[Conclusion I: Problems]

I honestly would be interested to see how Tev's thoughts have evolved on this topic in the year-and-a-half since he started this series. A lot of the criticisms surely have only been proven true: Oculus continues control, Cobrasphere basically imploded at least in small part because it couldn't escape its own chaotic energy. However, I think it could be argued that some others may have been either misguided or simply acted on: there were major shakeups in leadership both in RFI and elsewhere, alliances and coalitions have somewhat meaningfully shifted on the peripherals at least, etc. Also, it seems like it's around that time where a lot of the people in the community are in the mood to opine on the state of CN politics lol, and this blog always seemed great at being a space for people to do that relatively freely.

[Conclusion I: Problems]

1000% agree with the point about game mechanics. CN is a nation simulator that accidentally got used as a political simulator, except the game never evolved to really cater to that play style. As you pointed out, there's no in-game benefit for being good politically, and sometimes you actually end up behind the curve even if you're successful in your goals. It makes politics mostly unrewarding, which is probably why so few FA-talented folks still actively run things. It doesn't help that the community has grown complacent on top of it, but fundamentally there will always be something missing as long as the game works the way it always has.

 

Your point about a community is interesting to me. It's a fair point, although I think it provides more positives than negatives. Frankly, the community that alliances have always fostered is why the game hasn't died yet, despite the stagnation that they also encourage. Besides, at some point politics isn't worth a whole lot if you're not helping your side win, and there's no penalty if you don't have a side that you caused to lose.

 

All in all, I don't know what the answer is. The way the game works is never going to change, so either the majority of the remaining active community agrees to change/break some rules to encourage political activity and discourage stagnation, or we'll always be in this state. I feel like there are enough remaining political leaders (and not enough minor players) that we could make changes if we wanted to. Change all non-bloc defense clauses to be non chaining, use tools like lyricalz to decide official winners to wars, bring back sanction races, etc. It wouldn't be perfect but it might help. Otherwise we're probably stuck with what we've got for the foreseeable future.

[Case Study: Ex-Moralists]

This was a good read! I've been looking forward to this entry for a while as I obviously have a lot of interest in seeing how my sphere is viewed from the outside. I kind of figured it wouldn't be very complimentary since there's frankly not a lot about us to compliment these days, and it certainly wasn't lol. I see where you're coming from on most of these points, but there's one that really stuck out to me that I have some thoughts about.

 

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Simply existing as institutions, these alliances do not contribute to politics in any meaningful way or at least have not in the last five years or more – and there is little indication that this can or will ever change. Inactivity is a more general problem that plagues the planet, but it is especially prominent in this sphere when it comes to their (lack of) politics.

 

Maybe this is where I should've challenged you more about mergers and the like, since I agree that this is a serious problem in our alliances (obviously, I'm still trying to help lead one of these alliances into recovery from it), but barring random strokes of luck like CCC and Sparta have had, I'm curious how else you think this can be solved. You even made a more damning statement later that really gets at the heart of why these alliances are in such a failed state.

 

Quote

For some of these alliances, they are resigned to a position of contentedness – not one that is born of security but founded on the belief that the alliances simply do not matter enough to do anything anymore. They are “waiting for the lights to go out” and their leadership cares so little for their members that they aren’t even willing to try to improve their precarious situations. These are alliances with failed leaders who care more about the prestige of their titles than their membership’s security or alliance cultures, which they have both allowed to erode. The very boredom that paralyzes their membership and plagues their leadership is sourced at least in part by their lack of internal cultures and utter inability to churn out rustlings of excitement from within their memberships.

 

Again, I actually mostly agree because I witnessed this from the inside. Often these alliances already had memberships that were disengaged - that wanted to stick around with the community that they'd made deep connections with, but couldn't be bothered to contribute anything to actually keeping the alliance afloat - and so the people who led these alliances did their best to keep the communities in existence while their energy for doing the actual hard part of running a functional alliance became more and more limited. The only thing I disagree with is that you are criticizing and demeaning them for it. What would you have done in this situation, should GATO have had the misfortune of falling into the same depression of a once-vibrant community wanting to continue existing but no longer contribute to being alive? You've condemned mergers as an almost-always wrong approach, and disbanding all the groups of 10-40 people who are literally only here because they have a sentimental tie to some friends they made 5-10 years ago is a surefire way to kill the game immediately, so obviously that's not an option. What else is there? It's to do what most of these alliances have done: keep the lights on until the game either finally shuts off or one of the old guard comes around and jump-starts things again. 

 

Honestly, if you have a better solution or approach that these people could have taken, I would genuinely love to hear it. I understand why people would write our entire sphere off - I almost did last year - but there are still people in these alliances that I'm sure would love to see their communities up and running again, were it only for someone else who had the answers.

 

7 hours ago, Liltrekkie said:

None of us were required to hit the biggest threat, we wanted to hit the biggest threat, because we believed in defending our allies no matter the cost. Something CN has completely lost, we arennt called the moralist sphere for nothing. We aren't just allies, but true friends who have been there despite the overwhelming odds stacked against us.

 

I mean, to be fair, I think this mentality is exactly what he's criticizing. It's not rocket science that this is a horrible approach to politics for the sake of politics; you don't get to the top by fighting all the people twice your size, you do it by picking winnable battles until you're big enough to not have anyone twice your size anymore. That's exactly Tevron's criticism: our sphere wasn't playing politics for the sake of politics, but for the sake of real friends that we would die for. You can argue that this made us better allies than most, and I would agree, but it certainly didn't make us smart political players of Bob, and it's easy to see how it prevented us from ever gaining any real power. 

 

A better question we should be asking is how this contributes to the death of politics on Bob. It's an easy and a fair criticism to point a finger and laugh at the people who went to bat for their friends instead of undercutting them when it would have been beneficial, but a real vibrant political sphere needs this sort of element to it. If no one trusts that anyone has their back when things get tough, what point is there to even making friends and alliances? And it doesn't always fail: look at CCC and TTK defending their allies against NpO with the threat of the greatest superpower that the world has ever known looming as a consequence, and it actually worked! Maybe it's not the move that geniuses like Moldavi and Moo would've made, but does that mean it's killing politics, or is it just a different approach to keep things interesting?

[Case Study: RFI]

Interesting. I really appreciate your responses and insight! Good post all around; I'm looking forward to the next entry 🙂

[Case Study: RFI]

Yeah that's a fair point I suppose. I mean, I would argue that if 2 of the 5 most powerful alliances in the game are essentially a complete result of mergers, then the concept can't be universally bad. You are right that mergers centralize power, and that certainly does make the game less politically diverse, although I guess I'm suggesting that that's not necessarily always a bad thing, at least not to the people who are giving up some or most of their power in order to centralize it. Also, plenty of alliances have failed and died whether they merged with other alliances or not, so I'm not sure how useful of an indicator that is.

 

Regardless, I definitely understand not wanting to seem biased to your own bloc. The whole point of the series seems to be about how each power center in the game has contributed to the political stagnation that we see today, which doesn't exactly suggest a ton of compliments for anyone lol. Your last post though suggested that you were going to not just be criticizing people, but trying to help figure out and explain why the problems came about and what positive or negative forces are preventing the situation from changing. In the case of Oculus, it was the desire and ability to win and continue winning that was leading them to help control and stagnate the world to the point we see it at today. I'm just saying that the same thing maybe could have been done here for RFI, especially for issues such as high numbers of treaties and tendency towards mergers and political dynasties, which must have happened and are still being maintained because of some positive and/or negative force that is keeping them in place and disincentivizing change.

[Case Study: RFI]

It's really interesting to see your perspective on RFI as an insider, especially for me being very much an outsider. I know it's not easy to be critical of something you've put a lot of time helping to build, especially when other people will frequently do the job of criticizing it for you lol.

 

One of the biggest things I would dare to disagree with is the idea that mergers are bad, or that RFI is somehow preventing people from leading alliances. I think both of these can be easily shown to be a symptom of the lack of an active player base left in the game, and in fact are the only things keeping the game from really imploding. Running any alliance is hard, and running one with several dozen+ to a hundred members takes a lot of time and patience, which is a luxury that very few people have, much less are willing to give to this game of all things. It is in fact extremely easy to be allowed to lead almost any alliance except maybe the top 5 or 10ish; most alliances are just kind of existing, and if you fit in with the community (this is actually very important but not so much for the point I'm making), most people are more than happy to hand the reigns to someone willing to actually do the work of running things these days. To that end, I think folks like you, Canik, Lowsten, and others who have been dedicated to keeping their communities alive and well for several years is actually a good thing and even admirable. These people are providing a home that isn't crumbling for those who still feel sentimentally attached to this game but don't have time to do much except log in and chat with friends, which is more than I think 95% of the player base can say.

 

The same train of thought goes for mergers: being able to have a strong community that others will help manage is extremely desirable for most people these days. The political world isn't becoming stagnant because alliances are merging, but because the game is dying and simply can't support dozens of alliances worth of people who actually want to spend time managing trade circles and tech programs and recruiting messages and discord servers and...all the other things that a functioning alliance needs to manage. Mergers these days give communities the opportunity to stay alive while having those things managed for it, which prevents the game from collapsing.

 

All this isn't to say you're wrong that these political dynasties aren't preventing global politics from being more dynamic. I agree that someone who has led the same alliance for over half a decade is going to have much more rigid opinions about politics than a newer leader, and having an entire bloc full of alliances set up this way is going to struggle to shake things up very often. I really liked your other points too, especially the last one that RFI is sort of a victim of its own success in not having any way to prove that it's actually a successful bloc because of the way it's managed political relationships. I would just posit that, unlike your evaluation of Oculus, there maybe wasn't enough credit given to the positive or desirable aspects that have led RFI to have the influence it has on the political world.

[Case Study: Oculus]

This is a great write up. I'm curious to what extent you attribute the economic victories of Oculus (namely their overwhelming superiority of average and max nation strength as well as tech efficiencies [not including the various conspiracies that often come up]) to their political domination. Do you see this element as a potential avenue for change in the political landscape of Bob, or simply a means for the powers that be to further entrench their dominance?

[First Post]

Was wondering how long it'd be before someone finally made a new blog post lol. Good place to start with history is this page of the timeline of CN wars. You'll go down a lot of rabbit holes from there but most of them are generally useful.