Some insight into my resource fanaticism
Some of you may have noticed that I've been gone from Cyber Nations for quite some time. Many of you probably didn't. And of the former, a few of you might wonder why it is that upon my return to the game, I've spent nearly all my time lobbying for changes in the way resources are generated. I mean, for someone who supposedly doesn't care about his nation, I sure complain a lot, right?
Well, here's the deal. As it stands now, I am not playing this game because I want to. I specifically refuse to do so until the resource issue gets addressed. I have zero interest in a game where critical aspects of it are broken and ignored by the developers. If it gets addressed, I might be more inclined to actually care about CN again, but not a moment sooner. I am playing the game for the sole purpose of helping out a RL friend of mine, Herooftime55, with United Equestria. I am very much a brony and a loyal friend, so it is only natural for me to want to assist him in this effort. Still, that doesn't explain why I have such contempt for what others might trivialize as an insignificant issue. So, sit back and I'll tell you the tale of Magi Nation and perhaps you might start to understand why it is I feel the way I do.
I started playing Cyber Nations at the request of Herooftime55 back in the days of the Nintendo Outsider Alliance, 'gtfoutsider.com' (I actually had to look up the name because it's been so long ). While I can't claim to remember every single step I took in the last 4 and a half years, I do remember that Outsider had very little idea what they were doing and at no point did anyone ever bother to explain the full details of the resource system. After what had to have been somewhere between a few months to a year, I ended up joining the League of Small Superpowers, aka LoSS. I had gotten particularly interested in nation development at that point and made it a goal to research as much as possibly could about nation optimization. I spent quite some time with LoSS, it was and I imagine it still is an amazing group of people and I will never forget all the amazing times I was there for. During my time there, I made some very excellent progress on my optimization research, becoming particularly interested in all the subtleties of each resource and bonus resource. I eventually gained & adopted the unofficial nickname of Trade Guildmaster and offered my expertise to anyone interested. It was around this time I first realized I'd need to work pretty hard to play around my nation's resources, as Rubber wasn't a 3BR resource and Silver wasn't a popular choice for 5BR. (Later on I would carry dual membership with LoSS and Herooftime55's new project, 64Digits, though eventually I was forced to make the full transition over to 64Digits.) I did my best for the year or so that followed trying to keep a working trade circle of 5BR with Silver, and I had varying levels of success. Ultimately, I realized that my resources were just becoming a ridiculous pain to me. It was especially bad during times of war when I needed Uranium and couldn't swap out Silver for it. At one point I was replacing trades every two to three days, and I finally got to the point where I just stopped trying. This was well after I had broken 12,000 infra, so it's not like I hadn't been trying to deal with it. When the next war rolled around, I just quit bothering with my trades, letting them fall out as they inevitably would (with the exception of one or two kind souls). I started logging in every 2-3 weeks purely to keep my nation alive and after many months of doing this, I ended up amassing nearly 2 billion dollars. I had one war after that, where I dropped about 500 mil over the course of three weeks, and I've been just sending out money and tech at Herooftime55's request since then, not even bothering to fully repair Magi Nation. As a nation over 4 years old, I've bought literally every single wonder I can possibly own at this point. I still have over 1 billion dollars left and no intention of bothering to do anything with it besides send it out in aid every 10 days. I've drained out all my tech and just buy it 300 at a time for the benefit of my alliance.
It's taken quite some time but what I've come to accept is that as long as I am forced to stick with Rubber and Silver, which I've come to utterly despise, I will never be able to have reliable trades or be as financially powerful as nations with better resources than myself, so I don't see the point in even trying. I've tried pushing the issue for resource reform before, but it always went ignored by admin and the problem persisted. I really WANT it to be fixed. Not just because it would benefit me though, but because the current system is horrible. As a programmer, it offends me that such a terrible system for resource generation has existed for this long without any sort of reform. From a design perspective, the system is set up in such a way that it actually encourages the precious few new players CN gets to NOT play the game for however long it takes them to get a good set of resources, and completely screws over those not lucky enough to know about the resource system when they made their nations.
That's why I really want to see this get addressed. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't partially for my personal satisfaction, but really it's something that should be changed for the benefit of everyone - new players, old players, and even admin (more new players = more potential donations). So with that in mind, I hope you will forgive me for the overzealous protesting, but please, click below and help put an end to this atrocity of a resource generation issue. I've made a very clean and easy proposal that I'd love to get support on so that just maybe admin will actually do something about it.
http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showtopic=92255&view=findpost&p=2783681
And if you've actually bothered to read through this entire rant, you have my personal thanks.
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