Mind the Gap

The fact that all you could pull together was an ODP is a discredit to both of you.

Rarely does somebody make a quit tread who is worth as !@#$. See you, space cowboy.

Someone should convince the top ten alliances to sign a pact to cut three MDP+ level treaties by the end of the week. It'd be for the good of the game. [i]That'd be exciting.[/i]

This is dumb. You're complaining about a macro effect that is purely logical on and individual scale - of course people are going to group up, when their enemies are grouping up. You act as though you can just show them the error of their ways and they will care, but they won't, and I don't think they're wrong for being that rational. Complaining that the molecules are doing molecular things is lazy thinking.

It's sort of a social science problem - why is the CN population falling? Why is the economy tanking? First off, it's not a problem with any individual player. It's a resort to convenience when somebody says "stop talking about it and do something." If there was something that an individual player could do, one of the 17k that play this game [i]would have already done it.[/i] Blaming the aggregate is like blaming atoms for your car engine not starting - if you provided a system which was conducive to internal combustion, the atoms would be all for it. I think it's interesting that we once had such a vibrant community and now it is half the size. What happened? What are the macro effects that cause so many people to hang it up? What brought them here in the first place? The political climate drives the rockstar players (Moldavi, Sponge, 404, etc) to take action and play. These people led large alliances which made the game exciting and interesting for the common agent. It's important to note that this is above the game itself, highly abstracted from anything to do with the actual gameplay. While I do think Admin should be doing more to incorporate forums and IRC into the game shell itself (it's a terrible pain to keep these people active when it's so complicated), the actual mechanics and movement of the game is impossibly boring, and was that way back when things were more exciting. The problem seems to be a macro-political one. A game reset would have such very interesting effects on that. Building the alliances into the shell of the game would be a huge gain. Talent we never would have seen will appear on the scene (haha!) with easier accessibility in their noobish days to the actual fun stuff of the game.