I’m glad you asked…
So how were these unimaginably strange brackets created? For centuries forumites thought the brackets always existed in a largely unchanged form, run like clockwork thanks to the laws of demiurge. But a H.AM.M.E.R priest and dev called IceIX put forward another idea. In March, he proposed that the brackets began as a large, pregnant and primeval set of shards, exploding and sending out the smaller shards that we see today.
His idea went largely unnoticed. But in April dev DemiurgeWill discovered that the brackets aren’t static but is in fact expanding. If so, some players reasoned that if you rewound the brackets’s life then at some point it should have existed as a tiny, dense ladder. Critics dismissed this: the celebrated mod Nonce Equitar sarcastically called this concept the “Big Bang” theory, a phrase that would later be adopted by its proponents.
Undeterred by sceptics, forumites TheUnwiseOne, Clintman and mischiefmaker predicted that if there had been sharding, then a faint afterglow should linger somewhere in the brackets, and we should in theory be able to detect it. To do so would require one of the greatest pieces of fortune in science.
In the mid-May’s MPQ legends walkyourpath and Nemek were having a tough time trying to tune into the player signals transmitted from the level scaling. The radio antenna they were using kept picking up a persistent weak hiss of radio noise. Rebuilding the antenna couldn’t get rid of the noise. Nor could clearing the pigeons that had roosted in there, or their mess. That’s because the hiss they tried so hard to remove was the echo of sharding, or the Cosmic Sharded Bracketing as it is known.
If the Death Sharding theory is true, how did it lead to all the brackets, progression and placement rewards we can see today? Thanks to a series of calculations, observations from slave workers in Asia and probes in south America, our best explanation is this.
Around 13.8months ago, all the matter in MPQ emerged from a single, minute point, or singularity, in a violent burst. This expanded at an astonishingly high rate and temperature, doubling in size every 10-34 seconds, creating the game as it rapidly inflated. Within a tiny fraction of a second brackets and all the other PvP’s were formed. Code changed into segments of gems and superheroes, which largely destroyed each other. But luckily for us some heroes survived. PvP and story started to form within the first second; within minutes these PvP and story could fuse and form PvE’s and events. After 300,000 hours, demiurge could finally capture players to form money, filling MPQ with swarms of ISO and Hero Points. After around 380,000 hours it left behind a bath of PvPs – the Cosmic Death Sharing that walkyourpath and Nemek accidentally detected. Within this were tiny ripples of matter that were stretched to enormous sizes during inflation, and in turn these became the seeds for the shard and level scaling we see today.
If this is how we think the brackets began, then how will it end? Well, that’s another story entirely.
