Zed

In a public press release, Zed is able to confirm that The Firm, a sovereign and independent alliance (NZX:$f), has received a supply of munitions for peacekeeping missions against 30-50 feral HOGGs. The Firm is grateful for this support.

As Paula Deen would say, needs more butter! In general, public perception of alliances is often that losing wars means you have done bad in some aspect of the game.If you lose a few in a short time, it compounds. You can pat allies on the back and such, but catch a few Ls and everyone feeds on it. Results are what people get driven by, and sometimes people will overdo it with stats and such. Going to war is a serious business in this game. If you're allied, you need to be on the same page when you do it. Losing a war is not the end of the world if there is something you can plan for in it. Supporting an ally in such an effort is what you should do. But if you do not agree, and the visions do not line up, you have to figure that out and negotiate it. There really is not a substitute. That is where the fallout happens with t$ and Cata. I joke with WANA about blessing him with a dispensation to be paperless, because only I can properly be paperless FA Head for t$, but I think it can be agreed that it would not be a long term thing. The only real problem is where to go. t$ has had run-ins with alliances before, and then worked with them as allies; TEst is not really that different in such a regard. Realistically though, where else is there to go? Unless there are changes elsewhere, like joining a HOGG or MG breaking up and picking up something there, most of the other paths are not viable for a variety of reasons. The FA ability there is just, well, what else is left? To be fair, I heard Eclipse is apparently highly ranked on some power rankings, so it is not like there is some woe is me, this is all we could do kind of stuff. There is no disrespect meant to Cata or Eclipse or whoever. I do appreciate being able to discuss things without going too far into bad territory. Thank you. People love to e-lawyer things, especially treaties. I have been guilty of it myself within the past few months on these forums. I liked writing treaties and putting out some effortposts from time to time because they are reflective pieces of thought, or at least they can be. Forums move slower than chat, and you can have just a different type of discussion on them. I agree on both. I do not intend for this to be a cop out, but not being in those channels does mean that my ability to contribute to a discussion is only filtered through what I get reported to me from other members of active government who are. While as an Exec Emeritus I do have some privileges beyond even Low Gov at times (but please do not tell those poor saps), I do not get a vote, and anything I say is treated as advice rather than holy edict. I know you have seen how we operate at a certain level before, so this is probably not news. I have my own opinion of how this could have all played out, in various gamesmanship theories. While I did and would suggest those to our active government, there is only so far it goes. The dead should not rule the living. I write about this at more length in my reply to Buo. He just happened to ask first, sorry for shortchanging you and not writing more walls of text. I wrote in a reply to Hodor about how I think, for better or worse, the tone for public perception of t$ changes with We Are Here For The Whales, the wandering in the wilderness during NPOLT, and the subsequent fallout of a lot of the major public enemies of the game. Something that probably does get missed in this analysis is that in late 2019 t$ had a major crisis of leadership. What revived t$, in part, was the fact that KT and TGH both broke apart, and several prominent people from those halls stepped into t$. Ironically, almost all of those people either have deleted or are playing elsewhere now, and the internal leadership pools were replenished to a healthy and functioning level. That period of late 2019 was probably one of the very low points in our internal history, and in our depth of leadership ability. That said, Sisyphus is an absolute saint who put on a masterclass of FA, Leopold is truly an IA wonderworker, and we had other talent - it was just not fully baked or recruited, or it was not necessarily in our halls at the time. For those people who were around at that time, and are still playing, often in a government capacity, I do wonder what personal perceptions played into where t$ went following NPOLT. Did those people take their own rivalries and connections with them? If they did, how much does that get conflated with the t$ "brand"? None of this is to suggest that any of those people are responsible for any fault or negative perception of the alliance. t$ does not survive without most of them, and those names are some of the absolute best to play this game. Plus we repatriated some old familiar faces; people might always recognize Partisan with t$ and we brought him back around then, but he has left us before, whereas WANA left us but he was an original founder of the alliance - and that was before even my time! I only get to vicariously live through the spirit of a gay motorcycle gang, which I promise is really a big letdown. I personally think there are exciting and skilled people in t$ now. Our Vice President lineup has a lot of skill and potential, and e$ Manager is probably one of the best training platforms for prospective alliance leadership in all of Orbis. I overflow with pregnant desire to see Lucas continue our great IA Exec to FA Exec transition (for legal reasons this is a joke); but he, Vemek, and Pope are quite understated in public. None of them have the name brand recognition of some of the famous faces in the past, but they are not generic scrubs either. WANA has been doing the FA thing for a long time and knows his way around the game. Maybe part of the difference in perception from 2019 and today is in this fact. When people seem more unknown, or more distant, then it is harder to judge how skilled they really are. If 4 of the 5 wars you fight in a year like 2015 are defensives where you are on the lesser side, and you come out on top in each, you build an easily recognizable global reputation. When your innovations like Treasure Island or Ground Zero are easily understood economic or military victories, your easily build a recognizable reputation. What is less recognizable is when you twice in as many years lose the base of your Econ government and have to completely rebuild it, but still keep up the same level of success. Or when you have bubbly and personable IA types manage to build community and great members out of random recruits, who in olden times would have never been invited to the alliance thanks to its strict admission policies. We are not in a situation where someone merely okay needs to stand aside for someone with genius talent. That happened with me and JR once upon a time. But we are also not in a situation where our old leaders from the past, as tired and worn out as they may be, are still hanging on. We have refreshed many times over, and I believe that is what allows t$ to endure in a way that is difficult to replicate. Any alliance at our age still living and even quasi-relevant in this game has a lot of baggage. Rose does. TKR does. UPN does. Others do, and apologies for not mentioning everyone. That baggage will color peoples opinions; legacy infrastructure is hard and comes with challenges. And that will build up over time in a way that makes people wonder where the good days of yore are. I know there are certainly some people who will wonder why any of those alliances I mentioned are not as good as they used to be, or why they have not become better than they are now.

As a precursor to the rest of this, a note on "literally NPO". This gets tossed around a lot, for better or worse; and usually, for worse. I am not here to do that, and I am not implying that Cata is conducting an illicit operation like the Pacificians did when they broke the rules. Any reference to that conflict as it relates to this one is purely about the mechanics of entry, and not about people and their behavior. Cata is not, and I want to be very clear here, "literally NPO" in the pejorative sense of the word as we toss it around.. For what it is worth, I responded to your post initially instead of a few others because you actually had something relatively constructive to say in the thread in terms of building a point in general. I very distinctly remember alliances who were pleased we entered the war in the screenshots. I also remember a number of alliances who were very less than pleased when we left the battlefield abruptly after NPO hit TKR. SuperCholaX (not the real BK) was very incensed when we left, after being highly elated when we joined. A lot of the people on that spectrum of feelings are no longer around for various reasons, but it is what it is. That war was very messy and had a lot of feelings built up around it, and we are very much living in the shadow of that era. It is not my intent to re-litigate the t$-GG rivalry that developed around that time here, but I think both of us would have experiences colored by that fight given where we were then and where we are now. I would not be surprised at all if the negative external opinion of t$ today is driven deep down by the role the alliance played in that particular conflict, from beginning to end. It may not be what people cite now, but it is probably where the initial seed is planted. There is even a thread about it, sort of, from WANA a few months back. In the situation screenshotted above, one major difference is that all allied parties to t$ were okay with that particular conflict between t$ and GG. Where things went off the rails was when NPO later decided they had to save SCX directly, which was something explicitly not agreed upon. What was agreed upon is that NPO would mostly sit out, given their diplomatic situation at the time. The entire point of NPO and SCX breaking apart was because they agreed - falsely in hindsight - that their continued partnership was mechanically broken for the game to manage. Pacifica entering the conflict on their behalf was a terrible idea for many reasons. You can theorycraft all you want, but there probably is some simulation where SCX agrees to just take an L because their FA infamy was in the gutter, and then they decide to rebuild and reload with NPO turning and swinging after t$ and GG beat each other to a pulp. That is a very different Orbis, but it is speculation for another time. t$ signed NPO at the time because in terms of challenges, it was really the last thing left on the list at the time. It was about moving the game and the narrative along. And again, without trying to make equations between the two that people will want to twist, t$ signing Cata was also something that was close to that kind of storyline shift. Short of a t$-GG union, that was about it to do. I was very supportive of t$ signing Cata, and I believed it would be a pretty good treaty. Keegoz is one of the few S-tier FA players left in this game, and one of its relatively few active drivers. Having what is probably two of the three most narrative driving alliances in Orbis together was going to be a lot of fun, and probably pretty powerful. In short, there was not really a good reason for Wayward to enter the MG-TKR conflict. Why would there be? Both HOGG and OB were much bigger entities, and aside from one or two parties in that MG-TKR conflict, have most of the other major players in the game. Peers are who most alliances look at when it comes to crafting politics and rivalries in the game. For Wayward, this means figuring out what happens with HOGG and OB. That does not mean you wait for them to hit each other, or you hit one of them yourselves, but I hope I do not need to explain how politics works here. If we all want to grandstand about minispheres and dynamic politics, with many diverse cliques of girlbosses, then some gatekeeping when that kind of dynamism happens is necessary, otherwise we are just gaslighting each other. The fact is if t$ decided to hit Eclipse, and then OB/MG decide to come in on top of t$, then if t$ loses - which we will not know but not out of the question - I guarantee that the public sentiment here would still be to suggest that t$ has terrible FA and MilCom, and some version of ratio + L + you fell off + malding + cope. To be clear, this is not the reason t$ refused to enter the war, and this should not be twisted to suggest so. It is rather a summation of how public behavior would be. Sure, we could say some weird situation where Wayward enters, then OB counters, then HOGG comes in (or not), and we get a nice massive actual Global War. But that requires a lot of hoops to jump through, and assumes a lot of implied ties and deals. Bloc treaties are designed to have the group move and think as a unit. There may be disagreements, but at the end of the day some level of common value and path is required. It may not be something that all parties, or even some parties, find to be their ideal outcome. Relationships are like that. Cata entering the MG-TKR war was not something t$ agreed upon was in the best interest of the bloc. Entering wars is a serious thing in this game. You have to be prepared to do it, and you have to know the consequences of what happens if you do. That is really what this boils down to. This is a common practice, I agree. In antediluvian times, there were a great number of types of treaties. Some were mutual, some optional, and some just for color sharing or friendliness. Over time the community has mostly done away with most of these - to the point where effectively there are just MDP and Protectorate, and the latter usually means oA is included. We do not have to go back to the days when people signed random ToA type documents, but my original point was that the treaty t$ and Eclipse just signed is not a bloc treaty. It is designed, in part, to have some independent bilateral treaty-based politics re-enter the game. It is not out of the question if we signed other alliances too, but they will not be part of a bloc agreement.

Leave them and join Mi6.

When I wrote t$ treaties, I usually would explicitly spell out non-chaining clauses. I also prefer to spell out oA clauses, even though we have had past treaties and writers who say that any MDP has an implied oA clause. The articles in this treaty between t$ and Eclipse, in large part, do cover what happened with Wayward. But I remember a day, long ago, when we told an ally - hey look, there is a conflict that we do not have any business participating in. Let us not do that. Said ally then proceeds to intervene in that conflict, with little notice or warning, because of some grand plan they figured they were concocting. That led us to break the treaty, and stop the actions we were undertaking at the time. It also led to one of the greatest forum threads ever composed here. Now imagine that happening, again, years later. I doubt other people would be thrilled by it either.

To clarify: This is not a bloc treaty.

Join Mi6

Disband your alliance. Join e$ today. AA Link: https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=4829 Discord: https://discord.gg/B5QBJe6ZCZ #freemonkey

Face in that pic a 12/10 so that should make up for any other apparent deficiencies.

Yes but it is le reddit funny numbers of perversion and degeneracy, lolololol.

Jokes on you, I run 150/150 taxes and have fully semi-automatic banking.

It has been awhile since we posted here. I can promise you, e$ has even better benefits than OP lists. You might as well Git Gud and join the best alliance in Orbis today. AA Link: https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=4829 Discord: https://discord.gg/B5QBJe6ZCZ Also while we are here, I call upon Alex to #FreeMonkey from the unjust permaban.

Forget walls of text with silly stories, long CBs, and a lot of reading to get to the point. No fuss, no muss DoW right here. Somewhere in the distance, the lamentations of forum posters can be overheard over the fast moving keyboards of Discord servers.

https://politicsandwar.com/account/vacation/ >Vacation Mode is not intended as a tool to use to avoid wars, and it is not a "peace mode". Other people have made the point well enough that it does not need to be thoroughly re-litigated, but this honestly was one of the most "bruh" moments I have ever had reading a comment on these forums. Fortunately, I think most of us know this is atypical for TKR. People do have legit reasons for VM sometimes, and sometimes real life happens when we prefer it not to. Or, if someone was in a global war for six straight months or something like that, then I really doubt people will have the same issue with that as opposed to VMing after the first round of a fight.

The forums will set you free friend! Way better than RON, VGM, or DNN!

MensaHQ literally went galaxy brain years ago, and went wide on cities versus tall on infra. It is why they wrecked noobs. Glad to see the rest of the game is catching up to the lost forgotten knowledge. Honestly this is based, and something I will probably do myself.

Agreed with Who Me; I cannot stand for gravedig slander on Charles.

Pics or it didn't happen.

I remember writing the HS original protectorate treaty with t$, many years ago. Many things have changed since. It is my hope that you will forge the trail to your own success with all due speed and grace.

>checks personal signature >remembers is in an alliance where IP and copyright infringement is hunted down Valid CB Also nice grimderp music, thanks.

Why would it count? They are not the same war. Moreover, if you are referring to Fault In Our Stars as a back-to-back for the signatories in question, it lasted 35 days. This war lasted 38 days. That’s still short of the 85ish this NAP has in it. The numbers do not add up for the length of the conflicts, even if you want to add them together. But why even add them? As stated before, they are not the same war. The problem here is not that an NAP of any length was signed. NAP treaties have a place in the game as the meta has decided it, and there are no problems with having one at all. The problem here is not that the war lasted a bit over a month. Wars will have variable lengths, and while I presume we as a community are done with wars that last as long as a human pregnancy, a month is well within bounds. The problem here is not that there was a back-to-back war where the defender the first go-round went offensive in the second. There are meta conventions now where you do not immediately double-tap offensive wars on the same alliance, but this war is not that. None of these are problems. I can recall that alliances who did not sign the global NAP treaty were widely mocked and condemned by those who did. Alliances who did not do this were ruining the spirit of the game. Alliances who did not do this were willing to directly harm the game and its community by not agreeing to the “flavor of the month” for restoring justice and fun to the game. The problem is the moral grandstanding that comes from proclaiming that an alliance will sign a binding resolution saying they will do an action for the positive health of the game, and then violate said resolution without its termination. If people in this game are so hard-on to get treaty politics back in the game, to have better cultural norms around how conflicts are handled, and to do global politics that are actually interesting… then people in this game should not have their actions be divorced from their words. Signing a global declaration that ensures an NAP will not last longer than the length of a war, and then signing an NAP that is significantly longer than a war a few months after doing so, is actions divorced from words. I had a very low opinion of that NAP treaty when it was signed, but if that was just an excuse to score spicy roast points for a time only to be forgotten while still in effect months later, then my opinion of it is somehow even lower. If there had been an NAP signed for about a month in this war, which would put it right about on Armistice Day on the real life calendar, I really doubt anyone would have said anything. It would have been in line with the signed NAP treaty, and been within conventions of the meta as the community has supposedly decided it.

>War lasts just over a month. >NAP extends about three months. >Checks signatories of NAP.

It was brought to my attention that this was posted and I forgot to reply. This means I have to come back to FA Leadership. Hard pass.