I've been browsing the wiki, and stumbled upon the "State of War" update: http://einsteinianroulette.wikia.com/wiki/The_War_Effort
*rant-rant-rant*
May I cautiously suggest not rating a mission result until debriefing has been held? Now, personally, I'd probably agree that it was a mission failure, but not for the reasons stated, and I think that, under the circumstances that happened, we did pretty okay (M22 is good for comparison here, encountering 'force of nature' enemy and dealing with it in the best way possible). And that's beside the question of whether the incursion can be counted as result of Maurice's actions or merely a whim of RNGod, but I will spare you the rhetorics I'm saving for my trial.
P.S. Could we perhaps replace the "failure" in that sentence with "disaster"? "Utterly massive disaster on a scale never before seen." Kinda neutral and shifts the focus from "Who is responsible?" to much more important and productive "And what are we going to do now?", while preserving the initial idea of the mission "contribution" to war effort.
P.P.S. But hey, we wiped UWM! That's gotta count for something, right?
Okay. You make this point a lot. Like every time you see something or someone claim there were problems on M21.
Maurice examined the central point of the anomaly and opened a portal (so to speak) to the Lurker, or whatever. Fine, it was a reasonable enough action
Pancaek got too close to a puppet and became one. fine, it could have been avoided but wasn't. ultimately, he escaped, so there's that.
Maurice and Morul had a race to see who could become the avatar of the extrauniversal eater of worlds.
as for failure verses any other descriptor: failure doesn't place blame. However, I think Maurice knew well enough that the goal of the war and the missions was to prevent exactly this event. Maurice failed to prevent exactly this event. M21 was a failure, not for the stated, immediate goal of "look at that thingy and poke it with a stick to see what it does" but for the implied goal of "and make sure it doesn't eat us all."
Settle down and take your lumps, man.
As for mission briefing, well, if Steve decided it wasn't a "failure" per se, then you can strut around and go "told you so" to all of us whose opinion is that yes, yes it was.
By the way, I don't recall anyone ever actually saying "good going Nik, you ruined the game," or anything either. A successful mission that brings misery to the players is a bigger failure than an unsuccessful one that brings excitement and interest. (case in point, M22 at least in one aspect.)