[Treaty] Direwolves and Guinea Pigs Don't Match in the Snow

[Prefonteen]

7 hours ago, Edward I said:

I don't think it was paranoia. The simplest version of what happened, from our perspective, is that a bunch of people who'd historically been very comfortable dealing under the table via paperless treaties said they were done with all that after Knightfall. Then many of those people plotted to roll IQ for the umpteenth time in the immediate aftermath of the war, and many of them loudly declared that former-IQ hadn't done enough to dissolve itself and that it was still operant, by design or by accident. Then those people started a war with no apparent IC motivations and buddied up halfway through without, by outside appearance, much friction. So of course we were suspicious of the paperless-loving, IQ-opposing people who'd called us liars and game-breakers for years - sometimes hypocritically, and as recently as days before Surf's Up - who'd only had weeks to build a track record to the contrary and who already seemed to be reverting to form. Maybe that's not fair, but that's the environment in which we had to operate.

I'd probably be more sympathetic to the soul crushing bit if I'd seen more appreciation for N$O's (ill-fated) intention to act as a bulwark against collusion between power centers instead of the propagandistic spin that it had been a poison pill for the project from the start. To me that's always been an important bit of evidence pointing to the suspicion that minispheres with short wars, where BK and NPO hopefully fight each other, was in large part a repackaged version of the demands for IQ break up when its opponents realized they couldn't achieve a comprehensive military victory against it. I don't mean that as a grievance, just an example of a widespread tendency to attribute the flaws in the design to the actions of people who tried to compensate for them, or who were just caught up in them.

Our complaints against Syndisphere were:

1) That there wasn't a strategic reason to hit us. Paracovenant imploded in mid to late 2016 and its remnants weren't a credible threat to Syndisphere. That left only two motivations to remain aligned against us with the vastly superior forces Syndisphere retained: some kind of grudge (which, at least in NPO's case, would almost certainly have had to be from another game since we'd only been around here for about six months) or the start of an "easy mode" mentality favoring short wars, low infra losses and easy victories.

2) That our preference for wars that weren't almost categorically curbstomps was in Syndisphere's interest as well.

In today's situation, what we're saying is definitely not the opposite of what we said back then. We're not on top of the game, at least not in the same way Syndisphere was, so it's not really a great comparison to begin with. The complaints about NPO now are categorically about a return to bipolarity rather than the near-unipolarity achieved by Syndisphere.

The wars that NPO has fought over the past few years also don't bear much resemblance to the wars we assumed we'd face for the foreseeable future then. IQ's wars were all exercises in asymmetric tier control, and the two major wars fought in the last year were both long, hard struggles to bring down upper tiers superior to those of NPO's coalitions. We've never swamped our opponents in all tiers in a matter of weeks, if not days, as Syndisphere did twice.

The last distinction between NPO in 2016 and its critics in 2019 is that we took it upon ourselves to do something about the situation rather than blaming our rivals for all our ills. We did as much as we could during Silent to make it clear that there would be a cost, both in material terms and in entertainment value, to casually fighting NPO whenever the urge struck. Coalition A is obviously dug in right now, but the notion that NPO has an obligation to accommodate their preferred mode of diplomacy is usually cited in reference to our reservations about minispheres and the actions we took earlier this year, which they claim destroyed minispheres.

 

1 hour ago, Epi said:

Paradise and Camelot didn't do any plotting this war.  

 

1 hour ago, Dondarrion said:

@Epi to re-iterate the context here "Your gov planning a war against its two largest allies might have do do with it. "  @Prefonteen is referring to CTO and Co in this matter, the way Paradise worded/voiced his opinion (i guess you'd call it that) can be/was read that he was from CTO and the former.

see usage of "us" etc in 

 

1 hour ago, Epi said:

Ik, it was my way of pointing out he wasn't without pinging the relative posters.

Hehe, I simply misquoted. For some reason I thought he was Pacifican. Fixed