Edward I

Principle. If these are going to be wedded to the game and its moderation - again, they have their own subforum and they can be displayed in-game, so they definitely are - then they should be conducted and recorded, start to finish, on infrastructure controlled by the game's admins and moderation staff. That's silly. It's also definitely worse and less "fair" than a popular straw poll. Not upset, just disappointed. We don't dislike your idea because it's new; we dislike it because it's bad. Then focus on the discussion, not the voting. We don't need a poorly designed, counter-majoritarian process when direct democracy has always worked just fine. Change for its own sake isn't a good reason to alter anything. There are almost certainly more daily/weekly forum users than there were people on that Discord server, so the first half doesn't make sense. I said I'd be fine with a vote happening in-game last year; I'd be fine with that this year. It's not your decision to make. You're not "the community" and you don't speak for a "majority of the game." I suggested doing it in-game. And not wanting to make an account here isn't the same as being unable to join, so I have no idea what you're getting at there.

It was hosted off-site last year and the results were initially revealed in a player-controlled, non-official Discord server. That's a bad management/moderation practice, and it shouldn't be repeated this year. So I'd be very disappointed if the setup was the same as last year, especially since, as I recall, Alex offered to host them in-game this year. Either you articulated your original idea poorly or this is wrong, because the way I and several others read your OP was that a significant number of the awards would be voted on by only 50 people, half of whom would be chosen by you. If that's the case, then we don't have anywhere near the same definition of "fair." They are. They have a dedicated subforum here, which is a moderation decision and lends them an imprimatur of legitimacy. Displaying them in-game unfairly inflates the images of the alliances that win the positive awards. I don't think it's any better for alliances to trick noobs into thinking their friends are the best than it would be if they could trick noobs into thinking their rivals are the worst. You can read the forum without posting on it, so this doesn't make sense even on its own terms.

These are politicized every year because it's the nature of the beast. Every year, there's someone whining about them being "unfair," "unobjective," or otherwise "rigged." The reason they are politicized is because they're "official." They have their own dedicated subforum here and the results are displayed in-game. We're never going to achieve a "fair" or "objective" outcome by changing the process unless that change makes the awards unofficial - not held in their own special subforum, and not recorded in-game. If those aren't being considered (and it appears they aren't), then I'll say what I say every year: host these in-game or here on the forums, and use a directly democratic voting process for all the awards. That's closer to "fair" than any other method. I'd encourage you or anyone else interested in a discussion between better-informed players to have one on the side. A discussion thread separate from the voting thread(s) in here seems reasonable. An radio show run in parallel with these (although not integrated with the awards) with a guest list comprised of "historians" would also be interesting.

The easiest solution by far to all of the weird edge cases in color mechanics is to get rid of beige and replace it with a "protected status" that provides all the benefits of beige but doesn't change a nation's color. New nations would spawn on gray. As for the other changes, I prefer my own suggestion.

It's not pointless. IC has come back several times to aid in negotiations and for most of his "retirement" he's wielded substantial influence within TKR. If he doesn't anymore because he's now completely inactive, fair enough, but it's not incumbent on us to immediately change our opinion of TKR or its government every time there appears to have been a changing of the guard. You don't need to defend your relative newness, but it's also not a free pass for you. You chose to join and represent a major alliance with years of history rather than, say, start your own micro. Continue doing whatever you feel is best for you and TKR, but don't expect NPO or anyone else to treat TKR like it's as fresh-faced as you are. He's not spinning anything, he's referencing common knowledge. TKR has plotted to roll NPO several times, some of them successfully, and all of them more recently than the events which Azaghul mentioned. That job will be easier for you if choose not to write off so much of what we say as unfair to you or TKR. If you want to put the past behind, you'll need to have your ears open for more than just what you want to hear.

The structure you’ve proposed is both unrepresentative and so toothless that it wouldn’t be a meaningful change from the way the suggestions subforum currently works.

This is an OOC forum. Your IC views on alliance management don’t belong here. Yes, nations can always leave their alliances because that’s how game mechanics work. No, tax rates aren’t a community issue. If you think other alliances should set theirs differently, take it up with them in-game. @REAP3R pretty much covered everything else I was going to say.

Beige isn't the same as being inactive, and it's also not the same as being blockaded. If you want to change the way nations are taxed with respect to their activity, then use the system you've already created to track activity - the colored diamonds - to do so. If you want to change how blockades affect the way nations are taxed, then use the system you've already created - the "blockaded" variable, which already affects trades and bank transfers - to do so. Please don't say you want to change one thing (inactive nations being taxed), then ignore better, cleaner suggestions than your own (using the colored diamond system rather than nation color) to implement it, and then justify your decision ex post facto by saying you wanted to change something else (the incentivizes surrounding beiging nations) which wasn't even alluded to in your discussions with players about this.

Well, in his case he’ll hide in vacation mode and make third-rate shitposts on the forums instead of taking it, but otherwise you’re right.

FTFY

1. This amounts to printing money. I'd take all the money in my alliance's bank, divide it by the maximum per-unit value of a trade, and trade that much food back and forth between my nation and the nation of another alliance officer. 2. This wouldn't really enhance roleplay because it would be used to accelerate nation growth independent of IC ideology. 1% boosts aren't that far off from the boosts that already come from domestic policies. That's not a reason to be against this particular change, but it's not an RP change because it isn't inconsequential. 3. Let's not widen the income gap between the whales and the mid tier. There are enough game balance issues associated with upper tier wealth hoarding already. 4. Not exactly roleplay in my book, but it's completely cosmetic and therefore harmless.

That's a distinction without a difference.

So Side A doesn't want to lose the bargaining chip it sees its eventual admission of defeat as... ...and Side B doesn't want Side A's admission of defeat to be up for debate, as a bargaining chip or otherwise... ...and the compromise is to give Side A what it wants. Got it.

My nation started with zero cities.

Fair enough. "Right-wing dictators" might have been a better description then. The PRP ended in 2006 under Ivan, and a PRP-esque rebrand happened under Moo in late 2007. The original NS version of Francoism was mostly about a class struggle and a revolution, so definitely more Marxist than Hobbesian. The Hobbes stuff was fleshed out more in CN (like you said) because, you know, no Userites. PG is as old as NPO. It was the first, or close to the first, internal organization they created in 2006. High taxes are a means to an end. The primary issue has always been the immense wealth of incumbents compared to newcomers, which distorts power by skewing it towards older, larger nations and away from newer, often more numerous nations. Some of that is a consequence individualist attitudes, but it's mostly an issue of groups of players not having power in rough proportion to their membership numbers rather than a problem of redistribution within groups. Yes, this ^

Early NS NPO stuff was pretty heavily influenced by Marxism, and especially by the early history of the Soviet Union. NPO was rebranded as the People's Republic of the Pacific for about a year, and there was another vaguely communist-themed rebrand a few years after that. I don't know when the second one was undone, but probably around the same time that Mary was effectively in charge of both CN and NS NPO. The jackboot is from sometime in 2006 in CN. People tried making anti-NPO propaganda that referenced fascism (jackboots specifically), but it came off in the same way the "BK literally practices chattel slavery" bit did here, so NPO repurposed it as a joke. I'm unaware of any South American influences, and I'm pretty sure there weren't any because the South American dictators were pretty much all fascists, which wouldn't have gelled with the rest of the thematic influences. Roq's right on this one: Vlad ripped most of his "state of nature", "united sovereignty" stuff straight from Hobbes's Leviathan. Early NS NPO was explicitly Roman-themed even if it was pretty obviously influenced by Marxist ideology, so both you and Keshav are basically right here. The reason why NPO isn't communism/Marxism themed here, though, is because we've never really incorporated that part of NPO's past. Our theme at the moment is Warhammer, but that choice was as much to avoid wholesale recycling of CN NPO titles as anything since we're not the same organization as CN NPO. The Francoist stuff was stretched to (and, in my opinion, past) the breaking point to be reused in CN, and largely because of that it was never really imported here. It had already fallen into disuse in CN, so it wasn't a hard break to make in any case. The only old school NPO ideology that came over was autocracy/meritocracy/collectivism = good, which is how we ended up with a 100/100 tax system well before anyone else. Francoism is to fascism as Marxism is to peanut butter.

He's not accusing you guys of being inconsistent; he's saying you've consistently misinterpreted what we're demanding despite multiple, detailed explanations from several members of our coalition. He's not advising people to comb through your government's various statements for inconsistencies; he's telling people to compare them with those from Coalition B. We've been consistent as well (we haven't "softened" our demand because we haven't changed it), and anyone can find out as much by just reading what we post. He called it spin because, at this point, the creative interpretations of "unconditional surrender" from Coalition A amount to either ignorance or plain obtuseness. Yes. New players are always good.

Yeah, but his “neutral” commentary tends to look and sound like KERCHTOGG talking points, so the mistake is understandable.

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It's not an out-of-character problem, and therefore doesn't need to be regulated in an out-of-character fashion. If it's an in-character problem for you or anyone else, that's fine, but don't come to the suggestions forum looking for solutions to it. Regulating player associations is never going to work. Alliance membership and alliance treaties are the two most obvious ways this is semi-frequently suggested, and both have painfully obvious workarounds that are trivial or near-trivial to implement. We also shouldn't want these regulations, regardless of their efficacy. Unless an alliance is obviously sucking players into inactivity (particularly mismanaged or inactive micros are the only groups I can think of that would fit this description) then alliance size should purely be a matter of player choice. What you and the others are implicitly arguing is that the ideal alliance size is somewhere under 300 members (more specifically, it seems to be 50-100 members). Not only is there not a coherent, non-political reason for this preference (I don't see this suggestion as "persecuting NPO" so much as I see it as undue preferential treatment given to incumbent 50-100 member alliances), but there are good reasons to prefer larger alliance sizes. Larger groups tend to sustain themselves better than smaller ones because they have the resources and knowledge to invest in long-term player and community development. When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Most of GPWC isn't "active" in a meaningful sense (there aren't anywhere near 1000+ people actively building nations, let alone raiding or fighting wars), so you're leaving out some important details as well. But more to the point, so what? I mentioned above that this isn't an OOC problem and that there are probably more and better OOC reasons to prefer larger alliances to smaller ones. I didn't say it was lazy or ridiculous for others to fail to replicate GPWC; I said it was lazy and ridiculous for them to frame large alliances as threats to game health, especially if they omit important details in their arguments. Even on its own terms, all that argument amounts to is a failure to adapt to a perceived threat. In other words, if you think it's somehow unfair for a sub-100 member alliance to coexist with alliances several times its size, then the onus to change and innovate is on that alliance's members, not the game's developers. That would be great. CN hit peak membership after it made international news, and I'd be very excited if PW managed to do the same.

NPO has far more room to talk about “unfavorable circumstances” and how it would respond to them than almost any other group here, and our answer, historically, has been to cope, persevere and find a solution, however incomplete or imperfect. I have no doubt whatsoever that our response to a rival invasion alliance would fit that description. We don’t criticize others for expanding the player base because we think it’s an inherently positive thing. Other than cheaters and rule-breakers, new players are categorically good. If you can’t understand it in those terms, then the problem is you, not them. NPO had 1000+ members in 2006-07, many if not most of whom (especially the leadership) were from NationStates. GOONS had 1000 members at its peak in CN, and its entire identity was as an offshoot of the Something Awful community. It’s possible there are other groups that meet the 1k member criterion I’ve forgotten about, but my point is that it’s definitely happened before. It’s neither lazy nor ridiculous to worry about rival groups or to start in-character fights over their presence, but it is both lazy and ridiculous to frame them as a threat to the health of the game.

You've achieved gold standard of PW critical acclaim before recording a single episode. Congrats.

I always suspected they ate their soup with forks. It explains so much.

And neither you nor Vivec has offered a coherent justification for such a restriction. I can't figure out what "past" has "shown" him that administrative divisions become political divisions, and neither of you seems motivated by anything besides discomfort at size disparities between alliances. Why should size disparities be regulated in the first place?

Why isn't it instead necessary for various smaller alliances to merge or collaborate more closely? I'm curious to know why you think any burden to change should be on larger groups rather than smaller ones. What past? I'm unaware of any history of colony-like administrative division within alliances that have led to meaningful political splits later on. Alex has said in the past that the doesn't want to encourage these types of gamey, multi-AA alliances, so your "worst" case scenario is, unless he changes his mind, off the table.