possible collaboration on the next canvas, C82, with GSm and osu!
As a result The Swarm members were told to be in hibernation for the rest of C81, but were given osu!'s template for any dedicated placers who wished to keep placing (Gsm's art template had been completed by this point in time). At this point osu!'s template consisted of expanding a purple arrow lattice across the canvas.
Following the osu! template, The Swarm were keen to expand northward to secure and connect to the co ordinates 727,727 where osu! had built a mini_osu! logo, and represented a number that the osu! and Neuro communities held in special regard for being an ongoing and recurring meme relating to the osu! rhythm game.
During the expansion, Re:struct's lattice was starting to form along a bottleneck and was seen as a roadblock that cut off the only viable connection route to mini_osu!. If the lattice would be allowed to consolidate, then there would be no other routes that weren't occupied by large, established artworks, for which such a lattice/background could be ethically placed for the connection attempt.
Thus, deeming the rapidly forming Re:struct lattice and what appeared to be an inactive claim (The Grid) behind it as a threat to their connection path, The Swarm now enacted Operation Connect-To-Mini-osu! (OCTMo!). This operation aimed to urgently expand over the currently unfinished Re:struct lattice before it could consolidate, and place over the The Grid in order to secure a path for connection. When later asked, The Swarm claimed they were unaware of the (currently mostly empty) Grid's purpose as a place for newcomers to place small arts, and were keen to place over what they thought was an unfortunately shaped empty claim. Due to it's shape, The Grid attracted alot of flat flags which The Swarm was notorious for hunting and very vocal about publicly destroying on past event canvasses in which they had participated. To this effect, one member of The Swarm drew a "NO FLAGS" sign next to the grid days earlier to discourage new players from making flat flags in The Grid.
The expansion operation was expectably met with resistance from Re:struct and The Grid. Noticing the defense and learning from pxls chat that The Grid was considered a community project and many did not wish for The Grid to be covered by lattice, The Swarm decided to put up an Art template with which to cover northern expanse of The Grid, triggering the First Battle of the Grid. During this operation, members of osu! were also expanding the lattice on various fronts around the map, but included some placers on the north front, who joined in on building The Swarm artwork and covering of The Grid. osu!'s participation was quickly noticed and angered various members of other factions. Noticing the community's anger, template-managers of osu! rushed to mask out various still-intact artworks that still existed on the grid, but by this point the majority of the grid had already been covered, with many Swarm members simply following anything their template told them to place.
With help from some osu! placers, The Swarm were successful in constructing their artwork and covering what remained of The Grid, but left a couple grid blocks with art which managed to be masked from the template in time.
Due to The Swarm's usage of the osu! lattice and some placers from osu!'s faction participating in the expansion operation, there was some confusion amongst other factions and members of pxls chat on who was behind the expansion, which lead to an ersatz alliance against the "osu!" faction who copped a major portion of the blame, due to earlier tensions relating to Slavborea, and also in part due to osu!'s large size and high placing power, other factions and members in chat were easily convinced to help in the resistance.
Despite the seemingly high amount of placers now actively resisting their operation, The Swarm continued their expansion north from The Grid and were met with significant obstructions on multiple fronts. Some of these volunteers and resistance members would use various tactics which The Swarm would later consider as unethical, such as using duplicate artwork placed in chokepoints, certain individuals switching to osu!'s lattice colors to grief arts that The Swarm had been instructed to protect and had pledged not to cover and actively blaming the swarm/osu! for doing so in pxls chat in what The Swarm would later consider as "reputation smearing attempts". The resistance also utilized various lattices to attack on multiple fronts in lattice vs lattice territory battles, but The Swarm noted some of these lattices were being very lazily connected or even entirely skipped having a connection to previously established latticed areas to more optimally block the expansion route, which The Swarm simply placed over, but caused extremely vocal pushback from resistance members in chat that The Swarm was being unethical and unfair to place over such (mostly disconnected) lattices. Confused as to why they resorted to lattices and didn't simply void instead, The Swarm concluded this was another deliberate smear campaign against The Swarm's reputation in order to continue recruiting volunteers from chat.
The resistance and expansion conflicts continued like this for the rest of the day, with resistance members and swarm members alike active in pxls chat continuing to be vocal. At some point many members of The Swarm decided to stop participating in pxls chat as an attempted de-escalation method, but this proved ineffective as resistance members continued to be vocal, and now with no one defending The Swarm's story, resulted in even more escalations instead.
By the next day, amidst high tensions and increasingly common voiding and griefing efforts on the osu! lattice and osu/swarm related arts, The Swarm was ultimately successful in establishing a solid connection to the mini_osu! logo. During this time The Grid was almost fully rebuilt and was being expanded, which The Swarm members allowed as it was being quickly filled with small arts and not attracting flags. By now having sucessfully completed their operation, The Swarm had no wish in further antagonising the other factions, especially establishing such rocky relations on their first real canvas on main pxls space. However, it was noticed by The Swarm that almost all of the grid blocks weren't filled by "newcomers" as was stated was The Grids original purpose in the earlier conflict, but this variation of the grid was filled entirely by members of the resistance and vocal chatters / reputation smearers from from the past day.
Following yet even more excalations and taunts in pxls chat, the expansion of The GRID reached the "NO FLAGS" sign, which caused another conflict, this time with The Swarm defending their sign against persistant griefs. Now viewing the entire Grid as an expanding danger to nearby arts, and knowing that almost all of it's squares were built by enemies implicit in the resistance, griefs and smear campaign against them, a decision was made by The Swarm to retaliate against The Grid, only saving the art squares that weren't implicit in the above behaviour. The resulting art template by The Swarm would cover the entire GRID and only saved 1 square.
Battles
On 20 July 2024, an unprovoked attack against an underpopulated GRID began with the takeover of the Liberia cell. Negotiations between two sides quickly fell apart due to hostility between the opposing groups. After valid complaints from many unrelated minor factions about the GRID community being replaced with a simple lattice, the NSS painted a major part of the grid over with their art, an indisputable manoeuvre.
GRID, in an attempt to revive the community project, relocated southwest. On 21 July, construction began once more. Land was donated for the project by Meta:struct and the Brazilian Empire. The NSS once again painted this section over following a conflict between one GRID placer and their "NO FLAGS" sign. As part of further negotiations, the GRID offered to move this sign slightly further down, allowing for the final row of gridcells to be finished, but this proposal was rejected. The Swarm Council offered to relocate the grids somewhere else but this proposal was also denied. The Swarm Council claimed that GRID didn't give any chances of negotiation and so the war began.
| ❗ (To-do: osu! members, please include your point of view of the story. A neutral member will merge both points of view into a unified conflict article.) |
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