Edward I

In fairness, that happens to SK in most wars regardless of the state in which they enter.

I'm not asking them to go into VM, I'm saying that retirement isn't a get out of jail free card. To be clear, I don't think anyone in Swagrr or Yarr has said that retirement is grounds to not be declared on; Akuryo mentioned it here and I commented on the idea.

Treaties mostly exist as public announcements of an alliance's foreign ties. They characterize those relationships somewhat - ODPs aren't the same MDPs - but, in practice, the actual language of most treaties is all but ignored. Because treaties aren't used as reliable generators of acceptable casus belli, they're not particularly relevant as mechanisms for fighting wars. War coalitions are instead determined by personal relationships and shared priorities, and alliances' entrances into wars into wars are almost never explicitly justified by treaty clauses. It's interesting to me that some of the same people who are quick to decry neutrals, deadbeat protectorates, and pixel huggers in general seem to feel it's an entirely different matter if someone is "retired". If the extent of someone's retirement is great enough that they don't even want to fight wars, they should strongly consider entering vacation mode, or at least find protectors capable of deterring potential aggressors. It's what everyone else has to do.

I think this is the best solution. The stats don't exist as an arbiter of the politics of wars, they're only meant to track damages. I know there's an at least partially-implemented alliance filtering system somewhere in stats module, so I think it makes sense to allow people to selectively exclude specific alliances from coalition-level stats views, but leave the default inclusion settings as they are now. Even under the current system we're already arguing about the "true" damage ratios of the war, and about how much they actually matter. I don't think breaking each war into a half dozen separately-tracked subconflicts would change that. If people feel the need to differentiate themselves from a war coalition, the stats page already links to each war's wiki page, which in turn usually includes all relevant alliance announcements on the forums.

Probably a bad idea. There's a reason treasures are hard to get and have sharply diminishing marginal returns https://politicsandwar.fandom.com/wiki/Treasure_Island

There's a difference between jokes or propaganda and attacking a community. I don't pretend to have a perfect definition of the distinction, but I say the conduct of many of the critics here counts as the latter. NPO understands it's a collectivist group. We've had a running joke for years in both CN and PW that the government is a hivemind. Jokes or propaganda about Roqbots and communism are fine; I think most of them are pretty funny. However, comments like this one aren't jokes about NPO's tax rates; they're full-on attacks on the model and culture of NPO's community. The consistent, obvious implication of such comments is that NPO isn't a legitimate group - that we prevent members from playing PW and brainwash them into keeping their nations alive, thereby allowing a small group of leaders to have undue amounts of power. That same bogus line of reasoning has been reapplied here almost verbatim. NPO didn't set up and doesn't own the Discord server in question. NPO lent its bank alliance only because the new players signed up before deciding on a group identity, leadership structure, or purpose in PW. The decision to use NPO's bank AA, to keep the Discord server private, and to characterize other PW Discord servers the way they were was made by the group's leadership; not NPO's. The newbies here aren't brain-dead and aren't being controlled by NPO any more than NPO's own members are. Forgive us if we're tired of having the very format of our community assaulted and if we're impatient when the same rhetorical BS is directed at others. You didn't do anything obnoxious as far as I've seen, and I think your various community engagement projects have been (and are) laudable. That's a perfectly reasonable opinion to have, and I wish many others shared it. They apparently don't, though. Instead, much of the commentary is that these players are "being kept from the community". That's a load of horse crap being used as a rhetorical cudgel, mostly by people who don't like NPO, and mostly as yet another way to say the things I pointed out above. In response to the first point, there's a reason that Discord server is private, and it's more than a little irksome that people think they're entitled to access it. Their failure to accept and tolerate a different approach to community-building is a problem. In response to the second point, I'll again refer you to the first part of my response here. I think it pretty much covers my thoughts on the matter. In response to the third point, dumb and toxic aren't mutually exclusive. I'm not calling this behavior out because it's dumb (although it is); I'm calling it out because it's the latest installment in a long, corrosive pattern.

1) The insinuation that NPO is manipulating these folks. It's the same old "NPO members are mindless fools, NPO's gov are duplicitous manipulators sitting on a throne of lies and deceit" narrative, but applied to a new group. Like Charles said, not only are we not manipulating this community, we wouldn't be capable of doing so if we wanted to. They're exercising their own best judgment here. 2) The notion that "the community" (meaning the game at large and active posters in particular) gets to decide what's best for them. First of all, "the community" very much included them the second they made non-multi nations, so acting as though they need to do something to gain admission to it is pretty scummy. Second of all, acting as though they owe "the community" anything - interaction, access, etc. - by dint of having more than a dozen new nations on a single AA is also pretty dumb. Older players are entitled to exactly nothing as far as new players and new alliances go. The line between drama and toxicity is, generally, the line between IC and OOC. It's the line between knowing what "no thank you" means and hunting down invites to Discord servers that you've been explicitly told you're not wanted in; it's the line between voicing displeasure at your lack of access here and insinuating that other people are mindless drones; it's the line between expressing concern for your alliance's future strategic position and claiming that 300 new members on a single alliance will kill the game.

Please read the posts we make in reply to yours. They chose not to interact much with the wider PW community. They have a right to make that choice. Nowhere did I or anyone else say they didn't.

It's not NPO that invited them, the community chose to come here. They're also just as much members of "the community" as you are, and you have no right to tell them how to be a part of it; that's their decision.

It's that community's decision how to conduct itself, not yours and not "the game's". Furthermore, they made that decision themselves, as Keshav already said. They don't owe anything to you or anyone else outside their community and if you really had their best interest in mind, you'd stop trying to spin this into anti-NPO propaganda.

I'm flattered. ? Isn't that what we have now, though, even after some fragmentation? BK-sphere is named after BK; N$O is named after NPO and t$; Chaos would almost certainly be called TKR-sphere if it wasn't a bloc with its own name. The only major grouping that isn't named after 1-2 focal alliances is KETOG. More generally, why are semi-hierarchical relationships among allies a bad thing? Can they really be avoided? Even if you think the status quo represents multipolarity in name only, or else is insufficiently fragmented, why would "weaker" alliances necessarily choose foreign policies independent of "stronger" alliances? It seems to me that if they wanted dissociation from the BKs, NPOs, and TKRs of the world they'd have opted for it already. Similarly to what I said above, why would fragmentation mean small alliance leaders would have this opportunity? What's to stop bigger, more powerful groups from effectively determining a small alliance's path by the consequences of their actions? Perhaps more controversially, do small alliance leaders deserve this chance? There's a perennial argument against the existence of protectorates in the first place, for example, because many people think they add no value to the game as a whole. Small alliances that didn't need protection or grew out of it are different only by degrees. They still typically lack the resources and activity that larger, more established alliances have, and the exceptions here are mostly elite alliances made up experienced players that prove the rule. In many cases, these groups are vestiges or splinters of previously top tier alliances, meaning they had a head start creating group cohesion as well. I'm not saying there shouldn't be new alliances that are given the chance to succeed. But what can we reasonably expect success to look like? If we want to socialize newer alliances or younger leaders into the main metagame, do they need to be somewhat subordinate to established alliances? If new alliances are to survive at all, do they need protectors? And if so, should established alliances expect a reliable future ally that shares FA goals in return for their protection? A strategic position isn't solely about protecting infrastructure, though, and multipolarity is the perfect example of this. Lots of people have an almost ideological investment in multipolarity. Wars should be evenly balanced; short; small rather than global; and fought between constantly-shifting coalitions in their minds. They claim to be - and to an extent, have been - willing to fight for this, even at the expense of some infrastructure. The more moralistic arguments made against NPO in particular say that our involvement in the war is wrong because it weakens the strategic position of the people who are in the right.

You seem to assume that bipolarity implies the two sides are static, even though that's not necessarily true, and isn't in this case. I'm not trying to trivialize the problems with it, just point out that the proposed cure is likely worse than the disease here.

Where have we said we'd do that? We've been willing to deal and cooperate where trust exists, and I don't think we've indicated that we'd go to war with anyone who doesn't follow our "wishes". Just because NPO doesn't trust TKR or most of Chaos and KETOG doesn't mean that we're warmongers incapable of productive discourse. Why is bipolarity so bad? I'm not saying it leaves nothing to be desired, but I strongly disagree that it's the greatest evil as far as gameplay goes. NPO's government is after the same things you are. We too want to build a better world. But the world you seem to envision is not a better one. Wars for their own sake are senseless. Wars justified solely by the inherent entertainment of blowing up infrastructure are senseless. Politics and diplomacy conducted with the primary aim of orchestrating such wars, though, are worse than senseless; they are corrosive. We understand your frustrations because we understand that much - although far from all - of the work that went into bringing about political fragmentation was motivated by a desire to make the game better. There is value in novelty and in change. However, novelty cannot come at the expense of actual politicking. As you said, good alliance governments try to do right by their memberships. Part of that mandate is looking after the security of your alliance members. That doesn't mean shielding every last bit of their infra from harm, but it does mean keeping your alliance in a viable strategic position. Another part of that mandate is building a world in which your alliance and its members can thrive. NPO is unlikely to embrace a contrived politics that substitutes "fun" for real competition and which dismisses genuine disputes when they're incompatible with its embedded notion of "fun". We're especially unlikely to embrace that vision if it also includes the potential to degrade our strategic position so far that we can't work to build and maintain the world we believe our members deserve.

Fair enough. I'll leave you with one parting thought then: We knew we'd be dragged through the coals for this, and we did it anyway. For better or worse, power gives us the luxury of being both intransient and intransigent (not sure if that was a typo or not ). For better or worse, power gives us some say in what the rules of the metagame should be. We haven't fully made up our minds, honestly. Like I said, NPO always had misgivings about multipolarity, but they were primarily - if not exclusively - about the details, not the principle. If the details are properly worked out and the credible assurances against bad actors I mentioned earlier are incorporated, I imagine we'd be fine with it. This will likely be a high bar for many people, though. An incomplete list would (probably) include, in no particular order: No expectation of a cage match between NPO and BK. We're not against fighting them at some point in the future, but we're not going to hate them overnight, and blowing up all the infra in the mid-tier while the whales sit and watch is going to be a hard sell in itself. A better definition of what a sphere is, and what kinds or sizes of spheres aren't allowed. For instance, if BK-sphere was too big for the system to handle, that's as much a fault of the system as it is of BK because, as far as I can tell, no one bothered to work that out before early April when this all came together. This will also need to be a discussion about the nature of the Paracovenant-IQ model of large numbers of less active, less experienced players, not just an exercise in plopping scores and city counts into spreadsheets. A better definition of acceptable ties and cooperation between spheres. If there's a sense, even a misplaced one, that some people are dealing under the table it will kill the whole endeavor. This needs to take into account IC and OOC friendships, what ad hoc cooperation between spheres can and should look like, and how many traditional treaties define a sphere. (I'm waiting for someone else to tell me an ODP between NPO and one BK-sphere alliance means we're a hegemony.) A model for change. Unless we're going to delineate permanent alliances later this year and keep them until the servers get shut off, there needs to a way to change treaties or FA goals without breaking the system. A contingency plan. What happens if (probably when) this all goes south? As we've said before, it's not just a matter of stylized, multipolar separation between groups; it's also a matter of incorporating and accommodating other agendas. We don't want to be stabbed in the back, we don't want to see upper tier consolidation or runaway upper tier growth, and it would be nice if we could hit people over a grudge every once in awhile. And that's just NPO; I don't know what every other alliance wants, but I can't imagine their only goals are a pretty treaty web and smaller wars. Those conditions alone may very well be unattainable. Personally, I'm skeptical that it's even possible for minispheres to be truly self-sustaining. But, regardless of what happens, I think it would be nice if most of us could figure out and agree on what went wrong and why. If there isn't an existential disagreement, maybe future wars will feel less existential.

Serious question: what are you trying to accomplish here? Are you only trying to articulate a sense of despair and disappointment? If that's the case, then what you're doing makes complete sense and I won't try to keep having circular discussions about it. I never expected us to see each other in a positive moral light; instead I've been trying to indicate a path forward to save or resurrect multipolarity without the pitfalls of this first attempt.

We've explained this repeatedly. It wasn't a secret tie to BK. If this is so unsatisfactory for you that you'd ask whether we "want to go back to the drawing board", perhaps you should reconsider the soundness of what was on the drawing board in the first place. Of course it's ironic. But the fact that the thing we feared - a multisphere coalition, not to mention the prospect of that coalition opportunistically hitting NPO - happened should tell you something about the immense fallacies of the entire concept and the necessity of some contingency plan. You are, of course, free to draw separate circles around BK, Citadel, and Covenant, but that doesn't mean that other people have to. And if their not doing so makes them bad actors or disingenuous in your eyes, perhaps that's a good indicator that this was half-baked all along. We expressed our misgivings publicly for months. Pretty much every time I saw Keshav or Roquentin say something about multipolarity in the abstract, it was skeptical. If you want someone to talk specifically about what was and wasn't said when this whole thing was being put together, you'll have to talk to someone who was there. The public record, though, is detailed enough to figure out pretty much what we thought about the inherent flaws.

Nominally at least, this bit is the core of what the war is supposed to be about. There are plenty of people whose motivations for fighting or propagandizing are more cynical than their stated aspirations here, but I think it's worth making at least one post about it that isn't a wall of text. "Bad actors" are probably the best way of framing the stated issue. You say Roq, and by extension NPO, only want bipolarity, making us a bad actor in your eyes and the eyes of everyone who highly values the reality or the appearance of multipolarity. We, on the other hand, saw ostensible multipolarity as an unsustainable construct waiting to be messed up by a bad actor who refused to play by the rules of the system, which are largely unenforced. When I said earlier that a doctrine of intervention against inter-sphere coalitions was the best way NPO knew how to maintain the system, I meant it. It was the only way NPO's leadership could think of to counteract the potential for abuse inherent in multipolarity. Even if you disagree with me here - if you think I or Roq or NPO are lying, if you think we're the real bad actor who messed everything up for all the well-intentioned people - my point still stands. If you or NPO or anyone else want to build a better world, the bad actor problem will have to be addressed. Any new construct for diplomacy needs to include some credible assurance that it can't be corrupted by someone who isn't playing by its rules. This could be done by broad consensus, the threat of overwhelming force, or something else. But it needs to happen or, sooner or later, someone will decide their interests are best served by breaking things.

You spelled "preferred" incorrectly.

I thought we'd been over this. An agreement between t$ and NPO - allies with a public treaty - is not a paperless tie with BK. If you're saying that, in this instance, it had a similar effect to a paperless tie, then you're kind of agreeing with the central point of my argument, which is that there is an undue focus on appearances at the expense of substance. Does cooperation between Chaos and KETOG via a coalition mean they have paperless ties? I don't think so, but it's had the same substantive effect as an alternate scenario in which they do. Does an ODoAP between NPO and Polaris do or promise anything that couldn't have been without it? Not really, but that hasn't stopped people from claiming otherwise. Does the notion that everyone really separated because they deleted lines on a treaty web amount to anything more than an unverifiable promise - an appearance, in other words? Not really. Just because others chose to define minispheres in almost purely aesthetic terms doesn't mean we had to.

See my wall of text that came after the post this was in response to. The details are there, but the short version is that we reject the notion that we had - or needed to be given - the "benefit of the doubt." The minisphere construct which we were all but commanded to support wasn't one we thought was fully sound. Its advocates accused us of undermining it from the start, seemingly without listening to our concerns and certainly without addressing them. If trust in NPO is predicated on its deference to your preferences regarding the metagame, then you have every reason to distrust us. We will never value the preferences or concerns of others over our own. That doesn't mean we aren't willing to compromise or listen, though. If you want NPO to be a full partner in building whatever world it is you want, perhaps consider doing the same.

Perhaps you don't think it was contrived reasoning, but from our perspective it absolutely was. An ODoAP treaty - one by which its signatories reserves the right to fight alongside one another - isn't substantively different from at-will cooperation between alliances in general. Many alliances don't sign them precisely because they feel they are meaningless and that their option to go to war in conjunction with any other alliance is inherent. The apparent failure to understand that minispheres wouldn't happen in a vacuum - that alliances wouldn't suddenly agree on a comprehensive, universal set of rules regulating every aspect of their foreign affairs - was also contrived. It was never reasonable to assume that everyone would immediately arrive at a consensus on how treaties should be signed, especially since (to the best of my knowledge) a standard one was never articulated. Instead, many people assumed the standard way treaties should operate was "semi-paperless", where the number and number of degrees of visual connections was prized over almost everything else. However, just because some people were hung up on the aesthetics of a treaty web doesn't mean that everyone was. PW managed to produce bipolar wars for years despite an observer's near-constant ability to trace a line from almost any major alliance to almost any other major alliance via treaties. It's a little strange to assume that multipolarity would be killed solely by the continued ability to do the same thing. Treaties obviously aren't the only way foreign affairs are conducted. The history of a working relationship between NPO and Polaris, for instance, wouldn't have disappeared if we'd cancelled our treaty altogether. The relationships and friendships in former EMC, former IQ, and anywhere else didn't evaporate in early April when Chaos formed and The Inquisition dissolved. The failure to realize this is both another contrivance and the basis for a double standard beginning in April. For all the whining about the supposedly-hegemonic ambitions of BK and NPO and the injustice of their supposed collusion, first in the plot from Sphinx's leak and then in NPO's decision to enter the war against TKR, there has been almost nothing said about Rose's involvement in the war. Chaos had a rock-solid CB and KETOG, while on thinner ice, arguably had one as well. Rose, however, was never mentioned in TCW's plans. If the root problem is NPO and BK's behavior, then surely Rose is at least as much of a bad actor here; after all, they didn't even present a CB like NPO did. Furthermore, NPO was probably the most vocal skeptic of minispheres for all of these reasons. Roquentin, Keshav, Frawley and I all pointed out flaws we saw in the concept well before it became a reality. However, unlike many other actors in this drama, NPO came up with contingency plan, namely the doctrine of interfering against collusion devised by Kayser and NPO's government. Despite our skepticism, we tried to make minispheres work the best way we knew how. Of course, this landed us where we are now: NPO was the target of months of public sniping claiming that an ODoAP was proof it lied about the Inquisition's dissolution, two minispheres colluded to roll a third one, and one of the alliances in that group leaked its intentions to take advantage of the situation to roll NPO as well. Forgive us if we chose our own defense over deference to a version of game play that never fully took into account our objections or our play style.

It's two minispheres per Sketchy's comments on BK, NPO and their respective allies, actually. Threatening to war people out of the game because they failed to adhere to the contrived rules of a metagame that, at times, seemed deliberately constructed to constrain them specifically is toxic. If the framing of your intentions is a years-long time period ("three years giving you ample opportunity") and almost apocalyptic ("If you thought people were targeting you before...you are going to find out what that actually looks like now. The new norm is scorched earth...anyone still tied to BK or NPO will sink with the ship.") then yes, it's fair to say that you intend to force BK and NPO out of the game, via long-term attrition and isolation if by no other means. Your "support" mostly seemed to be constant complaining that the split didn't go far enough, and no, the criticism was not strictly centered on BK. The ODP police I referred to earlier was the effort by you and others to shame NPO into dropping its already-downgraded, optional treaty with Polaris based on the nonsensical claim that it amounted to sphere-level cooperation between BK-sphere and N$O.

If you trace the conversation back to the original comment about antagonism, it was Keshav telling Hodor that the antagonism began long before this thread was even started and that it is pervasive throughout the alliances in Coalition A. I chose to focus on TGH since there's only so far Hodor can fairly be associated with prewar actions of his coalition-mates. I didn't imply that Hodor was lying or insincere, but rather that his attempts at amiable, good faith discussion means little in the face of the stance taken by his own alliance for months. Calling Roq and Keshav lying hypocrites for the umpteenth time in the post I quoted above covers hostility pretty well. Sketchy's stance that anyone who remains tied to NPO or BK needs to be perma-warred is both hostile and toxic. The months-long act of ODP police you and others put on after IQ split up was deliberate obtuseness over minispheres, and the double standard applied repeatedly before, during and after Surf's Up regarding cooperation or ODPs constituting secret ties is both obtuse and hostile.

House Stark isn't passive. They just conduct all their foreign affairs via drive-by memeing.

And I'm one of NPO's FA gov members. But the four other people I mentioned are the ones who outrank us in our respective alliances and are the ones who have explicitly identified one another as problems. How TGH wants to govern itself is its business, but don't expect us to take your word or your tone over those of Buorhann and Sketchy when they clearly outrank you. Unless they change their tune or you're empowered at their expense, we're going to keep listening to them when they claim that everything we say in public is a lie and the correct course of action is to salt the earth.