GeniusInc

Episode 4 June 17th, 2014 GOD/RIA | NSF | Sparta | NPO/Atlas | Treaty Map

I'd love to have you on. Not the next episode, but maybe the one after. I'll keep in touch with you.

Episode 3 June 4th, 2014 OsRavan | Guinness/LT | NPO Cancellation | Happy BDay NPL | IRON #1 again | ODN & CnG | AAs Improving CN

The original idea was based on the war games conducted by fire squads. but since CN is a 3 war slot game, it has to be 3 man squads, rather then the RL 4.

Basically a no holds barred round maybe 2 weeks long where AA's can not be larger then 3 members, and each nation starts with something like 10 mil, 2000 infra, 300 tech, 500 land, the appropriate number of soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships, and a built economy. Trades are removed, and aid is allowed within AA only. The strongest AA in the end wins. With the three nations inside it getting 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, based on NS.

Transcript courtesy of AngelCruzdelaSant [spoiler][Intro Music] “From the depths of the OWF comes your weekly dose of drivel from the most uninformed man on Planet Bob. I’m your host Genius Incorporated. [Intro Music fades] Hello and welcome to The Apathy Report. Wow. Just wow. I am shocked. The first episode of The Apathy Report last week has gotten 141 listens. I was expecting something more in the arena of like maybe 12 or 13. But no, 141. Now I am curious to find out how many of you guys will actually stick around for episode 2. Hopefully it will just keep going up. But let’s take a look at the feedback that you guys gave me. I was actually surprised that there wasn’t very much negativity and for that I thank you. Looking at the comments on OWF post, it seems like at least a few of you guys like it. There does seem to be a common confusion though. A lot of you told me that it seemed like I cared. Now usually I wouldn’t respond to this kind of thing and just leave it alone but since there’s so many of you I figured I’d respond at least once. I care about what I’m talking about, I don’t care if it offends people and I’m just going to leave it at that. So looking at the comments a few of the specifics: I’m sorry Lord Hershey, I can’t do subtitles, mainly because [in] The Apathy Report I speak off the cuff. I do have some show notes, but beyond that it’s all off the top of my head and to transcript the whole thing would just be an absolute pain so I’m not going to do subtitles. Let’s start out by taking a look at the OWF. Let’s take a look at the news of the day. It appears that quite a few alliances have had their birthday[s] within the last couple of days. Viridian Entente is turning seven, I believe that was last weekend. Invicta is turning seven, three days ago I believe. And the New Polar Order is turning eight, either yesterday or today. So congratulations to all of you. It will be interesting to see what happens in this next year, especially for the New Polar Order because they- the New Polar Order just does not seem to not know what to do with itself. Now I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just that they don’t know how to be a top ranking alliance. And they have arguably the most power in this game right now and they are not doing a single thing with it. It’s like they think that because they won the last war everything’s going to be fine. But they’re stagnating and I was a member of the New Polar Order for a year and this is an opinion I’ve had since about halfway through that time in the New Polar Order. At first I thought it was you know, they were just like a sleeping giant; they had the power to do what they wanted to do, they just chose not to. But as time went on I realized that it wasn’t that they chose not to, it was more like they weren’t aware that they had it. And it wasn’t until the War of the Orders that they seemed to start understanding, but even now they don’t know because look at the incompetency that took place in the War of the Orders. That’s not something that an alliance that had the power- knew it had the power-knew how to use it like New Pacific Order of old would have done. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next year. See if their government can get it into gear and stop this stagnation and the loss. Because the New Polar Order has been shrinking in over the past year as opposed to the growth that they were having for the years before that. They’re losing members, their government really hasn’t changed in a while. [The] New Polar Order needs to have a mindset change, whether that requires an entirely new leadership or not. They need to change their mindset if they want to have their next year be any improvement. [missing/not transcripted] Next step is the academies. A few academies are good. And a few academies are down right atrocious! I mean they are horrible! Take R&R for example. Now, I don’t know if they’ve changed it since I became aware of what their academy was like, or not. But, it is horrible! It will take you at least three weeks to get through that academy. And until then you are locked out of the community and the rest of the forums. You only have access to what you need to have access to. It has five levels with five tests that you have to complete one part before you can get to the next, and on some of the levels you have to do stuff like set up for a trade circle, which doesn’t sound hard. The next level is “complete a tech deal.” Yes, a tech deal. This kind of academy is horrible! On average from what I’ve noticed, attrition rates through academ[ies] are approximately 20-50%, which in of itself is bad. I wouldn’t be surprised if an academy like R&R’s had a 70% attrition rate, because that’s the first impression you’re giving a new player. They come to Cybernations. They come to have fun. This is a game. A game! I’m not sure if you guys are aware of that, but this is a game! They come to have fun! And that’s what you give them. You bore them out of their minds. You force them to go through something to teach them how to play . And it’s not like this is going to affect much. We have ONE war a year, which I’ll touch on later. We have one war a year. They have anywhere from six to nine months to learn how to play the game before they’re ever going to be in a situation where it affects them or their nation[s]. Academies like Sparta[‘s] if I’m remembeing correctly and IRON[‘s], they have it right. The nation is allowed about 70% access to the forums. And the academies are simple. Apologies for the banging if you hear it. I can’t go through and edit out all of it. There’s construction next to my house. So, apologies for that. However, IRON has the right idea with academies. The nation comes in, they get admitted quickly and I believe Sparta has the same type of academy. They get admitted quickly, they’re in an academy, they have access to the forums, they’re integrated into the communities, they can get a job, become a recruiter, join the press team, maybe working as a lower rank military official, get joined into the community, have fun while simultaneously learning about the game. That’s how it should be. That’s what we should be presenting toward new players. Our academies should have an attrition rate of about 5% maximum. We should be retaining 95% of our players at least that go through the academies, not losing 20-50%. That’s just horrible. Next step in the retention of players is keeping them around once they’re older. In the amount of time I’ve been here in CyberNations which is two years, we have lost 2,000 nations. A net loss of 2,000 nations. And most of those were nations that have been around longer than I have. Why are we losing our older nations? I think it’s because this game is not interesting enough. They were around during the golden age of CyberNations. When it was fun, it was interesting, it was fast-paced, it was moving, and it was fun. And now, CyberNations is dying. I once talked to an older player about a year ago, I’m not going to say who it was. But, I asked them how long they think CyberNations had. They said “about two years.” That was a year ago and I can see that happening now. We are steadily losing nations, older nations and we’re not pulling in enough newer nations. CyberNations isn’t fun anymore. We need to make CyberNations fun on two levels: both the alliance level and the nation level. And so this week I’m going to talk mainly about the nation level and maybe next week address the alliance level of all of this. Let’s take a look at the new updates. Last week I talked about the Crime Index and gave my opinion on it. Since then it appears admin has taken it down due to the general dislike of it. I don’t know if he’s planning on bringing it back or not. I know he said he had the code saved somewhere in case he wanted to bring it back but it doesn’t appear to be coming back in the near future. And to be honest, I feel sorry for Admin. I mean, that was the first real thing in a while that he had tried to implement that would significantly change CyberNations and it fell flat on its face. And I feel sorry for Admin because he put some effort into it finally. We’ve been saying as a community that he really doesn’t put much effort into it and he started to put some effort into it and it didn’t work. Admin, if you’re listening to this I’d like to thank you for trying. For putting an effort forward. For trying to do this. And it appears given your recent track record that you’re going to keep doing this and so I’d like to thank you for that. Thank you for trying to keep this game alive. However, addressing us players now, there is stuff that we should be doing to make CyberNations a better game. And one player, Bilrow from the New Pacific Order seems to have taken hold of this idea and started running with it. He has posted a thread called “Thoughts on New Updates/Improvements” –this is in the “Open World RP” part of the CyberNations forums- and in there he started talking about how we as players need to; this wasn’t the original point of the thread but it generated into we as players need to take our role in helping revitalize CyberNations. He said that the New Pacific Order is brainstorming internally how to help CyberNations grow and they will be posting the best of these ideas in the “Suggestion Box.” So, applause to the New Pacific Order for doing this. For taking the first step. My question is, can the rest of us do this? Can we put aside any and all political differences and work together to make CyberNations a better game? I managed to get a[n] interview with Bilrow. A little bit of introduction for him. He appears to be a returning player and is currently an Imperial Councilor for the New Pacific Order. I was told that this means he’s like an Imperial Officer, which is a Minister, except he doesn’t have a specific ministry. So, basically an overview. So, I was able to get an interview with him. Unfortunately, it was not a Skype interview so I can’t actually insert a recording here but I’ll give you a basic gist of what he said. I asked if he could share with us his basic plan for in his effort to get people to help revitalize CyberNations and he said “to help bring awareness to this campaign, I am visiting alliance forums and offering this challenge: get ideas internally and let’s get suggestions posted up for Admin.” “Get ideas internally and let’s get suggestions posted up for Admin.” This is brilliant! What better way to help Admin improve the game how we want it improved than to tell him ourselves? And you may be thinking “well GeniusInc, we do this already with the Suggestion Box.” Yes, but how much effort do we put into it? Do we get together as entire alliances to help flush out ideas and give legitimate, well thought-out ideas to Admin, or do we individually go and put up wants and desires? I think if we started going as alliances with ideas that have been completely thought out, then we can start changing CyberNations. I then asked Bilrow how he was, inside of the New Pacific Order, taking care of this. And he said that he’s posted a thread –in their Body Republic I would assume- and they are talking about these ideas and then fleshing them out and he’s going to take the best of them and put them in the Suggestion Box. This guy is brilliant. He’s doing what we should have been doing. But it’s not too late for us to start. I’ve seen Bilrow’s posts in a few of the alliance forums. Now I would challenge the rest of you guys to do the same thing. Think about this as an alliance. An idea I really think could help CyberNations, if you guys could flesh this out, is the specialization of nations. And this is something that seems to have spawned from the new improvements Admin has added. Admin added six improvements just the other day, all militaristic. He said that he didn’t want to add any econ improvements at the moment. Three of these improvements were offensive improvements and three of them were defensive improvements and they are mutually exclusive. You have to choose between being offensively here or be defensively here. And this is brilliance! Imagine if we could change CyberNations so that nations are no longer photocopies of each other. In Bilrow’s thread on the last page currently, King Wally from the Nuclear Proliferation League said, “I find this game, as old as it is now, provides something of a photocopy nation every step of the way.” And he’s right! Once nations reach approximately 30,000-50,000 NS they become photocopies. They’re all identical, the only difference being the amount of money they have and the amount of score they have. In every other way they’re identical. They all have all the improvements and most of the wonders depending on their age. They are photocopies. Now what if we could specialize our nations. This is something that Operative from New Pacific Order said in Bilrow’s thread on the OWF, he said “while I’m still new, I find the idea of specializing your nation quite intriguing, as it has the potential to add a whole new dynamic to the game. It would add strategy not only for the individual but for alliance as a whole. I’d like to see more improvement/wonders etc that add this type of decision making to the fold.” And I agree with him 100%. Unlike the crime index which would only keep us busy for about a week, specializing nations would add a dimension to the game that would keep us busy for the life of the game. It would add strategy to nation building. Imagine if you could build your nation specifically for economics, or specifically for war either offensively or defensively. Imagine how many ways we could come up with if we put our heads together and thought about this. Imagine how many ways we could specialize nations so that they cease to be photocopies. This is a brilliant, brilliant idea and I think this could be one step towards making CyberNations once again an interesting game and keeping our older players around. And next week I’m going to be talking about this second step and it’s how to make the alliance side of the game more interesting to keep our players around. But until then, if you have any tips or anything you want me to talk about, drop me a message in-game at nation ID: 503547. Or you could hit me up on IRC Coldfront #theapathyreport. Two other options are the IRON forums and the CyberNation forums. Links to all of these can be found in the OP for the Apathy Report post on the OWF. [Music fades in] So hit me up. Tell me what you want me to talk about and I’ll be more than glad to talk about it. Until next week, take it easy guys. [Music stops] [/spoiler]

I have regular communications with 6 AA's and countless non govt (but those are mainly from former AA's of mine)

A fair amount. would be tough to get numbers.

Episode 2 May 28th, 2014 New mic | Happy Birthdays | NpO | Player Retention | Academies | IG Updates

The Apathy Report Latest Episode All Episodes Contact Me

Took long enough

Would this work?

Can you add the Invicta flag?

NIce job, I really like the first and second place ones. Wish I had remembered to vote.

Great job legion. And grats on those two wars xD

Ha. Like hell. This is the war everyone has been waiting for. Of course it is going to escalate.

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Aura/3XanEs?src=5 Sad to see. Best of luck.

NDO declares on WD and HL. NDO Nations 29 NS 200k WD Nations 23 NS 93k HL Nations 17 59k -GeniusInc Minister of Defense

Whatever you do. Please do not let this turn out like that game that you apparently have a word filter on.

In other news, the armies of the desert have been released to bring one round of destruction before admin resets our lands.

Sorry about the confusion. How about we all get together and drink a beer when this is sorted out.

[center][img]http://i932.photobucket.com/albums/ad162/mompson/120609NDO.jpg[/img] Warriors of the desert. Today is the day. The day you avenge your fallen brothers. The day you avenge your mothers and your sisters. Today is the day that we march from the sands and show the world that we are the New Desolate Order. Today is the day we collect our debt from the State of Unified Nations. The sand that billows forth form the desert will cause such a storm as to be seen as a new solar eclipse that will last till all SUN nations have felt the wrath of our holy warriors. NDO hereby reconizes a state of war with SUN and NAO. [quote]NDO Charter Article 2: We roll when we want to, and we roll who we want to.[/quote][/center] Name SUN NAO Combined NDO # of nations 31 12 43 47 Total NS 208,900 34,436 243,336 253,075 Total Infra 49,111 6,504 55,615 61,012 Total Tech 6,150 1,255 7,405 7,136 Total Nukes 28 0 28 11

We want YOU to join the New Polar Order. seriously...