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Thalmor

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    The Trial of Borg

    in Orbis Central

    Posted · Edited by Thalmor

    Thalmoria_Official.png

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    trial_of_borg.jpg

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    People are yelling! The Gavel has been swung! The Bailiff takes out his service weapon! It's pandemonium, it's chaos! It's...

    Thalmoria v. Borg

    Scheduled for tonight at 10 PM EST, come see if a cyborg can plead the fifth, or if a bot can be compelled to testify against its creator (probably not).

     

    Court Lineup:

     

    Defendant: Borg

     

    Judge - Thalmor

    Bailiff - Zig

     

    Lead Prosecutor: Prefontaine

    Assistant Prosecutor: Jadenstar

     

    Lead Defense: Decagon

    Assistant Defense: Vice

    Assistant Defense: Luna

     

    Thalmor Radio will also be at 9 PM EST as usual. I plan on going for 45 minutes, and then will slowly ease into trial proceedings. Topics tonight include the war ending, my takes on some minor happenings this week, and a brief special guest appearance! I wonder who it is! Ooooh, mystery! 

     

    Server invite: https://discord.gg/j8FBFJaWg9

    Recording archive: Thalmor Radio - YouTube

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    [DoW]The Fear Has Struck

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted

    9 minutes ago, BelgiumFury said:

    You're the guy who scammed all your members, yes? Seems apt to name your alliance after a parasitic creature then. 

    He used the entire alliance as his own tax farm to grow his nation, then he tried to sell the alliance off. That's straight King Shit right there.

    Econ nerds all over the game have to have days-long arguments behind closed doors over increasing alliance taxes from 10% to 15%. Meanwhile, Dwight - acting decisive and self-interested as all rational people should - just takes the whole bank for himself. Uhh, hello? Based Department? 

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    Return to the OWF, fellow Orbisans

    in Orbis Central

    Posted

    I think 'Orbisans' is the Demonym for residents of Orbis. Those with more knowledge in etymology are free to correct me. I asked Alex and he said he had never thought about it, so he didn't have an answer for me. Rip.

    In between making appeals and writing love letters, there has been a sudden return to high-level, passionate, long-form discourse on the forums. Perhaps my brain is fried from 5G cell towers, but I haven't really seen this kind of stuff since - and may Allah forgive me for uttering these words - New Pacific Order's Last Time.

    In response to how destructive that war was, both in the rhetoric and its effects on the player base, the meta quickly did a one-eighty. We currently play a game where decision makers are constantly acting in good faith within a principled framework. Wars end without terms- sometimes suddenly. The community regulates itself to ensure no one or two spheres can overpower the others. Yes, there are exceptions to all these themes, but there's almost two years of data to look over and I believe that's been the trend. The current meta is a strong disgust response to what we had to deal with in that one war with those people.

    Interestingly, alongside the meta's shift to being as non-toxic as possible, spirited debate has also disappeared. If you go to the wiki, and browse the forum threads linked in the various globals of 2016-2018, you will find plenty of discourse among the decision makers of the time. Some threads, if I remember correctly, would even reach 50 pages long (in a time where the active play base was less than half the size it is now, mind you). These threads would have plenty of walls of text, and tons of passion behind them. Unfortunately, these kinds of discussions don't happen anymore. It's probably the only change in the meta these past two years that I miss. Presently, it appears as if most wars and their motivations are cut and dry enough that there isn't much room for spirited discussion. If I had to guess, that's the price paid for everyone operating in the same frame of trying to act in good faith (I'm not sure if that should change though; it will inevitably happen as the years go on anyways so there's no need to hasten our collective return to hell).

    I do miss the discussions of the past, though. I miss the intellectual melees that happened. I miss the passion. I welcome the changes that have occurred in the mindsets of people since NPOLT's ended, but to me, the lack of enthusiastic debate on the forums is missed. I think a lot of it has shifted to Discord, but a lot of that is hidden away in embassies, DMs, group chats, and in servers I am not a part of. There are times for talks to be hidden, but I think a lot of discourse can happen out in the open here on the forums, and it would be nice if that returned. 

    I am not the only one who feels this way. I've seen plenty of people saying that they enjoy Horsecock's OP. Killzbob made a video recording of him reading that post, and it sits with 135 views; making it the 5th most viewed video on the Thalmor Radio archive- a channel with over 100 videos. In that thread, others jumped in and wrote long posts of their own. Reading these walles de textos are fun and the energy behind them is somewhat intoxicating. Now, in that thread, recent posts are encouraging people to return to the forums (comments made by Shiho and Adam are my inspiration for making this thread myself). I think that is something that should happen.

    The forums have been a big part of the game. It is a place where communities make announcements, and others post their memes or valuable information (such as a tier or sphere analysis). While these things are all great, the complex political discussions that use to be commonplace are as every much a part of the game's experience and collective inheritance of the community as every meme or serious review of something that gets made. While the forums were probably used more in the early years because IRC is, like, from the 90's and Discord is much more convenient and fluid, I do think the community is missing out on entertaining and informative discussions by our political leaders in our alliances and spheres.

    So, that is my request, fellow players of the game (especially those who are as decrypted and wrinkled as I am). Return to the forums. Return home. Discord has it uses, but during a time of war - or some other crisis - take it to the forums. Hash out those issues in the DoW or RoH. Someone screws you over? make a call out thread instead of yelling in the embassy. The community stands to benefit from seeing these things discussed more in the open when they happen. I enjoy seeing it, and I know others do too. It's a part of the game that I miss, and it's an old pastime that our newer companions can derive important information and fresh entertainment from.

    TL:DR - Use the forums more because people are getting value (information and entertainment) out of the walls of text that come with passionate and energetic political discussion.

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    Sanctuary Pulls Out

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted

    5 hours ago, HeroofTime55 said:

    I dunno, in this world, it's a good question.  t$ dropped us because we refused to drop our other allies on their whim.  I guess the preference is for a world where nobody is actually loyal to anyone else or has any honor or decency?  Y'all a bunch of monkeys flinging poo, and it shows.  Just look at the utter mess that passes for a DoW posted by f***ing anybody for the past year and a half.

    Your first ally was a multi farm (who you guys got rebuild money from), and your second ally was NPO's greatest pet; who to this day is so inactive that they didn't even know that the first ally was a multi farm. Your wanna talk about utter mess DoWs, but you three misfits haven't done shit in the same period of time. 

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    [RoH] Polaris' Tango With Time

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted

    You guys breached reasonable doubt. Congrats! 

    Just now, CitrusK said:

    <blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="a/R02WePS" data-context="false" ><a href="//imgur.com/a/R02WePS"></a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

    Caught in 4K

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    [DoW] Time is up.

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted

    14 minutes ago, Jonyk5 said:

    yea thats why common

    Thank you, 3 month old nation that's in a training alliance. I look forward to hearing the rest of your high-level analysis of this 7 year old game's history. 

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    Double the National Motto character limit

    in Game Suggestions

    Posted

    I want to make my national motto "cant see a damn thang for that WAP", but I can't because that's 34 characters, and the limit is 32 characters.

    To rectify this, I propose that the character limit be doubled. 

    There are some national mottos in real life longer than 32 characters. For example, Liberia has "The love of liberty brought us here." This motto has 35 characters.

    Albania also has "Ti Shqipëri Më Jep Nder, Më jep Emrin Shqipëtar" (this translates to "You, Albania, give me honor, give me the name Albanian). The Albanian version has 47 characters.

    Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_mottos

    Increasing the limit from 32 characters to 64 gives players more freedom in customizing their nation. 

    Barring some technical limitation that I'm unaware of, I believe this would also be an easy change to do. I would imagine it would be as easy as slightly changing a line of code or two. 

    Thank you for reading this. I hope you consider it.

    PS: Thank you Alex for upgrading the servers so that the game ran fairly smoothly on the night that war broke out. 

     

     

     

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    Why we can't have nice things

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted

    Pardon for any spelling or grammar mistakes. I'm tired and I also don't feel like proofreading this:

    I disagree with the OP pretty strongly. I still think politics are the best they've ever been.

    Some of you guys really don't understand how good y'all have it. Wars in 2015-2020 were almost entirely just the same two sides going against each other. Maybe one time it was Para-Convenant against Syndisphere, and another time it was Inquisition against 'Easy Mode Coalition' or whatever; but for much of the game's history, that's pretty much all that ever happened, and people planned for that. People wanted it to be different as early as 2017, but you didn't really see any big changes until 2019. Then, we had to - tragically - fight a war of extermination that resulted in the worst elements of the community being driven out of the game entirely. Although it's been a long road, the meta of the game is finally a point where I think we've broken out of that bipolar (in more ways than one) world that we inherited. 

    Look, I'm sorry that dawgpiels happen. I'm sorry that Oasis and Mystery had such a bad case of feeling impotent and buck broken that they scrambled to the bunkers because half of Clock built a few tanks. I'm sorry that secret treaties are something we still might have to deal with (or are dealing with, depending on what narrative you want to push). I'm sorry that this isn't a game with 30,000 players and dozens of blocs who all have something different and interesting going on. I'm sorry that P&W is kinda a shit game that doesn't give us anything to really fight over (which leads to the weird cognitive dissonance of people saying that they don't care about CBs until they get hit, then they suddenly care about CBs). I'm sorry that the meta still has a way to go before we're all happy.

    But, with where we are now, we are in the wild west of politics. Blocs split and join up with each other. When somebody mils up, nobody knows what they're doing because there's so many directions for a person to swing at. Globals ends with a sudden white peace that nobody really saw coming. Entire swaths of the game are making agreements on how they'll approach peace terms (the NAP end 4 out of 6 blocs signed right before the war started). That in particular in something I haven't seen in years.

    A lot of people seem quick to read the eulogy of minispheres, but I'm just not seeing it. Now, we have a global with TKR and Rose staying out. Did anybody see that coming? Would anybody see it coming if Rose and TKR did decide to come in? Who knows! Hell, did anyone see this current war coming? What was supposed to be 2 alliances against an entire bloc turned into two blocs on another two blocs. The current flexibility of politics is only possible thanks to the commitment to minispheres that people have been pushing for.

    Mystery-Oasis forming a megabloc because they got scared does not kill minispheres. Lord Tyrion does command a lot of power within Oasis, but he isn't some demigod who is capable of blowing up a massive chunk of the meta based on his political posturing. The reality of P&W is that we went from boring, predictable wars that eventually led to one side trying to win the game, to a very dynamic, open political situation where alliances, blocs, and decision makers have a much wider toolbox of options to use when executing their political agenda- whatever that may be. 

    I'll believe minispheres are dead when we're back to, like, how politics were back in 2015-2016. And if you don't even know what I'm talking about, then I'll repeat myself: You don't know how good you have it. 

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