Edward I

@Jazz R Oppenheimer

Hacking and cheating are the fastest ways to destroy the integrity the game and the enjoyment derived from it. Since it bears repeating: We're not going to be super torn up if people delete because they feel entitled either to winning wars or, more generally, to the universal acceptance of their preferred style of gameplay. The absence of either of those things won't "ruin" someone's game. If anyone claims we forced them to delete, that's on them. We don't have access to the accounts of our IC adversaries, and no one can hit the delete button for anyone else. Unless, of course, someone gains access to others' accounts illicitly, which is what appears to have happened here. Regardless of what happened here, cheating and hacking are wrong and should be punished to the maximum extent of our IC and OOC abilities. Your tiptoeing towards a justification of this isn't much better. Hacking actually does ruin someone's game, and the threat of hacking or tolerance of hacking (by the player base) ruin's everyone's game. Posts like this make you, at best, a useful idiot and at worst an apologist and de facto accomplice.

You do know what happens to the student revolutionaries in that movie, right?

No, I'm pretty sure they've chosen to treat them as evidence in moderation reports. If "cheating is ok if it 'saves the game'" is the hill you want to die on, knock yourself out.

We're happy to start treating Scarfalot's posts as official Coalition A announcements if that's the road you want to take.

Godspeed GOONS. May you blow OD's enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.

There are a lot of things you can say to describe TCW's military record, but "unwavering unity" isn't one of them.

This strawman argument again? NPO and BK members form their own opinions every day, just like TKR members do. They chose to join and choose to remain in their respective alliances. If they listen or talk to NPO's and BK's governments, that's their choice. If they vote the same way their government does, that's also their choice. If they choose not to subscribe to the propaganda information from TKR or any other source, that's their choice. It isn't your, TKR's, or anyone else's right to have equal access to and equal consideration from our members. They are, after all, our members. And that is, again, their choice, and the result of their popular will.

The official imprimatur can be removed, more or less, by getting as much stuff out of this subforum as possible. I'm glad you agree, and I applaud the request to move the thread. We criticized these for a couple of reasons: First, because these look and smell suspiciously like the myriad, perennial complaints that the awards would be oh so much better if they were "objective" (whatever that even means) and not "rigged" by people actually, you know, voting in them (lol). The timing immediately after the actual awards didn't help, even if it was, as you said, a prime motivation for creating these. Second, because these are ultimately designed to produce another set of winners. Fun or not, that's still something of social and propagandistic value, so we're taking note. Third, because these were in this subforum. I've posted at some length about why I object to the setup, and you seem to agree (even if only to shut me up ) so I won't go into more detail. Lastly, because the idea that full participation in community activities should be restricted by anything beyond having a nation is anathema to our vision for the community and for the metagame: I've helped out by offering several suggestions to improve both the ethos and process of these. Obviously whether or not that advice is heeded is up to you guys, not me. However, we believe that many things which happen outside the game are intrinsically linked with and strongly impact the game itself. Because of that, and because we think the mentality behind these is ridiculous, we'll continue to criticize and/or ridicule them.

Since I was quoted and since quite a few people still don't seem to understand why pretty much every system for these awards is unsatisfactory, I'll spell it out again: The awards are politicized because they are political. They are political because they have in-game representation in the form of player/alliance badges and de facto administrative sanction in the form of both those badges and this subforum. The problem this presents is exacerbated by the extremely poor moderation/administration practice of allowing players to conduct the awards haphazardly and somewhat opaquely each year. So long as the above remains the status quo, the least unfair, least unobjective way to conduct the awards will be a one man, one vote system for both nominations and voting. Any other mechanism would constitute obvious partiality by the moderation/administration team towards whichever players are given a voice that is proportionally greater than what they would have under a direct democratic system. The best way to "fix" the awards isn't to continue the annual exercise of trying to limit popular input into the awards. This implicitly paints large swaths of the playerbase as less-than, or as not-fully-fledged members of the community who are undeserving of the chance at full, equal participation in the game and its events. The way to fix the awards is to get rid of them. Remove the in-game badges, lock this subforum and, if anyone wants to conduct unofficial annual awards, force them to use Orbis Central like everyone else who creates a community event without direct accountability to the moderation/administration team. That is, after all, what these have always been. Let's stop pretending. The reason why NPO in particular and Coalition B more generally have panned this idea is because it is, like Kastor's original concept for this year's awards, transparently exclusionary and self-evidently bad. It's not because we don't have "open minds," it's not because we were or weren't invited, and it's not because we're voicing our criticisms here rather than on a private Discord server. If this is truly an attempt to produce something better than this year's polls, I'll offer a few suggestions: 1) This should have been posted in Orbis Central because it has no impact on the game itself (whoever wins won't get a badge), and so is unrelated to the official, administration-sanctioned awards. The OP should request that the moderation team move it to reflect this fact and to reflect the OP's acknowledgment of this fact. 2) Drop the pretense that popular democracy is somehow unfair or unobjective, or at least that it is more those things than other systems. It isn't a problem that large alliances and groups have loud voices. Conversely, no alliance is inherently deserving of a voice equal to that of any other alliance. In other words, being an alliance doesn't make you special, and neither does leading one. 3) Focus on discussion rather than on picking winners. After getting rid of the abdication of administrative responsibility that these awards are, the thing I'd most like to see is a format that prioritizes talking over winning. The main event(s) should be about reminiscing and about recognizing notable accomplishments and failures. If the plebs entitled old boys clubs insist on having some kind voting in addition to this, fine, but that will make it that much harder to de-politicize these. As long as the awards produce something concrete to utilize in recruitment material, there will still be a strong incentive to vote with your group.

Best Discord Server: Factory Fresh Radio - Great Job and Factory Fresh are the standards against which all other community servers are measured Best Gaming Crew: Best Forum Topic (please link): Question for Coalition Leadership - I thought Pre's attempts at starting discussion threads about the war were dumb. I was wrong. Best Forum Reply (please link): Best Wall of Text (please link): Funniest Event: Biggest Military Blunder: The Syndicate getting itself into a competitive war for the first time since 2017 Best Treaty Announcement: Opus Dei Best DoW: GOONS vs. Typhon - Best flex, fewest f*cks given Biggest Meme: Slayyves - "BK" actually stands for "chattel slavery," in case you didn't know Best Propaganda Post (please link): TKR is more than an alliance Best Moderator: Chief Wiggum - Why is this even a question? Worst Alliance Leader: TheNG - This is his salary for making our memes

Alliance of the Year: New Pacific Order - Single handedly reversed the course of the war Most Powerful Alliance in 2019: New Pacific Order - MADPs with 300 other nations. Would be ranked #1 if its 1k-nation protectorate didn't take the spot. Best Fighters: Best Themed Flag for a Holiday in 2019: New Pacific Order - The one from our Discord Most Active Alliance: GOONS - Better forum presence than any other alliance. 132 wars in five minutes. Best Government Line-Up: New Pacific Order - For our IA and milcom people Best Rookie Alliance: GOONS - A top ten alliance and one of the most polarizing forces in the game just months after it was founded Most Honorable: House Stark - Honor, if it was ever more than cheap propaganda, was in short supply this year, but House Stark easily came closest to truly deserving this title Most Likely to Succeed in 2020: GOONS - Imagine GOONS now, but with even more players and cities Best Forums: New Pacific Order - Still the most active forums. They also host the stats page. Best Discord: GOONS - The best parts of NPO's aren't public, and #paradoxia in t$'s server is only one channel Best Alliance Page: Acadia - I like 17th-18th century ships Most Controversial Alliance: GOONS - Never have so many tears come from so many over the actions of so few Best Alliance for New Players: Guinea Pig Whaling Corps - Recruited and trained more new players than all other alliances combined this year Best Economic System: New Pacific Order - Often imitated, never duplicated Most Missed Alliance from 2019: Best Re-brand: Strickland Propane - Propane and propane accessories Scariest Alliance: GOONS - 132 wars in five minutes. After negotiations over a raid gone wrong went worse. Best Alliance Ad:

Player of the Year: Roquentin - The Unsleeping, Euthanizer of Minispheres and Emperor of the Order Most Influential Player: Roquentin - Wars for shiggles are out; material force is in Best Alliance Leader: Roquentin - N$O and minisheres imploded. NPO is still on top. The earth has not been salted. Best non-lead government member: Eric the Red - Spends his time doing valuable things like training new members instead of wasting it on the forums Most Controversial Player: Keshav - Like Roq, but with more haters Best Avatar: Do Not Fear Jazz - The original version, before the shark apparently swam through an oil slick full of fake mustaches Best Signature: Do Not Fear Jazz - The original version, before the shark apparently took a break from eating computers to learn how to write things in blood Best Nation Page: Best Player Ad: Michaellaneous Best Fighter: Sphinx - Coalition B's one-man upper tier Best IC Poster: Edward I - My walls of text are better. Change my mind. Best OOC Poster: Nicest Player: Marina - She's too good of a person to enjoy blood sport posting on the forums, so many of you don't know her Best Radio Talk Show Host: Kevanovia - Like Frawley, but actually goes on the air sometimes Sexiest Voice: Frawley - Like Kev, but pleasant to listen to Best Baseball Team: Most Likely to Succeed in 2020: Leo the Great - Instead of getting rolled by Coalition A, he traded Gorge and some lackluster sphere allies for Opus Dei and Apex Best New Addition to the Community: Best Community Contributor: Frawley - If Keno is like cocaine, the stats page is like heroin Most Likely to Become a Real Politician: Keshav

Treaties have no direct effect on in-game economic activity at the moment. What you're proposing isn't adding a new treaty so much as adding two new mechanics: alliance taxes on their members' trades (tariffs) and automated transfers of money and resources. Rather than tying either of those to treaties, which seems clumsy and limiting, if they're implemented I'd suggest adding them as independent mechanics. If alliances want to include them as part of their treaty agreements, they can make use of them independent of drawing lines on the treaty web, which was always meant to be a visual aid rather than a mechanic. Epi's right as far as the balance and metagame go. Micros, and peaceful alliances in general, are of little immediate use to the larger alliances that protect them. If they view tributary arrangements as exploitation, they don't have to sign them. They'd also probably be useful for all alliances as a means of economic integration or cooperation.

I know. I figured a bit of trolling would wash away the bad aftertaste of posting a fully OOC wall of text. The results so far have been mixed.

It's not like people can downvote me anymore, so what do I care.

New game mechanics and metagame rules. New game mechanics because there's not much to stimulate or sustain competition in the first place. We farm infra to build warchests to fight wars to gain a relative advantage in farming infra. Anyone who doesn't focus on this will either eventually be out-competed by people who do, or already has such large warchests and nations that they effectively force others to follow that formula just to catch up. (The ability to accumulate money and resources far in excess of what's needed to wage wars is another instance of bad mechanics.) Metagame rules are what make these types of games into giant, in-character dramas, which is always what they are when they're at their best. Without a common language and common tools to collectively tell a story ("valid" CBs, treaty chess, norms on raiding, trading and so on) they tend to devolve into a glorified multiplayer sparring match in which the only things that matter are, fundamentally, out-of-character. When that happens, it takes the focus away from a collective story and its characters (us) and instead puts it on isolated episodes that have little relation to one another. The ostensibly multiplayer game becomes a less robust version of a single-player game when the inter-player interactions are impoverished or diminished as a part of gameplay. If you want some anecdotal evidence of this, think about your favorite memories from any of these games. More likely than not, their defining features are the stories behind them (how people acted, what they said, whether they stabbed each other in the back, whether they made you feel as if the silly game you played as a hobby had some kind of deeper, social meaning) rather than the mechanics behind them (how evenly matched the sides were, etc.). In practice, a successful implementation of what I outlined would tend to put power in the hands of groups that have the highest "aggregate activity." By that, I mean a combination of the absolute number of players a group has plus however much they collectively go above and beyond the daily floor on effective activity. In PW, that floor is probably around several logins per week in peace and one login per day in war. Higher in-game activity (baseball, trading, spending MAPs as they accrue) obviously helps you; so does higher out-of-game activity (smoky backrooms, etc.). Having lots of cities or large stockpiles doesn't count for much in my formula (those are dividends from past activity rather than present activity), and neither does having old friends who you know won't fight against you (again, dividends from past activity rather than present interests). Large strength disparities between nations/players also tend to be detrimental to this because they shift the focus and incentives away from activity and towards control of the largest, most powerful, most productive nations. Basically, whoever is best at telling and driving the story in the here and now deserves to be in the driver's seat, and very few other considerations matter. These suggestions probably won't be very popular. They'd require significant mechanical updates to the game; would very likely force incumbents (older, well-connected players and players with larger nations) to cede some of their de facto power to newer, more numerous players; and would likely necessitate liberal usage of threats and military force to maintain (I'm now waiting for someone to cry "hegemony"). On that darker note, I'll end the wall of text.

Yeah. I don't think most of the rambunctious acrimony was NPO specifically in CN, at least not by then, but the OOC nonsense that came out of those wars was still pretty dumb. We were annoyed with it at the time too and tried not to bring it here. Guerrilla Republik. I'd forgotten about that. Again, I was only talking about the weeks/months surrounding Silent. Early 2016 was a bit of a clusterf*ck and no one alliance can be blamed for (credited with?) all of it.

I was talking exclusively about the leadup to and aftermath of Silent (since I guess that wasn't obvious), and only about NPO's perceptions and criticism of Syndisphere. From where we were sitting, it was obvious that Silent was a desperate gambit and that Syndisphere's consolidation afterwards was unnecessary strategically. That's when our loudest criticism of Syndisphere happened and that's what Kastor seemed to be referencing when he said I was a hypocrite.

I don't think it was paranoia. The simplest version of what happened, from our perspective, is that a bunch of people who'd historically been very comfortable dealing under the table via paperless treaties said they were done with all that after Knightfall. Then many of those people plotted to roll IQ for the umpteenth time in the immediate aftermath of the war, and many of them loudly declared that former-IQ hadn't done enough to dissolve itself and that it was still operant, by design or by accident. Then those people started a war with no apparent IC motivations and buddied up halfway through without, by outside appearance, much friction. So of course we were suspicious of the paperless-loving, IQ-opposing people who'd called us liars and game-breakers for years - sometimes hypocritically, and as recently as days before Surf's Up - who'd only had weeks to build a track record to the contrary and who already seemed to be reverting to form. Maybe that's not fair, but that's the environment in which we had to operate. I'd probably be more sympathetic to the soul crushing bit if I'd seen more appreciation for N$O's (ill-fated) intention to act as a bulwark against collusion between power centers instead of the propagandistic spin that it had been a poison pill for the project from the start. To me that's always been an important bit of evidence pointing to the suspicion that minispheres with short wars, where BK and NPO hopefully fight each other, was in large part a repackaged version of the demands for IQ break up when its opponents realized they couldn't achieve a comprehensive military victory against it. I don't mean that as a grievance, just an example of a widespread tendency to attribute the flaws in the design to the actions of people who tried to compensate for them, or who were just caught up in them. Our complaints against Syndisphere were: 1) That there wasn't a strategic reason to hit us. Paracovenant imploded in mid to late 2016 and its remnants weren't a credible threat to Syndisphere. That left only two motivations to remain aligned against us with the vastly superior forces Syndisphere retained: some kind of grudge (which, at least in NPO's case, would almost certainly have had to be from another game since we'd only been around here for about six months) or the start of an "easy mode" mentality favoring short wars, low infra losses and easy victories. 2) That our preference for wars that weren't almost categorically curbstomps was in Syndisphere's interest as well. In today's situation, what we're saying is definitely not the opposite of what we said back then. We're not on top of the game, at least not in the same way Syndisphere was, so it's not really a great comparison to begin with. The complaints about NPO now are categorically about a return to bipolarity rather than the near-unipolarity achieved by Syndisphere. The wars that NPO has fought over the past few years also don't bear much resemblance to the wars we assumed we'd face for the foreseeable future then. IQ's wars were all exercises in asymmetric tier control, and the two major wars fought in the last year were both long, hard struggles to bring down upper tiers superior to those of NPO's coalitions. We've never swamped our opponents in all tiers in a matter of weeks, if not days, as Syndisphere did twice. The last distinction between NPO in 2016 and its critics in 2019 is that we took it upon ourselves to do something about the situation rather than blaming our rivals for all our ills. We did as much as we could during Silent to make it clear that there would be a cost, both in material terms and in entertainment value, to casually fighting NPO whenever the urge struck. Coalition A is obviously dug in right now, but the notion that NPO has an obligation to accommodate their preferred mode of diplomacy is usually cited in reference to our reservations about minispheres and the actions we took earlier this year, which they claim destroyed minispheres.

Perhaps I didn't make my point as well as I thought then. By "crippled" I meant two things: first that BK-sphere would be in no condition (or mind) to serve as a bulwark against potential future aggression against N$O by some or all of KERCHTOG in the nearer term, and second that BK-sphere might have collapsed entirely in the longer term. Alliances might have jumped ship to Farksphere or formed smaller "spheres" of their that were too weak or dependent to serve as much more than satellites in practice. (Whatever its intentions were, I think Rose fits the latter description pretty well.) You wouldn't have needed to wage a total war against BK-sphere to cause any of that to happen. It was a fragile grouping comprised in large part by fragile alliances. Like I said earlier, this might not have mattered if the environment had been different. If KETOG and Chaos hadn't aligned and given the appearance that it was plausible for that alignment to rematerialize in the future, we might not have been particularly concerned. If KETOG and Chaos were weaker, we also might not have cared much. (Imagine a scenario in which Rose came along for a couple of KETOG's wars. We likely would have ridiculed Rose for being a de facto satellite of KETOG, but we wouldn't have cared much about it beyond whatever upper tier strength Rose added to KETOG.) Maybe we misjudged the situation. My point isn't that we're absolutely certain we were right 100% of the time, but that even in hindsight our decisions made sense under the prevailing circumstances. NPO is not "many players," and what Chaos and KETOG want is of little to no intrinsic importance to us. We'll work with them if it makes sense; otherwise they're on their own. They had their chance to make their FA designs into something we might have felt more invested in and chose not to. That's fine. Their aspirations and actions are their own and they have no obligation to please NPO. But NPO doesn't have an obligation to please them either. We don't think things have become particularly stale or dull, and we definitely aren't willing to accommodate the whims of others if they come at the direct expense of our own goals. (See Roq's comments on the effects of short wars as an example.) If we were a micro, this probably wouldn't matter, but we're not. We're as much of a stakeholder in the game as anyone and, whether or not you agree with us, that has consequences. "The problem," as you put it, isn't that NPO didn't agree with the views of "many players"; it's that the many players who tried to make minispheres a functional reality didn't do enough to ensure all the major actors were sufficiently included as stakeholders in the end design. Why did you put "member" in scare quotes there? I believe the post called for actual discourse and not another circle-jerk of shallow attempts to delegitimize the community and culture of a major alliance. You have plenty of other threads for that. Go back to them.

Actually, it's not our fault. We explained, publicly and privately, that minispheres was a deeply flawed concept. It's not our fault you all didn't listen. We attempted to insert one of the biggest missing elements in minispheres - a force aligned against collusion - ourselves, in the form of some early shared goals for N$O. It is partly our fault that those designs devolved into disagreement and inaction, but it isn't our fault that no one outside of N$O appears to have even tried to do the same. We had several, overlapping reasons for war. They didn't change, as Roquentin and I explained above. Horsemen had a treaty with NPO at the time and either (I really do forget which) asked to come along or was invited by N$O. We said we had no plot to go to war with your spheres because we didn't. By the time we entered, our changing understanding of the evolving circumstances dictated we develop one, so we did. Those have never been contradictory, and the implicit argument that we must formulate our plans based on the calendar of others' wars is ridiculous. Why is that a problem? "Different" isn't better or worse; it's just different. Since Frawley and I are fairly like-minded on this, I feel comfortable explaining on his (our) behalf. We don't place inherent, positive value on bipolarity. We don't care either way. What we do care about is using wars to prosecute IC goals or settle IC scores. Depending on the underlying goals and rivalries, I'd be fine fighting a different war every six months or fighting the same war six times in a row. And we'd be fine with a different game if it was compatible with that. Awhile back, I wrote a proposal for some new game mechanics that I thought might be the start of facilitating multipolarity. Some of them were my ideas; some came from a voice chat I had with @Frawley, @Epi and @Abbas Mehdi. If you think we're boring, that's fine. It's incumbent on you, not us, to make your own fun.

The point of Knightfall for us was always to cut the upper tier of EMC down to size. Roq's point is that it was at best a qualified, temporary success that needed to be followed up on to be meaningful in the long run. The persistent upper tier strength of the alliances from TKR's Knightfall coalition shows how transient the effect was. No one ever said you didn't have a good reason to hit BK, Cov and co., but the stated reason for hitting them was irrelevant to our worries about that power center being badly defeated and potentially crippled. We view this war the same way, and it's something that's regularly dismissed by your coalition. We weren't sure BK would be a long-term ally for us either, until your coalition decided to turn this into an all-encompassing, existential struggle in which we were at the top of their list of enemies. I'm not trying to tally grievances, just to point out the symmetry. It's not our fault or our problem that Sketchy and others tried and failed to make minispheres work, especially since we explained repeatedly that something along these lines would happen sooner or later. The lesson here is that if a major center of power - NPO, in this case - repeatedly voices criticisms and misgivings about a global FA project, maybe take them into account. At best you'd have gotten a better, more durable version of minispheres, and at worst you'd have known this was doomed to fail from the start. We didn't make promises to TKR to "stay true" to anything. Our obligations were always to our own interests and to our allies. The whole vision you've been outlining was always yours, not ours. To the extent that we acted in accordance with it, we did so for our own reasons and don't owe anything to Orbis at large. Furthermore, the initial reactions of multiple future Coalition A government members in April, when IQ dissolved and N$O was formed, were that we hadn't gone far enough or that we were outright lying about our FA arrangements. "Trust" is a strong word for the attitude conveyed to us, an attitude we kept in mind going forward. We had several, overlapping, compatible reasons for going to war. Citing different reasons at different times was never "flopping," but referencing the parts of our thinking that were relevant to whatever the topic at hand was. In simplest terms, our reasoning was that, together, the alignment between Chaos and KETOG and BK-Covenant's rapidly deteriorating position posed a serious, long-term risk to NPO and N$O. Some of this was self-evident (the demolition of a power sphere made wars between the remaining power spheres easier and less risky); some of it was speculative (we guessed that Chaos-KETOG relations would be friendly enough after the war to make future alignment a plausible if not likely); and some was evidence-based (we received what we considered to be, under the circumstances, credible information indicating that TKR and Chaos would capitalize on the developing war situation to hit NPO and/or N$O). This is on top of the months of rumors, leaks, and statements that indicated there was a significant amount of lingering hostility towards us, either dating back to our time in the Inquisition or to what many saw as its incomplete, ineffectual breakup. The war didn't happen in a vacuum, and things that might not have warranted action in isolation were troubling in combination. It's possible, although not probable, that our inferences and assumptions didn't reflect reality. But under the circumstances, they made sense. If you or anyone else doesn't want a repeat of this in some potential second attempt at minispheres, take care not to produce a similar set of circumstances. We've brought up Sketchy's post multiple times because it's indicative of a larger attitude among the coalition. It says something about Sketchy and TGH that he posted it in the first place and that it took them so long to push back on it, but even in the "fit of rage" he claims to have been in, it didn't make sense in isolation. There were multiple posts from other people, including Coalition A government officials, that got at the same idea in less explicit terms, and the prevailing attitude towards the war has been, as you said here, that of existential struggle. The immediate aftermath of NPO's entry precluded any possibility of an easy peace, regardless of who won. In context, his point was that the strategy and tactics of EMC fostered a culture which enabled behavior that was just this side of war-dodging to save infra. It wasn't a commentary on the alliances in EMC so much as the players. Drawing a parallel between NPO and EMC doesn't quite fit because, regardless of what you think of our FA, our members have never had any illusions about what their infrastructure is for. The entertainment and fun is what you make it, nothing else. It should be obvious by now that there isn't a universal answer to that question. Who says that's what we're doing? NPO has never had enough power to be "unparalleled," either on its own or as part of a group. Even if we achieve the latter when this is over, it's not like we've announced what we'd do if that happened. And as far as our in-character policy is concerned, our community is our membership, friends and allies.

@Necrosin did.

"Minispheres" were a half-baked concept with a half-baked implementation. Anyone who didn't think they were more likely to collapse than not was either blind, naive, or both. They were a suboptimal strategic paradigm - alliances were asked to discard allies and working relationships and to not build coalitions to wage wars, which was never a stable equilibrium. The moment one set of actors broke that ill-defined, unenforced rule - "don't get too big" - their rivals would be forced to do the same or lose wars by default. They were, as I just said, poorly constructed. There was never any real attempt to create a consensus definition of "too big" - how many nations and alliances, how much score - let alone a real plan to counteract groups that became "too big." It's notable that the only premeditated attempt (that I'm aware of) to do this, N$O's tacit agreement to act against power centers that coordinated with one another, fell apart internally and was condemned externally. They depended on a huge amount of unaccountable amnesia. People tried to sweep 3-5 years of personal histories under the rug with predictable results. They ran roughshod over whatever remained of the IC-OOC divide. Claiming that "fun" and "balance" for the sake of "game health" - all OOC concepts - were paramount concerns that outweighed IC motivations was more corrosive than any "hegemonic" or "stale" elements in foreign affairs prior to this year. It's again notable that the one major instance of framing anything along those lines in IC terms was N$O's ill-fated doctrine of intervening against other power centers that consolidated. By framing the possibility as a military threat rather than a "game health" issue, N$O at least attempted to prevent P&W from becoming a glorified battle simulator. The central theme here isn't the supposed virtue of N$O (I've gone fully OOC for this post), but the apparent incapacity of most of the game's players to see how deeply flawed the whole project was from the start. The emotional investment in "minispheres" coupled with the lazy assumptions and unrealistic expectations that went into creating them are what made so many people so angry about how the war developed. If it's existentially important for foreign affairs to be conducted a certain way - never mind the messy details of actually making it happen - then anyone who is perceived to be against that paradigm is an existential threat. The collective refusal of so many people to either concede that minispheres weren't existentially important or to recognize that they needed do a better job in a second attempt at implementing them is what's fueled a lot of the rage over the past several months. Lazy and inaccurate invocations of "hegemony" aside, I don't have a problem with bipolarity, although I can understand why other people might not like it. However, I have very little sympathy for the people who believed in minispheres but did little to nothing to address the problems I listed above, and I have no sympathy for the people whose motivations in pushing for them were cynical all along. Put it this way: for the fifth anniversary of him creating a CN nation, he wrote and published an interview that was several thousand words long. He interviewed himself.