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Why Announce Anything?

watchman

Entry posted by watchman

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Recent posts have shown the truly dangerous ghetto that the CNForums have become for alliance announcements. The boards are infested with roaming observers, waiting to mercilessly flame and troll any post they deem to be from "the bad guys." Even the most mundane topic becomes cluttered with seemingly endless text about hegemony or (more often) outright OOC insults.

On the flip side of the flamefests, some topics end up being bandwagon exhibitions where commenters fill pages of mindless hails and celebratory remarks. Between trolls and bandwagons, I wonder what the use is. Why do alliances make public announcements?

I think there are a couple of very good and legitimate reasons to make public announcements and proclamations:

  1. Maintain a presence on the world diplomatic/political stage. Like it or not, the CNForums are a clearinghouse for news and information. An alliance that lacks a regular presence is in danger of falling into irrelevance. This is true of new or growing alliances that are under 3M NS and is having trouble collecting allies and friendships. An alliance looking for allies needs to ensure that their name is out there. However, if you are within striking distance of a sanction (3.5 M NS, let's say), then you are automatically relevant and a public presence does not seem necessary.
  2. Efficient Communication - It seems reasonable to make announcements on CNForums that are for a Bob-wide audience, and would be very difficult to communicate to every alliance.
  3. Protectorate Agreements. It seems reasonable to announce that an alliance is under another alliances protection. Raider alliances would then have fair warning.

For everything else, it seems that announcements are unnecessary. The feedback is probably not worth the reaming an alliance would take. Currently, the Trolls are willing to rip into anything. As an example, I would point to the recent GPA announcement. GPA announced that they were reforming their non-binding NAP. I had some genuine issues with the style of how they went about it that I communicated privately, but overall it was a pretty non-controversial topic. That did not stop the topic from degenerating into hails and hollers, flames and a debate about the troubled history of GPA.

Another example: Agora announced the results of an arcade tournament and clarified their signatory policy. Hardly flammable materiel. Again, this thread turned into a mess of flaming and arguing.

In my opinion, the less of a Forum presence, the better. Unless an alliance needs publicity, don't post on the forums.

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Poobah

I'm going to summarize to make sure I get the gist of what you're saying before I make my comments. You have 2 real points:

1. CN forums are cluttered with useless announcements that don't really do anything or matter.

2. The trolls/bandwagoners are the only people that comment and can block any sort of a healthy debate.

I agree with both of these statements, but you brought up the Agora announcement. You seem to have found a problem with the trolling in the thread, which I agree can be very, very annoying and downright moronic at times. However, you fail to mention that the Agora announcement was also in the other category, things that don't really need to be posted. I'll start with the 3rd and least important part of the announcement. While I think having the regular members associating with each other is a great thing, I don't see how who won an arcade tournament for that bloc is important to almost all of Planet Bob. The 2nd part of the announcement about Firebolt being the new candidate for blue team senate is also unnecessary. If I needed a sanction on blue, I could just look at the list of blue team senators and find one I needed. Once again, not important to almost all of Planet Bob. Finally, the part about Agora not being about blue dominance/unity/any other blue goal, and that any color alliance may apply. If someone reads the actual text of the treaty, you can clearly see that it's literal translation is not about blue team unity. But because of the trolls, it at least attempted to clear things up (although it was trolled again, which was to be expected imo). So this part of the announcement was the only part that was at least partially important, but the Agora alliances aren't stupid; they knew that it'd just be trolled by the same people that troll them all the time.

What I think is that if alliances/blocs stop posting useless things, the trolls may actually begin to use logical arguments because the things they are trolling will actually be important. 2 birds, 1 stone.

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watchman
What I think is that if alliances/blocs stop posting useless things, the trolls may actually begin to use logical arguments because the things they are trolling will actually be important. 2 birds, 1 stone.

I completely agree with you. There just needs to be fewer announcements.

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