Raphael

Thanks for putting in the effort to respond btw.

I don't buy into this oft-repeated platitude. It's a lazy blanket to hide under, that's all. Some newer players may get roped into this line of thought by the older players repeating this ad nauseum, but that really feeds back into my point that these old, tired groups are a net-loss for their own members and the wider community. When you look at the peak of activity here, in Cyber Nations, in Nationstates, and every other similar game it's during the peak times of alleged toxicity. NPOLT or earlygame PnW were ferocious on the forums, people trading essays and claiming that XYZ was out to get them. Me "yelling" (aka- saying anything about the reality of the situation) at these people doesn't drive them away, their disinterest keeps them away and my "yelling" in fact brings some here to defend themselves. This is a political/nation simulator, disagreements and criticisms are core gameplay elements. It just boils down to having cake and eating it too. If you're happy, as some in this thread claim, with your current status - then by all means stay the course. I'll be in your defensive slots looting your stuff, and my gameplay experience will not be worsened for it. I post these threads to call attention to, and hopefully get read by, the people who are languishing in these insular or dead groups like the low gov who are genuinely interested in PnW but stuck in a bad AA.

Good thoughts that I agree with. This thread is part of my attempt to refocus discussion back onto the forums, as realistically there can be no communal space that is privately run, as privatization naturally creates exclusion. While I didn't mean to kick UPN in particular, they have been the bulk of people responding. So I hope they don't feel hated or unwanted in the community when the contrary was my point: I want these people and more to come back into shared spaces and take proactive political and internal action to better themselves. Self-organizing is just anarchy in disguise, the central committee will organize the people.

There was a second part of this post, but I got cut short by IRL stuff. UPN was a major player for the first couple of years of PnW. You cannot deny your alliance's fall from grace. Disbandment is not a bad thing when you've spent more years as a looked-down-upon alliance than a major player. If you guys want to do something else then that's also fine, but I think it's safe to say you and several other long-standing groups need radical change to stay or become competitive with the other alliances in the game. Sorry if that offends you, these are my personal thoughts and by no means some kind of religious proscription. You can play the game any way you want but you can't be mad when people call your alliance bad when... your alliance is bad. Just to re-emphasize my above reply, that's great. UPN is just, unfortunately, not the competitive alliance it was in the earlier parts of the game. If we're being honest it's a pain I share with you, being in Arrgh: We're constantly working to bring ourselves back into relevance after being a big-ish player in the early game. So I hope this doesn't come across as preachy, but rather just shared experiences.

These are just my personal thoughts on a topic that is a bit controversial. I've felt recently that there are quite a few alliances in existence that don't participate in the wider community, don't really initiate or even contribute to politics, and generally only ever fight defensive wars when their inactivity or incompetence becomes the center of someone else's war of boredom. The reason I write this is because I feel that there has become an oversaturation of these alliances and we seemingly are living in a time of change for Orbis, so maybe this writing will prompt action. The problem with these groups is usually not their inactivity as they log in often enough to function, sometimes just barely, as an alliance. The problem also does not lie with their incompetence, as the meta and politics are both relatively easy to learn and navigate. The issue is that stubborn pride is like a glacier: Locking up fresh water, inaccessible to the world. These alliances are host to several active players usually working hard to keep the wider group afloat, locked away from the community, and usually stuck in lower government positions long enough to drive them inactive. Cora from UPN is a good example of a potentially great player in an alliance fallen from greatness long ago, and now can only be described as insular on their best day. UPN, The Immortals and Mortals, Dark Brotherhood, TCM, USN, and Gods of Orbis -- just to name a few from the top 50 -- have over 400 nations between them. That's almost 10% of all active nations, locked up like a glacier in insular communities that generally don't drive or even participate in politics. Food for thought.

For future reference, these types of posts need to go into Orbis Central subforums. Alliance Affairs is really for announcements or something your alliance wants to share with the world at-large. You're also embarrassing yourself a bit by making multiple posts about some random micro guy no one has heard of, better to join an actually established alliance like Rose or TKR than keep on this crusade in my opinion. You can even come join Arrgh and attack Ragnar and his cronies all you want.

Congrats to both parties on the upgrade.

It'd have been cool to see the wording of the treaty, if there is any, specifically looking for a supremacy clause or lack of. I'm curious how this pans out when you have so many peripheral alliances and treaties left in the wake of this new bloc. T$ being the obvious question but also: House Stark, Carthago, the entire Odd Bunch bloc, the Legion, Requiem, etc. Congratulations and praise for doing something new though, this is definitely an unorthodox lineup and I know more than one party is taking a chance to make this happen. I'll be interested to see how this pans out over the next week.

Can we please make this optional? I can see this becoming hellacious with the number of times PnW already asks me to re-login if I go from PC to mobile to a laptop, etc. If you add an idiot test button to your game, then I don't think you understand who your playerbase is. I can see this being abused maliciously by disgruntled leaders or accidentally triggered via a page loading lag way more often than anyone actually needs to use it. It's already simple to disband an AA, my vote it to not add this feature at all. Ease of access is not always a good thing for certain features. This and missiles destroying 2 improvements feels absolutely excessive to me. Improvement destruction shouldn't become a meta ever, improvements are the core element of PnW that enables economic and military production (AKA - the ability to do anything), allowing them to be further destroyed via wars I think is a mistake in a game that already struggles with lacking recourse for losers. Even acknowledging nukes as a weapon of last resort, improvement destruction should honestly be nerfed from its current state rather than buffed. All the other changes look good though, I think/hope they will have positive game impacts. I'm unsure of the superiority changes but let's see what tests show.

Cataclysm is establishing a tradition of fast-paced politics and agile diplomacy as they see a perceived advantage to take. I appreciate the change of pace compared to other major groups and the openness to opportunity that we see from you guys. Good luck moving forward.

Good luck guys

All the ideas look good here to me, seems to be a net-positive for the game. My only feedback is regarding this quoted piece: I feel that both the game AND Alex would both benefit from widening this a little bit. Rather than basing it on nation age, why not base it on a sliding scale in relation to cities (or even more simply, score). Anyone outside of the top 1% of the game (score or city-wise) can purchase this bonus. This allows those older players in the c20-39 range get a good boost and reason to login daily and help solve this growing issue of whales dominating the game, while also widening Alex's audience of "people who might be interested in buying more credits." Just my two cents. I will also simply mention that $8m is a pretty high number when looking at the game's economy. That will add a lot of cash into the game that was otherwise not there, maybe try doing the new player bonus as $1.5m -> $2.5m -> $5m first and see how that pans out. We can increase it later on.

As they should be. I judge all my actions by whether Morf would approve or not.

I want to really stress that if this were happening irl with a bank and a depositor, you guys would be on the hook so hard lol. This is starting to read a lot like the story of Enron. Even your rebuttal to the CB is full of mistakes, misinformation, or just platitudes appealing for forgiveness citing human error. I want to type up a longer reply but frankly I have no dog in this fight. Suffice to say, this was not the angle I would've personally gone with trying to defend myself. The people commenting that this is good are either skimming or lying.

For clarity, do you mean Guardian or are you pre-emptively stating this for other third parties outside of CTO-HS?

While I personally disapprove of private business ventures in the game, I will say that they've contributed to the politics of the game in their own way. Usually in a very silly way like every bank collapsing, but still.

This new Guardian, breaking up with Grumpy and forming new spheres, sparking globals, and now jumping in on an Optional Aggression clause of their treaty... Christmas in July June!

You guys have time to honor the cancellation clause of the ODP. This was a great post by the way. Well done, Ataxia. I absolutely understand how dealing with Daveth can be and honestly it's impressive you guys managed to hold off war for almost a year.

Reasonable and measured.

Pretty simple. Make Wind plants power 500 infra instead of 250. I think you'd see a lot more use and niche raider builds use wind plants. Gives somewhat of a use to otherwise ignored improvement.

Both of these are doubling the usage of the most commonly used power plants, I like the concept we're going for but I think smaller tweaks would be in order here. So the question here is: Do you want to drive prices on the market up from multiple directions all at once? Cities costing resources, power plants consuming more, population eating more food, food production being reduced, manufacturing costs more, etc. It all seems like a lot, and I would again caution against drastic changes like this. Maybe do one for a month or two, then introduce the next. Conceptually I don't see this as a bad change, but compounding with the other changes I could see potential for disaster. Generally speaking, it's not an elegant suggestion but why don't you make this particular change only kick in after c30? Slow whales down a bit. Solid change. Good in concept but bad in the meta context. Whales are a huge unbalanced problem right now, increasing city costs that current whales will never pay will inflame the problem in my opinion. I'm not sure what the "reduced by 2.5% for cash" means. City output is decreasing? Or city cash cost is decreasing? I'd like to see a more transparent breakdown of whether this is a net increase or decrease in city cost either way. I like the concept but again the proposed red line formula looks like a drastic increase. The green line may be better to start with and then if-needed increase again. Overall cool to see the team tackling econ tweaks. Can't wait to see how it pans out.

I definitely feel this same frustration, as do many PnW players I think. As the game encroaches on a full decade old and many older players are well past a city count that will ever ROI the cost, I think many of us expected to see more content continue to flow. However, I think there are a few problems at the organizational level within PnW that are causing a chain-reaction of frustration down the line. 1. Over-reliance on a handful of volunteers who are, at-best, received as controversial by the wider community. Specifically: DrRush, Prefontaine, and their teams. As someone who has been extremely involved in said volunteering, I feel uniquely qualified to say that the systems aren't working, and turnover or outright dissolution (in the case of the dev/design team) is sorely needed. I highly appreciate the effort put in by everyone who has been involved, but somewhere along the way it stopped working. 2. A disjointed approach to how things are presented and disconnection from the playerbase - I want to be very clear when I say this: All the teams are putting in work. Moderation teams in-game, on discord, on the forums, and even on reddit, the dev/design team, and the actual people coding like Alex/Village are all pulling some kind of weight. This is not a dead game by any means. The problem comes in with how information is presented to the playerbase. Oftentimes posted into a discord server that most of the active playerbase avoids, put on forums that again many active players no longer check, or lost in some random chat somewhere on RON. If a player isn't actively looking for news and updates, it's way too easy to miss. There is a lot more depth to go into with the problems surrounding the development cycle of PnW, but I think these two problems are the roots of the rotten tree and no tweaks to the branches will fix the issue unless you first fix the foundation. My suggestion, as always, is to revamp the PnW discord into a community hub instead of an afterthought. Get the playerbase all in one place, go look into other big game's community discords if you want inspiration and, as always, I'm here to help if asked. Once a community hub is in place, then we can start making progress on development that doesn't constantly generate controversy and community outrage. Shout out to @Village for his hard work coding and re-coding the game and really pushing forward things this past year or so.

Northern Lights... I feel like there's a name for those.

I love how this treaty is presented. Now the inevitable question: What's the secret clause(s)?

I'm taking all posts from you as high gov leaks from now on, given your record. Serious take: I don't see an alternative to this move unless Grumpy wanted to disband, join a group like Midgard, or stay pseudo-paperless forever. As much as I love paperless, I know people won't be doing that. Forming a smaller or new sphere made them a target, joining Rose or Fortuna would only solidify either's advantage and be political suicide for all involved, this was the right move for the time.