Help me Understand

[Kastor]

The last thing I remember is NPO got deleted.  Can someone please fill me in and spare no details. 😭😭😭 

[Lord of Puns]

Join Lordaeron

[Kurdanak]

Shhhhhhh. Back into the Rose dungeon, Kastor. Looks like you got lost.

[hidude45454]

[Buorhann]

You coming back?

[Kastor]

10 hours ago, hidude45454 said:

Wait paragon 2.0??? Rose is tied to tS. Yikes

6 hours ago, Buorhann said:

You coming back?

Until Law School

[J Kell]

7 hours ago, Kastor said:

Until Law School

Take my hand and we'll make a shadow.

As a 2L, I feel like I should advise you to stay away from law school

[Mega]

Hello, my friend! I'm assuming you're returning to the game after being away for so long! Welcome back! As for what happened regarding NPO, they were caught cheating. They managed to recruit ~1000 new players in a short amount of time to an extension of theirs known as "Guinea Pig Whaling Corps" ("GPWC"). Obviously, this caused a lot of suspicion across the game's community, as it doesn't make much sense to have that many players in a single alliance coming in all at once. But, an initial investigation concluded that all of these players were separate and not multi accounts, and as a result, the admins basically just left the situation alone for now. But some time later, more details came out that NPO was involved in a full-blown operation in mass recruiting players from a community that was dedicated towards "manwha" (Korean comics) and they got them all to sign up in exchange for English-language translations of said "manwha". If you don't know, this is widely regarded as a serious breach of game rules. (There is a rule that doesn't allow exchange of IRL goods in exchange for in-game goods or something along those lines). This whole operation allowed NPO and their coalition a massive advantage due to NPO "tax farming" them (setting them all on 100/100 taxes) in a war that was going on at the time. NPO required the "manwha readers" to log in just enough so they could continue taxing them or else, they would deny them access to the comics if they weren't taxable until they made the necessary changes. Alex ended up banning NPO leadership (who were behind the whole operation) and NPO was essentially disbanded (although they still exist in-game technically, although they are mostly a dead alliance with only a few fairly inactive players). Hope this answers your question! If it doesn't and you had a different question, please let me know, thanks! 

[Canbec]

On 9/17/2022 at 6:10 PM, J Kell said:

Take my hand and we'll make a shadow.

As a 2L, I feel like I should advise you to stay away from law school

As a lawyer I concur.

[Alastor]

On 9/16/2022 at 11:05 PM, Kastor said:

The last thing I remember is NPO got deleted.  Can someone please fill me in and spare no details. 😭😭😭 

tbh I'm a little hazy up until the end of Quack bc I also faded out of existence for a bit after NPOLT - because @Buorhann decided a year-long NAP was somehow a great idea and it made a lot of people basically log off for a year. I'm going to bold all the key pieces so you can quickly skim and get the gist.

 

So we had a year-long NAP and basically very little happened. Some IQ-Remnants like NPO's last few members or GOONS got rolled til they too quit. BK disbanded but then reformed back under the leadership of Yoso and LordStrum. ShiftyStranger had multiple big OOC fallouts with various women in PnW resulting in him receiving a ban. Obviously several coalition A alliances never recovered from NPOLT and disbanded for various reasons including the Golden Horde.

[insert a fuzzy time skip bc I was in Arrgh and not fully paying attention]

The game collectively decided that it was time to give something new a try. This part is subjective. The idea was to try out "minispheres" - an idea that Kayser and others had been floating for awhile - I believe the idea was everyone would be grouped up in similar-sized spheres similar to how Chaos was structured (if you remember TKR's bloc from pre-NPOLT). The implementation was more accurately a multi-polar world. Something I would contend is just as good as minispheres but the difference between the expectation and implementation of this new political meta basically defined the next few years of PnW politics.

So Coalition A splintered but maybe not quite the way people expected or wanted. Again details are fuzzy through time, so I won't go into overt detail. Basically t$ and their satellites combined with TKR and our close partners and formed Quack. Rose saved Camelot from absolute destruction by signing them right after NPOLT ended and formed the core of a new sphere there. Fark, The Immortals, and others formed the Swamp. There were other spheres but I don't remember them. Obligatory Arrgh wrecked the Swamp during this time period and then TKR wrecked Arrgh bc Sheepy deleted Beige from the game for a month.

Quack was probably a 2.5:1 (ish) ratio in size to any other given sphere. This is where you begin to see expectation vs. implementation of minispheres start to cause friction. Many called Quack too large, and Quack I think rolled a sphere or two then got coalitioned by the other spheres (Duckhunt). Quack fought a last war together before disbanding (The Last Ride) where we rolled the Swamp iirc.

Post-Quack then split into two main spheres: Blackwater (t$ and satellites, most notably Nexus: CTO, OWR, Legion, HS) and Hollywood (TKR, Grumpy, Guardian, Children of the Light, Error 404, Black Knights, Name Withheld, and friends). Camelot departed from Rose roughly right before this and Rose was the smaller of the three "main" spheres during this time. Swamp also splintered.

Hollywood attracted a lot of flak because, again, people took issue with the size of a sphere during an era of "mini" plus Grumpy+Guardian's dominance of the upper tier. Blackwater similarly attracted some, but not as much, flak for also being huge. HW and BW were both maybe 1.5:1 size ratio any other spheres at this point. So really we were moving towards a more even meta but not quite there yet.

Hollywood fought some wars, Blackwater fought some wars, Rose fought some wars, basically a big back-and-forth between the three. Here is another very subjective piece so I'll word it politely: t$ had a crisis basically where they were finding themselves repeatedly on the losing side of wars so they made a change along with Rose: T$ signed Rose and merged spheres to create Celestial, a new bloc. A lot of political shifts happened here: CotL+E404 merged to form Cataclysm which formed its own powerful sphere called Clock. The Immortals joined Hollywood to replace e404+cotl. Disgruntled former Syndicate allies formed a new sphere called the Back Rooms. And there was also Haunted Mansion (basically the worst remnants of Swamp no one else would take) and Johnsons (a meme sphere of micros) but neither of those are relevant to warrant me bolding them.

Celestial being slightly larger than Hollywood was now the recipient of relatively equal criticisms over sign as HW - I guess it depends on who you asked. People felt like that was a step backwards but others felt it necessary to somehow defeat Hollywood. Fortunately, Hollywood would go on to defeat Celestial and then disband itself. So now we're basically at the "modern day": TKR/BK/NW split into their own true minisphere hitherto unnamed, GGO split into their own true minisphere. Eventually Celestial and Clock would split up with Cata+t$ forming Wayward and Rose+Eclipse forming Oreos (delicious cookies). Midgard also formed post-Hollywood/Clock/Celestial from many different pieces.

 

So the game has decentralized itself pretty heavily since NPOLT. There are a lot of moving pieces now, a lot of new combinations of alliances, and generally more content but, in my opinion, the content has typically been more shallow.

[Velekk Hemlock]

I miss Lord and IQ...

[Buorhann]

On 10/3/2022 at 1:10 PM, Marika said:

tbh I'm a little hazy up until the end of Quack bc I also faded out of existence for a bit after NPOLT - because @Buorhann decided a year-long NAP was somehow a great idea and it made a lot of people basically log off for a year. I'm going to bold all the key pieces so you can quickly skim and get the gist.

 

Come corrected or get corrected.

(6mos =! 1 year)

 

 

 

Edited October 7, 2022 by Buorhann

[Ripper]

1 hour ago, Buorhann said:

Come corrected or get corrected. (6mos =! 1 year)

Off-topic: Come correct or get corrected. "=!" != "!=".

[Buorhann]

Damnit, you’re right.  The exclamation is first.