Jump to content

Oni

Recommended Posts

I just want to add a point that I think is escaping everyones notice here.

When you sign up for this game, everything leads you to expect you will play a nation ruler. A sovereign. You will be playing the political game.

Then you get the recruitment spam and you investigate it and find out how people typically play. As a peon, with no sovereignty, walled off insofar as possible from any and all politics. If they want to actually play the game, they have to sit in a large alliance for years, and even then there is no guarantee they will get anywhere. What's the point?

It's hardly a surprise that most new players go away at that point. It's a bait and switch and a particularly crappy one.

There is absolutely no mechanical reason that people cannot play as sovereign nations, I've been doing it on and off for years, and before me Opethian did the same. But it's certainly not an easy road, or one that is publicized. New players will get advice from every corner saying it's not really an option at all. Anyone that tries it will run into dogged resistance and hatred from every direction. They are attacked mercilessly and run out of the game whenever possible. I had a warchest larger than many alliances could muster in aggregate along with every wonder in the game and a lot of experience, both military and political, before I made my second attempt at it and I needed every bit of it to hold onto my sovereignty through that first year. For a new player, this path is very nearly impossible.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 64
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Sigrun, as much as individualistic minds are a persecuted minority, I am entirely certain that large chunk of the problems you face are self-inflicted.

Oni, my suggestion to you right now as far as the OWF is concerned, is to lurk a little more. Spend some time talking to fellow alliance members, and if you want a broader perspective, there are also plenty of diplomats around the GOON forums and irc channel/s. Your first month or so of CN should be focused on learning the nation-building side of the game and getting used to the mechanics and nature of CN. You have the potential to be a pretty decent player/poster, just don't make one of the classic blunders of new members and post lots of stuff in-character while you're still green. Everything you say/do gives an impression of you/what you are. Discuss your posts so far with your alliance-mates and mentors and they should help you move in the right direction. They should also be able to answer all of the questions you've raised here thus far.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Many people join an alliance just for protection. They tend to aim for the strongest ones. Then they become peons and, frankly, they deserve it.
 
But many people, too, join alliances because they want to play the political game. And active people are always welcomed in the goverment of most alliances, specially nowdays. You just need to find one that allows your voice to be part of the chorus, instead of treating you as a peon. They exist.

Edited by Krashnaia
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honestly, there are very few politics left. 

 

You see , a funny thing happened since this game began. The game began with burgeoning rivalries , downright hatred and disgust at some alliances and players. Then, IRC became ALL the rage. Everyone slowly began to get to know everyone else OOC. Everyone realized that in  game philosophies aside, everyone is a pretty decent person. It became harder and harder to have the needed heat in the political game to sustain a fun and dynamic political atmosphere. Because everyone likes everyone, nearly every alliance in this game is connected in some way, shape, or form to every other alliance within 4 treaty chains. No consensus on who is an enemy for whom, no real reason to try to change things. Instead, we plot along as an elder community doing nothing except waiting for boredom to split us off into 2 sides so we can shed some stats, post about how much fun war is (lol its like 6 extra mouse clicks a day , totally based on an RNG, where simply whoever is online at a given moment has an advantage on whoever is not online.) So in short, there are no real politics, and we, the players are partially to blame. 

Very spot on post.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So in the early days of the game it happened and a "golden age" happens with a "golden generation" of players created in that maelstrom of tears and hatred and once it stopped years later that golden generation passed on from the game and the politics of it began to die... that sounds like a fair bit of causation if I'm looking at it. Someone should reintroduce a little bit of perma death into it I think!

The problem with the perma-death / forced disbandment of alliances was that some individuals paid real world money for domain names and/or other related costs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well if the games driving force are it's politics and those politics are stagnating due to a lack of of sufficient motivation on the part of players to drive them then wouldn't that be a good reason to introduce (or in this case reintroduce) a motivation for it. To me it would seem like a life and death struggle would introduce much more motivation then the prospect of taking a turn on the throne of the world... plus what good is reigning if you reign in a time of limp-wristed wannabes... the challenge lies in ruling a world of cut-throats and hardened players breed in an age of challenge. (Like the one this previous golden generation seemed to be created in.)

 

I mean every game needs a spark and perhaps that is the spark needed to reintroduce a bit more zest to the otherwise dull buildup to whatever happens next. I mean reading through the wiki some of the early wars seem really !@#$@#$ cool whereas some of the more recent ones seem pretty listless and boring in comparison and I also couldn't help but notice the frequency for these conflicts seems to have slowed even more.

 

Operating with a lack of real danger isn't a recipe for a vibrant and driven community and what is cybernations besides it's community?

 

Speaking as a part of the evil hegemony from back in the day the problem is that it takes time to build nations.  Wars that broke up alliances, forced harsh terms and reperations, placed viceroys, zi nations etc. drove players from the game.  While on the upward climb to power it is a full time job of plotting and planning but, once your on top and just crushing every threat as it would appear to rise things get boring.  Many players would just quit, the people in control become bored and then begin to fade away as well or begin plotting on each other out of bordem.  Many of the alliances that used to drive the drama were exterminated.  You will never find another Illuminati causing trouble, or another Shark Week etc. because the alliances who drove that drama were crushed and its leaders chased from the game.     

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Speaking as a part of the evil hegemony from back in the day the problem is that it takes time to build nations.  Wars that broke up alliances, forced harsh terms and reperations, placed viceroys, zi nations etc. drove players from the game.  While on the upward climb to power it is a full time job of plotting and planning but, once your on top and just crushing every threat as it would appear to rise things get boring.  Many players would just quit, the people in control become bored and then begin to fade away as well or begin plotting on each other out of bordem.  Many of the alliances that used to drive the drama were exterminated.  You will never find another Illuminati causing trouble, or another Shark Week etc. because the alliances who drove that drama were crushed and its leaders chased from the game.     

 

You start with a non sequitur. 'It takes time to build nations' has nothing to do with all the things you talk about thereafter. Nations do not actually take all that long to build and there is little real requirement to build in order to have fun. But yes, in many cases the excesses of that era drove *players* from the game, far worse than destroying nations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So in the early days of the game it happened and a "golden age" happens with a "golden generation" of players created in that maelstrom of tears and hatred and once it stopped years later that golden generation passed on from the game and the politics of it began to die... that sounds like a fair bit of causation if I'm looking at it. Someone should reintroduce a little bit of perma death into it I think!

 

With "golden age" I meant a time in which you could expect to see speeches quoting Marx, Gramsci or Rosa Luxemburg in a war declaration and such thing was not taken as a joke by anyone.

Or Alliances explaining that they were going to fight against Marxism in CN...

... And the Alliance that ruled the game, the New Pacific Order, had invented a weird political ideology that was called "Francoism" that was both a tongue-in-cheek joke and something that was taken seriously. Indeed, every player of CN became some sort of scholar of Francoism, even the enemies of the New Pacific Order... so the rivals of the NPO often discussed with NPO members if what they were doing was REALLY Francoist or not... or they were trying to find philosophical failures in Francoism.

With the decline of the New Pacific Order as the "leader" of the game and the rise of another Alliance, the Mushroom Kingdom as the new leader, the political situation changed a lot.
Instead of a long essay featuring quotes by different political leaders, long political explanations, screenshots of incredibly complicated conversations by political leaders of different Alliances... the war declarations by the Mushroom Kingdom were more like this:

cat7.jpg

 

The ONLY strength that the Mushroom Kingdom had was their treaties with other Alliances. They had managed to become a relevant Alliance because they were the "center" of a very complicated web of treaties between lots of Alliances. 

The Mushroom Kingdom often brought "internet memes" to the game instead of long political speeches... and it was clearly an Alliance that didn't defend any kind of political ideology (it was an Alliance inspired on the game Mario Bros. thus they were not Marxist, Fascists or Capitalists or anything... and they mostly mocked the Alliances with political ideologies).

And yet the Mushroom Kingdom was an Alliance that played very well the POLITICAL game of Cyber Nations... they knew how to use the treaties with other Alliances to their own advantage... and they changed the politics of CN forever.

The idea that there's no more politics anymore is absolutely false, it's just that the current politics have a style that has nothing to do with the old style that we had during the "golden age".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's a very revisionist way to view that period and it has to be called-out.

 

That's not a 'golden age', unless you mean a 'golden age of stupidity'. It was ridiculous that people were taking the game seriously. It led a lot of people to do really stupid things. Even today, people continue to do stupid things because they want to cram real-world stuff into a virtual world with no tangible connection to reality other than what players cram into it. This is why people like Tywin are rightfully looked down upon today as kooks, only back then, their behaviour was normative.

 

Activity was higher then because the game and medium were fresh; it was also a time before MMO games had fully evolved, where N@tionstates (lol, word filter censorship) and forum-based nation sim games were biggest. Rush's analysis is more accurate. Rivalries were bigger then, because the community was divided. With so many people involved in the game, it was impossible to know other players too closely. It was ok to force an alliance to disband because you didn't know/like any of the people you were fighting. As time moved on, alliances between AAs changed; people began to have ties and connections all over the place, and community shrinkage means it's now far easier to maintain a wide array of foreign acquaintances than it once was. The continuing rise of warchests and mega-nations has also helped, obviously, but it's not quite as important, from my perspective.

Edited by RevolutionaryRebel
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This game is very flexible. If you want to see it played differently, start a new alliance and play politics in a new way. I would love to see an alliance try and play a little differently.

 

However, I would recommend you join an alliance (any alliance) to help learn how the mechanics work first. Half of this game is the internal logistics of coordinating an alliance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eh she's not sooo far off, it's obviously from a particular perspective, but valid there.

 

She's selling MK extremely short, however. Conveniently forgetting *how* they became a hot enough property that people were trying to sign treaties with them even though Pacifica hated them. If you want to pick a point where the balance really tipped, that was it, and it happened after NoCB. Despite "losing" that war on paper, it was a massive strategic victory for them, in which they achieved virtually all of their objectives. They concentrated fire very effectively and did a tremendous amount of damage to NPOs 'banks,' showing Pacifica as vulnerable for the first time in how long? They defied what had passed for community norms with their nuclear policy, and other alliances had faced disbandment or eternal warfare for lesser offences, yet they showed that to have become a bluff as well when they got peace. Then in paying reps afterwards, they demonstrated something that had been true but little known for some time - that they had developed a first rate banking system of their own in the time between the Unjust War and this one.

 

THIS was where the political capital came from that allowed Archon to make the spider-strands linking his alliance strategically with every corner of the globe. And it's hardly 'nothing.' Though of course the scene has changed fairly drastically since NoCB as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This game actually has very little to do with collecting taxes, paying bills and all the stuff done inside the actual game, the real meat of this world is found in the expansive universe that surrounds it.  All the politics, intrigue, and all the real fun and sense of community (which is what makes playing worth it, at least for me and I'm sure there are many others that would agree) takes place within and between alliances.  Almost all of that "action" takes place off-site on countless forums, IRC, and even Skype in some cases.

 

Selling this game as just a text-based nation simulator really does it a disservice, and I wish people would stop doing it.  Nobody comes here to click a few buttons everyday, they come here for the community that surrounds it, plain and simple.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


×
×
  • Create New...