lilweirdward

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

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.

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.

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?

If you think a woman owes it to you to personally explain how you sexually harassing her is humiliating, then you truly don't deserve an ounce of sympathy or forgiveness. The politics stuff is what it is, but this type of behavior is inexcusable and should be zero tolerance.

2,699 Holding strong in this range which is a good sign (or at least not bad).

Welcome to Cybernations! Unfortunately I don't have any openings at the moment, but just wanted to wish you the best of luck and Godspeed on your adventure!

If you're interested in working for a diehard Christian-themed alliance that you attacked a few years ago, and can make commitments like never cursing on a public channel or disparaging the great name of FTW again, then I may have a position for you.

Interesting. If nothing else I'd like to salute the flags being sized for mobile 👍 Congrats though!

It's not my job to speak for Sparta, but none of the folks I've gotten to know there would contest that the alliance has had issues with activity over the last few years. The leadership that's around now are good folks though and have gone out of their way to help rebuild allies who fought in the latest war. I trust that if the time comes, they'll be ready to stand by their allies. Ah yes, they don't have several members who post constantly on the OWF so they must be dead! This is indisputable evidence, I don't know what FTW will do now.

2,696

Congrats! Good to see you all thriving.

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.

Well well well, welcome back! Sadly almost none of those big time players are still around anymore, except maybe a few people. You just missed AlmightyGrub's annual rampage, sadly, as well as the time-honored tradition of the biggest blocs in the game absolutely annihilating some poor old sods (although I think NPO is still kicking NEW around, so you might not've missed that!). Any plans to get into alliances and/or politics again, or just strolling down memory lane?

Letting go of an alliance that you've spent a lot of time and energy trying to keep alive isn't easy, but I commend you all for doing it the right way, and you've found a great new home in FTW best wishes on your future!

Sent you a message in game. CCC has guides and other materials that we can send you to help get started as a new nation. I would definitely recommend starting with the advice Woryand gave though, and for the time being just focus on getting your bill payments low (hence not holding tanks and aircraft since they're expensive to maintain) and tax collection incomes high (mainly by buying as much infrastructure as you can afford, within certain ranges). Also yeah, definitely join our discord if possible which is linked in our alliance page, since it's much easier for the rest of our leaders to communicate and mentor you there. Feel free to reach out to me personally if you need anything else

Luckily admin started including activity stats in the daily export files, so we can see exactly how many people are active. It looks like it's roughly what you expected. Only around 1500 nations are truly active right now, but we can more or less assume that the "Active This Week" and "Active Last Week" nations can be considered still active players in the grand scheme of things, which puts it right around 2300 "active" nations.

Nice to see a Junka post live and in person. I forced myself to read the whole thing just to get the full experience, and it was everything I could've imagined.

Always good to see sphere unity! Congrats guys.

We've flattened the curve? Speaking of which: 2,765

Ha, maybe so. Who knows what the future holds, eh? I'm just glad to see my new friends also becoming friends

Congrats you guys! Dang we pick good friends

It is an MDP I could just be an idiot, but when did Christians and Spartans meet? Are you sure you're not thinking of the Macedonians or the Romans? Or is this some CN reference that I'm blanking on lol