Ambition

[Artigo]

 

we are hemorrhaging nations.

 

Meh. CN peaked at 45k nations and the dropped down below 20k in a couple years.  Nations are trickling out at the pace were going at now.

[Morgaine]

"Meh" should be the slogan of your alliance. It captures the mentality completely.

[Artigo]

We Meh'd our way to #1. 

 

Sorry about the try-hard chivalry not working out. 

[Neo Uruk]

Say what you will about what DBDC is doing, but you can't really question the way they got here. They started with three (four? was sighet around idk) nations two years ago.

They've picked up some questionable characters along the way, but the core group of members at DBDC were just really good at war and somehow chanced into thriving by it, instead of staying at a medium or not-gargantuan size.

Edited January 27, 2015 by Neo Uruk

[enderland]

All these years later and people care about Walford's crusade(s) now just as much as they did back then. Which is to say, not at all.

 

(Also, if he would just use the word 'bourgeois' a bit more his posts would be indistinguishable from Tywin's.)

 

You know, if all people who participated in politics here acted like Walford and contributed meaningful things to the OWF or backroom politics this planet would be a much more vibrant place and provide far more interest for pulling people out of retirement.

 

This is a philosophical argument and one I, an observer, find quite interesting. It is the "might vs morals" argument except played out in an actually interesting fashion because Walford can actually articulate a cohesive perspective (unlike many of those folks who I have on ignore here).

 

The issue at hand here is fascinating. Is it more important to have a strong alliance and security? Or to be comfortable in knowing you have "done the right thing" - this is what is up for debate here. The only problem is that DBDC and Walford disagree on "what is the right thing" but this is what contributes to a good discussion and less drivel on the OWF.

 

So for that, thanks to Walford and DBDC for making the OWF -- and this world, by extension -- a better place.

[The Zigur]

Too many people try to act "too cool to care" rather than exercise their brains and try to think about things.

[Morgaine]

We Meh'd our way to #1. 

 

Sorry about the try-hard chivalry not working out. 

 

What you are "#1" at is nothing to be proud of. That is like being proud of how many dishes you can break in your neighbour's house.

[saxasm]

You don't have any power, that's what you don't get. The ability to destroy is not power. It is the opposite of power. True power comes from integrity, virtue and honor -- which as I already said, your band utterly lacks. You have a horrible reputation as liars, betrayers, bullies and cowards -- which is well-deserved. Your meat-shields will learn this soon enough.

 

You keep making this claim, and yet I see no evidence for it. Given how many disagree with you on this assessment of their reputation, perhaps you could explain the basis for it? Otherwise this will just seem like self-serving slander, which I am sure a moral paragon such as you would never engage in.

[Morgaine]

 

Meh. CN peaked at 45k nations and the dropped down below 20k in a couple years.  Nations are trickling out at the pace were going at now.

 

I feel the need to revisit this assertion more deeply.

 

You are implying that losses in population are a coincidence, but there is a direct correlation between this Planet ceasing to be one of a smattering of wars for political reasons and becoming one of constant wars out of boredom. Of course it is boring. How interesting is it to fire cruise missiles rather than converse with people and see the various ideologies, philosophies, religions, and the personalities behind them interact?

 

The uncertainty fostered by groups that attack when they feel like it, do not keep to their promises and start major destructive wars for frivolous reasons creates an environment of instability that some will find so unpalatable that they will leave. 

 

So they have.

 

Why bother building up a nation if you know that at any time some unsupervised teens whom have apparently never been held accountable in their lives see what you have and decide to burn it down? What is the point of a political debate if rhetoric is trumped by guns at every turn?

 

In this war, a very few on our side have actually surrendered that I know of, but looking at nations that are showing no evidence of resistance indicates that a significant number have apparently become demoralised from the onslaught and have simply abandoned their nations altogether.

 

More people gone whom we shall never see again. How is that fun for you?

 

One thing that this has done for us: After yet another culling within our ranks, those who hold honour above statistics form an even higher percentage of our membership. That is what you are facing; people who truly do not care how much technology, infrastructure etc. they lose, so long as we stay together and never waver in our resolve.

 

This is all fun and games to your sort, but there is a body count that has accelerated because of you and those whom you secretly despise you have duped into filling war slots against those on our side.

 

This defines your lot as a pathogenic presence.

 

Hopefully enough of the world will realise this before it is too late.

Edited January 27, 2015 by Morgaine

[brucemania]

The Emperor Protects!

Regarding capitalism and such remember these concepts only refer to systems within our own nations and have no macropolitical relevance in our world. Kingzog is wrong, any political terminology I use is always unique and adapted to the material conditions of our world.

 

Why is it then i always feel like i am watching a bad episode of Game of Thrones when you post ?

[Starcraftmazter]

I don't think you have a belief system other than Might Makes Right. It is the belief system of bullies and cowards.

I think, "there's no right or wrong, it's just for fun" is more appropriate. Peace is not fun for anyone relevant. In my view this is the healthy attitude to take.
 

That thousands of nations have disappeared from Planet Bob once Might Makes Right replaced diplomacy, rhetoric and discourse is absolutely the case. As I noted earlier, at one point there were 45,000  nations -- 12,000 of which were non-aligned. They were left largely unmolested until general war was declared upon the independents and small alliances. Now there about 500 non-aligned left and so, small and then medium-sized alliances were then targeted once the non-aligned were flayed and then discarded. Now there really are no large alliances left.

If this is your understanding of history then it is deeply flawed, the commonly agreed upon to version is that after Karma (the ending of a period where might makes right was by far the strongest), people got bored, and that is when the numbers started strongly dwindling. It definitely has nothing to do with DBDC which would not come for many years after.


Quite frankly, I think you lack a basic understanding of our world or simply choose to ignore it. You thoughts are disconnected from reality. Edited January 27, 2015 by Starcraftmazter

[The Zigur]

Please explain the "people getting bored" argument, and how it relates to Karma/Armageddon War, with as much logic as Walford's argument if you intend to offer it as a serious alternative.

[Morgaine]

Quite frankly, I think you lack a basic understanding of our world or simply choose to ignore it. You thoughts are disconnected from reality.

 

Arrogance. Just because someone shares not your amoral view of the world, does not mean that they are 'lacking in basic understanding' or 'disconnected from reality' as you say. 

 

I look forward to this war ending so your lot can be forgotten about. Your mentality is so, so repulsive.

[The Zigur]

 

Arrogance. Just because someone shares not your amoral view of the world, does not mean that they are 'lacking in basic understanding' or 'disconnected from reality' as you say. 

 

I look forward to this war ending so your lot can be forgotten about. Your mentality is so, so repulsive.

 

I think just looking at the poorly structured logic of his argument is cause for amusement:

 

If this is your understanding of history then it is deeply flawed, the commonly agreed upon to version is that after Karma (the ending of a period where might makes right was by far the strongest), people got bored, and that is when the numbers started strongly dwindling. It definitely has nothing to do with DBDC which would not come for many years after.


Quite frankly, I think you lack a basic understanding of our world or simply choose to ignore it. You thoughts are disconnected from reality.

 

All of these are unsupported statements or use logical fallacies like Argumentum Ad Populum. If anything, the quality of the opposing argument goes to show that intelligence or enlightenment has little to do with how big ones nation is.

[Morgaine]

 

 If anything, the quality of the opposing argument goes to show that intelligence or enlightenment has little to do with how big ones nation is.

 

This why Walford and others were driven away from speaking here or just left the Planet altogether. If they troubled themselves to put together a cogent argument, the "lawl" squad would come out and smother dissent. 

 

If I may, Tywin, they are trying to make you into a meme, so no matter how well-reasoned and how well supported your point is, they can just dismiss it by saying that this is something that Tywin would say. That is a fallacy also.

They are like fat, hairy chavs who brag that because they can club someone else in the head, that means they are smarter and better people. 

Edited January 27, 2015 by Morgaine

[tayloj7]

 

 

I feel the need to revisit this assertion more deeply.

 

You are implying that losses in population are a coincidence, but there is a direct correlation between this Planet ceasing to be one of a smattering of wars for political reasons and becoming one of constant wars out of boredom. Of course it is boring. How interesting is it to fire cruise missiles rather than converse with people and see the various ideologies, philosophies, religions, and the personalities behind them interact?

 

The uncertainty fostered by groups that attack when they feel like it, do not keep to their promises and start major destructive wars for frivolous reasons creates an environment of instability that some will find so unpalatable that they will leave. 

 

So they have.

 

Why bother building up a nation if you know that at any time some unsupervised teens whom have apparently never been held accountable in their lives see what you have and decide to burn it down? What is the point of a political debate if rhetoric is trumped by guns at every turn?

 

In this war, a very few on our side have actually surrendered that I know of, but looking at nations that are showing no evidence of resistance indicates that a significant number have apparently become demoralised from the onslaught and have simply abandoned their nations altogether.

 

More people gone whom we shall never see again. How is that fun for you?

 

One thing that this has done for us: After yet another culling within our ranks, those who hold honour above statistics form an even higher percentage of our membership. That is what you are facing; people who truly do not care how much technology, infrastructure etc. they lose, so long as we stay together and never waver in our resolve.

 

This is all fun and games to your sort, but there is a body count that has accelerated because of you and those whom you secretly despise you have duped into filling war slots against those on our side.

 

This defines your lot as a pathogenic presence.

 

Hopefully enough of the world will realise this before it is too late.

 

 

If you are implying that our wars have driven people out of CN, certainly some people have quit. This is also true for every global war (and usually non-global wars), so I don't think this is a fair criticism of the way we play the game our the effect it has. Nor do I concur that our wars are all simply the result of boredom, that's certainly a factor but we're not a barbarian horde as some would like to depict us DBDC has been playing the political game as well albeit with its own special twist on things, but is it such a bad thing to shake up old political structures especially when those structures don't necessarily benefit certain alliance styles or structures?

 

You also imply that this game would not be losing people if we returned to the political wars stagnation of the past, and to that I completely disagree, the downward trend of people leaving began far before DBDC was every created. The political system is captivating certainly if you are actively involved with the politics but if not then you sit around waiting for something to happen, and once you finish purchasing your improvements and wonders there's really not much else to do. Compound that with people playing for a decade, well many of us don't have the free time we did have when we were 16 and aren't wanting/able to commit the time to be actively involved in politics and so the game would be far more boring and probably not offer much in the way of retention value. You could also say that the neutrals, arguably the exact opposite of ourselves, have been the pushing force behind the decline of the game as they have massive nations that just keep growing that anybody starting out today, working in either the neutral sphere or in the political war sphere, would have basically zero chance of catching up to, and even if they did it would take several years [now i'm not saying that's unfair since they did put in several years as well but still].

 

So you may have already guessed but we obviously aren't a group of teenagers. As to accountability, we've given plenty of people opportunities to hold us accountable, and sometimes have been [although not necessarily militarily]. As to why bother building up your nation, well I think you answered your own question. If you are playing this game to uphold certain priniciples and somebody tries to destroy you based on different principles then the point of building would be to try and support a resistance against the things in the world you oppose. If you just sit around and think oh well no point in building cause i'll just get knocked down again then you've already lost, if you don't even try then what was the point in starting the game in the first point? Also if you ask me a debate centered around political rhetoric isn't really much of a debate to begin with, at least a debate with guns would probably achieve something in the end.

 

As to abandonment, is this necessarily a bad thing? I've seen some cases of abandonment, but they're usually people who were wholly unprepared for an aggressive military encounter. I'm stereotyping but in general those that abandon were lacking warchests, or military, or hadn't been tech dealing, basically were not very active or organized to begin with. This is a different play style and I don't think its fair to hold us accountable for attacking people that were unprepared in a game where war is not an uncommon event. To those that are just demoralised, well certainly being at war is demoralising, hence the term war weariness. But is it really the job of the attackers to rally the morale of the defenders? Being on the losing side sucks, sure, but it is the job of an alliance and its leaders to plan for worst case scenarios, make the community fun and attractive, etc. so that when such events arise that the group sticks together. If when confronted with a challenge you collapse as a group its easy to blame those that presented you with the challenge but that doesn't mean you shouldn't also be taking a look around at why things collapsed and determining what could be done to improve morale going forward to prevent such challenges from occurring again. [and of course how to maneuver politically to prevent such events from occurring again]

 

As for how is this fun? [I mean come on, who hasn't secretly wanted to kinda kick a neutral around for a while now, but i digress] Well, i'm going to be a bit elusive but I'll answer your question with one of my own. How fun would Risk be if we just let everybody own one country and nothing ever changed. We'd just keep building our armies every turn. Or how much fun would monopoly be if all you did was rolled the die and never purchased any property. Nobody would want to play, especially not for years. I guess my answer is this is fun for a large number of reasons. There's the camaraderie of participating in a war with you alliance mates. There's the thrill of not knowing exactly how any given war might turn out. There's the satisfaction of knowing that planning that went into place is finally being acted upon. There's fun in watching people get mad at you on the OWF because their plans weren't as good/succesful ;-). [sorry couldn't resist the jab]. In essence it is fun because this is a game, and we're playing it because we like the game and the people in it. If it wasn't fun we wouldn't be doing it. Its of course easier to find the fun in such things when you're on the winning side.

 

You call us pathogenic but the largest alliances in this game have not changed really changed all that much in a very long time and the number of nations playing the game decreased heavily before we were created. In fact we've just turned two years old, I still think its far too early in our existence for anybody to claim that we have had a net positive or negative impact on this game. Have we potentially changed political dynamics and structures, sure. Whether those changes are good are bad are still yet to be seen, and i would argue your glasses are tinged with the bias of being on the opposite side of us during these changes.

 

In any case Sir hoppington is out of brussels sprouts again so time to head back onto the battlefield....

[Pastor Jason]

 
Blood for the Blood God.

Actually whats wrong with this singular goal. Simplifies things a helluvah lot.

[Walshington]

 

Wall of text

 

Kinda what he said.

 

The TL;DR for the last half of this thread is "That's life in the big city."

 

DBDC pulled a game changer, and created a powerful upper-tier force with a tremendous system of support == all within the physics of Planet Bob.  If Polar could have done so (or any other alliance), they would have. We're all subject to the same physics.  But they didn't -- it was DBDC.

 

You may say you would act differently had it been Polar -- but that is irrelevant.  The world is what the world is -- if DBDC is creating the resistance you claim, their overthrow will come eventually, but someone's going to have to make it happen.

 

A sports analogy: Football for years was played with a massive run game.  Student body left, student body right.  Then someone came up with a pass oriented offense -- high risk, high reward.  Purists said that wasn't real football -- real football established the run and dominated the clock. Nevertheless, the forward pass was within the rules, and transformed from a "gadget play" to the way things were done.  Defenses were forced to adapt, which ultimately was good for the game of football.

 

I'll tell you what didn't stop the forward pass -- stern disapproval of it.

[The Zigur]

Actually whats wrong with this singular goal. Simplifies things a helluvah lot.

 

It is a highly individualist goal that clashes strongly with collective goals. In other words, the only way it contributes to any sort of community is if that community is comprised of individuals having the same kinds of goals (like bandit gangs or barbarian holds). It leaves no room for the productive unless producers band together for collective defensive (as with Polaris). Traditionally Order has always trumped Chaos, which is why such a strong atmosphere of civilization developed (OOC)strong IC environment(/OOC). But with DBDC suddenly Chaos has an opportunity to defeat Order (at least in the upper tiers for now), thus degenerating civilization. Worse, many alliances align with this powerful chaotic influence in opposition to their own long term interests for short-sighted, short term gains.

 

Now, I think there are some in DBDC who realize this is a problem and are attempting to resolve this. I think Polaris welcomes all intelligent DBDC members to our forums to discuss how to resolve this problem. But until Order (and Order-based philosophy) can be imposed within DBDC I don't know if there will be a long-term resolution of the core problem even if there is a peace agreement.

Edited January 27, 2015 by Tywin Lannister

[Gh0s7]

You have wonderful diplomatic skill. Obviously the constant insulting of our side is the right way to go in order to get the anti-DBDC thing to gain traction. Call them stupid until they do as you say in order to not be called stupid? Simply brilliant.

 

Also, since you're dictating who will be masked as a diplomat at Polaris' forums, are you saying you have an official position in NpO's FAs department? Just curious, because otherwise you should edit out that bit from your post.

 

 

 

I think Polaris welcomes all intelligent DBDC members to our forums to discuss how to resolve this problem. But until Order (and Order-based philosophy) can be imposed within DBDC I don't know if there will be a long-term resolution of the core problem even if there is a peace agreement.

^ Before he edits it

[Alexio15]

You have wonderful diplomatic skill. Obviously the constant insulting of our side is the right way to go in order to get the anti-DBDC thing to gain traction. Call them stupid until they do as you say in order to not be called stupid? Simply brilliant.

 

Also, since you're dictating who will be masked as a diplomat at Polaris' forums, are you saying you have an official position in NpO's FAs department? Just curious, because otherwise you should edit out that bit from your post.

 

 

^ Before he edits it

Ghost you work quick...

[The Zigur]

You have wonderful diplomatic skill. Obviously the constant insulting of our side is the right way to go in order to get the anti-DBDC thing to gain traction. Call them stupid until they do as you say in order to not be called stupid? Simply brilliant.

 

Also, since you're dictating who will be masked as a diplomat at Polaris' forums, are you saying you have an official position in NpO's FAs department? Just curious, because otherwise you should edit out that bit from your post.

 

 

^ Before he edits it

 

I simply expressed who I think is welcomed to visit the Order. That in no way expresses formal policy as decided by The Emperor.

 

In any case, I typed out a thoughtful question in the private DBDC embassy that formal members of DBDC are welcomed to visit and answer :)

Edited January 27, 2015 by Tywin Lannister

[Artigo]

 

What you are "#1" at is nothing to be proud of. That is like being proud of how many dishes you can break in your neighbour's house.

 

I don't get proud of my gaming achievements, but I do enjoy competitive ladder and so far were on top  :smug:

[Artigo]

 

fat, hairy 

 

 

Excuse me, sweaty.  

 

My body is shredded like the Gods of Mt. Olympus and is ritualistically shaven, daily.  Pepper thine angus.

[kingzog]

 

I don't get proud of my gaming achievements, but I do enjoy competitive ladder and so far were on top  :smug:

 

All you're good at is breaking the contract of peace that is written in the hearts of....well, no one, I suppose.