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The so called "Cartergate"


Nintenderek

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So I think Friday nights / Saturday Mornings are going to be my usual blog time. Watch for more blogs around then.

For some reason, about three different people since I returned have asked me about FIRE. I'm honestly not sure why because it's pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of CN history and really wasn't even that entirely relevant at the time. I'm not sure how they remember it either, since it was so long ago, not that important, and in all honesty, I don't even remember that much about it. But in the grand scheme of things, the story of Carter has many lessons within about Cybernations and how to properly start a new alliance. Basically, you want to do the opposite of what he did. However, what really makes me wonder most, is a lot of these questions that these people have asked were around to have seen this post and I don't think there's any more I could say that wasn't in that post. However, I am a person to try and make everyone happy, and so, to please all these people and to give newer players a chance to learn all those lessons, and since I have nothing better to write about but I feel like writing, I'll tell this story again. Keep in mind, I don't remember a whole lot, and I don't have the old FIRE forums to look stuff up. This is mostly based off of the little I do remember, the posts on these forums I've been able to find and the wiki.

First, I have to say it was a very different world than it is now. It was a post Karma era, and everyone was still trying to get a hang of things. The red sphere was open for new alliances for the first time in years, and a lot of people wanted to capitalize on that. I don't think FIRE was the very first, but they were one of.

I never wanted to be a member of the alliance. Post Vox, I actually originally planed to help some ex-ODNers who came to me help form a new alliance. I don't remember how they contacted me or how I met them. Heck, I don't even remember who they were. But I do remember I was going to help them when Incitatus contacted me and recruited me to Realm. Realm was a good alliance with lots of promise, but just as much inactivity. My experience has been that inactivity is the number 1 killer of alliances. I've been in more than my fair share of disbanded alliances, (I admit this openly) and the only one that didn't disband due to something related to inactivity in one way or another was Vox Populi. And it was this inactivity that eventually brought The Realm to merge with FIRE. I don't remember much else about the realm besides occasional government arguments over who should be in government. Personally, at this point I was tired of government positions and starting to wish people would stop offering them to me. I have a problem telling people no.

And this is how Carter tried to get me in. Before FIRE, I admit, I only talked to FIRE once. He PMed me after Vox disbanded, asking me to tell all the former Vox members they should vote for the FIRE senator. I posted his message on our forums, but most of them switched teams or stopped checking the forums by that point.

Anyway, I had heard a lot about FIRE. I remember several people telling me not to trust Carter, but I forget who all they were. Having never seen many posts by him on the OWF and having never heard of him before, I was starting to wonder how he had so many enemies. To this day, I don't understand how so many people knew about him and disliked him when he had done so little. To be honest, I have no clue what he did before FIRE.

Carter however did make a lot of mistakes. His goal was to make FIRE one of the biggest alliances on the planet. He planned on doing this through mergers and recruiting inactive members. Mergers are not a good way for an alliance to grow. If two alliances are good friends and allies and they feel a merger is beneficial, that is a good time for a merger. However, going up to random alliances you just heard of and asking them to merge into you just because they are smaller than you, is not a good idea. This is the first lesson we can learn from Carter, as ultimately a good portion of the government that opposed him so much, were merged into FIRE...

Another lesson we can learn from Carter is how to treat people. Carter as Firelord had ultimate power over everything, and there was no way to remove the Fire Lord. Ironically, this is just like the the nation that FIRE was based off of. So there was no legal way to remove the Fire Lord (which was a huge problem later, when people kept calling us out for illegally couping the government.) Carted used this power to his full advantage. Whenever a government member would oppose any idea Carter had, he would throw them out of the government and replace them with someone new who would agree with him. This never affected me much, as I usually tried to just keep to myself and do the job I was assigned but never wanted. I kept a FIRE newspaper up to date and that's what I was there for.

Carter however was basically using me. At the time, us Vox Populi members were almost looked upon as war heroes. An ex-vox member who posted a lot was an amazing thing to have to make your alliance look good, no matter who it was. This is why alliances like tJO, tLC and CoJ were slightly popular at first and the first two eventually died as the hype around them died off. For some reason, Carter thought I would generate some of this hype and even joked about it occasionally on IRC. This is not how to gain popularity within your alliance. An alliance should try to gain "good PR" by making good political moves. Defend your allies. Make people happy. Have lots of good posters. This is how an alliance should generate good PR.

There were lots of other things I remember too. I remember one member of the fire government got into a fight with another member and resigned at one point, only to rejoin almost 8 hours later and be let right back into government. While I did like this particular member, this was a very poor decision by Carter. What was there to stop that member from resigning again, leaving FIRE one government member less?

Ultimately, Carter's biggest problem was that he thought he ran the alliance by himself, and no alliance should EVER be ran by just one man. Teamwork is one of the most important parts of running any alliance and it's what makes an alliance so strong. Why anyone would try to run a Cybernations alliance with out any teamwork behind it, is beyond me and could possibly be one of the worse possible political moves an alliance could make. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that governments with a main figure head (like a president or an emperor) are bad ideas. I'm saying they need their ministers or senate to help run the alliance and Carter didn't realize how badly he needed the rest of his government's real input. Everyone makes mistakes. The more teamwork a government has, the less likely a mistake will affect the alliance as a whole. Carter didn't realize this. And the fact that he didn't get input from the rest of the government is how his biggest mistake got him thrown out of his own alliance.

While I was on vacation (I don't remember any exact details. It's possible I might just not have had internet at my house. I honestly don't remember why I was unavailable) Carter decided he was going to protect BTA from TAB. TAB had some allies (I don't remember any specifics) and BTA had none. TAB was angry over BTA stealing the name of one of the alliances that merged (Ironic?) to make TAB if I remember correctly. Carter thought this was not right and had several friends in TAB, so he decided we would protect them, even though most of FIRE (including most of the government) hadn't even heard of the alliance before. Indeed, had Starfox and RV not been in it, I doubt I would have even had heard of them. Although I agree with Carter's opinion, his actions I did not and most of the government did not either.

You see, you can't just ally with any random alliance you don't know. I mean, you can, but it will only lead to trouble down the road. You need to take the time to make friends with an alliance before allying with them. An MDP with out friendship means nothing, because with no friendship, you have no way of knowing if that alliance will come to your rescue when you are the one being attacked. While the treaty (actually, I don't think it was even a treaty. I think Carter just announced we were protecting them, but I haven't been able to find the actual topic) wasn't an MDP, the reasoning behind why it was bad was still there.

Carter did this with out letting any government members know, and when I came back, that talking between us government members started to happen. We all disagreed with Carter's action, although no individual member of the gov realized that the rest of the government disagreed with the actions until gov members started leaving in mass. Some of them even acted like they did agree, with TimLee even posting something good about it in the protectorate agreement topic if I remember correctly. That's when the remaining government got together and started to talk. It's also when another person in FIRE showed me some interesting logs and screenshots regarding Carter that would eventually have him removed from Planet Bob.

With no nation, it's difficult to rule an alliance, and so the government decided to throw a "coup." I quote that because it's what everyone called it, including other members of the FIRE gov. In all honesty, it's not a coup since Carter had no nation. I remember though that the "coup" was my idea. I ran it by the rest of the government online at the time and then typed it up. I gave them a summary of what was in it and then posted it. This timeline of events should answer one of the biggest questions I keep getting and was indeed asked several times on IRC that evening. I posted the announcement of Carter's removal from the alliance and things started to get interesting.

Here's another lesson to be learned from this. Actually, it's not a lesson. More of a recommendation. I have NEVER gotten as many queries at one time as I did that evening. I think I had something like 14 separate private conversations going on at once. If you make an important announcement, don't get on IRC after it. You'll only be getting queries.

Had that "coup" not been thrown, we would have learned not to throw around numbers we don't have. One of the reasons Carter decided to protect BTA was due to a mutual treaty partner between us and Virdia. I remember talking to government members in that particular alliance (although I don't remember what alliance it was), and I remember talking to gov in their allies. If Carter had not been couped, FIRE could have possibly (I honestly forget if TAB attacked BTA or not) gone into a losing war with no allies to back us up. It would not have been the Super Friends VS Citadel war that Cater wanted. Especially if you consider how quick RoK and VE our other ally at the time (I honestly forget who it was) were to drop us.

The coup however was handled with a lot of professionalism. We switched forums quickly and removed all remnants of Carter. To this day, I honestly have no clue how we were able to do it, but we did.

Our treaty partners quickly dropped us. It was expected, but still very disappointing and the reasons given made me quite upset at the time. I remember posting in the VE and RoK threads about their bad reasoning. I try not to hold grudges. Especially after my three year break, I've basically forgiven anyone and everyone for anything and everything I have to forgive people for. I really don't hold any grudges. But to this day, looking back at how VE handled that, still disappoints me considering that was the one treaty I was expecting to keep. But you know, looking back at their history before that, I'm not sure why I was expecting such a thing.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I did decide to leave FIRE. I just had a bad taste in my mouth after all that, and I really didn't want much to do with it. Plus the alliance was really inactive, which was not my thing at all.

It's too bad though, because FIRE had a lot of promise, and I am disappointed that it didn't take off like it could have. There were a lot of good members in FIRE who knew what they were doing. There was a lot of potential. I'm not sure how things would have turned out had Carter never been a member, but I'm sure they would have been a lot better. But here's the lessons I learned from FIRE.

1. Sometimes coups need to be done, even if the charter doesn't allow for it. This however is VERY rare.

2. Don't sign treaties based on just one member's friendship with another member in another alliance

3. Government needs teamwork to be successful

4. Don't purposely try to start huge alliance wars. Let them happen naturally on their own.

5. Breaking the rules and then bragging about it to your friends is a bad idea. I mean, breaking the rules by itself is a bad idea, bragging about it to all your friends makes it that much worse.

6. Research an alliance and it's government before becoming a member of that alliance. Always. Even if you think you already know those people.

7. An alliance shouldn't try to pave their way to success through mergers. It takes time and patience for an alliance to be successful

8. Don't try to use hype for success either. Carter did this when he decided to make FIRE a red team alliance and several of the members he wanted in FIRE were there just for hype related reasons.

9. If a member quits and then rejoins, that doesn't mean instant government time

10. The most important thing I learned is to always trust your instincts. From the start I thought Carter was bad news. I should have left, but instead my loyalty to the former membership of The Realm kept me there, even when half the former alliance left right before the merger. I should have just left and been on my way.

So that's the story of FIRE and the so called "Cartergate" that took place. I'm not sure why people still bring this up with me, but like I said, three people have queried me since coming back, asking about it. Looking back, what I did in FIRE was probably some of the best I've done in this game, but the way it turned out disappoints me, which is why it's typically a subject I try to avoid at all costs.

I hope this was an interesting read however and that people can learn something from the mistakes everyone in that alliance made.

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