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Partisan's hot takes: Episode 1


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Y'know, 'voting with your feet' is way too simple of a political argument to hold any water, since reciprocity and golden handcuffs are both things. It's easy enough to hold someone on a hook as long as they're not too miserable about it, which undermines if not invalidates the whole "you are totally allowed to leave whenever" train of logic.

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On 2/27/2021 at 2:08 PM, Sir Scarfalot said:

Y'know, 'voting with your feet' is way too simple of a political argument to hold any water, since reciprocity and golden handcuffs are both things. It's easy enough to hold someone on a hook as long as they're not too miserable about it, which undermines if not invalidates the whole "you are totally allowed to leave whenever" train of logic.

 

It's fairly easy to switch Alliances in game, so long as you do so in a way that doesn't make oneself look bad, such as refusing to pay off a large debt in one's former Alliance, for instance. Leaving one's country is another matter entirely. 

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8 hours ago, Phoenyx said:

It's fairly easy to switch Alliances in game, so long as you do so in a way that doesn't make oneself look bad, such as refusing to pay off a large debt in one's former Alliance, for instance. Leaving one's country is another matter entirely. 

Au contraire mon frere, if you're seen as an alliance-hopper then you're far less able to build up trust with the alliance that you choose to stay in for longer than the others you've checked out. Even if that's only a few.

Much the same as leaving citizenship in one country and making a new life in another one, in fact: all countries that I'm aware of insist that there is a major legal and ethical difference between "natural-born citizen" and "immigrant citizen", USA and Britain most of all. This extends to other types of communities too, like the Diaspora and such.

So, why should P&W alliances act any differently? It takes less time to fully assimilate into a new P&W culture, but that's mainly because we're all quite immortal as leaders of browser-game objects. The risks of bringing a new soldier into an army on Orbis is only as great as the loans/grants/counters that could potentially be wasted if they choose to bail prematurely/without leave. OTOH, bringing in a new officer into an alliance's command hierarchy is a big logistical and financial risk, so that sort of responsibility is only extended to the elder members who are both competent and intrinsically trustworthy. Which is nearly none, hence the limited number of officers anywhere outside of Grumpy (and they've got their own unique and successful way of mitigating risks).

Now, I do realize that you're basing your statement on your own history, and I definitely respect the way you handled your emigration from... wherever it was, but I would like you to still be mindful that your exodus was only as smooth as it was because IQ had been defeated and driven away. If you had in ignorance chosen to join an IQ bloc "vassal" state, then you would not have been 'allowed' to leave at any price. Sure you'd have had the mechanical ability, but there would have been dire consequences. They would have beaten you with a carrot and force-fed you a stick, and unless you gathered up more than the average amount of courage (not to mention war-chest), you would have I suspect honestly allowed yourself to believe your slavery was a happy one.

It always just killed me to see those promising smol alliances suffer under the IQ 'protection' racket. This is because while some alliances work on the loyalty model and afford their personnel trust in the expectation of mutual benefits, benefits that are very real and very profitable, others misinterpret P&W entirely.

Keshav notably assumed that "what is good for my rival and potential enemy is by definition bad for me", and thus IQ deliberately inhibited the growth of their "vassals" out of a paranoid insistence that they were playing a zero-sum game... which was just plain not the case, and destroyed them in the end.

IMO, it wasn't the scandal nor our military efforts that annihilated the IQ monster, but their own flawed... nay, damaged way of thinking about the game. Sad bit is, I've only ever seen one game even survive such behaviors, and it's this one.

...I'm not entirely sure any of what I just pointed out applies to real-life, but I certainly hope it doesn't since what I just described is ww3, and we all know what weapons ww4 will be waged with... 😕

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
consequences schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich...
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3 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Au contraire mon frere, if you're seen as an alliance-hopper then you're far less able to build up trust with the alliance that you choose to stay in for longer than the others you've checked out. Even if that's only a few...

I read your entire post. You make some good points, but as you yourself pointed out, IQ is no longer around. I can easily see them getting me to leave the game, but I'd never continue in a game where I felt I wasn't getting enough happiness out of it. I mean, it's a game, after all. 

 

Anyway, thanks for complimenting me on my own Alliance shuffles. If I could go back in time, I would have just joined the Alliance I'm in now and perhaps not needed to shuffle Alliances at all, but it's hard to say- I think Alliance wars in this game can be trying for the Alliances involved and global wars even more so. 

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