Due to a lack of demand, we have decided not to do player rankings this year.

Alright, here goes. I'll be revealing the rankings over the next few days, posting each out separately. This list is based on both the opinions of myself and Pollux based on everything we saw throughout the game.

Players are ranked on game performance, activity, journal quality, character performance, progress towards their goal, attitude to the hosts and relevance to the story. There are a number of factors to consider when it comes to ranking players, and I don't expect everybody to completely agree with the listing. These are purely our opinions, but I hope that at the very least people will read our justifications and understand why we've placed them where they are.

With each ranking we'll be talking about the positive and negative aspects of the player, discussing our feelings on the character they played, discussing our initial opinions and how they changed as well as much more. These are detailed entries that will hopefully have been worth the very long wait.

To kick-start, there are three players who are exempt from being formally ranked. In two cases, it was because the player quit. In the third, the player technically quit but in a way that had no bearing on the game. These players can't really be compared to the others, so I'm listing them first.

Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Now we move past the dropouts and onto the real players. Everybody past this point has no excuse. If they sucked, they did so on their own terms and made no attempt to correct the balance by side-stepping the game altogether.

For the most part though, they didn't suck. There was a general mixture of good and bad for most cases and it reaches a point where it will become difficult to rank people. The next few were almost unanimously decided by myself and Pollux though. These are the players who despite their potential, never came remotely close to unleashing it for one reason or another.

Number 42

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Rhea Leonhardt Portrayed By: Vespis Rhea was a somewhat interesting character who had a lot of potential but became nothing more than a walking, rarely talking inactive shoe. She barely used her role, barely had a character arc and barely posted during the entire game. Vespis has since been quite apologetic about the whole affair and openly admitted it was one of his worst games, but that won't stop me from laying into his performance! History: Vespis has a perfect record when it comes to Labyrinth games. He played in the first under his own name (or one of his notable variants) and was the hacker. His cryptic messages caused a little bit of disarray before his untimely end in an acid trap that would prove to be disappointing to both of us. Continuing on from this, he played as the androgynous butcher, Rayne Lant in Labyrinth 2. He became a mysterious, silent and creepy annex to the infamous Group B before he attempted to murder Roth and got the tables turned on him quite dramatically. In Labyrinth 2.5 he was the leader of the "scum" side, the Shades. His heart wasn't in that game much so his performance wasn't particularly noteworthy and Rayne got his just desserts in purgatory too. Despite this we had fairly high hopes for him coming into the third game. Having played with Vespis before, he's certainly somebody who can dominate in the right circumstances. His was also one of the first applications we received. Character: Original Avatar: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v629/mikirou/bluehighlights.jpg Rhea was an interesting character. A few people got the idea to extend the plot of Labyrinth 2 by casting themselves as somebody related to a former character. In the case of Rhea, she was the younger sister of Rayne and on a desperate quest to locate her older brother. This scenario actually proved something of a challenge to us in development. I liked the idea, and I wanted Vespis to be able to portray Rhea as he wanted but the girl in the photo looked fairly young so making the timeline sync up proved to be a tad problematic. I originally anticipated Labyrinth 3 being set a long time after the second, maybe as many as 50-100 years onwards. Rhea didn't fit this model, along with Rita. The result was we had to limit it to being a mere decade later. This worked in the end, and we kept the character of Rhea the same without any changes. In spite of this, however, the character idea would ultimately fall flat. Vespis barely portrayed her as a character at all and aside from the one phases where she proactively spoke, Rhea's story was more or less forgotten for the duration of the game. Her eventual death resolved or sealed nothing with regards to the character and what we got was an ultimately wasted opportunity. Journal: She used her journal to post the occasional role use, somewhat inconsistently. Other than that, the pages were very much left blank. Gameplay: It goes without saying that this result was also disappointing. Rhea was the tracker, a role which has been placed in every single Labyrinth game to little acclaim. Though it has been used throughout, it has never been used to deduce anything worth knowing. In the case of this game, the tracker role would've been perfect for finding Carl and the Caduceus, saving a lot of backtracking time and thrusting the game forward into a more interesting direction. Rhea's lack of involvement in the game came at the expense of Vespis not having time to read the long threads. Unlike other people in a similar set of circumstances, though, Rhea was extremely vocal about this. It seems like the majority of the posts I remember her making in the phases were complaining about the amount of talking that was going on in the phases. Whilst there was a lot of unnecessary back and forth going on, I found the complaining about it to not only be counter-productive but to also detract a little from the fun of the game. People don't want to see other people constantly whining and complaining about the state of the game, and the constant one note attack on people who were more dedicated felt incredibly coarse and tore away any empathy I had for Rhea. She used her role, but almost never commented on the use of said role. She revealed results in the one phase where the groups were halved and she had opportunity to finally speak, but other than that I don't really recall her making an effort to post them any other time. Part of this was due to her wanting to keep her role secret from the other half of the group. I still don't get the rationale behind this because while it could've been a nasty role in the wrong hands, its only value is if the results are known. Pollux kept a meticulous record of footprints long after Rhea's death, just in case. Like the trackers before her, they would prove to be somewhat worthless which was a pity. Other than her role, Rhea's involvement in the game was next to nothing. She discussed nothing, achieved nothing and her only viable purpose was acting as a shield so the others in her group wouldn't die instead. Conclusion: Her exceptional lack of activity and functionality, coupled with the fact that she was openly abrasive about the state of the game and its discussion leads her to falling firmly in last place. Most of the other characters achieved some semblance of interest, whether from a one time effective use of their role to just a single humorous moment or comment. Rhea had no plot, no humor and was barely even a player at all. Overall, a very disappointing effort from a player who can do much better.