Gopherbashi

If that doesn't boil CN down to a single statement, I don't know what does.

I'm sometimes tempted to reactivate my nation and see if I'm in bill lock yet I'm also sometimes tempted to delete my old nation and start a new one just for the experience

Yes but it's so much more enjoyable to actively toy with their emotions. Did I?.... Or was it just an incredibly involved fake application? 🤫

Jerdge, you just have to do what I did when MI6 wouldn't leave me alone. Troll them with fake applications.

I just check in every now and then to see if someone's posted how many nations are left.

Now there's an idea - the fall of nations. Not a global reset or time limit, but a randomly-generated event chain that simulates a nation's fall. Military failure, crumbling infrastructure, population upheaval. You can't predict it, you can try and fight it, but sooner or later it will happen to you. Could end up being very frustrating if executed wrong, but could also allow for some decent mobility for younger nations.

Yeah but all the cool mods like me

I like to come back and poke this place with a stick every now and then. Seeing if it still moves and all that.

sup jerdge, You wanted to know why people left CN, and I'll respond with a question of my own - what more did we hope to get out of the game? What more did we hope to accomplish, and would it be worth the time & effort required to achieve it? All the big names who have left would probably have seen everything the game had to offer. We'd won wars and we lost wars. We'd (hopefully) bounced back from defeats, and we'd been knocked down after victories. We'd probably done every type of work imaginable within an alliance. We'd optimized our nations, built to optimal infra, amassed warchests that would put Google to shame. If we were lucky, we found a tech and trade circle that didn't fall apart every month - and those who were really lucky found someone with five brothers to be part of it. We'd had countless arguments about dumb, inane things both within and outside our alliances, and seen the RL/CN line crossed far too many times. We'd stayed up until 1 AM just to hit F5 forever and then have 25 nukes blocked in a row. So, I ask you - what more did the game have to offer? What else would we want to achieve, knowing that most things had already been done, and the things that hadn't would require far too great an investment of time and effort for even a minimal chance of succeeding? At a certain point, you know that you don't have any more goals or any more experiences to get out of the game, and logging in every 20 days becomes a futile exercise. You also start to realise that, even if there were things you wanted to accomplish, your time spent on this game can no longer be a priority. Everyone is in the same boat - we're all a decade (or more) older than we were when this started - and our ability to commit the required effort to accomplish our goals reflects that, especially when there's a diminished payoff because no experience is new anymore. There may be a small hope that someone else will take up the mantle, but we lose interest if no one does. In all honesty, I feel like you (ironically) summed this up quite nicely in your OP:

It's all Chim's fault.

The "Hey, you're at 21 days" email was a good trigger. Might as well just accept it. I have a trade partner from 2008. Wanted to keep that going just because I could.

Probably gave a few extra years of activity - gave me something to do in this game rather than log in and collect taxes every few weeks.

Because I'm far more of a bureaucrat or administrator than a diplomat - I never had the desire, patience, or skill to play the political game.

My nation is probably at around 27 days inactive by this point, and I don't think I'm going to log in to save it this time. My apologies to Power, who has been my trade partner since 2008. Since I've been around for a long time and have done (way too much) stuff here, some people might want questions answered before I leave. Feel free to ask whatever you want and I'll see what I can remember about it.

Sounds like my cat, all right.