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Another (Not so) Brief Note on the Narrative


Raphael
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I don't think global wars are meant to be made into equal bloc A vs bloc B match ups. Alliances have different interests and act upon them, which makes the game more interesting.

Spheres are tied to the game mechanisms and the politics between alliance leaders. I think minispheres bring a lot of diversity to the game and more political chances. Diversity and small is fun.

People won't go paperless, because they want to stay safe and protect eachother's pixels. Given our current system, paperless policy can fit Arrgh and like-minded pixel-burners, but if everyone were to be paperless, there would be people still teaming and there'd be unfair global wars still, bloc A vs bloc B, but with a tad more work required to keep the blocs together. It would be a confusing mess, especially within the sea of micros, trying to figure out who is teaming with who actually.

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6 hours ago, Roberts said:

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

-Me, just now.

 

The (repeated) shock with which many of my fellow colleagues greet the failure of minispheres is quite astounding to me considering the last several wars have shown the concept to be quite dead and frankly only detrimental to the parties actively participating in the experiment. The previous three wars have shown that parties will either not agree to minispheres to begin with (NPO + IQ) or they will simply go the backdoor route of forming politically convenient ties (Swamp + Hedge) and an unbalanced war will ensue either way.

The fact remains the only workable option for politics to truly carry on freely will be to go entirely paperless. The only reason one seeks out a treaty should be as a protectorate / protector to help grow our smaller friends with some modicum of security. Otherwise tethering yourself, your political and military agenda, the sovereignty of your alliance and nation, and in many cases your ability to speak freely... It's a rather odd phenomenon. Trading all that might make you interesting for potential security. This is not to say collaboration would never be necessary or prudent, but to say that you should look at shedding paper rather than trying to artificially limit the quantity of said paper. There can be no minisphere universe where the minispheres do not inevitably work together - thus becoming the threat they sought to prevent (a mega sphere). The only solution is to remove spheres from the political vocabulary entirely.

 

Thanks for your time. Mine wasn't as long as Cooper's. Arrgh!

 

I don't see what why there can't still be paper treaties. It's just that I think that paperless ones are probably here to stay as well. As to speaking freely, almost nothing can stop someone who is determined enough to do that- this is a game after all, no one's actually dying for speaking out, though they may be risking their pixels. Clearly, freedom of speech works better in these games if your nation is small and thus any damage taken not so difficult to repair.

I think that people are overlooking something -very- important. Whether treaties are on paper or paperless, they are formed because the people involved believe they will benefit from them. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of spheres believed that Quack was a threat to them and so a group of them decided that the next time Quack attacked one of them, they'd band together. Now some time has passed and I imagine it won't be too long before this global war starts winding down, if that hasn't started already. I think it's now been firmly established that if enough spheres get together, they can take on Quack, thus potentially lessening the old "First, they came for..." fear.

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The whole notion of, and conversation around, multispheres and minispheres is inherently flawed in my opinion due to the belief that alliances should voluntarily limit their treaty options in order to better benefit the game. It's one thing to support the notion of a healthy and competitive game, it's quite another to ask leaders of alliances to risk the wellbeing and safety of their alliance on the sheer hope that their opponents might engage in a roughly fair fight instead of just forming a blob and rolling them without difficulty.

And truth be told, if fighting a "fair" war with comparable numbers carries the risk of defeat and significant cost to both the defeated alliance's rep along with the repair bill, it's not much incentive to actually encourage the formation of roughly comparable spheres in the pursuit of "fair" conflicts. Any leader worth their salt tries to make sure the the war's result is a foregone conclusion before the first wave of attacks after all.

So in that sense, if we are to see a multisphere bipolar world, it has to develop organically and not be artificially forced or created. We have seen on ample occasions now that attempting to create or impose artificial minispheres simply does not work. Personally I regard tS and TKR's claims that they deliberately took steps to decrease the size of their sphere to be, whilst admirable in ideal, to be ultimately foolish as there is no guarantee their opponents would do much the same as can be shown by the various ad hoc informal agreements drawn up throughout the rest of the web to curb potential tS aggression which ultimately did occur. It's a mistake they hopefully don't make again, and whilst I applaud the apparent sentiment they had in attempting to create a smaller sphere, I damn them for the poor grasp of Realpolitik.

As for paperless agreements, it won't solve anything. Alliance sovereignty allows alliances to take action as they see fit with or without a treaty, the only thing which limits an alliance's actions (such as jumping into a war without a treaty if it benefits their own immediate interests) is what they are prepared to do and if they can get away with it.

Whilst hegemonies get a bad rep around these parts, I believe they are an inherently natural aspect of this game. They form, dominate for awhile before ultimately imploding or going down in defeat to an opposing sphere only for the cycle to repeat once more. This is a natural process which organically occurs and it's happened at least 3 or 4 times now during this game's history. This natural cycle of rise and fall is what we should be encouraging as it leads to a dynamic game with new alliances and new faces assuming prominence before fading away. Attempting to impose an artificial construct of forced multispheres creates stagnation, the same alliances and faces assume positions of prominence within their fixed spheres and as a result we end up fighting the same war over the same grudges every war and every year.

Just my two cents anyway.

 

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22 minutes ago, Charles Bolivar said:

The whole notion of, and conversation around, multispheres and minispheres is inherently flawed in my opinion due to the belief that alliances should voluntarily limit their treaty options in order to better benefit the game. It's one thing to support the notion of a healthy and competitive game, it's quite another to ask leaders of alliances to risk the wellbeing and safety of their alliance on the sheer hope that their opponents might engage in a roughly fair fight instead of just forming a blob and rolling them without difficulty.

I think the point of both the conversation and effort towards minispheres is to foster an environment where minisphere behaviors aren't an existential risk to an alliance.

Just because that's a difficult thing to do, and perhaps impossible to fully realize, doesn't mean that striving in that direction is in vain.

What really needs to happen isn't so much that alliances limit their allies or actions per se, but rather restrain themselves from creating a narrative and environment where getting 'rolled' is equivalent to 'kicked out of the game entirely'.

I have every reason to believe that both sides are fully committed to that ideal and nobody is actually trying to pull an IQ on anyone.

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
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2 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

I think the point of both the conversation and effort towards minispheres is to foster an environment where minisphere behaviors aren't an existential risk to an alliance.

Just because that's a difficult thing to do, and perhaps impossible to fully realize, doesn't mean that striving in that direction is in vain.

What really needs to happen isn't so much that alliances limit their allies or actions per se, but rather restrain themselves from creating a narrative and environment where getting 'rolled' is equivalent to 'kicked out of the game entirely'.

I have every reason to believe that both sides are fully committed to that ideal and nobody is actually trying to pull an IQ on anyone.

I would counter IQ's actions have little to do with them being a hegemony, more so to do with the personalities who made up their core collective governments. They weren't the first hegemony and they certainly won't be the last, but we can be reasonably sure they will end up being the sole hegemony to engage in the sort of behaviour they perpetrated.

Essentially, hegemony =/= being a bunch of  game ruining jerks. That's more a case of a game ruining jerks just managing to be in a hegemony instead of it being a defining feature of hegemony itself.

Ultimately, any artificial attempt to create  a multisphere world is doomed to failure and will likely result in a resumption of a bipolar state of affairs. That's not to say it is impossible, only that it has to happen naturally and organically and not be the result of some agreement or discussion for the sake of seperation, rather it has to be happen as a result of a genuine divergence between political goals and interests and adhering to this path.

 

Edited by Charles Bolivar
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25 minutes ago, Charles Bolivar said:

I would counter IQ's actions have little to do with them being a hegemony, more so to do with the personalities who made up their core collective governments. They weren't the first hegemony and they certainly won't be the last, but we can be reasonably sure they will end up being the sole hegemony to engage in the sort of behaviour they perpetrated.

Essentially, hegemony =/= being a bunch of  game ruining jerks. That's more a case of a game ruining jerks just managing to be in a hegemony instead of it being a defining feature of hegemony itself.

Ultimately, any artificial attempt to create  a multisphere world is doomed to failure and will likely result in a resumption of a bipolar state of affairs. That's not to say it is impossible, only that it has to happen naturally and organically and not be the result of some agreement or discussion for the sake of seperation, rather it has to be happen as a result of a genuine divergence between political goals and interests and adhering to this path.

 

I fully agree with all of this. I never understood this fascination so many people here have had with this notion that spheres shouldn't be "too big". -Far- more important is whether people find a sphere too -threatening-. The antidote isn't a bunch of hollering about it though- it's just making a Coalition that can take them on. As happened in the case of the Anti Quack pack. We can all argue about whether or not Quack was truly threatening enough to merit the "dogpile", but those who did the anti Quack pack clearly thought so, at least for now. Moral of the story, I think, is to not pay so much attention to words or rumours of what might happen and focus more on what has already happened and what is currently happening.

 

This isn't to say that I'm not interested in learning more of the sources to the rumours that TCW, Hedge and Swamp were going to attack Quack- I would still like to know who SRD's source was, and perhaps even more important, who SRD's source's source was. However, it -does- mean that had I been in Quack's position, I would have looked into the rumours more deeply before striking. And most of all, at this point? I would probably be apologizing to Swamp et al and seeking to end the war. But to each their own. 

Edited by Phoenyx
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4 hours ago, Micchan said:

A paperless world is the perfect world for paperless ties

 

Frank God: Emperor of Dune (another Dune movie coming out soon, I hope it's good :-))...

**

“...The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices.”

“Acceptable choices?” “They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems.”

“But don’t they sometimes need more information to make . . .”

"A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors.” '

“And good administrators?”

“Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.**

Frank Herbert. God Emperor of Dune. Ace Books. Kindle Edition. 

 

Edited by Phoenyx
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