La Vanguardia Pacifica

Banksy states that there's a greater total of active nations now, for a variety of reasons, but that the total number of nations overall have decreased, due to more stringent entry requirements into alliances and so forth. This means there is room to continue to believe the claims which were made about Pacifica driving active members from the game, whether due to eternal zero infrastructure or the sheer boredom of unipolarity. If this is the case, Pacifica did have a negative influence on Cyber Nations (in my opinion) and people who hold this view don’t fall in a bad light. Thus your thread is irrelevant.

Lord Brendan, the mechanism given for the decline wasn't the name 'Pacifica', but rather political circumstances blamed on Pacifica -- unipolarity, diplomatic secrecy, etc -- and all of these things are still going strong. Thus I think it a stretch to say that the theory, as it was given back then, was proven incorrect by the war. Likewise, I think it a stretch to suggest that all these people simply disappeared, since the arguments made up a the foundation of a large part of Karma's war propaganda.

You don't mention routine beatdowns of large alliances, which was probably another thing frequently cited as a reason for the decline, and one that has stopped.

It's a pretty big stretch to call the present day a period of unipolarity. The SuperGrievances "hegemony" exists through the co-operation of three distinct blocs. It is nowhere near as omnipotent or as centralized as past hegemonies (is that even a noun?) were.

It's dying because new players aren't allowed to RP anymore. They come across as an in-your-face character and get flamed to the point that they just leave the game. People play games to RP and CN doesn't let them.

It's also because if you haven't been here since 2006, you're immediately a noob and deserve to be laughed at. Players are made to feel inferior and like they're missing "the big picture". They *should* be welcomed and allowed to develop their own political niche. CN are just a bunch of elitists and I'm not the only one who has been tempted to just give it away for that very reason.

I smile sometimes when I see old players leave, because I don't know them, and it's one less person who will abuse another for being too new at the game.

As soon as CN drops the elitist attitude, there'll be more players. IMHO of course.

While Banksy's and Rextu's theories are interesting, both in their own rights and as a data points, and I certainly appreciate their contributions, I am not debating the reasons for decline -- I am discussing the discussion.

Well, that's just silly.

Good luck keeping everyone on topic while discussing your discussion of the discussion at issue.

Welp. The point I made is slightly out of context. Vladimir's OP is discussing how people blamed the NPO for the loss of membership. I can't say I buy into that argument either, most players on CN don't really care about the political element. They just collect taxes and buy tech, actions which are beyond the control of any political player. So I skipped ahead to some gameplay reasons for the loss in membership.

Focusing on the political reasons for the loss in nations, I can see pacifican dominance as having both a positive and a negative effect on the total number of nations. On the one hand, I think we can thank the NPO for keeping the numbers up. Between the UJW and Karma, there were few 'sides' beaten down (yes, i'm not counting the WotC). This meant alliances were bloated with inactive members. In wars, alliances shed members, with inactive members on the losing side being the first to go. Look at the membership drops that the NPO and IRON had in Karma as evidence of this. They had sat on top for some time, but now that they were being attacked, they were leaving the game.

Obviously wars still occurred between 2007 and 2009. But these were beatdowns on smaller groups of alliances, and so although Bob lost hundreds of nations in each war, it was not as devastating as the more even sided wars such as Karma and even TOP-C&G. We can almost thank the NPO for keeping Bob in this state of paralysis caused by the MADP web mess and the dominance of Q. It prevented wars, and while it made it quite dull for some, I believe it kept the overall number of nations up.

On the other hand, the NPO's beatdowns were disheartening for the alliance leaders and active political players in the 2008-2009 era. Kalasin essentially says what I feel here. Look at the number of active players who have departed because they were hounded from the game, or saw all their work destroyed through war. The NPO can be blamed on killing off the active membership.

I'm happier with a smaller, active community. Someone mentioned on the previous page that all multiplayer internet games have a 'die off' after the peak. CN is having a very successful 'death' in my opinion. And it's been having one for two and a half years now. The loss of these inactive nations is not such a terrible thing for CN. I also feel that there is a strong group of active post-Karma players who are stepping into leadership roles around the planet. It is removing some of the 'old guard' feel. Would this have happened when the NPO was at its peak? I don't believe it would have.

All I see is Vladimir playing the NPO victim card again.

First it was a year of, "We can't prove we're different because we're under terms."

Now it's, "People were mean to us!"

Pathetic.

All I see is Vladimir playing the NPO victim card again.

First it was a year of, "We can't prove we're different because we're under terms."

Now it's, "People were mean to us!"

Pathetic.

All I see is you whitewashing the silence on the issue of current decline by throwing out a bunch of stereotypical quasi-memes as a distraction.

I've got to hand it to you though. It certainly is an effective way of undermining a point without actually having to address it. Who needs rational argument when you can just make an accusation?

Perhaps a minor reason, but the culture of this game has its head too much stuck in the past. Every treaty between large alliances has its historical roots to past wars, split-ups and other events that may have occurred years before a new player entered the game. It could take weeks of wiki-ing to learn a sufficient amount of information to even begin to understand the context behind the discussions on the OWF (oh wait, an acronym that new players wouldn't understand). Then for those who are indecisive on joining an alliance (not always because they don't understand the significance of alliances in CN) they have their nations plundered constantly.

Yes, this is exactly how I feel. People - on all of the "sides" - need to stop fighting wars based on what happened in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It drives newbies away.

Well stated Banksy. That's what I was trying to say.

Well, there is also the lack of attention span. When a war does happen, if it lasts longer than a week, everyone starts crying about it and saying "OMG HEMEMONY 2.0!". With the current mechanics, it takes longer than a week to actually change the landscape of the tier barriers.

SG are killing the game. They are a monster and need to be destroyed.

The game stalled a long time ago new people are still joining and leaving but large nations are leaving in record numbers because of the boredom. Collecting once a month wars once a year no real new developments to get large nations to increase activity and think about the management of their nation. Let banned members come back and stop running controversial players out of the game.

People hated you and threw anything they could at you. With that simple answer in mind, maybe you'd be better off focusing on why anyone would go to such lengths to smear the hated NPO in the first place. I think that'd be more productive than rewriting history by deflecting the blame for your downfall away from your leadership and onto the evil propaganda merchants (and their various lines of attack on your own particular brand of rule).

OR!!! Maybe you could simply let it go and move on, instead of trying to stoke up tired old fires.

All I see is Vladimir playing the NPO victim card again.

First it was a year of, "We can't prove we're different because we're under terms."

Now it's, "People were mean to us!"

Pathetic.

There's certainly a correlation between the continued decline of CN membership and NPO whining because they got their keister handed to them. Correlation isn't causation but...

CYBERNATIONS SUCKS

100M GET

and NPO is still ruining the game

SG are killing the game. They are a monster and need to be destroyed.

The game stalled a long time ago new people are still joining and leaving but large nations are leaving in record numbers because of the boredom. Collecting once a month wars once a year no real new developments to get large nations to increase activity and think about the management of their nation. Let banned members come back and stop running controversial players out of the game.

Psst, Q/1v were bigger than SG werent they? and they were in power 3x as long as SG has been

SG are killing the game. They are a monster and need to be destroyed.

The game stalled a long time ago new people are still joining and leaving but large nations are leaving in record numbers because of the boredom. Collecting once a month wars once a year no real new developments to get large nations to increase activity and think about the management of their nation. Let banned members come back and stop running controversial players out of the game.

Do something about it.

Perhaps a minor reason, but the culture of this game has its head too much stuck in the past. Every treaty between large alliances has its historical roots to past wars, split-ups and other events that may have occurred years before a new player entered the game. It could take weeks of wiki-ing to learn a sufficient amount of information to even begin to understand the context behind the discussions on the OWF (oh wait, an acronym that new players wouldn't understand). Then for those who are indecisive on joining an alliance (not always because they don't understand the significance of alliances in CN) they have their nations plundered constantly.

In addition, I feel the treatyweb and general realpolitik way of doing politics by the leaders of alliances on this world are a major reason for the decline.

It is the old guard that has a tight grip on everything in this world. Players that have been at the top for years, who refuse to step down and let others do their jobs.

Why have any of us even registered here? I personally enjoyed the politics of it, but I know most of the FOKkers are simply here because of the community, that quite some time ago decided to invade this game and establish an alliance.

You have to be able to attract people, and have them continue playing this game. But why should a noob continue playing? The first thing he needs to do before he's able to join an alliance is:

- Find a trade circle

- Understand game mechanics

- Accept rules that restrict his gameplay

And if he's accepted:

- Sit quiet for every 20 days then pay bills and collect.

CN offers virtually nothing to these noobs. Everything comes, and needs to come, from the CN community at large. CN is only the platform for the game the top guys are playing, the rest of us are tools.

Where's the fun in that?

The brilliance of our retention strategy is to keep people engaged by both raiding people and getting cultural objects from them, such as poems and pictures. We have been extremely successful building a community on the foundations of our mercy board, and other collected hilarity from the community.

In many ways we enjoy the game far more than the old GOONS did.

You're asking questions you already know the answers to, Vlad.

Though rubbing the facts of a propaganda line proven false into the faces of one's detractors seems only reasonable.

Do something about it.

Read beyond the joke on the 1st line.

Obviously anyone who was trying to push a political agenda by claiming that the Orders or their blocs were responsible has stopped doing so once you were pushed out of the world controller position, either because that agenda was fulfilled (i.e. it was just another stick to beat Pacifica with, a means to an end) or because of the logical next step (that the new power brokers, their friends, were now responsible).

However, I take a less cynical view than that. The game gets into trouble when new players feel that they can't do anything to compete, and particularly when both that is true and also groups of established players are driven out of the game by harsh war and terms. During the Order-led hegemonic period, the first part was true and was largely the responsiblity of a hegemonic bloc which was impossible to even consider competing with. But there is also another factor, the sheer size of the larger nations and the time it takes to grow a new nation to a size where it matters at all, and that factor is increasing in importance as time goes by. Every day, a newbie is another day behind. There is no particular political construct any more that it impossible to compete with (though a stable and united Supergrievances megabloc would do it), but the game mechanics themselves are taking over that role to a far greater extent than before.

So essentially people stopped talking about political stagnation causing the decline because the effect of inflation (mostly of tech and warchests not NS) has taken over, although if we do get a new hegemony then the political factor will come into play again. This is similar to your third option, but without the implication that the belief was only ever there for propaganda purposes.