Khronicles of Kharnia

You're wasting your breath.

You're wasting your time.

You're wasting my time.

You're wasting my breath?

The essential problem with comparing this game with WoW is that WoW has Blizzard Entertainment behind it. Blizzard Entertainment is a multi-million dollar corporation with the money to hire a staff of programmers and marketing people. Cyber Nations on the other hand has a small staff of people who multitask (talk about additions to the game, play moderator for the forums, etc.) and have a "day job". !@#$%* (Admin), though I do not know him personally, probably works on the code for this game on weekends and in his spare time.

In other words comparing WoW to CN is a bit like comparing a US Navy Aegis-class missile cruiser to a small fishing trawler.

In terms of new game elements, if something doesn't work out in WoW (and they have a large staff of playtesters both in-house and around the world to prevent something like that from happening) they can quickly move on the next big thing, tweak down or eliminate what wasn't working and while they might hear some player complaints and perhaps even like a few thousand people rage quit, the community rolls on and the situation is soon forgotten. Therefore Blizzard can be more innovative and take more risks. Back in CN, Admin only has his small group of moderators and other trusted people (people who likely also play the game) to play test something. The probability that some unforeseen issue will arise once something is in production increase dramatically. Also, I don't know how many people get to touch game code. I'm guessing it's Kevin and...Kevin. That means that any new elements that are added to the code must be done in the evenings and weekends and vacation days he gets from his day job. They also must be worked around any fixes to the code he has to make because of some new game exploit (no piece of software is ever truly bulletproof) or because something got broken during the last server upgrade, etc. Therefore, in terms of CN, Kevin is unlikely be as innovative and be much more risk adverse because every time some new element gets added to the code and it doesn't work out, that's hours of development time that just got wasted and some other ideas that he wanted to implement for improvements to existing game elements that won't get added for another extended period of time.

All that said, there are actually advantages to playing a game like CN over WoW or even those Facebook game apps that Facebook is constantly barfing at you like Mafia Wars. Because the guy who created the game is also the guy who owns the game, you won't see some "corporate decision" come down that causes the game to be eliminated. Those that work on this game on a daily basis have been doing so for an extended period of time--they care about the game at a level that some guy who submitted his application a couple of months ago to be a game coder never will. You don't have to buy "special CN bucks" with real money to reach nation development goals in a reasonable amount of time. Nor is your email box spammed to death by some corporation or its "quality business partners" you didn't read about in the fine print when you hand over your email address when you sign up.

Cyber Nations is a good game run by responsible people. We might gripe a bit about Forum Warm system (and yes it could be better), and the politics in game (stick around long enough and it will change...it's constantly evolving), and some of the existing game elements, but I never hear anyone say there is something fundamentally broken and make it stick.

Is there room for improvement? God yes!!! The entire moderation team (Kevin included) would freely admit that. The question is what should move forward. If I have concerns at all, it is that they might become too comfortable with the level of development in the game and not innovate at all. That's where we as players play a role--want change? Organize. Our individual voices with our individual complaints and game elements we'd like to see added become so much white noise if we are simply putting an idea in the breeze and poo-pooing what everyone else puts forth simply because it wasn't our idea or done exactly how we would have done it. The cool thing about being part of game that has tens of thousands of players as opposed to millions is that you don't have to organize that many people in order to garner a significant portion of active players. So decide on some new game element you want at a macro level (new ground units, new air units, more environmental improvements (Border Walls being an example of an existing one) and start a petition drive. Or come up with something specific you want that is fairly detailed (not at the code level, but all the things it would affect written out) and pass it around to other players before going forward to Kevin or a forums thread.

Point is, don't listen to players that say, "you are wasting time" when you talk about change in CN. Likely they aren't actually reading what you are saying and think they are being "cool" by crapping on you or they wouldn't know a good idea if it popped up in their bong water. You will however have to be patient, but insistent that your voice and those that support you, be heard. Also, if your idea doesn't get anywhere, take to time to find out why. Doing so will help you avoid wasting your time by proposing things that won't fly if they are proposed in the future...like Navies were for a long period. Of course, Admin changed his mind about that too.

Good luck to you.

Send all your money to GOONS, we'll find a way to make the game interesting.

@ChairmanHal I don't think that should be like WoW, i think everyone could agree that WoW has more capital, staff, and popularity than Cybernations. But i don't think ideas cost that much money. The last batch of ideas wasn't that good. The Mars and Moon base seem only to effect the top 3% in the game. Its seems to me that they are cratering towards older players(although it would seem that i should complain seeing that i have been playing for 3 and half years)

Maybe i'm asking for the CN staff to take a risk. Or at least add a comment remove button

I sent in a request, and they said the main reason they cound't "fix" the game like I wanted it to because one simple coding mistake blows up your mommas nation,now do you want that. (That wasn't their EXACT words, though...)

@Kharn420

I understand about the comment remove button...trust me.

No, CN isn't the same kind of game that as WoW (in many ways not just visually) and WoW had something that CN never had to help launch it--a very successful game franchise and preexisting Warcraft 2 and 3 community to draw upon for fans. However, ideas for both games have an associated costs, whether those costs are indirect like time, and foregone opportunities (a side business doing freelance development work would certainly make more money than whatever Kevin is getting out of running this game, though obviously there are benefits to being your own boss and realizing your creative vision that go beyond a paycheck) or direct, like the cost of server space, bandwidth, etc.

As for "CN Space", there's so much more to be done with it that I don't think that the final verdict is in just yet. FYI: top 3% is also not at all accurate since I constructed a Moon Base and never even sniffed the top 3%. Indeed before the war I'm not all certain I was even in the top 6% and I built my base with leftover warchest money because I knew that I faced some expensive repairs over the next several months.

What's a bit puzzling to me is that CN:TE (or some other flavor of CN) isn't more of a testbed for new ideas than it is. I understand that there have been a few things that have been tried there in terms of tweaks to the game that later found their way into CN, but I'd like to see more new units (military or civilian other than the traditional citizens/soldiers/tanks/CMs/aircraft/etc. It wouldn't necessarily be all that much more of a risk and perhaps just might result in a better regular game in addition to ending the boredom you speak of.

Open source the code and give the improvements to the Blessed Admin for testing on a dedicated testing server. Slot improvements into the regular game.