The home of various third party programs for Anarchy Online... and a leet or two lurking about!

Depending on who you talk to, it was either an important step toward getting a horribly broken profession fixed, or it was a futile gesture that did little more than attract attention. Either way, it was an important event that brought the plight of the Meta-Physicist profession to the public eye.

Recently, the topic of Black Sunday came up, and it occurred to me that this important bit of Anarchy Online lore needs a home... a museum, if you will. Therefore, I scrounged up a few screenshots off my archives and built this page.

The Meta-Physicist profession has come a long way. Some would say it has even come full circle, back to the state it was in at the time of the march... I leave that for others to debate. For now, I would like to simply present these pictures, taken by myself while I was on the Black Sunday march, and share with you my thoughts.

I welcome your comments and thoughts on the matter.

In the Beginning

If you weren't playing an MP around the time prior to Shadowlands, you may be shocked to know just how the MP was thought of back then. The famous Composite Infuse is thought of as a "SL nano" and the more powerful pets are called the "SL pets" for that very reason - the MP profession, as a whole, did not have a lot going for it. It was not uncommon for an MP to be the last person picked for a team, and even then there were (unscrupulous) folks who would simply seek out the MP solely for buffs, then ignore their requests to join the team.

This situation was made even worse by the unfortunate fact that most of the MP's "toolset" - their nanos, pets, and other abilities - simply were not working. Pets would become easily lost, nanos did the opposite of what they were supposed to do, the mezzpet would actually cause players to suddenly die, our Creation items were almost worthless, debuffs did little and rarely landed, and the list went on.

MPs as a whole felt left out of the game. The unreliability of pets drove many MPs to become "soldiers with healpets", relying on poor weapon skills, horrible evade skills, and our only semi-reliable pet - the healpet - to function at all.

The Black Sunday March

Black Sunday was created by a player named TheDeacon. Describing TheDeacon is a bit tricky; quirky, unconventional, and even abrasive are all words that come to mind... but in the end, no one could argue that he was very passionate about the MP profession.

Speaking as a focus for the MP community, TheDeacon felt that the public needed to be made aware of the issues and that FC needed to act upon them. The concept of the Black Sunday march was to gather together as many MPs as possible, on both the RK1 and RK2 dimensions, and to spend several hours walking (yes, walking) across the world. During the walk, TheDeacon encouraged brainstorming on potential solutions to solve the numerous issues faced by the profession, with the intent to submit these user-generated ideas to the developers.

To prepare for the march, several posts and ingame messages were made. The picture above is one such note, made by the MP Professional at the time (Xtremtech).

I was a bit late in getting off work, so I joined the march when it was about a half hour in progress. When I arrived, I found the field full of pets - attack pets, demons, healpets, even the (at the time) too-broken-to-use mezzpet. I managed to get a mugshot of my demon before we went out on the march.

We walked through the day and through the night. In-game times of course; the march itself lasted a few hours. You can see TheDeacon at the very front, using a Creation shield.

We walked past several tower fields, some at 25%. In the spirit of Black Sunday representing a peaceful protest, no tower fields were attacked. To this day, I am proud of every MP who was able to walk past these fields without any hostilities.

During the entire march, we talked the entire time. Most of these screenshots deliberately excluded text (for better viewing of the pictures) but this one sums up our thoughts on the community of MPs itself.

When we arrived at the "Bully Bridge", I opted to use Quantum Wings and take a few camera shots of the march itself. As beautiful as these images are, bear in mind that these demons are walking in a straight line over the bridge... and yet they still fall off the bridge.

One of these became my site's banner.

One of the sillier things seen - demon pets do not swim. Therefore, we had a field of "water walking demons" when we swam across a small lake.

The march took us south, out toward Newland City.

In Newland City, someone had an idea to attack a guard. Now, this was before the whole "Attacking Guards Results in Flagging" patch.

The aim here was to demonstrate the weakness of the level 200 MP demon. It took about five minutes for two dozen demons to kill one guard... the guards are level 210. A few MPs even joined in to help out, but again when you're trying to attack something with entirely dark blue weapon skills, few hits landed.

The march eventually ended at ICC. One of the FC workers darkened the sky for us.

We had a few people from FC show up, including Lucien.

What came out of this?

In the end, the MP profession received a thorough going-over with the introduction of the Shadowlands expansion. Now, no official word has ever been issued that linked the revamping of the profession and Black Sunday, but in our heart of hearts the MPs like to think so. We would like to believe that FC did in fact listen, that they did review the user-created ideas, and did take the plight of the MPs to heart.

Thank you for looking at this page, and for listening to an old MP ramble on about ancient history.