Isaac Lazarus

Just noticed this too. Had been looking at the total food every day, puzzled at why the line wasn't falling.

Well this raises the bar. Nicely done!

Nice, only five achievements left before I can re-roll.

“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

Yeah. Why can't we all just not get along?

The proper terminology is "shellhounding".

Context is everything. It depends if you've got something salty for the fresh sweetness to counterpoint.

Good theme!

I was honestly, delightfully impressed with the quality and civility of this thread for the first page or so.

Welcome back!

Hey man I'm just riffing on the semantics of hiding behind something that's hidden. I ain't gonna try dispel the notion that the laziest dudes in Orbis are actually the Board of Shadowy Figures. That's quality optics.

I don't think you thought that sentence through.

But one these things is not like the other, and you're absolutely right. I'll admit I skimmed Kastor's post the first time around. I wasn't aware of this, and it's a much bigger deal. I'd still argue that in Thalmor's case, the worst Alex did was weaken the credibility of his own game platform. That is what I believe can be repaired with a commitment to a consistent and transparent approach in future. But broadcasting a user's IP address, particularly on an outside medium, is materially different. And starts to look like a pattern of disregard for user security. I can appreciate a few of the voices in this thread a bit more in that light. How would you see a way forward from that? Besides en masse deletion, that is. Log into P&W through a third-party portal that insulates private data from Alex' server?

Hang on. Disclosing the in-game username of someone who took an in-game action is not remotely the same is making private information public. Alex hasn't broken any privacy laws, or contravened his own company's privacy policy. The word doxx was being thrown around a bit too liberally earlier in this thread. All he's done is contradict an in-game mechanic description. "Bounties are anonymously posted rewards for defeating nations in war." That it and of itself has made people uncomfortable. Even people who agree with his reasons for doing so. We have a reasonable expectation that we're all playing the game by the same explicit rules, as published on the web pages the game consists of. When I look at the Military page, I see "Each barracks can house up to 3,000 soldiers". I naturally expect that everyone else sees the same thing when logged in, and I expect that mechanic to remain the same each time I log in unless Alex posts an update. If I were to break a major rule, like if Alex were to find out that I'm just another Shellhound multi like the rest of Guardian, I would fairly expect to be banned. But I wouldn't expect Alex to discretionally limit my soldiers to 2,500 per barracks, and I'd be just as uncomfortable to see an inconsistent approach of the game rules applied to someone else. I think it's clear to everybody here that Alex did not foresee the bounty system used to try and slide rule-violating harassment* under the radar. He made a judgement call at that time. Whether or not that was justified is an exhausted topic. Either way, the judgement has done some amount of damage to the perception that all members of the P&W community engage with the game itself in a consistent way. That's easy enough to repair. Either a rules amendment stating that bounty posters' anonymity is only guaranteed unless breaking in-game communication rules ( "included, but not limited to..."), or a policy that makes clear that going forward that game mechanic text is sacrosanct, or which whatever caveats he sees fit. Just make a policy, own it and we can all move on. *No, don't respond with whether you think it was harassment or not. Both sides of that argument have been covered in this thread. One of those sides is wrong.

Well, he did have a certain charisma and really put himself into his RP, when he was able to separate it from his OOC politics. Honestly I'm kind of impressed that a thin-skinned seether who pretended to be a handsome wrestler managed to generate 4 pages of discussion about his parting tantrum.

It's not fair to paint the rest of Alpha with the same brush. But on that note, Placentica needs to show some leadership here and take responsibility for the reputation fallout from his actions. There's good people under him who aren't at fault here.

I wanted to be charitable and allow for the possibility he'd just misinterpreted some data and jumped to a conclusion. Which is bad enough when you start accusing people. But since it's demonstrably false and he's so far unwilling to walk back from it, it's looking more and more like spreading deliberate misinformation to hurt and discredit other players.

o/ Gordon

Sounds great!

This is the best thread I didn't read ever

OGASM?

Sensible exit. Sorry we didn't get to scrap as much as usual. You guys are always a fun contest. Till next time!

I can see this coming up next war as a major issue. Remember, before this one, food prices were sitting around 80. I'm sure I wasn't in a minority thinking prices were too low to bother selling, and thus went into this war with a gratuitous food stockpile. I wouldn't call current food scarcity a crisis, but that's only because of pre-war market conditions providing a generous buffer. Radiation is going to be a much bigger deal in the future. People will get talking when they have no choice.

Well fought Rose!