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I think the actual fact of the matter is that buyers really hate sellers. There are more rapid ways to grow than tech selling, but at the same time, the tech market is the most efficient way to obtain tech at the present moment. The longer sellers are kept dealing, the more tech they make available. There are in-game methods to deal with it; that is to say, there exists an opportunity to deal with the present structure, but I'd rather keep them under wraps.

unnecessarily inflammatory

nice reps; reasonable for the alliance size. It's a bit of a pity you had to peace out Kaskus; otherwise, you could say you had been continually at war with various alliances between october and the big one

What's for lunch, Polaris?

[quote]Honestly all I hear is "You betrayed us 3 years ago, You made us pay reps because we lost a war, and now that we have became friends with someone stronger then you were gonna fight you!". It was funnier when TOP was going to declare 3 days ago but then lost support from their new allies and they ran like cowards. The reason there is 66 wars by IRON/TOP is because they're not even fighting, PB/DH is fighting for TOP. If PB/DH dropped support for TOP tomorrow, TOP would call a ceasefire and beg for white peace. TOP will never fight this war, only talk about how they did so well when someone else tries to roll Polar. If TOP was offended so much of getting "betrayed" by Polaris back then, then why didn't they declare 2 years ago and settle the issue? EDIT: Polaris, Please fill out a new debt slip to TOP for 253,000 Tech this time... So they can call it an even 500,000. [/quote] I'm impressed. I tend to have very filtered and very eclectic situational awareness, but you have even worse data than I do. You really have no idea how decision making works in CN, do you?

[quote name='King Xander the Only' timestamp='1322287801' post='2851866'] Please kill them dead. [/quote] i like the way you think; after all, there's other modes of killing, right? http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDIQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7YAEWrnOtrY&ei=pl7RTta5KcTAtwe-6e2xDQ&usg=AFQjCNHt0TwLIXSEXsAVU5-8QqG8gX9uFQ&sig2=CbcZM5BG3oFeVYULE_wS6A

This occurs. One of my dear friends (neneko) deleted at 26 days inactive. The next scheduled deletion after 11 PM server, is 1.30 server.

Good luck, Airme. Loved you in EFF; sorry to see Ronin go. Would be great to have you make a stint in MK, but you know what's been going on. On the plus side, GKC got demasked from forums access after an "incident", although he still retains IRC access.

Tech survivor: what is the alliance that gets the most tech per nation per 10 days that's not Umbrella? Seriously, Ella is just incredible. I also recently did a count; unless you can find some other candidates; MK seems to be the alliance below Umbrella. Arnes has been doing an incredible job for our alliance, and he's improved much and much of the problems we've had traditionally. Rankings: MK-> Observed ~50 per nation, 77 predicted based on slots usage GOD -> 55 predicted based on slots usage BN-> Observed 44 per nation, 55 predicted based on slots usage

love your structural innovation

Evidently, it's possible to send messages to banned and/or deleted users through the in-game messaging system. I'm not sure whether or not this is an intended functionality or not. Also, not Chris Kaos, please tell me if my typeface makes me look fat.

req delete

[quote name='Gibsonator21' timestamp='1319423211' post='2831308'] Edit 2: Hahaha, NG blew the stagger on him! XD [/quote] *laughs at the underlying causes*

Is it possible for us to have a statistics chart of who donates? We don't need individually identifying information, or even alliance information, but it would be useful to see the donation rate of players at various ages, various infra levels, and various tech levels.

Would you please be kind enough to provide server downtime information?

problem resolved, thanks

A fairly dignified response, and props for that.

http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=369789 THis is one of my charges, and he has fish furs wine + fine jewelry, but lacks affluent population. What's going on?

Jammar: TE's missing something in SE. I'm pissed off that the discussion is occurring here, not in this thread, but you have the respondents and I'll post here. If people want to move off to the gameplay discussion forum, I'd be delighted and obliged. http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showtopic=105108 === Let me elaborate on what I've said to Jammar. Most people think that war is good in itself because it's "fun", but war isn't really anything interesting in this game. It's the build-up to the war that matters, you spend a lot of time building diplomatic ties, building up an alliance's organization, and building up an alliance's strengths, and that's what makes things worth it. When the war comes, you get to see whether your alliance is better than theirs when it comes to all of these strengths, and that's why war matters, not because there's anything joyful in bashing other people's nations to the ground. This is what's missing in Tournament Edition. You don't have a logistics trail in the TE aspect, most alliances don't have strong communities, although recently I've been impressed by what's coming out of TPC, you don't have politics because war doesn't matter as all the nations are disposable. So TE is just pure war and meaningless war at that. With regard to Magicman's posting on player recruitment, I'd actually reverse his order of priority. It's more important to retain new players than to obtain them. Most CN players only give one shot at the game, and if they get bored of the game that's it. They're not coming back. If you tap new forums or communities to join the game, it's quite possible they'll just turn out just like The Flood Empire (Bungie). As others have said, the number of possible communities for the game is depleted. 4chan made their shot, SA's here, Fark is here, FOK is here. What other forum invasion is possible? The two main issues for me, as I've said in my post, is the lack of new nation relevance and the extreme difficulty in setting up a new alliance. For new nation relevance, we've already discussed the matter, but let me make my comments. I think Magicman is making a mistake here when he discusses Wonders, because the Wonder system does not deserve such a drastic change, and not only that, the Wonder system is not the main reason new nations are irrelevant. It's the tech system which is so brutal at the moment, not only because it takes a long time, but because the tech market takes a lot more effort, and the variability of different alliances when it comes to tech matters. Some alliances have very high tech incomes due to well-developed and/or exploitative systems, others have a lot more difficulty since they're effectively only buying on the open market. === I'll post on things for new alliances, later.

When oh when will Methrage stop being entertaining? When he rogues your alliance, of course.

what the $%&@ is this !@#$?

War is overrated. The game sucks not because of the absence of wars but because of the failure of alliance formation.

HoT, I can't remember if it was you or someone else who won WPE 2011, but I love your avatar. I've since made a post in Gameplay discussions, focused solely on what's wrong with the game, but let me add in my 2 cents: Is UE ever going to be politically relevant? You can get a ton of members signed up, but will those members ever amount to much militarily? Will your military potential ever get you into a significant game-controlling political unit?

I'm just fed up; I've been planning to make this thread for a long time, and I haven't been able to write this in the correct manner. So, this is just a spur of the moment thing: here goes. There's two factors that are killing the game. The first is the relative inviability and pointlessness of mass alliances, and the second is the extreme difficulty of forming a politically important new alliance. Let me explain the first factor. The traditional life cycle of players is that they start in none-AA, they get picked up by a mass alliance, the lack of opportunities for advancement or dissastisfaction with the culture and/or politics of their mass alliance drives them off to a smaller alliance, and they just sit there until they get bored of the game and quit. As of right now, however, mass alliances are far less politically significant than they used to be, and elite alliances are far more politically dominant. The reason for this is because mass alliances don't really matter all that much anymore. Once upon a time, mass alliances were the dominant force in the game. This was because elite alliances weren't so militarily dominant, while elite alliances, compared to mass alliances, always had better participation rates or esprit de corps, the game mechanics were such that a bunch of large nations were easily mobbed and mugged by smaller nations and would thus not be superviable. Since the tech change, sometime in '08, he who controls the upper tier effectively controls the game; the players who have tech advantages have a disproportionate advantage over players who lack tech. Another corollary of this is that because tech is now so important, mass alliances have reduced incentive to perform mass recruitment. The amount of political power a new nation contributes, compared to in the past, is far reduced. Why recruit a new nation when they depress your ANS and don't contribute that much to your military effectiveness? The second factor is a corollary of the first factor. In order to start a new alliance, you need nations to provide military force and governmental manpower for your alliance. You can either recruit new nations, which gives you the same problem as that of mass alliances, which is to say, new nations are politically meaningless because they can't get enough tech to fight, or you can draw friends from existing alliances, which, relative to the game at large, is an act of cannibalism. The consequence of the difficulty of forming new alliances is stagnancy. The thing that's making the political scene stagnant is not the dearth of wars; TE has wars all the damn time and we're down to an all-time low of 600 or so nations, down from 1500 only a year ago; it's the dearth of new faces with new ideas and new cultures. As we can see, most of the people posting and making nuisances of themselves on the OWF are old nations, old faces that have been here for many years. === The underlying cause of both of these reasons for decline is simply that the game is really old, and there are many many old nations with huge gamebusting advantages over new nations as a result. The amount of time it takes to get a minimally important new nation is now something around 2 years, and that's encouraging the fall-off in player population. The Poison Clan government members who had to reroll as a result of their scandal are evidence of this. For Derwood1, taking him as an example, to regain what he lost when he was deleted, when he was a respectable lower-upper-tier nation, would take more than 2 years, just to replace all the wonders he had lost. For tech, at 450 tech a month, considering the decline of the tech market, it would take 2 years to replace all the tech he had lost and regain the individual significance he had as a nation. Derwood1 knows what he's doing, given that he's a highly experienced nation and leadership in Non Grata. What about new players? Here, we can look to the Flood Empire. I believe this was an alliance that had invaded from Bungie's forums a while back, around the start of spring, I believe. They had a peak of around 160 players, although my memory's hazy. As of now, they have 26 nations. Their strongest nation has 4400 infrastructure, and has zero wonders. I think from the matter we've discussed previously, you can see why they've collectively opted to give up on the game. If you want more examples, look at GOONS. This is a refound of a storied and historied alliance from CN's early past. They restarted about 2 years ago. The Pandoran/Doomhouse-NPO war was very hard on them, but before the war started, they were approaching a meatshield alliance, somewhere around but below Viridian Entente's level. And this was after 2 years, despite being the reincarnation of one of the more successful alliances in Cyber Nations history. The third and final example I want to use is more of a success story, but in considering how much effort they had to take to get to where they were, they also illustrate my point. Basketball Ninjas. The SE counterpart of the feared Pork Shrimp alliance of Tournament Edition. These guys are incredibly disciplined, and incredibly well-organized. I know this from my dealings with them in TE. This is an alliance that sends about half their number into peace mode for any given span of time. Despite this, they were founded sometime in 2008, and recruited wholly from their base in the RealGM forums. Despite all of their discipline and effort, they were only able to fully emerge onto the diplomatic scene as a big-shot alliance with the foundation of PF, almost 3 years after their founding. After all this effort, they only have a credible upper-middle tier, and this is after pursuing an almost isolationist foreign policy with only getting involved in one major war during their history, a curbstomp on UBD. === So, what's the purpose of this thread? I think the game perhaps is not past the brink of death by this point. Suggestions can be made on how to save the game and reinvigorate it, but in order to do so, the problem needs to be clearly identified and that we need a consensus on what exactly is ruining this game. This thread exists for this purpose. Once we've reached a consensus, future suggestions to fix the declining population of the game can simply reference this thread for a basis of what the problem is instead of running into massive debates over the fundamental problems of the game.

[quote name='Eumirbago' timestamp='1315541501' post='2797238'] Approving and banning people from joining your alliance would be nice. That way, we wouldn't have to worry about ghosts. [/quote] Horrible feature. The simpler the game becomes, the more dead the game becomes. As long as you continuously need ghostbusters, you keep alliance lowbies in work and make sure that your alliance needs relationships to obtain ghost-busting. In any case, I get the feeling it will go in. Admin put in so much effort towards this feature (2 weeks equivalent), so it's almost definitely going to make it in.