Entry posted by Delta1212
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Right now, I'm posting up the announcement of our cancellation with TORN.
That OP was actually the end product of several hours of careful thought and a lot of waiting. As it says in the OP and in my last blog, I actually gave notice about six hours previous in private. At the time, there was very little information information released regarding what the CB was and most of it was fairly contradictory. That fact, extensive talks with OV at the time, the repeated rebuffing of offers of mediation from various parties and the fact that the timeframe offered up for revealing was pinpointed at an hour before update meant that: One, we were pretty sure that there was $%&@all in the way of a hard CB on OV and Two, they were probably going to get hit at update giving us absolutely no time to respond.
The fact that a specific CB hadn't been claimed resulted in the phrase "manufacturing a war" rather than "manufacturing a CB" since at the very least all evidence pointed toward attempting to circumvent any chances at peace and dive straight into a war. Granted, I should have figured that the distinction would be completely lost on the OWF, but I was reasonably certain there wasn't a solid CB either anyway, and the three day fishing trip that followed more or less backed that up for me.
The other element was the fact that I put in any kind of details at all rather than just being vague. There were several reasons for this. One, there was a notable trend of canceling treaties and citing relatively mundane reasons even when it was blatantly obvious there were much more controversial reasons for the cancellation. There are actually a couple decent reasons for doing this in a lot of cases, though it was at the point of being ridiculous in many cases back then. Breaking the convention gave the announcement added impact in that it played on the general sentiment of transparency over fear that had been building momentum on the boards over the past few months. This was needs because of the second reason for including such detail in that we were basically grasping at straws by this point.
See, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The problem was that we couldn't tell whether it was daylight or a train barreling down on our position. The latter possibility was very real for a lot of us and we really did not want a war to break out that night the way it looked like it probably would. We had almost nothing prepared at that time, we had no idea where half our heavy hitters would fall and that's to say nothing of the fact that it looked like the CB, whatever it was, was going to be posted up at the last minute giving us no time to come up with some way to counter it other than "No!" which never works. So, we went public with the issue first in a bid to knock things off the course they seemed to be traveling and buy us badly needed time to either kill the war before it got off the ground or figure out how in the hell we were going to build a defense that wouldn't get blown away with the opening salvo.
Desperate measure though it was, that didn't make it particularly easy to do. I did like TORN, starting a war that would have ended with me crushed if it had been successful not-with-standing, and bigwoody was a friend. That was a major contributor to waiting those six hours to see if anything would change before posting. They didn't and I didn't really see any other options besides twiddling my thumbs, so I did what I could. It's kind of sad because bigwoody pretty much stopped talking to me after that, which I suppose is understandable. I mean, Dilber and I have realistically probably done worse stuff to each other IC and we still get on well OOC, so it's disappointing... but anyway, that's neither here nor there.
So, talks started up within about an hour or so of that post going up. I still have no idea what affect that cancellation had on the whole process, but given how things ultimately turned out and given the information I had at the time, I'd still take that call over waiting to see whether or not I'd die.
Good times.
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