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Purple Flower Garden was once a dream in the mind of a certain Purplemoon-Yui. She carried this dream with her for many years. Much later, she met a certain Cupcake and told the Cupcake of her dream. Others before had said the dream was silly but Cupcake didn't. Eventually, the time seemed right to try to make the dream happen. Purpley travel a long way to make Purple Flower Garden and once the place was chosen, she invited Cupcake to join her. Today, they have been there for one whole year. The Two Dorky Weebs (as one supporter affectionately named us) would like to invite you to celebrate with them. To get an idea of what would and should be at the party, we got some ideas from others: (Disclaimer, if we visited you to get ideas and you aren't mentioned here, or if we didn't drop by this time, we apologise... we were a little high on icing sugar the last few weeks). Everyone is invited! You'll see there's a definite theme... Ellie is ready! Some guests had very specific ideas ~ (Thraxy might not know it yet but he'll be leading the marching song!). Bring your stuffed animals too! Work in progress: Anyone offering to help with this one? Always. ------ Thank you for being with us today and to all our friends for supporting our dream.

TEst will bring the punch bowl..

Shifty here reminding you that your alliance will never be this bad. >get dogpiled and run a bloated AA that's got micro tier management >blame imaginary bots for brutal beatdown

CN died because of crappy mechanics that weren't fixed, but your point still stands. I want these hosted on either the forums or in-game, and I would still object if next year it was the exact same thing except for Alex being the one to give out the link, but even that would be better than how it's being conducted now. As for the radio show, no one is objecting to it specifically. We just don't want the entire process to be contrived around announcing the winners on a radio show with a complete disregard for any other concerns, which is what's being done now. Independent of it being used as a justification for this whole poorly conceived process, I think a radio show about the awards is a great idea. It's almost like it's not a political issue and we're complaining because we care about the community, not just our own alliance. Yes. The default option shouldn't be having to use a VPN to conceal your IP from a dubiously trustworthy third party, it should be hosting the awards on the politicsandwar.com domain. We started asking you two months ago, the day you posted your awards announcement. It's not our fault you didn't listen. And we only found out about Dynamic's site after the awards started. That's not us moving the bar, that's us reacting as new information comes to light. You hosted the vote on the forums before, which meant no one had to "do the votes right". The forums did them for you. We told you to do them on the forums as they've been done in the past because we feel that is the way to do the votes right. It's almost as if the way you conduct community events matters as much as the attendance. No. There were six posts on the first page of your announcement thread telling you to host the votes on the forums, all made less than 24 hours after you posted it. And these concerns weren't unreasonable given the reactions to last year's awards votes. The common thread in our complaints has been transparency and using official PW spaces (like the official forums) rather than third party sites. This is no different. And, to repeat, we're not moving the bar if we complain about things as we find out about them. Perhaps the underlying issue is that you prioritize your plans over doing the awards in a reasonable way.

I mean, NPO is right, doing this shit offsite is stupid. Also, apparently the trust and safety team can't even collect nominations properly and missed a whole bunch of them, so idk why I'd trust them at all. The nominations are on the forums... anyone could just make a poll (hint hint nudge nudge)

You guys care wayyyy too much about this dumb as frick popularity contest. They are meaningless and not actually reflective of the truth. Who cares about transparency or where the vote is taken place. Do good = not win BK wants you to win = win period. To add, those complaining maybe next year you can do the awards. I can imagine the tedious work it is setting this up, looking through the nominations and such. This year they tried something different with a big reveal of who BK wanted to win instead of us already knowing by watching BK slowly knock out other nominations. If you got a big problem then take some time out of your day and do the awards instead of the current team taking what I assume hours of their day to do this for the community since others didn't step up.

dont even have a permit for a kangaroo

You're welcome! I do strive to be that attentive friend ?

01/08/2019 01:12 AM Nizam Adrienne of Nazaradeclared a Attrition war upon Paradox Akuryo of Desura. Adrienne's justification for the war was, "Oh, cute. You want to be a farmer now?". @Nizam Adrienne it’s actually for giving food to noobs which is why I only went to 2150. Thanks for noticing though, so many people just don’t notice when you go to all the trouble to get a new haircut and dye it and they act like nothing happened. Everyone needs that one friend who notices to get them through the day. Next time show up with actual infra and military though so it can be fun instead of a boring chore, this is actually MORE BORING than farming.

I'm mostly supportive but I have somewhat mixed feelings. I think the way the game allows people to fight on basically endlessly isn't a good thing. People should be able to fight back from a loosing position, for a while at least, but it shouldn't lead to an endless stalemate and game of whackamole, where people have nothing left to destroy but can keep fighting. It makes wars really boring when your opponent has so low infra that it's not worth destroying. In that sense, being able to use ground attacks to keep someone from having the funds to fight when they don't have enough infra to easily replenish their cash via their income isn't necessarily a bad thing. And it forces people to come up with creative ways to fund their military, also not a bad thing. For that reason I would propose making the limit based on infra or population, not just city count. Something like population / 4. (I say all this as someone who right now is immensely benefiting from the ability to keep fighting long past the point where anyone can really do meaningful damage to my nation. In some cases I can do more infra damage with one attack than the value of all my infra put together. That shouldn't be a thing.)

There are several issues with switching to forum voting at this point: Wasting the time of hundreds of players who have already voted. Not everyone wants to vote again Reducing Dynamic's work to nothing Ruining the radio show which people are looking forward to I think the best option is to let things run their course. Any changes should be made in 2020 Personally I find it pretty ironic that the NPO guys have more spheremates in our team than other alliances and yet they are complaining the loudest in this thread. It's almost as if you don't trust your allies to "watch" the system on your behalf

I promise you that is not the reason you receive downvotes.

Just for the record. The tone of this post is a pretty good example of why I didn't trust you to run the awards, and the fact that you have some people who volunteered to help you doesn't change a single thing about that. You're not valuing community input when you're stacking a team with people who are either malign or naive, then claiming that they're representative of the community. Also, it makes no sense for you guys to make a point about hosting the voting offsite when you did the nominations on the forums. Edit: Everyone agrees with me. Literally every player in the game. I just hosted a vote for it, and it was unanimous. I hosted it off site, but given the fact that even you voted that you agree with me, Kastor, I expect you to address these concerns immediately.

In principle having this done off-site with no public transparency or any proper voting mechanism that can be seen by the public during the process is quite shady. I mean I'm glad folks want to step up to hold things for the community, but this is something for all of us, and the biggest transparency for these kind of public polls (which they should be) is hosting here on the forums, in this sub-forum specifically created for it. I just fundamentally disagree taking it off-forum, regardless of who's involved and would prefer to have the voting returned to the boards.

There’s too much goodness in this thread to be on the forums.

We need more wholesome content like this Happy anniversary!

Happy first b-day! Best post

@Yui @CuppyCakeYums In the almost 3 years I've known you two in this game, through over 100,000+ discord messages and through highs and lows its been great fun getting to know you both. I remember when you two first founded PFG, to see it continue on with your unwavering dedication to it is such a great sight. Yui you truly are the nicest person in this game (If you don't win nicest player 2018 award then its rigged). Cakey you're a total legend, I love your meme posting, your jokes and just having a good chat. You two weebs were the ones who introduced me into anime when at first i hated it, so well done mates you got me into it even though 2 years ago I said I'd never watch a single one. ;,P Straight from down under Here's to PFG, happy 1st birthday!!!

I make all my friends through art. Wanna be friends?

That's because Yui is one of the nicest people in this game ❤️

While I support moving the site to politicsandwar.com domain for the next award, there is nothing sketchy about Dynamic's site. I use one of the best antimalware programs and it didn't detect anything bad on his site. If you run a scan on virustotal and other similar sites, it will show that the site is perfectly safe.

I say give this a shot. See where it goes to. It's one of the few things that's making this interesting. I'll definitely be tuning into the show if I can, to listen in to who won. While people criticize about transparency and "awards don't matter", this is an attempt to fix some of the poorly done stuff from the past. If it goes bad, so what, just chalk it up to another year of badly done awards. If it goes mediocre, then at least we have a foundation to work off of to make it better. If it goes well (That is, if TGH and it's allies wins every award, including knocking TheNG from Worst Leader), then great - let's keep it going as is!~~~ Multiple years we've had spam votes on obvious bias choices. While you cannot remove bias votes completely, we can come up with ideas to limit it if we want to legitimize the awards. ----- Personally I'm all for this idea. I'd like to flesh out the committee over seeing it though, but since it's a group of volunteers - I can't gripe about it. Plus it's the first attempt at this so I'd like to see where they take it. While this is odd, I also appreciate the non-transparency of this to an extent. On one hand, people don't know who's winning. On the other hand, people also don't know who's spam voting what. At the end of 2019 (Or hell, even now), I'd like to see a elected committee to oversee the private voting process and cast in their own votes. Like how the Electoral College does for the US. While at the same time, we hold a public, fully transparent vote for the masses to contribute. Then we can see the differences of it between both the committee and the popular vote, and come to a general consensus. The biggest issue I have with myself recognizing these awards is the fact that the majority of those voting have no idea of "other" votes. There's little to no campaigning or reasoning to who should win what. There's a major difference between say... @Prefontaine and @Thanos arguing who should win what to me and Roqbot #4599 arguing it out. (As in, there are players who are much more knowledgeable about who contributes what compared to others) Other than that, at least the award threads are entertaining to read when the low tide washes out and reveals all the salt left.

At the end of the day, this whole shabang isn’t a big deal. Keshav and Frawley made some good points as to why doing it the way it was done was a mistake, and it looks like the people running the vote took the feedback and came to a solution that people could get behind. When it comes down to it, it’s an attempt by some folk to do something nice for the community. I’m happy to help by using a medium that people seem to enjoy. These guys have done enough to drum up enough interest to gather Hundreds of votes. You indicate that the awards are pointless and people don’t care about them anyway, why not try doing it a different way?

Or they just see the bullcrap for what it is and aren't afraid to call it that. The point of all of this was to allow for a big reveal surprise show for the radio stuff. Here's the problem, the only people who seem to want it are the people running it. Everyone else is seemingly apathetic or against it. Trying to run an event a certain way for the joy of the people running it, rather than the people partaking in it is a failure in the part of the people organizing (see: you all). This whole thing has been beyond miss handled from the get go and I doubt you'll see more than maybe 5 extra listeners to the radio show, cus guess what you run your radio show at a time when very few will stick around to see the big reveal of the awards. If anything people will just wait to see them announced the next day and then !@#$ about how it was rigged (which they would have done even if it was on the forums, just a little less so). So here's what you idiots have done. You've taken a pointless contest that really no one cares much about, because the deserving people/alliances rarely actually win, and there is NO benefit to winning or losing and have turned it into a fustcluck of a headache for the joy of the people running the damn event. Wake the fark up. I couldn't care less about the awards and even I can see how much you guys are screwing this whole thing up. It might've been a good idea in thought but when enough people (on your own side as you've pointed out) started !@#$ing about how it's being done, you might've realized you farked up. But no. You keep chugging along. How you are so oblivious to your own frick ups is beyond me. "HEY GUYS IT'LL BE FUN BECAUSE WE THINK IT'S FUN DOING IT THIS WAY". The thought never crossed your mind that you could actually be wrong.

Nah, I trust Frawley, robots don't have preferences

Let them eat cake!

Was on my way outback when I noticed some Kangaroos looking at me! I fed them some food and they followed me even when I went back home! I think they want to stay with us in Purple Flower Garden so say hello to Roo and Hanny, our newest addition to the Purple Flower Garden, on its 1 year anniversary! Happy 1 Year Anniversary Purple Flower Garden!

The fact that Kastor and co. ignored them doesn't discount them. So....why does that mean it doesn't count? Half of what we're saying now is that Kastor ignores input from anyone he disagrees with, which is essentially what Thrax said.

Not really:

I have to concede that I'm ambivalent to having NPO part of it, or not. Even if a NPO'er isn't part of it, its alright, if there was a transparent system in place, one that has enough regulation mechanisms. If Alex supported this, then a post outlining this is the steps/rules and accepting it being held off-site would have been a good start. At the end of the day, while I'm grateful individuals in the community want to hold community awards, I'd like to see it done here or have it not particularly left to the devices of the players ourselves (myself included I'm terrible at work! ).

Then he's wrong to have done so. At a minimum he should have posted his approval on the forums, and any offsite voting should have been announced by him in the changelog in-game. The fact that his approval wasn't common knowledge is a problem in itself, and hosting anything official on a domain other than politicsandwar.com is still a pretty sketchy administrative practice. None of this is a coherent reason not to host the polling on politicsandwar.com, none of this is a coherent reason to make the voting less than 100% transparent as its happening, and none of this is a coherent reason to make people who aren't PW staff the face of the voting. Clearly not, or there wouldn't be this many complaints and your dismissals of them would make more sense. It wouldn't matter if it was only NPO members objecting; my point was that it's not and thus your claim that the complaints are coming solely from NPO is baseless. Also, no one here said it was "irrelevant", so I'm not sure where you're getting that from. NPO being excluded was one objection of several, and it wasn't even the first or primary objection.

There were numerous objections from across the community to voting being hosted on an opaque, offsite portal with no oversight from the mods or Alex. At least thirteen people from TKR, BK, NPO, GOB, HS, TCW, Arrgh, TGH, and TI indicated that they would prefer the voting was hosted on the PW forums, that the PW mod team oversaw the voting, or both. The only coherent reason given for hosting them offsite was to make the winners a surprise to be revealed on a radio show. However, as cool as Orbis Weekly and Great Job are, they aren't official representatives of PW. Now the justification has shifted to turnout. First, our complaints aren't about turnout; they're about transparency and the fact that a group players who don't represent PW in any official capacity have hijacked the awards. Second, the solution to low turnout isn't to move the awards offsite, it's to host them on politicsandwar.com. PW has two official sites, neither of which is https://pnwawards.cf/ @Alex needs to either prevent players from appointing themselves in charge of these things, maintain moderator oversight over them, and keep them hosted on an official PW site, or he needs to stop lending them official legitimacy. That means locking this subforum and allowing players to conduct their own annual awards in Orbis Central, on Orbis Weekly's Discord server, or wherever else they choose, without the imprimatur of being sanctioned by PW's staff. Kastor saying there were a bunch of people who objected to the offsite voting who didn't post their objection in the announcement thread ^

You should've learned when to shut up when we kicked you from BC. I never liked you anyway, you couldn't do the basic shite you were asked and you were so bloody arrogant thinking "oh I'm so good at FA and Milcom" I'd publish some of the stuff you put on your milcom assessment but I don't wanna give people stage 4 terminal brain cancer.

Yes, I'm a spoilt brat for asking for transparency. Got it!

Yeah just ignore the bunch of other folks who posted in that thread. It really isn't about which AA I come from, as much as been straight with you about the issues that you refused to engage with at any point. But good job ignoring anyone else who had issues with it, and bring it down to AAs.

And heres whats inherently problematic with the system a) its close door. b) I have to randomly trust individuals over a vote thats for the entire community. c) Theres no transparent manner to actually look at the votes as they come in. If its a community system, the simplest way is to run the forum vote, its far better and the outreach can be done, since its picking a place for people to vote in. I absolutely do not trust a self-appointed board of arbitrators. The only means for the community at large to ensure transparency if its done here, since there are systems of checks and balances. This really isn't me arguing against a new and shiny thing and the obverse to this argument is true, just because theres a new and shiny thing, doesn't make it better. This system is rife with potential misuse when its supposed to represent the community at large, and you nor anyone else on this board were appointed by anyone else other than yourselves. At the end of the day, the only means to ensure the vote is transparent, is here and not on someone else's server, since this deals specifically with voting mechanisms (also why democracy sucks in games!). So no, I'm not against a new and shiny thing, just don't think the old method was broken to introduce a new and shiny thing, let alone something that raises questions to the entire process. I stated this earlier to Kastor when he first posted it up in December on NPO's discord, and I'm stating it again. This new method could be so easily questioned and if its "PnW's" awards, I'd prefer it was held on an official "PnW" forums when it involves voting mechanisms and choices.

Two months though? Yes, the holiday season is indeed busy depending on job and family, but it's a rather broad interpretation to consider it to begin in October. Either way, the holiday season has at this point been over for about a week by any rational metric. People should be heading off VM in about one week, if their VM was in fact due to that.

I did my part in voting for none of the people who should win in any category. #boycottyearlyawards

You let her get the high ground didn't you?

C'mon now, missiles ARE military ?

API data: Thanks @Shadow.

Uhh think you missed my point. I was saying "using your premise that it is unfair to exclude people based on having a forums account, why did you only collect nominations from people with a forums account"? You didn't message people in game until after the nominations were done, so now you have a vote that only has partial representation on who people may actually vote for, do you not? I didn't suggest you should change it midway through the vote. I suggested you should have used the same methodology from the start. Which you probably would have thought of, if you had the super-representative pnw brain trust you claimed to. : )

Look, I’m going to just be honest. There’s ZERO chance that we switch to the forum voting at this time. The reason I feel comfortable doing this is because they’re multiple people from multiple alliances looking and trusting everything for the awards. It’s next to impossible to rig them and if anything happened, the members of the team would see it. As for NPO not being invited to help, I didn’t ask anyone, everyone volunteered. None of your guys did, so none of you guys are included. Finally, stop !@#$ing. It’s way too late, and I already said a long time ago this is what was going to be done, and in all honesty I don’t give a flying frick if random people don’t like it. This is the biggest participation ever, so obviously we’re doing something right. Please feel free to DM me about any concerns. Or feel free to post in this thread. We value the input of the community. The community at large > NPO. Sorry bud.

Aye, not sure why when we have a perfectly transparent and neutral voting site here, on this forum, that we need to take it offsite and shady, what was the point?

Should be onsite. I don't particularly care who hosts it and although winning is nice, the main thing is it should be onsite here.

Your ability to state the obvious leaves us lesser mortals in awe.

Is it weird that this gives me more respect for Typhon? Rolling your @$$ is precisely what I would do. With extreme prejudice.