Changeup

It means that there were 86 times someone laughed at you, 87 times someone supported something you said, but forgets to include the 334 times someone has disliked something you posted.

People here don't want to hear what you have to say.

March Following the tumultuous start to 2020, March was a month of relative peace. However, there were dramatic changes to the treaty web, as Orbis prepared for a post-IQ world. The first was the dissolution of Chaos Bloc. After losing Church of Spaceology a couple months prior to disbandment, the bloc now consisting of The Knights Radiant, Seven Kingdoms, and The Enlightenment (formerly Soup Kitchen) was making its plans to disband for good following the end of NPO's Last Time. TKR and SK kept their MDP, and it persists to this day. The dissolution of Chaos bloc came with the addition of a new bloc to the game. The Hedge Money bloc was formed on March 6 and originally consisted of The Enlightenment, North Point, Grumpy Old Bastards, and Guardian. Given that two of the alliances involved were former KETOGG-sphere alliances, and the third and fourth alliances had core KETOGG gov members, this bloc was often compared to KETOGG. Later in the month, another new bloc appeared. Swamp bloc was formed on March 24, consisting of The Immortals, The Fighting Pacifists, The Lost Empire, The Federation, The Ampersand, and Farkistan. At the time of its creation, Swamp was often considered to be a band of misfits, but they have worked to disprove this since. After the creation of Swamp, The Immortals cut their treaty with T$ and TKR, finally splitting the treaty web from the mess it was at the end of the war into the distinct spheres that remained for much of the year.

Bidding is currently at 75B, 2 pieces of OPSEC info, the end of daily water pings, and a heart.

Man, you guys will not believe some of the things I can find on Ebay!

I reeeeealy want to see Boyce make his name "Portisun".

Burn the pixelhuggers! o7 war foreverrrrrr

Fake jesters.

February, Part 2: With most of their coalition allies switching sides or peacing out, and core alliances Black Knights and Guardians of the Galaxy disbanding, the sole remaining fighters (aside from 1 or 2 micros) were GOONS/GPA/Bird Weed (who exited the war, but later rejoined) and NPO, who kept chugging along despite the in-game loss of many core gov members. By this point, they were being easily struck down by the combined Coalition A forces, and they were resigned to a guerilla war effort not unlike the one they inflicted on the game just weeks prior. On February 12, NPO gov member Eric the Red was involved in another cheating scandal, which involved an exploit in the alliance tax rate. They used this to spawn tens of millions of resources. After some of Eric's personal information was accidentally leaked in the announcement, most of NPO deleted their nations. On February 20, the war was officially declared over by Coalition A. All parties (aka most of the game) signed a 6 month NAP to give some stability and recovery time to the game. Alliances not involved in the NAP included Knights Templar, who officially became a raiding alliance and attacked a large coalition of micro alliances. On February 22, founding leaders of Black Knights re-created BK as a T$ protectorate. Many old BK members returned and several IQ-era BK members told to delete by their leadership also joined. A day later, on February 23, The Golden Horde disbanded after being hit hard during NPO's Last Time. On February 25, Soup Kitchen was reformed as The Enlightenment, which later merged to create Children of the Light. After many months of permawar, peace had finally arrived in Orbis. There was a great void on the treaty web where IQ had once been, but there were 6 months of relative quiet to come and hopefully fill that void.

Due to irl business, I haven't been able to post in the past couple days - I'll write the rest of February and March tomorrow.

We already have one pixelhugging business "alliance"...

February, Part 1: The Roqpocalypse February of 2020 was likely the most impactful month in P&W history. Because of the sheer scale of what happened over those 29 days, I will be splitting my review for February into 2 parts. The first part will focus on the GPWC Cheating Scandal, with the second part focusing on the end of NPO's Last Time war and the aftermath. Not unlike the start of January a month before, the outlook for the game heading into February 2020 was grim. Although a renewed battle against Opus Dei/IQ had begun in January, a large portion of those who entered or re-entered the war to fight IQ had left under white peace, with only The Commonwealth and her allies remaining alongside the longtime Coalition A members of Chaos Bloc, KETOG Sphere, and The Syndicate. The recent push was in the process of being subdued, and more war seemed likely. Then, on February 5, everything changed, and IQ's dominance of game politics began to rapidly unravel. The game admin Alex announced that in exchange for access to illegal copies of Korean Manhwa, over 1000 members of an anime server ran by an NPO gov member created nations and joined the alliance "Guinea Pig Whaling Corp", essentially becoming tax farms for NPO. Over $800M per day was farmed into the game by these nations, and this had been going on for nearly 6 months. Many NPO/GPWC government members received bans following the scandal, including NPO leader Roquentin. Following these revelations, most of Opus Dei's remaining allies made the decision to leave them and several alliances on that side disbanded. Coalition A made an offering of White Peace to all remaining Coalition B alliances, and many took it, Camelot, Acadia/UPN, and Polaris were among the first to exit the war under white peace. Black Knights and Guardians of the Galaxy announced their disbandment. With such a massive shift in the course of game politics, the future of PW was uncertain, but there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel.

January: As we enter into the New Year, the war soon to be named NPO's Last Time is raging on. GOONS has stomped out any sort of low-tier safe zone for Coalition A, and massive amounts of member attrition combined with the lack of progression on peace terms keep the future of Orbis as a whole bleak. However, on January 6th, this began to change for the better. A treaty cascade started when micro The Manhattan Cartel declared war on MinesomeMC's alliance The Galactic Empire as a response to Minesome's leaking of important information, and North Point pre-emptively declared war on Brotherhood of the Clouds, a Camelot MDP partner. Treaty cascades ultimately lead to The Commonwealth and their newly formed bloc, along with other Fark-sphere alliances such as The Immortals, The Federation, and Pantheon (among several others), declaring war on Opus Dei, a bloc that consisted of the now defunct GOONS, NPO, and old BK plus Camelot and Guardians of the Galaxy. These new allies provided a surge of morale and energy to Coalition A. However, a week later, Schrute-sphere and Pantheon peaced out, removing much of the numbers advantage Col. A had just received. It looked as though Opus Dei's stranglehold on Orbis could continue for several more months as January came to a close.

To give a refresh on the events of 2020 before this years P&W Awards, Royal Orbis News recently began a Recap of the Year! Each day we look back at a different month of 2020 and review what went on that month. In addition to posting it on the RON server, Adrienne has asked that I post each day's recap on the forums as well. Enjoy! Link to the RON Server: https://discord.gg/Y6g5n2T January: https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/30396-recap-of-the-year-2020/&do=findComment&comment=480386 February (Part 1, NPO Scandal):https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/30396-recap-of-the-year-2020/&do=findComment&comment=480391 Feburary (Part 2): https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/30396-recap-of-the-year-2020/&do=findComment&comment=480632 March: https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/30396-recap-of-the-year-2020/&do=findComment&comment=480912 April: https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/30396-recap-of-the-year-2020/&do=findComment&comment=481106 May:

Stop feeding the Phoenyx.

Although I did warn Krampus against employing the same tactics, those messages were only sent to a very small handful of alliances (Aurora and a few micros is what I was told) rather than thousands of players across dozens of alliances.

This is a no-discussion forum, please keep complaints of this sort to discord. And I would have reported this if any business or AA did it. I specifically told Krampus not to send mass-messages to every nation.

It has recently come to my attention that the user "Dyana" (discord: Mountain Dew#0933) has sent an in-game mass message to nations in dozens of alliances, advertising their server "Meme News Network". These messages abuse the in-game messaging system, and can be a nuisance to those who receive him. And unlike traditional recruitment messages that are only ever sent to new players and those who just left an alliance, these were sent to every single nation in PW. This also sets the incredibly dangerous precedent for businesses and new alliances that if you want more members in your server for AA, you just mass-message the entire game. I encourage Alex to set restrictions on massmessages of this type, at the very least reprimand Bell, and make sure an incident like this doesn't happen again. Edit: This user also mass-messaged people asking for commendations.

Alright, who forgot to make a Phoenyx gag order part of the peace treaty?

It's been a pleasure fighting alongside my fellow coalition members. Although it was lopsided, I still had some fun wars with Quack and I wish both sides the best over the next 4 months.

Actually, that’s some “Exhausted me putting out a brief blurb when I want to sleep” mentality in that screen shot.

Best message I've ever gotten. What will I ever do without that 5 infra?

Wait a sec, hang on, peace invalidated! Peace invalidated! It's supposed to be 500k per use!

You have it backwards. In reality, it was "No, you're not quitting because I'm firing you!".

In case it wasn't clear, this channel is not for nominating people. That will happen at a later date.