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  1. Democracy is good until it doesn't work out to our favor. We clearly need a republic and representatives to strip the voting rights of the majority.
    13 points
  2. When you opened with "I've been thinking about writing this for some time" I was expecting a lot more than what you wound up writing.
    11 points
  3. 8 points
  4. For historical posterity this is the current status of this "pretty close poll" as of the time he wrote this post.
    8 points
  5. Well Roq if you are going to speak for Grumpy, please dont. My hit list post Knightfall, was CoS, BK, tS. In that order. The reason that list looked like it did was because of how CoS and BK acted in the peace talks for that war (and at the time I wanted to see tS lose a war). I expected to be hit, TKR sphere had it coming. I didn't even have an issue losing that war. That said those peace talks were such bullshit, that it was no longer in my eyes a, "shake hands, hey good war guys you got us" it was a you are specifically trying to stick it to me, so I guess we are actual enemies. BK and CoS became a future target in my eyes specifically because of the peace talks. I actually thought NPO was smart not to be in those talks because Thanos was such a dick in there, it put a giant ole target on his alliance post war. Maybe I am old school, but I miss the days when you fight a war, and post war you look at the people you fought and say those guys did a good job, we should see about getting closer to them. The toxicity now is so bad, not only do I not want to fight with many of you, I would be happier never having to talk to or deal with many of you ever again.
    5 points
  6. Pre-emptive thanks to GOONS for purging this cancer from the face of the earth.
    5 points
  7. We will accept a truce in the form of a certified letter relaying unconditional surrender to coalition leadership: @Leo the Great @Roquentin @TheNG @Sphinx @Khai Jäger @Arthur Pendragon and myself. Please DM us for the address, bonus points if you send a Christmas ham.
    4 points
  8. No one said publicly. Also what you say is essentially: "We will give you only one term at a time because we want to. Consequences be damned." Also according to you: Either IQ starts actually negotiating like every other alliance and in good faith, or Coalition A accepts the fact that t$ gets separated so you can continue to roll them even after a KERCHTOGG peace and that in order to see a term they have to accept the previous one allowing you to inflict much harder terms at the end. If we add the lies and your overall behaviour before (also after) coalition A agreed to surrender once acceptable terms have been negotiated, and the leaks of coalition B lately, i think it is clear why basically the entire game lost trust in NPO, BK and GOONS. You just saying "Either roll with it or accept the death of the game" isn't exactly helping with building trust. And not only TKR and NPO are on the negotiating table. Coalition A consists basically of KETOGG, Rose sphere, Chaos and Syndisphere. I don't know how you view the importance of individual alliances in coalition B, but in Coalition A we are equal. Hence trust and cooperation has to increase on the entirety of both coalitions, not just NPO and TKR. The situation now is: You present an unacceptable ultimatum, Coalition A continues fighting because as mentioned before it is "Unacceptable" and the only thing changing it, preventing the death of yet another nation sim, and eventually repairing relations between Coalition B and everyone else as well as repair your image is to simply stop negotiating in bad faith. You can't win PnW like that. You can't "win" PnW at all. No one can. This game is fundamentally based on dynamics. Wars like this one freeze those. Even if you would have won this war with all of your original terms, with Coalition A effectively disbanding and you controlling everything now. What is left? Sure, you will eventually roll Fark sphere, but then what? Game over. You have effectively turned this entire thing that everyone, including you, invested so much in into a badly programmed farming simulator. You lost because you are the ones ruining your own game, everything you achieved, everything you won, will become meaningless. How do we prevent that? Hand out the terms to the negotiators of coalition A, let them start negotiating together with you and finally get this game to peace. Another war will follow soon enough anyways, but hopefully with different coalitions.
    4 points
  9. I think we've addressed this earlier, but given the length of responses and in keeping with the cordial tone of this thread I can offer our rationale. The fact of the matter is, in a minisphere environment 2v1s are not to be forbidden. In fact, it's a component of this game that sheer numbers lends a significant advantage in many cases, so it might even be common in a minisphere environment. What we were hoping for would be that the opponents would be an ever shifting landscape. So the fact that Surfs Up happened would not preclude the chance for KETOG and CHAOS to work together in the future. Similarly, if N$O and KETOG worked together, hypothetically, it would not preclude the chance of them being adversaries down the line. It creates a more dynamic environment, almost king of the hill, where you can have a myriad of wars and a myriad of coalition combinations. That being said, we felt that we were signaling with Surfs Up our commitment to the above future. When we received actionable intel that BK and perhaps NPO were going to revert us to the status quo, we united in defense of our shared vision. I understand and do sympathize with the fact that this action taken in a vacuum would be fine by everyone (I should hope), but NPO read it in light of their entire history on Orbis, a terrible practice that too many of us continue to adhere to. So, in that sense I think it is all a difference in perspective and how we allowed our histories inform our interpretations. I will state emphatically, CHAOS and KETOG still had many an axe to grind and had no intention whatsoever of allying after this war at the outset.
    4 points
  10. So since Kastor has bowed out, I'll run the awards. I have two different ways we can do this and the choice is yours: Option 1. We run the awards as typical of every other year. Nominations and voting open to the public. Option 2. We run it with two delegates from each top 100 alliance with more than 5 members (to exclude banks). I've opened this poll up to let the community decide which option they'd rather take. After it closes, I'll begin organizing either option. Poll closes on Monday btw. Giving you guys the whole weekend to vote.
    3 points
  11. To add to what Roq and Edward says (also hi @Hodor thanks for the love), there is something I believe folks refuse to accept, or agree to and that will be that Roq or myself owed any of you anything. There is this entitlement that you have a right to decide how the game should play and the place of the NPO within that system, and that's something that adds a huge role into this present scenario. The NPO for the longest time has always had to exist in a system that was constructed first by tS/OO/MENSA, followed by the completion of EMC with Rose. The remnants of that system was always a cool boys club of folks who drift in and out and there was never any means to disrupt that as the NPO since we were the easiest bogeyman to fall back onto. Folks forget, that the vast majority of KERTCHOGG leadership have been similar faces that ran the NPOFT and Silent right after. The changes in alliances/names still brought out leadership looking to fight us during AC. At the end of the day, there was no means by which the NPO would not always be a target, and forced into this entitled straitjacket of a meta not set by ourselves for the game. We spent years with people calling our tax system horrible, that we had to git gud, oh and to crown it all off, that we're nothing but robots and have no real community that defines us. These are jokes, but these narratives made it clear, especially when fully supported by many in Coalition A's leadership that the NPO's role in this game would never be defined by ourselves. We always had to play in your meta. For all the claims of wanting to have a fun game, all I see is a narrow mini-sphere answer, and that this is the only right way to play, and I fundamentally disagree with that. Both Roq and I saw this war, at the beginning a means to further enshrine that stranglehold over the meta and FA over the game and that to me at least played a part in concurring to use the TKR CB now, and not later. I am glad someone pointed out that we're all plotting continuously. It's the nature of the game and its bread and butter. So the moralistic hill is just funny to see, when we have logs of TKR plotting a war over IQ, gift wrapped as some anti-hegemony narrative, when at its basic level was nothing other than using the old NPO/BK bad man trope that a lot of folks have spent years and attempted various means to push. That itself to us was problematic. For all the belief in "fairness" and "trust", and in this "two-way" street of foreign affairs, NPO was most often an outlier and benign because we were forced to out of necessity. The conditions leading up to this war changed. I think Buor mentioned that we flip flopped a lot on our positions early on? Well that's what happens in a fluid war time scenario. Unlike common belief, war doesn't happen in a vacuum. Things keep changing, tiers keep moving at least in the early days and one gets a feel. Was there a war planned vs KETOGG yes, but did that have anything to do with BK or anything else, not really. It was meant to be 1v1 to see how this mini-sphere could work, and if there was any real buy-in to let this kind of war happen. That did not happen because of Surfs Up and our views regarding that, multi-varied as they are, has been stated. But for any mini-sphere idea to truly work, especially if history is any pointer within the environment of the game (that being the precedent set by EMC), to the victor goes the spoils. There are a large number of alliances who do absolutely nothing, but bandwagon on and build into those victorious spheres, for the fact that they don't have to do much and have an easy victory. That is inherently problematic when mini-spheres combine, because to us looking in from the outside, it seemed a threat. The lack of any FA to assuage our concerns and an information blackhole was further problematic because what we saw especially as the early rounds saw quite a lot of Citadel fold, and Cov/BK on shaky ground was simply put, a threat. A threat not born out of paranoia, but out of working within the meta I explained earlier on in this post and reinforced by the creation of EMC. As @Edward I rightly pointed out in one of his posts, this meta and lack of trust was further eroded in the past due to paperless agreements. That fundamentally shaped the way we see the game. You can claim it paranoia, but the conversations we've had with folks and the nature of discussions over the years, poisoned the well when it came to believing that the "fracture" points within KETOGG/Chaos/Rose would remain wide enough that a meta based around paperless would not arise again. It's easy to be everyone's secret partner if everyone's in on it, and all the NPO would have is tS/HS. This brings me to tS/HS. HS are an absolute gem of an alliance with by far some of the most mature/pragmatic folk I know in the game. That being said, with regards to tS, our faith in their word changed when their government changed just before the war. The actions of Sisyphus/Leopold and Utmos later on, left us wondering where is the path forward. They may be disappointed with how the war shaped early on, but unlike HS who were willing to wrinkle out the issues and attempt to work out a common point, tS and its triumvirate believed more in the face-loss, than the real material nature of war itself. That led to us wondering how is it going to work further down the road. But tS was still at least communicating some of their treaties (Sanreizan/TEst), which to us was a sign that required to be reciprocated. That changed the moment the CTO/OWR treaty was signed, since to us, it seemed simply put a middle finger to the NPO/ and its war efforts, and once again changed the landscape within with we had to operate. Whatever those logs showcase, my reasoning for being involved in those discussions stemmed from what I saw was a move designed to build a base for tS that did not include us. So how does all of this lead to the term "zero-sum" that I have used quite a bit? An entitled belief that one set of players have the right to decide our meta and how we play, along with the history of actions, especially that of paperless that poisoned the well, and the actions/narratives portrayed when one side was winning the early rounds of this war, pointed to a bunch things. Namely: 1) Given the opportunity, old allies will always find common targets, and or have secret agreements as in the past that we have no knowledge off, and the reason was NPO/BK man bad, 2) That no action that the NPO did, would we ever control our own fate, because the peanut gallery would never be satisfied, 3) The early narratives from KERTCHOGG lit a fire they really could not pull back from and that for whatever reason you wish to speculate upon, was used by us to ensure we come out of this with a win. The fact is, I do believe the NPO has been blamed for a lot of things, that we did not do over the years. That a lot of folks refuse to work with us solely because of what Roq did in a game that should not be mentioned and that these actions are justified to be weary of his motivations doesn't work one sided. I don't know any of the present leadership except a few, but nevertheless if that is the framework in which you wish to operate, then that is the one we should also be allowed to operate within. If we're looking at actions, there are a plethora of actions taken against the NPO over the last three years and this war seemed to be a final culmination to permanently damage us. Given that we either follow or be killed, we chose a different option and that was to work with Coalition B, to disrupt the prevailing meta, and set up our own meta, without necessarily having to face an existential war. To do that, we had to jump in and do what Coalition A was doing, and I see our actions as simply ensuring our safety and security because our job is to make this game fun for our members, regardless of those from your side who believe they have the right to pontificate to us about how to play the game. tl;dr A history of Roq's action is fair game for everyone, but if we look at the same with regards to you folk, we're paranoid, power hungry game killers. We're tired of that nonsense and decided to flip the script. Here we are.
    3 points
  12. If the awards must happen, then you will win best leader, and never win worst. If it’s the only way to get you to join the no awards side of the forc—forum then so be it. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
    3 points
  13. Shut up shut up shut up! You will not keep my award from me!
    3 points
  14. Juss wan evryon 2 kno... Da Cowz and Da Herd at Larg held a mooting abut food suppluss. Thar wass much mooin', we had a stamp pede, an evn Ol' Bessy shewed up. It wass decideerd by Da Cowz 2 end da nashional fuud cunsumpshion oaf corne. Insted, da Cowz will now bee eetin' da sweeet, grehn grass ov da ground. Diss shuld lowr da methan producshion. Sinsteerly, Da Cowz
    3 points
  15. That wouldn't be different than how it has always been. Whichever group can muster the most people to vote controls the result.
    3 points
  16. You sure are concerned about disenfranchising the majority though.
    3 points
  17. Heya I just got navaled 3 times and my opponent now has 2 MAP left, which is different from the MAP bug I was aware of. With 3 navals it should have taken 12 MAP, with only 2 getting registered correctly it should be 8 MAP used, leaving 4 MAP left, but he has 2 MAP left which is neither. I believe I can make sense of this however. Yesterday after daychange he had 2 MAP left after airstriking me once, he then didn't do any attacks until this daychange, so there has been 2 turnchanges after he was already at 12 MAP (at the time of writing this its also just past daychange). I think the obvious suspicion would be that it somehow saved up to 14 MAP since that would have been his amount of MAP if it wasn't capped at 12. I have heard that there is now a check that calculates how many MAP you should have and then sets you on that amount. Maybe it calculated that he should have 2 MAP now, because the algorithm doesnt account for "wasted" MAPs and then set it from 0 to 2. Also, he is on fortress. Doubt this matters but mentioning just in case. Pictures: Link to the war: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=567306
    3 points
  18. wait who's at war??
    3 points
  19. You can always ask for individual surrender terms if you want out of the war.
    3 points
  20. We have offered our surrender on november 1st. t$ is waiting for its surrender to be accepted and terms to be presented.
    3 points
  21. Coalition A is willing to surrender once acceptable terms have been negotiated. Coalition B doesn't even present them, so there is no negotiating. About a ceasefire i agree with tarroc, although i think people will just fight less and less until eventually it either becomes a never ending stalemate until the game dies or coalition B presents terms and both can negotiate peace.
    3 points
  22. There have been dozens of threads about this. This war isn't ending until Coalition A surrenders and Coalition B accepts the surrender. A long term ceasefire is basically a White Peace, and there's a 0% of that happening at this point.
    3 points
  23. There comes a point where you have to stop looking backwards. I'm not saying forget, but put it aside for the sake of moving forward. I've also said how those types of logs are also gassed up. You've been in channels like there where you spit on your enemies while surrounded by your allies. It happens. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with what is said, however there comes a point where being fixated on it doesn't help solve the problem at hand. I'm not trying to discredit your feelings about what was said, but to find a solution we need to put those sort of things aside. It's not an easy thing to do, but in my opinion it needs to be done on some level for things to progress. It doesn't matter who has dirtier hands. What matters now is finding an end to this war that isn't deleting nations/alliances.
    3 points
  24. The answer was that by the end of KF, we had a choice to hate everyone or to move on. We chose the latter because grudges are pointless in the meta and it would clearly not be strategically sound to hate the 30 alliances that just rolled us. Ever since we dropped EMC in early 2018, our goal was to make a more interesting meta, and after KF we saw lots of opportunities save the giant treaty spam of stagnation that was IQ. We wanted to get rid of the hegemony of the game and to continue to add to what we saw as a dynamic future. During the formation of Chaos, the minisphere idea was a key idea that linked our desires with a realistic FA path to achieve it. Yes, our vision for the game required the dismantling of IQ because minispheres and the then IQ hegemony were mutually exclusive. This meant working with people who had just hit us and finding common ground with old enemies. Many of our plans were leaked by Sphinx. If you read them, none point to personal grudges against the constituent alliances of IQ rather just the bloc itself. If another hegemony had arisen that threw our desires for the game asunder, then we would've had the same response. I think your opening line seems a bit contradictory. Attrition is a significant impact. TKR lost a third of its memberbase, its upper tier was essentially gone, and it ended KF with better part of 1000 cities less than it started. It was a hard hit, but we survived and we grew despite it not because some TKR low gov said so. However, this concept has nothing to do with the hit on BK/Cov. Its extreme bad faith to just not mention the logs and myriad of evidence that started this war in the first place. They wanted to hit Chaos and draft you in to hit KETOGG. The validity of that CB is night and day. There is even public evidence that shows that Cov had plans to hit Chaos during rebuild. The only choice that was made was when this war started not if. And its not as if Coalition A is our ideal coalition of alliances. We had just come out of a war with KETOGG, and we were definitely not fans of KT especially. Frankly, we have a lot more in common culturally with your own alliance, Roq, than anyone in KETOGG (which honestly would've been a really interesting result of the aforementioned ideology). After some events that transpired during Surf's Up, many in Chaos and TKR gov were not having it with KT. This isn't a relationship of anything besides what we saw as survival because that's what the BK/Cov threat merited. KETOG and Chaos were no long-term allies, and neither of them coveted hegemony nor could really be considered EMC. We thought this was going to be the fight for our lives, and it was quite surprising to us when BK sphere got rolled in just a few days. Personally, I went into this war thinking that I was going to get rolled twice in a row because BK sphere was so massive. Perhaps, y'all were smarter than us and saw correctly that BK would crumple and offer no significant resistance, but we most certainly did not. It was a fight of the survival of our blocs, our alliances and of our ideology. And this is why TKR especially pushed as hard as it did to not expand the war you. We had believed your lack of relation to the initial logs and we knew that NPO's entry would ensure bipolarity, anathema to our ideals. After we saw a victory in sight for the war, our goals were simply to try to break up what we perceived as the hegemony of the game and end the war with three simple, easy terms. A big part of our goals is short, more frequent wars with less animosity, and at the moment we thought it possible even for a global war as such: a rolling, war goals achieved and peace. NPO's entry into the war changed all of this. It wasn't so much that we were losing. Remember that TKR had come out of KF just a few months prior and we were losing Surf's Up. Rather the problem was twofold. First, the ideals that we had were shattered. In the span of a DoW, the game snapped back into bipolarity with the same alliances against each other. What was TKR/KT/Rose (not a before-seen combination) against TcW/BK (similarly as unconventional) became TKR/KT/Rose vs. BK/NPO/Cov (IQ + TcW). Years of work on behalf of some of the Chaos alliances and even some in KETOGG was erased. It seemed at the time that no amount of relations-building, effort or even subjection to harm/risk would be enough to overcome the personal ties that bind us all in Orbis. IQ was too entrenched as a mindset. And for people like Sketchy, this hit a nerve. For something like 3 years, he had been working along with others across Orbis to change the meta out of bipolarity into something else. He made regrettable comments, which thankfully were disavowed months ago publicly by Hodor and coalition leaders. Second, NPO had broken the trust we had all placed in it to stay true to its breakup of IQ. We took a leap of faith when we believed NPO in its denial of involvement in Rainbow's leaks. We thought that good faith might lead somewhere in the future, or maybe it was the only way that we could keep the nightmare of bipolarity away. This was compounded by a shoddy CB, especially relative to the CB that started this war, against TKR, which is just a rehash of an age-old feud that I know TKR wanted desperately to put in the past in light of a path towards our desired meta. And the loss of trust just continued to compound. NPO broke T$' conditions, then they continually flopped on their reasons for attacking (even shifting to openly admitting that they did so in defenses of BK and the dynamic), to finally planning and conducting hostilities against a treatied ally. It seemed that there was no end to the breaking of precedent, and that this choice of NPO's was completely out of our control. To make these matters worse, NPO didn't just play dirty during the war, but also in the preparations for peace talks. Possibly, the focus here shifts to the coalition as a whole, but undoubtedly NPO plays an integral role of enforcing these actions. There was an unprecedented ask for a surrender before talks even began combined with a condition of talks only one day a month although fortunately they were only asking for a NAP, surrender and meme terms. It took many months of back and forth in the coalition to come to terms with our defeat with what it meant for the meta and for our alliances. Finally, in November, both T$ and KERCHTOGG both surrendered, our representatives were trolled, ignored and gaslighted. They weren't shown the terms as promised nor were the terms just a NAP, surrender and meme terms. The argument they presented against us was that we had pushed this war thus far because of comments from Sketchy and co that "crossed the Rubicon," and yet months after these comments in late June/early July the offers for simple surrender and peace terms was still on the table. It finally reached a point where we our good faith had run out, and rightly so we concluded that there was no interest in real peace talks. Partisan makes his post after days of researching, looking for the required evidence and exposing the truth to the public on how peace talks were going. Our situation was untenable. Damned if we do and damned if we don't. Yet coalition B was slandering us publicly for the lack of progress. The choice was clear. Predictably, the stance of coalition B changed because a lot of their bs had been called out although the worst was yet to come. George and Kastor leaked devastating (or what should be devastating) logs from the upper echelons of coalition B's internals. On the public record, was Leo, Keshav, Roquentin, Under, TheNG stating that their intent with the peace talks was to attrition us to death, to disbandment. Now, I have always tried to see the bright side of things and engage with as much good faith as possible, but for me and many others in our coalition, that was the line. What NPO had decried for a refuted microcosm was being perpetrated on a mass-scale to heinous effect. It was hypocritical and it was unbelievable. That wound will need time to heal, but despite these damaging logs being thrown into the open Coalition B didn't flinch. They gaslighted, they deflected and they even tried to justify it. Roq, the golden rule stipulates "do to others what you wish to have done to yourself," and even the vestige of this cardinal value escapes the NPO and the actions it enforces. If you want to find your metaphorical "rubicon," then here it is. For the living humans behind the discord users, nations, forum accounts and everything that makes up our own communities and the Orbis community, I choose that hill to die on every time. And a note is that I address this post to NPO mostly because I see them as a principal agent in many of these actions and it is in response to your post. It is possible that at least some of this can be contributed to your coalition. The thing is that pure hegemony isn't the point of this game. A lot of the above was about fleshing out how this game can be made better without it. I always find it funny that you were the one who coined EMC, easy-mode coalition. You had a point. This game is supposed to be a challenge in politics and in war. On that point, I'd like to say you usually make a great enemy and promise lots of fireworks and difficulties, and I respect that. To bested in the political theatre or mechanically in war is a part of the game, and the entertainment or the "fun" is overcoming those challenges with one's community to later become the defeater instead of the defeated. The evolution of paracov into IQ is a great example. Its simple choices that aren't always the easy path like BK leaving OO, TKR leaving EMC, or NPO originally joining up with cov that provide the dynamic framework that really lets these sims tick. I admonish you using your own words. Don't let Opus Dei become the new EMC. Different names, but the meaning still carries on. For the sake of NPO players and the orbis community, its not essential to milk out every little thing until you are unparalleled but to work in such a way that benefits your community. Evolving this game into a stagnated CN 2.0 isn't the way to achieve that. As I've said before, we're open to ideas on how to fix the game besides minispheres for the sake of a dynamic environment. And yet it's clear that consolidation, bipolarity and the sole desire for hegemony are only conducive for promoting stagnation and facilitating paranoia where none should exist. So @Prefontaine to answer your question after my magnum opus of a post. I think it boils down to three aspects. A difference in ideology of the future of the game. Personal relationships that have developed over time generally as a reflection of ideological alignments, mere exposure effect. Finally, a drastically distinct set of perceptions on the game, the meta and actions that we perceive to be justified or precedented. As a note though, I'm not a coalition leader, but I am intimately involved with TKR, the Chaos alliances and much of Coalition A in an FA setting.
    3 points
  25. It's quite interesting, isn't it? You'll have to forgive me, as I've been in-and-out of the game for awhile now. We have reached a point where the "meta" of the game has well outpaced the "mechanics" of the game. Most alliances still remaining that are actually relevant (lol micros) have mostly figured out fairly optimal paths to deal with the simple mechanics of gameplay. The builds, the infra and city building strategy, what units to target, how to raid or conserve resources, etc.; those have generally been well-solved aside from the occasional server hiccup or glitch. The development of major changes to the mechanics of the game has greatly slowed. I suspect this is in large part because the codebase is a very fragile thing at this point, and making even moderate changes of any substance is likely going to require a lot of time and labour to patch. That's not indicative of failure on the part of the game administration, but it does mean that you allow the invested and serious players a chance to really work out the optimal strategies that they feel will work for them. In Coalition A, I've noticed for the most part a relatively steady brain drain over the past few years. Many of the players who were well-known along alliances in Coalition A have either retired or left the game entirely. I would suggest this is because most felt accomplished with the way they have played, and thus they have moved away. Either that, or they feel as though the game does not have much to offer them at this point. There's been a fairly general decay in most of those alliances, yet for the most part they have a relatively diverse set of backgrounds and philosophies. Losing players of that calibre doesn't just hurt those alliances or the coalition itself; it also means that experienced players and personalities have left the game and no longer contribute to making it a community. I think the players in Coalition A are generally ready to move on with the "meta" of the game, but they find themselves unable to do so. Personally I was ready to delete months ago (maybe even beyond a year at this point to be totally honest), but I have stayed on due to the current global war - and had committed to staying on long before I knew I would actually be in the fight. It is more likely than not that I will delete post-war. While the memes of wanting to spite posters from Coalition B who want to drive people out of the game would be the thing that gets clicks and wows, the reality is more that I too, feel relatively accomplished in the game (inb4 lol you didn't do jack), and I have other things out of life that I'd like to turn my attention to. I don't actually think that everyone is like this, or that people will suffer from a lack of morale and leave the game because of this war. I've played these kinds of games for a long time. I honestly don't know why I've stayed on for the past two years even, other than the social community of people in the alliances I have been a part of. In Coalition B, I've noticed an ethos of taking every possible small advantage and rolling them in together to try and elevate beyond their normal limits. From the massive influx of referral bonuses and out-of-game allied help via GPWC and other communities, to providing tools and resources for the game and thus likely being granted some additional access to mechanical features, to well-organized baseball leagues to get cash; the major alliances on the side of Coalition B have found tiny bits of the fluff mechanics and used them to find an extra gear to the normal mechanics that they operate from. I don't think this is an awful thing in and of itself. Is it perhaps against the intended spirit of each of the bonuses? There's an argument about exploitative practice there that holds water. But I think it is perhaps a very good example of the "meta" outstripping the "mechanics", as I alluded to earlier. Other people in this thread have laid out the histories and reasons for why alliances in Coalition A and Coalition B (and I guess the neutrals count too) have acted and behaved in the way they have over the past several months and even few years. I don't have to reiterate that. I think part of the reason that Coalition A feels that Coalition B doesn't care about the PR battle (other than the fact that this is the OWF and it is pretty shi- as a general rule, let's be honest), is because Coalition B has taken the mechanics and imports and decided that they can go it alone without the help of peripheral allies or peeling off anyone from Coalition A to join them in a post-war world. Or, if for some reason they can't do that in a post-war world, then they've decided that Götterdämmerung is their only choice (and even then, it still mostly takes the concept of the PR battle and gives it the moutza). These games seem to have a somewhat limited shelf-life if the mechanics are not tweaked every so often. We have probably hit that point here. There was once a golden era for simulators of this type, but despite this probably being the best contemporary game of its kind, it is really fairly stagnant other than recent imported communities like GOONS and GPWC (who have all been ported over by Coalition B). The personalities aren't being refreshed or added, but rather dying off and stagnating. And if you don't have a new set of ideas to drive the "meta", then without innovations in the "mechanics", you'll come to a grinding stalemate soon enough. That's because our precious downvotes were removed from the forums so this is all we have left, amirite.
    3 points
  26. 3 points
  27. The real problem? This kind of game You are forced to play with everyone, you can't just play with your friends like with a videogame, move to another server or block that user to avoid him, to solve this situation you could move one of the two coalitions to another server, but we have one... when we are lucky There's no end or goal, no real rules, if you want to break a treaty and you don't care about your reputation you just do it, if you want to win a war you just have to join the biggest coalition, if you want to statpad your military stats you go to Arrgh in peace time and then you move in the winning coalition during war, if you want to pixel hug you go to RR Not all the players are equal, at best only 20% of us is really playing the game, and I don't talk about only activity but mostly knowledge of what happens in the game, this because not everyone can spend too much time for the game and becuase there's a lot of things you need to read and know, so there's an 80% of us who does what their gov wants and know what their gov let them know, an example are IQ players who ask why we don't surrender, I link the recent logs and they are like what? wtf? Government is a grat thing but can also really bad because only them can play politics and often just a few of them, the normal player has to follow the direction chosen by his gov, has no power to vote unless the gov is open to listen, has no power to decide who is in the gov, his only power is leaving the alliance, but it's hard to leave the alliance when you are there from the start and you made friends etc. The game sucks because is in an eternal beta version, a lot of things needs to be fixed but Alex is alone, then it's easy to use some mechanics to take advantage of other people, or just run a bot to make your life easy, right IQ? The game is very easy so to perform you need 1% skills, 19% activity, 80% numbers, and there's no real way to have a 33%-33%-33% Communities are too closed, most of the players spend their time only with their alliance, people lose objectivity easily and usually we all act like in sport where the ref always screwed your team and the other won for pure luck So the reason why we are in this situation is because the game is shit and we are too stupid to play a better game
    3 points
  28. I think most people would be against me arbitrarily intervening and forcing a truce upon players. I'm sure I'd screw up a number of war plans and whatnot, and likely cause more harm than good.
    3 points
  29. As anyone who’s at least a little familiar with me knows, I’ve been a member of Polaris for over three years. I’ve been a member of the New Polar Order in Cybernations for even longer. As of a few days ago, this is no longer the case. Throughout my time in the alliance, I’ve contributed a great deal to it. I’ve made artwork for them. I created and maintained the Polaris-related pages on the wiki. I created their Discord server and maintained it for over two years. I’m not saying I was the only one who contributed to these things, but I feel it would be fair to say my involvement with the alliance wasn’t anything minor. A few months ago, we came to the decision to combine our Cybernations and Politics & War Discord servers after my initial suggestion over the summer. Again, I wasn’t the only one involved in this process. Cobrastrike took on the task of creating bot commands for the purpose of role assignment, so that gov members from the opposite game couldn’t assign roles that they weren’t supposed to. While he was doing that, I spent the whole night going through each individual channel and adjusting the role permissions so they couldn’t be accessed by those who shouldn’t see them, as well as creating categories, channels, and roles for our Cybernations members/government. The server merge took place in late August or early September, I believe. The peace that the server had experienced up until that point was quickly cut short when the !@#$ known as Terminator joined the server. By this point, I had passed server ownership onto EaTeM, while still maintaining moderator permissions as a Council Adviser. Terminator had a history of not following the rules in our CN server, and that trend continued. Multiple times, I had asked him to quit violating the rules we had in place - spamming, not listening to mods, making the server a negative place in general. Unsurprisingly, he wouldn’t listen, so I used my mod powers to delete several of his messages and mute him. That was my mistake, as I was a fool to think the rules actually applied to him. Instead of Terminator facing any consequences, I ended up being punished instead. My moderator permissions were taken away and I was stripped of my position as Council Adviser. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off. After several heated back and forth conversations and a couple months later, I was finally given back my mod permissions and position as Council Adviser. When I returned, I discovered that the server was drastically different behind the scenes. Government members from either game now had the ability to assign any role they wanted, and gain access to any channel they wanted. My role as a P&W Council Adviser also lacked several permissions that it had previously, and didn’t even match the permissions that the CN Council Adviser role had. After bringing up the issues with how things were now, it didn’t seem like anyone cared about the possible security risks. The last part of the story involves me setting up some opt-in channels for the server, which I had received permission to do after asking like I was supposed to. The rest of gov was offline for the night, and I discovered after starting to work on the channels that I didn’t have sufficient permissions to complete them. To get around this, I temporarily assigned myself the Emperor role so I could finish setting up the channels. Upon receiving the role, I did not gain access to any channels that I didn’t already have access to. I had only received a few extra permissions that I didn’t have like Manage Emojis and Manage Channels. After setting up the opt-in channels, I took the Emperor role off of me and went to sleep. After waking up the next day and logging into Discord, I was being treated by everyone like I had just committed a heinous crime. After doing what I was given permission to do in an attempt to make the server a better place, I was treated with a vote to once again strip me of my mod permissions. Again, I was pretty upset. Despite being mistreated in the past, I was still trying to contribute to the alliance I had been in the past three years. I was pretty done at this point, so I decided to leave the server. The next day, I woke up to discover I was kicked out of and banned from the CN alliance, apparently targeted for perma-ZI, as well as kicked from the P&W alliance. My question for Polaris, that I’m finally getting around to asking - was it really necessary to ban me from a server I already left on top of everything else? I called Polaris my home for many years, defended it when I could, spent countless hours contributing to it in many ways, and I’m treated like this. I know you seem to hate being called out in public, but I guess you’ll have to deal with it now. To anyone who made it this far in the post, I shouldn’t need to say this at this point, but please don’t join Polaris. They aren’t worth it.
    2 points
  30. I've been thinking about writing this for some time but have held off, hoping the coalitions would sort themselves out but it appears that's not happening. Whatever the initial reasons for the war, there has to be a solution to it as it has gone on for far too long now and the game has become stagnant and to be fair - pretty grim. Even if neither sides accepts defeat, surely we can agree to a long term ceasefire instead? Surely that's better than losing players and destroying a once enjoyable and fun game to play. Realistically what is it going to take to stop this and how can go about brokering that deal?
    2 points
  31. nation link: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=169600 ruler name: nicholai nature of violation: inappropriate in-game communication, possibly moderation as a weapon? screenshot of description: https://s.put.re/KefpN2fK.png the first line of this nation's description mentions "the eternal goon," which is a blatant reference to "the eternal jew," a disgustingly anti-semitic nazi propaganda film. in the second paragraph, the nation's description includes the initialism "stfu," which is commonly understood to mean "shut the frick up," (word filtered in this instance) in the second paragraph, the nation also makes threats against moderators, promising to get them banned if they don't support the nation's leader the description also contains multiple out-of-character references, including cybernations and discussion of blocking/banning
    2 points
  32. I think the best part about this glorious post is, @Malal Underlord wasn't mentioned and rightfully so since UPN is basically a glorified micro. ;,V I'll stop making fun of UPN when you finally accept the recruitment bot we want to give you and start recruiting again.
    2 points
  33. Noctis please stop responding to GOONS members. Their only purpose is to get people like you to derail threads further and get all upset for no good reason.
    2 points
  34. Unironically this. The awards have always been a shitty brigading dumpster fire for years, the only thing that changes is which side of the trash heap your on. Tying the awards to in-game functions, even purely cosmetic, was just another avenue for whining and toxicity on these already terrible boards. Pretending that we can source an a single truth for these awards and have it mesh with even a plurality of peoples views is naive. The horse isn't just dead, it's desiccated at this point. We can stop beating it now. You say that, but Alex did get rid of downvotes primarily because of his whining.
    2 points
  35. ah yes, because alex will certainly change the rules of the game and forums because of a poll made by a person so mad about their bigot friend getting banned for being a bigot that they spam the reports forum with frivolous reports, clawing for any desperate means of pathetic revenge, who made said poll because their frivolous reports kept rightly getting smacked down. Alex is not an idiot so im not sure why you'd expect this to be the case.
    2 points
  36. GOONS Bad GOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS BadGOONS Bad User has been issued a warning for Spam Posting.
    2 points
  37. Brb, making a dozen micros to flood the vote and game that system jsut to spite it
    2 points
  38. So, its been direct democracy every year. Goons and GPWC become a thing, now there's a push to disenfranchise the majority of votes. Please, tell me how concerned you are for the rights of the community.
    2 points
  39. A question for Coalition A leadership. With minispheres a big part of your future outlook and something you were wanting to push, why did you decide that combining 2 spheres against 1 was the best way forward for minispheres? For me it goes against everything minispheres stand for and opposed the principle of them. Remember I'm asking this in light of the policy of minispheres rather than what was best for your alliance(s) in a war. From a general member point of view, it looks to me that combining spheres for this war gave you the advantages necessary to take down BK sphere or at least give you a good shot of doing so.
    2 points
  40. Coalition B is not going to reveal the terms publicly or outside of the format we've established. There will be no ceasefire unless the thinking in one of both of the coalitions changes on the drastic scale of a bloc with both NPO and TKR working together in harmony and cooperation and trust.
    2 points
  41. I can see this point of view. The only comment I might make is that during this same time, diplomatic relations between all spheres (except BK because of Leo's general demeanor as hinted to by SRD) were relatively open. NPO had a partner in t$ who could navigate these fears having been a partner with many of the KETOG/CHAOS alliances in years past. Likewise, conversations were happening on many different and new channels given all the shake-ups in treaties. It was in this environment of relative uncertainty that we had a lot of interesting ideas floating and much less consideration was given to whether future partners were enemies past. Additionally, t$ didn't even know that N$O was a bulwark. That agreement was made between Kayser and Roq. If that were public knowledge, I'm inclined to think that would've been a factor in our actions. For instance, had we known that a bid for BK hegemony via an aggressive war on CHAOS would've been countered by an N$O entry against BK, well that would've been amazing. All that being said, I do genuinely see where you're coming from with this, and if one sorts through the paranoid vocabulary of Roq, one can see a solid line of thinking there as well. I honestly don't think I've had much of a problem with NPO (Keshav has his moments) though, so I think even a fruitful discussion here between us would do little to wash away the bad taste of Leo in anyone's mouth. EDIT: GrAmMaR
    2 points
  42. Alex, do you now understand why we need the downvote button?
    2 points
  43. This is what we've been trying to indicate. If I thought it would change your mind, I would log dump our channels to prove KETOG and CHAOS worked together for one reason and one reason only, because of solid intel of BKsphere's intentions. Additionally, I don't deny Roq's assessment that there was bad blood between us and BK. I also don't deny that we were constantly plotting, because every alliance is, and if you're not, your're FARK. The point is you can absolutely become paranoid in a game like this, because evidence will sooner or later emerge to prove your narrative, but you can't let that paranoia guide your every move. I'm sure it isn't fun, and I'm sure we would all have a lot more fun if we just acknowledged the realities of the game. I know Roq has told me that at least in some part, NPO's entry was to provide some fun and break up the monotony for their membership. I've told him that if you could boil down our grievances to one word it would be optics. I would love it if NPO leaned on the "we were bored" CB, but that's not what happened, and, as Cooper said, the timing of it was particularly soul crushing to a movement that had so much potential and that NPO had at least somewhat signed on to.
    2 points
  44. This is a hilariously hypocritical statement by an NPO "member" But it's also bait. I believe the post called for actual discourse and not another circle-jerk of pointing fingers. You have plenty of other threads for that. Go back to them.
    2 points
  45. I'm not sure what the "3.5" vs "4.5" your talking about even is. Any 'advantage' you are eaking out this point is very marginal unless it is to drive players from the game. All the expensive infra has been blown up. You can't force anyone to spend their warchest and it's easy for us to fund ourselves just by raiding. Both sides are limited in what they can rebuild. The larger point that you are missing, and in my experience have always missed in this world and in previous worlds is that this is a game. It's not just about stats or eliminating all potential threats. It's about having fun and having a good community. Competition is fun. The seesaw of different alliances and groups going in and out of power and different coalitions forming is fun. Wars that involve months of both sides mostly just bombing and rebombing rubble aren't fun. If all you're concerned about is "strategic incentives" you're missing all that. Especially since as I said above, the actual in-game advantage you get from extending this war is very marginal.
    2 points
  46. Da Cowz nut sur ther wass anny payper 2 begun with seein as hoow dis iz a Bowser gam. Gud lucc. Sinsteerly, Da Cowz
    2 points
  47. This is exactly it. Same shit happens every time someone finds a way to fight back. It's not enough having thousands of nations on your side, NPO and their protectorates want everyone not on their side of the war to be able to do shit all (no ground means also no money for nukes and missiles) so that they can just sit for months on their enemies, never negotiate peace, and ruin the game by trying to make it "more realistic". Whenever I click the "Declare War" button I always think to myself how incredibly realistic this game is. I think the game should focus on fun game play, allowing people to fight back in wars, encouraging people to continue to play this game (as boring as it already kinda is) rather than laser-beam focus on trying to make the soldiers in this game more "realistic" to real life wars and crap. This reminds me of all those threads started years ago aiming at us in Political Pirates when we used the low infra/high improvement build before population control was in. People were lazy and just wanted an admin to help them continue to be lazy and not actually have to fight using the implemented war system. This is what this NPO suggestion reminds me of. I have no issue with changes to the game to make it more fun and active but changing things so they are more "realistic" and slow paced I think is a terrible decision. Still thanks to Vortex for replying to individual replies above even those which he/she disagreed with. I just think that if realism is the true end-game here then Sheepy should just design a new game with a new ground-up war system rather than another band-aid war fix on-top of a system that was never particularity realistic to begin with in any way.
    2 points
  48. Translation: Hi, I'm a GOONS/NPO member and I attack pirates that have won against me with only troops despite my totally powerful airforce of 900 gazillion planes and a cookie cutter, NPO approved, military build. I just now figured out that the people fighting with just soldiers save themselves alot of money against my spam attacks and continue to bring in revenue raiding other people (despite the countless warnings I ignored about the futility of hitting pirates). I'm unhappy about the lack of control I have over someone's freedom to play this game how they want, so I'm going make suggestion to put a stop to it.
    2 points
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