My First Looks
Entry posted by JohnKirk
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After my return to Cybernations, I have found an alliance to settle down in and enjoy myself for a bit. With the stress reduction of "Not fearing for being raided into dust" gone, I've had a chance to look at the current situation of Cybernations in the political sense.
Actually that is a lie. I haven't at all.
Part of it has been my own real life obligations, which go something like this:
Me:"Alright, class is done, now I can write a bit for that article thing I was going to do for this online game!"
Roommate: "Guess who just got Fallout: New Vegas!"
Me: "Whelp"
Additionally, another issue I've had in posting this is the fact that even though it has been ten days, My original thread is still on the front page. In the Cybernations I remember, The thread would have been buried to the deep nether regions of the forum. To put it simply cybernations, This is a problem and a big one at that. Gentlemen, We are suffering from
Stagnation
*Cue evil music*
When I saw stagnation I mean it in both the physical sense as in the number of nations, and the political sense. I feel this has happened for a number of reasons.
The MDP Web
Cybernations has always had a very unique system of politics. In must other games, no real sense of politics exists in those game at all. Often you will find alliances declaring war on each other just for the sake of doing it. CN was really the first game I knew that developed an almost real world sense of political intrigue and the ones that tried to create this system often had alliances with names such as "New Pacific Order Lunar Colony" (Note: I don't remember if NPO did have a spin off alliance in the other game. Please don't hurt me.)The ensuing political situations, with the more treaties and all that other good stuff, would become over time a double edged sword. While this is by far the most unique and attractive feature of CN, it also creates its biggest problem.
With people trying to protect their nations from total destruction and thus preventing their alliances in taking the "$%&@ it. time for war!" approach, this creates peace. Peace is fine and dandy in real life, but in Cybernations, peace involves buying infrastructure and waiting around for the next war. Heck, even with the approach of not collecting taxes for as long as possible means that people do not need to log on for nearly a month if they don't want to. Any activity that has you standing around doing nothing is not fun, which means people leaving the game when they don't care enough to remember what day they are supposed to collect taxes. The only thing that has been done to shake up the boredom is by a universal acceptance of tech raiding which a good portion of the community fought tooth and nail to prevent. And yet, this leads to the next issue.
Tech Raiding
I can almost be certain that someone who did not read the rest of this paragraph will come here and post something about who I'm a pixel lover and need to be relieved of my tech or whatever degrading stuff they feel like saying. But the rampant nature of Raiding has only added to the stagnation of the game.
So look at my scenario. I joined the game and one of the first things on my agenda was to look for an alliance to join in order to not get raided into rage quit. Which is in effect similar to earning protection from your local mafia boss or joining a prison gang. If you don't enjoy being, err... "pillaged" you need to do this quickly. This becomes even more devastating when a small possibly promising alliance is raided because they are lower than the internationally accepted size, which is continually rising. Yes! cry more tears for the fallen!
But the problem here is that new players are immediately put into the system of standing around and waiting for the next war as referred to in the last section. Whether they like it or not. They also are much quicker to realize "This !@#$ is boring" and move on elsewhere. A lot of the bigger alliances who were pushing towards 1000 members not too long ago are nearly half that size now and I think this issue can be attributed to this core problems.
Sisyphean Nature of The Game
For those who don't want to Wikipedia it, Sisyphus is the guy who was punished by being forced to push a rock up an mountain for all eternity.
It's not a hard metaphor to imagine in context for a new nation. Typically, one joins a game in order to have fun, but to achieve certain goals in their game. or as the About Cyber Nations screen puts it "...grow your nation and improve your status in the world." Good luck with that one chumps.
It an eternal rat race for someone who wants to have the biggest nation. It takes an incredible amount of time to get to the upper echelon of the game through physical means, which usually is tied in with your political weight. All the while avoiding the losing end of the next big war. So in order to reach the top 5% of the game and be able to buy Nukes without the Manhattan project. You need around 82000 strength. I have gained 2000 strength over the course of twenty days. ignoring the fact that strength gain slows over time and assuming I continued at the same rate (Which is unrealistic to begin with)which is 130. Division says it will take 630 days for me to reach the top 5%. Assuming I don't either get rolled, nobody else in the game grows at all, and my attention span lasts that long which given my previous history, is doubtful. People can nearly graduate from a community college in that time frame and it will most certainly take longer than that. The oldest nation in CN, at an incredible 1751 days as of this post, is at a mere 57,439.328 NS. I assuming this nation has seem some rough days, but for playing four years and not getting into the top 5% is pretty discouraging for little old me.
And the most major recent feature to come out in CN are the Moon and Mars bases. Essentially toys to give bigger nations an even larger advantage and give them more toys to play with. A nation with 100 strength, being techraided, and can't even get a full set of trades is pretty quick to say "$%&@ this !@#$" and every time that happens CN dies a little. *emo*
In conclusion, there are without a doubt some major fundamental problems with the game. Yet I feel bad for simply putting out these ideas and not offering a solution. Truth of the matter is I don't certainly have one. If it were that simple it would have been done a long time ago. I would like to see the game mechanics reworked a bit so it encourages people to stay with the game. I also feel that the current game would need a total overhaul.
So essentially, I'm calling for CN 2. But, we are all aware how well this worked for the other game where a fair number of alliances came from. So err, shoot.
Happy Halloween Guys.
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