Rush Sykes' Blog

Here we are a year and a half after NPO apparently paid their dues both on the battlefield and months after they finished paying their dues in cash & tech. People are still bringing up their past actions from nearly 3 years before that. So 2 years from now if you get a beatdown and hit with the biggest reps ever you will only have another 18 months minimum. Just like with NPO people are keeping a mental note of who is doing what these days. When friendships and treaties break and the time is right you will receive your forgiveness and then some.

Here we are a year and a half after NPO apparently paid their dues both on the battlefield and months after they finished paying their dues in cash & tech. People are still bringing up their past actions from nearly 3 years before that. So 2 years from now if you get a beatdown and hit with the biggest reps ever you will only have another 18 months minimum. Just like with NPO people are keeping a mental note of who is doing what these days. When friendships and treaties break and the time is right you will receive your forgiveness and then some.

While you do make a somewhat valid point, the notion that NPO is still "the target" in everything everyone does, is flawed. In my personal opinion, NPO is on an even keel. My indifference towards them results from the fact that we have next to nothing in common politically, ideally, or game-play wise. Still though, an interesting response.

Lots of people are still mad at NPO over Great War I and/or Great War III.

Idiotic grudges are pretty much the entire basis for politics in this game.

While you do make a somewhat valid point, the notion that NPO is still "the target" in everything everyone does, is flawed. In my personal opinion, NPO is on an even keel. My indifference towards them results from the fact that we have next to nothing in common politically, ideally, or game-play wise. Still though, an interesting response.

You might be indifferent but movers and shakers still want to kill them off. This is a world of revenge, everyone wants it on someone. Just accept that no matter where you go someone somewhere wants to kill whatever alliance you are in, just because.

People will bring up whatever PR points they can grab at the time, regardless of how out of date they are. It happens.

It's almost like people assume that politics is connected with reality.

People will be using that against you until admin smites us all on judgment day.

The wages of sin is death.

Dents in one's reputation are permanent, though with time they can at least be repainted and other adornments attached to increase the value. For some, like myself, events like you mentioned are more historical point of references to use in other discussions rather than with any ill will towards Athens. Of course, many will continue to try to use those events for their own political gain for as long as they can.

For the record, I think Athens' public perception has improved a good deal since then.

I think Athens needs to be destroyed and I have nothing to gain politically from that statement. Some people, believe it not, actually mean what they say. I know so many of the rest of your are hacks and hypocrites, but don't be so foolish as to paint the whole world with that brush.

How long will MCXA be held responsible for the wrongs it did pre-karma?

How long will I hear about how MCXA was in the coalition of cowards?

How long will I hear about how MCXA is a gutted alliance, even though we have thrived since TSO?

The answer to those questions is pretty much forever, and there is little I can do to change it, and there is little you can do to change the resentment over the KoN incident either. What we can do is look inward, and ask ourselves how much grief we are willing to give people over similar things. We cannot force people to treat us as we'd like, but we can treat others as we would like to be treated.

Idiotic grudges are pretty much the entire basis for politics.

Fixed.

On topic: I'd love to be able to tell an alliance to not worry about what other people think. Unfortunately that kind of thinking gets you killed. I'd hate to be on the foreign affairs team in any large alliance. Keeping public opinion high enough so that you aren't rolled in a moral crusade must be a painstaking task.

I believe a lot of people don't give a crap about it, but use it as an excuse to throw !@#$ on Athens. I know I do that :3.

I'm on your side and even I see the irony here.

It will be paid when we say it is. Now dance for our enjoyment, little puppet! Dance!

I almost started a thread on a very similar subject: how does an alliance "change"?

I don't think there's really much of a way to actually pay the price around here - you (generic you) just have to appear to have changed enough to put the incident behind you. You might get rolled, but unless your alliance appears to actually change through that process, you are still the same group of spies/backstabbers/oppressors, just a bit weaker. Not to mention the fact that it's possible to dish out more damage than you get while being rolled, so wars can never just be a purely one-sided punishment. There's reps, but these are usually forced out of you at gunpoint, and voluntary reps never create a true financial burden on alliance.

So that brings up the change question. And frankly, I don't know how an alliance is supposed to change on a time frame that would make it worth it to stay in this game. If I were to commit some premeditated crime, like mugging someone or robbing a bank, I seriously doubt I could shed all association with that 9 months later. Or even 3 years later.

The main tactics that alliances use to change seem to be a charter rewrite, dropping treaties with their the other offenders, and signing new treaties with the current hegemony. But none of that really changes who's in the alliance and it still looks very artificial

One question that might help this is developing an international agreement on how long one year on Planet Bob is in RL. I'm assuming there isn't a direct 1:1 relationship, yet we still talk about RL time in these situations. If we agreed that 1 PBY = 10 RLY, then we might be able to talk more realistically about change IC. The next time someone brings up Athens, you'd say "That was 7 and a half years ago, we've learned a lot since then."

You are probably going to hear a lot of backlash about Knights of Ni! as long as you remain a raiding alliance and continue to promote the practice of raiding. So in this case a military defeat is not your sole means of restitution. One of the prices of tech raiding is that you will hear negative comments about tech raiding.

I'm surprised that in your old age you can remember something that happened 9 months ago.

How long until people stop complaining about Echelon leaving BLEU to enter 1V and cancelling their MADP with New Polar Order?

And I don't think anybody ever actually gives anybody a break. The saying is that the internet is forever, everbody around has great memories, so you might as well get comfortable and come up with some decent retorts for when the Knights of Ni card is used.

Legion are paying for mistakes made near the beginning of the game four years ago. Also amusing that you want the criticism of Athens to stop, considering your stance on Legion.

You never clean a stain off your reputation unless you actively and clearly repudiate the policy that caused it to happen. In this case, that's tech raiding and/or launching aggressive wars. Since Ni (after which you maintained the same government that started it), you aggressively started the TPF war with a poor CB, and you supported \m/ (not militarily at the time) in the war that they got for tech raiding an alliance (Bipolar), and you still tech raid and support many alliances who do so. You might have paid reps for Ni (after a huge amount of pressure and under the threat of war) but both the aggressive streak and the continued raiding mean that you haven't even tried to put the things that caused the Ni war behind you.

And yeah this is pretty ironic considering that Athens' foreign policy seems to be largely fashioned by grudges that go back before the alliance even existed.

The government is pretty different now. In fact its quite a bit different. I think the only major players in Athens at the time Rsoxbronco1 and Jgoods45 are still in government although during that incident rsox wasn't active. Rush was low gov and Medtech doesn't do too much FA work but other than that all new people. But yeah I suppose this is a bit whiny and ironic.

I think as long as an alliance cares that people have a grudge agains them, they will pay. Once they don't care anymore, they see things in a new light.

Idiotic grudges are pretty much the entire basis for politics.

Fixed.

No, in real politics idiotic grudges are only basis #3. #1 is money and #2 is sex.