[Sithlis]

Of course it won't be the  Azzies, they are basically the super bad guy corp.  Besides if you get rid of the Azzies how are we gonna have nightmares about blood mages.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

It'd be tough to destroy Aztechnology anyhow, as it is (for all intents and purposes) Aztlan as well.  You'd have to Omega Order the bastard, and have the Court itself purchase ORO/Aztechnology in order to absorb/eliminate it as a permanent member.

[Nath]

Note these propositions don't necessarily represent my own opinions. They rather are attempts to imagine what the authors may come up with.

Ares Macrotechnology
In setting: insect spirits; massive loss of consumer trust following the Excalibur plot; loss of Pentagon contracts.
For the game: over-used, especially Damien Knight who is one of the most recognizable name in the setting; removal would make room for a new, more righteous American corporation (that some may be wishing: see the FMC).

Aztechnology
In setting: faces hostility from every other prime megacorporation and all immortals.
For the game: over-used as a villain - as long as they're around, Aztlan blood mages will keep on making any other villain looks dull by comparison.

Evo
In setting: non-permanent member of the Corporate Court; internal rivalry between Buttercup, Japanese and Russian faction; attempt to manipulate a Corporate Court representative; possible source of the new nano-evil.
For the game: neither of the Japanese and Russian identity seems to stick, and the Transhumanist one is frowned upon by some.

Horizon
In setting: non-permanent member of the Corporate Court; feud with Aztechnology; faces hostility from technomancers and AI.
For the game: disliked by many for being a rip-off of Google hastily thrown into the setting as a major player with magical opinion-bending powers.

Mitsuhama Computer Technologies
In setting: faces hostility from technomancers and AI.
For the game: not enough different ideas to fully flesh out three different Japanese corporations.

Neonet
In setting: possible source of the new nano-evil.
For the game: heir of a line of failing corps; as a Loremaster, Celedyr is supposed to be a powerhouse on his own, making cohabitation with Richard Villiers awkward.

Renraku Computer Systems
In setting: possible resurgence of its AI issues.
For the game: not enough different ideas to fully flesh out three different Japanese corporations.

Saeder-Krupp
In setting: Lofwyr authority questionned, which already forced him to abandon the Loremaster role, may make S-K assets a target for other dragons and its other enemies.
For the game: The number one corporation with a nigh-invulnerable great dragon at the head is a boring proposition - removing it would make the Whole field more open.

Shiawase
In setting: no reason.
For the game: not enough different ideas to fully flesh out three different Japanese corporations.

Wuxing
In setting: non-permanent member of the Corporate Court.
For the game: not a member of the original cast - those who wants SR to return to its original roots may wish to get rid of it.

[psycho835]

Note these propositions don't necessarily represent my own opinions. They rather are attempts to imagine what the authors may come up with.

Ares Macrotechnology
In setting: insect spirits; massive loss of consumer trust following the Excalibur plot; loss of Pentagon contracts.
For the game: over-used, especially Damien Knight who is one of the ost recognizable name in the setting; removal would make room for a new, more righteous American corporation (that some may be wishing: see the FMC).

I hope not, Ares and Knight are like S-K and Lofwyr - it just wouldn't be the same setting.

Aztechnology
In setting: faces hostility from every other prime megacorporation and all immortals.
For the game: over-used as a villain - as long as they're around, Aztlan blood mages will keep on making any other villain looks dull by comparison.

Overused? Perhaps. But let's face it - they are just too fraggin' BIG to die.

Evo
In setting: non-permanent member of the Corporate Court; internal rivalry between Buttercup, Japanese and Russian faction; attempt to manipulate a Corporate Court representative; possible source of the new nano-evil.
For the game: neither of the Japanese and Russian identity seems to stick, and the Transhumanist one is frowned upon by some.

Horizon
In setting: non-permanent member of the Corporate Court; feud with Aztechnology; faces hostility from technomancers and AI.
For the game: disliked by many for being a rip-off of Google hastily thrown into the setting as the major player with magical opinion-bending powers.

Mitsuhama Computer Technologies
In setting: faces hostility from technomancers and AI.
For the game: not enough different ideas to fully flesh out three different Japanese corporations.

Second most ebil (yeah, I've just had my first encounter with AdventureQuest...) AAA corp. I still keep on wishing that one day their policy towards runners (and, let's face it, EVERYONE ELSE) bites them in the hoop. Say, an expert decker/techno/mage with some sort of terminal condition decides to go out in a blaze of glory.

Neonet
In setting: possible source of the new nano-evil.
For the game: heir of a line of failing corps; as a Loremaster, Celedyr is supposed to be a powerhouse on his own, making cohabitation with Richard Villiers awkward.

Renraku Computer Systems
In setting: possible resurgence of its AI issues.
For the game: not enough different ideas to fully flesh out three different Japanese corporations.

Saeder-Krupp
In setting: Lofwyr authority questionned, which already forced him to abandon the Loremaster role, may make S-K assets a target for other dragons and its other enemies.
For the game: The number one corporation with a nigh-invulnerable great dragon at the head is a boring proposition - removing it would make the Whole field more open.

Not gonna happen. In-universe, Lofwyr and S-K are on par (more or less?) with the Azzies? Out-of-universe, they are even more essential to the setting than Ares and Knight.

Shiawase
In setting: no reason.
For the game: not enough different ideas to fully flesh out three different Japanese corporations.

What about constant their in-fighting?

Wuxing
In setting: non-permanent member of the Corporate Court.
For the game: not a member of the original cast - those who wants SR to return to its original roots may wish to get rid of it.

P.S. No, seriously, who would win in a fight between S-K and the Azzies?

[Angelone]

Fuchi was bigger than Aztech iirc they were #2. NeoNet is also bigger giving SK a run for the top spot, and yet people are saying that they will fall.

I feel Aztech is a cheap corp. In a setting like Shadowrun they don't fit there is no ambiguity with them, they are the bad corp. Smart money is on Wuxing.

I still don't get how one screwed product could hurt Ares like it did. This is a world where people can hack your car and have you delivered to a ghouls den or hijack your cyberware. Where's the backlash against that?

[Sterling]

I'm afraid I have to disagree re: Aztechnology.  Yes, to Shadowrunners they have a uniformly bad reputation, but to the average Joe Wage-Slave they are the main producers of food, were protecting the underdog in the Amazonian War, and without them Stuffer Shack would nor exist.  Rumours of Blood Magic may exist, but there is no evidence to the general population.

As far as ARES is concerned, I don't know if you are old enough to remember the whole debacle regarding New Coke back in 1985.  They put out one bad product and ... whoah!  Complaints shot up, sales crashed, and they had to reverse their position very quickly (in fact the whole thing is now taught in Business classes as what not to do).  It was bad enough for Coca-Cola with only one major competitor using the problem to enhance their own product.  Now imagine that with nine or Triple-As plus several other smaller corps doing their best to knock down ARES and take their position as the number one weapons manufacturer.

[Ursus Maior]

As far as ARES is concerned, I don't know if you are old enough to remember the whole debacle regarding New Coke back in 1985.

[...]

Now imagine that with nine or Triple-As plus several other smaller corps doing their best to knock down ARES and take their position as the number one weapons manufacturer.

While that story certainly is a good lesson for MBA-students, I think it does not have enough parallels to the situation Ares is in. First of all, Coke (the beverage) basically is Coca-Cola. Sure, they own many other beverages and branched out, but by far the most important market for Coca-Cola is beverages and its most pervasive brand is Coke. Also, Coke is a mass product, but its success as a brand depends largely on one thing: Its taste and if that is how the masses expect it to be. While the New Coke desaster might have have had a large effect on customers in North America, no-one really cared in the rest of the world; it wasn't even really introduced in Europe. In addition to that, it is easy to sway public opinion against a brand, especially if a key feature was changed without prior acknowledgement.

Ares on the other hand has two major branches that it dominates world-wide: Aerospace and weapons technology. Basically Ares is 2/3 of all the weapon and aerospace companies of today's North America combined. That's a whole diffrent ballgame. Ares has a couple of lead-products, but it never changed key features of them to a large extent. Guns still shoot, and planes still fly. The product and brand repertoire of Ares is much more diversified than that of Coca-Cola and a large portion of its customers are organisations and professionals. They behave diffrently than public masses. Look at the many acquisition projects western militaries ran in the last decades. There were multiple quite collosal screw-ups or projects that simply failed. Usually that does not kill a company, unless they went all-in on one very huge project. But that's simply bad strategy and will usually lead to a corporate buy-out. It also doesn't happen to a large corporation like Ares over one cheap piece of equipment like an assault rifle. If they blew their new mulit-billion nuyen nuclear carrier program, then they might be in trouble. But a gun? No matter the hightech, if they can basically dominate the gausrifle and laser weapon market, they won't collapse over what would basically be the next Alpha Combat Gun.

Unless of course, they are internally devided, Damien Knight cannot keep the execs in line and some of them are already insect spirits. Then it could get really nasty and the corporation might end like Fuchi, i.e. the Ares-permanent cororate court seat might be lost to another corporation and the rest be downgraded to AA status. But who might that be? Well, before the Crash 2.0 Novatech and Ares both heavily invested into the True America movement in the CAS. Novatecht used to own CAS-based Cavalier Arms, but sold it to Reality, Inc., which also owns Eagle Security and the largest share (25 percent) of Lone Star. On the other hand both the CAS and the UCAS, including President and former general Colloton have been rebuilding their militaries and there have been talks and hints about reunification for some time now, althoug only through backchannels. So maybe someone has been pulling some strings here and we will see a CAS-based security and weapons corporation emerge out off the Ares-buyout and a possible re-emergence of the North American nation states, with the PCC and SN using diffrent methods, but heading the same directions. That would leave profound consequences though. And Damien Knight would still own KE and whatever is left of the rest of Ares, when the insect spirits are ousted.

Pure speculation though.

[Angelone]

I was talking from a purely player perspective.

[ShadowcatX]

I'm afraid I have to disagree re: Aztechnology.  Yes, to Shadowrunners they have a uniformly bad reputation, but to the average Joe Wage-Slave they are the main producers of food, were protecting the underdog in the Amazonian War, and without them Stuffer Shack would nor exist.  Rumours of Blood Magic may exist, but there is no evidence to the general population.

As far as ARES is concerned, I don't know if you are old enough to remember the whole debacle regarding New Coke back in 1985.  They put out one bad product and ... whoah!  Complaints shot up, sales crashed, and they had to reverse their position very quickly (in fact the whole thing is now taught in Business classes as what not to do).  It was bad enough for Coca-Cola with only one major competitor using the problem to enhance their own product.  Now imagine that with nine or Triple-As plus several other smaller corps doing their best to knock down ARES and take their position as the number one weapons manufacturer.

And yet Renraku lost, not one project, but the single largest building in the world which housed numerous projects, including their biggest and greatest project Deus, lost somewhere over 70,000 lives, and they're still in the AAA category.

ETA: And if the German sourcebooks are to be considered official (no idea) we have our winner. SK. . . . .

[Herr Brackhaus]

ETA: And if the German sourcebooks are to be considered official (no idea) we have our winner. SK. . . . .

April Fool's mean anything to you? Come on, Fifty Shades of Shadowrun? I would buy it, but that's clearly a prank...

[Ursus Maior]

Where would you get that information from? I didn't come across that in any of the sourcebooks so far. And the only information available to German players not available to to English-speakers would be a couple of weapons and cars in an anthology printed last year.

As far as I remember, SK took a few big hits, like Mr Bremen leaving for Spinrad, a AA corporation. Allegedly SK-Prime took several hits, but again, that wouldn't put SK out of its AAA status. They need to loose BMW for that and then some. How would that work? From Number 1 to kicked out of the club seems unrealistic.

Plus: April's Fool...

[ShadowcatX]

Wipes the egg off my face. I knew the other two were fake, I don't know why I bought that one, so easily. Probably because I'd much rather it be SK than Ares. (Or Aztechnology.)

[Ursus Maior]

I'm sorry...  *handshanky*

Well... The quest continues...

[Wakshaani]

For what it's worth, ever since the announcement, I've been working on putting in some trapdoors to pull corps through if the day comes that they gotta go. The players will be determining which corp bite sthe dust and teh writing team'll make it happen. Most of us have someone we'd *love* to send packing and somebody we'd be all, like, "Not my baby!", but, at the end of the day?

You guys make the call.

*My* job's making sure it makes sense.

So, yeah, it can be one of the guys holding the Golden Ticket from the foundation of the Corporate Court. It could be one of the new kids. It ain't my place to decide. I just gotta make sure that it *can* happen, so, hey.

Door's open, y'all.

(The guys upstairs are willing to play hardball with the setting, if it comes to that. We got rid of *FastJack* for goodness sakes, and during the wrap-up to the Dragon Civil War, every single Great Dragon's head was on the chopping block. Nobody had a get out of jail free card, not even Lofwyr. Some would have taken an *astoundingly* good proposal to knock off, but, ultimately? Nobody's safe. We're all willing to George R.R. Martin anybody if the story calls for it. Seriously.)

Now, that said? I'm all about hearing who you'd *like* to see go down, and why. Feel free to chat.

[DeathStrobe]

Hm...seeing Aztechnology fall would be interesting. Being able to run in Mexico would be nice, because as it is, Aztechnology has too tight of a strangle hold on the nation to make it feasible for runners. But at the same time, I really really like them as boogey men. And them having their own nation does help keep them mysterious and more dangerous than the other megas.

I don't know what makes Renraku special anymore. What have they done since their CEO kicked the bucket and they led to the events of Crash 2.0. Seeing them go would help shake up the setting.

I like all the other megas. I'm not in love with Saeder-Krupp, but we need a mega corp with a dragon CEO. That's pretty much what separates Shadowrun from normal cyberpunk. In fact, I'd like more crazy drek like that, like an AI, Sasquatch, or free spirit CEO, or something weird like that.

I like Horizon, because its very modern cyberpunk. Treating people like literal interchangeable cogs, being metrics driven, personality cult, it's wonderful.

Wuxing, I want more about these guys. I like the idea of them being dangerous by altering ley lines with geomancy and such. But I want more.

I also like the internal politics of Shiawase and Ares. Though, Ares has taken a very interesting turn by playing with forces they shouldn't have. But that's awesome. That's so fitting for the setting.

EVO falls under the same reason I like SK, for just being uniquely shadowrun. A mega corp all about making products for trolls, orks and dwarves, with a free spirit on the board. You can't do that in any other setting. Also, they're transhumanist agenda is also very post cyberpunk and helps keep Shadowrun from feeling dated.

I like MCT for their yakuza mega corp gimmick, but I wouldn't be against seeing them go.

So, I'd either vote for Renraku or Aztechnology. Not sure which way I'd lean just yet.