[Aneurism IV] I really like the balance between the police and scum in this game

Aneurism IV is a multiplayer dystopia immersive sim and I really like the balance between the factions in this game. There's three major factions, the cortex, which are the enforcers of the police state, the scum, who are trying to subvert the state and spread the rot, and everyone else, who live in Aneurism IV but isn't necessarily aligned to either faction.

The most important thing to know about this game is that you can't start off playing as either the cortex or scum. To play as either faction requires an in game currency called Anamnecyte, which is earned through in game activities depending on your role. The only role that doesn't cost Anamnecyte is the Prole, which means through out most of the game, it's likely that most of the playerbase tends to be neutral as proles inherently outnumber everyone else. I have a love hate relationship with this mechanic. It is kinda a pain to grind Anamnecytes in order to play the role you want, but at the same time, it also stops everyone from picking cortex or scum and inherently makes proles more important. Proles are kind of the kingmakers bc they cost no Anamnecytes to play and are often the role that people play to bank Anamnecytes, which means if either side pisses the prole off too much, more and more proles are going to pick the other side when they die.

The cool thing I find about this game is that over time, both sides will inherently piss off the Proles in some way. For the cortex, their job involves keeping the peace and finding contraband, anyone with contraband will be killed on sight. Now the thing is there's a lot of items that count as contraband, and most of them are fun things like drugs, guns or ieds, so a server that gets dominated by cortex tends to be insanely boring. There's also the fact that Cortex is the most common role for people who like to powertrip, and no one like powertrippers. Scum can also spawn an event called darkness which causes everyone on the server to receive no penalties for killing anyone, and what often happens is a shitton of cortex go crazy and start shooting everyone, which will often push pissed off proles into being scum.

Now on the other side of coin, Scum. Scum are the roles with the best access to contraband, which means Neutral jobs will usually want some of them around for access to stuff like gunsmith tools or parts to make guns. However, scum are also unique in that they receive NO penalties for killing neutral fates like Proles and vice versa. Cortex lose Anamnecytes and karma for killing non scum so they're are at least softly encouraged to not kill without reason, Scumbags can just shoot you whenever they want and steal all your stuff. Furthermore, the end goal of scum is to spread the rot, and this means blowing up stuff like ration factories. High rot also means your jobs pay less and things cost more, which makes the life of any honest prole much harder. Furthermore, if rot hits 100%, the server resets and everyone loses everything and have to start over. If you're a wealthy banker with a thriving store that you spent hours grinding, you might not want the server to reset and lose all your progress, giving you an incentive to fight scum. Usually the way people end up hating scum is by scum being scum. An ied to your house and all your shit getting stolen is a pretty easy way to get people to join cortex.

Now more often than not, what happens is you end up roleplaying the role you want, but I still like how the system mechanics kinda soft push people against dominant faction. Too much cortex, shit gets boring. Too much scum, it's harder to do your job and way more likely to get gunned down for no reason.