How is this place still alive?

[IYIyTh]

I keep checking back twice a year hoping to see some decent prose in declarations of war, but it seems it's about the same as it has been for nearly 5+ years.

 

Still remember reading logs of the goons 1.0, \m/, continuum days, schattenman leaks... and being so utterly disappointed at the lack of bredth in alliance leaders much later.

 

This game was most fun on the individual alliance level, as OOC friendships tainted most of the global politics and was not as nuanced nor easily surmountable as internal politics. Being in alliances with vibrant personalities and semi-democratic government's was an absolute joy -- and the internal dynamics were simply a pleasure to navigate.

 

But i guess it had to end some day. Once folks started colluding to avoid intriguing conflict and conspiriacies the game started on its nose dive. While admin can be criticized in developing appropiate late game scaling and improvements, the real fault of the games end lies with the players. Lacking ambition and with no purpose other than to create insurmountable advantages rather than forcing conflict (and thereby forcing players to interact with the internal and external communities,) the game predictably collapsed. Congrats on being towers over nothing instead of keeping the game interesting.

 

Shout out to all of the ol' former NATOans, MHAers, R&Rers, AI and MI6ians. Friend or foe, whether fun or not, it was always entertaining.

 

 

Edited November 28, 2018 by IYIyTh

[Wobblies]

So you just came to piss in our cheerios?

[IYIyTh]

2 minutes ago, Wobblies said:

So you just came to piss in our cheerios?

The people responsible for the death of the game know who they are. The overall community was never truly at fault. A handful of shortsighted folks lacking imagination and too happy to just churn along with OOC friendships rather than understanding the rise and fall of all is what made this game great. Really just came back to wave to all of the folks I've seen posting their buhbyes.

[Franz Ferdinand]

2 hours ago, IYIyTh said:

The people responsible for the death of the game know who they are. The overall community was never truly at fault. A handful of shortsighted folks lacking imagination and too happy to just churn along with OOC friendships rather than understanding the rise and fall of all is what made this game great. Really just came back to wave to all of the folks I've seen posting their buhbyes.

See you in MI6 Private.

[Knights of the Grail]

9 hours ago, IYIyTh said:

Once folks started colluding to avoid intriguing conflict and conspiriacies the game started on its nose dive.

 

There was no collusion.

Where is your nation anyway?

[General Kanabis]

It's not so bad.

Discord kind of livened things up for a second.

 

Methrage is still out there somewhere. Always fun to watch him flail around.

 

and there's Junka I guess. But he's like a broken toy that just repeats the same sentence.

 

Plenty of life left here IMO, you just gotta know where to find it.

[Master Hakai]

oculus was about the community coming together to ensure there will never be anything challenging or interesting in this game ever again. not that i care i'm just here to make fun of losers for being the worst! still oculus was the dumbest thing that's ever been done in this game and i will continue to give them kudos for that.

[Monster]

Not really sure what you expected to happen. It's a game with a limited lifespan and people don't have infinite regenerative capacity.  The only recruiting alliances that maintained recruitment well for a long time are NPO/IRON/Polar. Everyone else didn't want to do the work of integrating new players, my alliances included, and the more you kept relying on old players to stick around forever to make non-recruiting alliances work, the worse it was going to get, especially as there was a decision to not grow the game. The game is a business at the end of the day and not a public service and the owner made the decision not to try increase the playercount after a certain point.  It's not the player job to make the admin money outside of the donations so if he wanted to expand the game and replace losses, he could have done a number of things.  The tech transfer level being increased was also terrible. The focus has been on older players for a long time and it wasn't a good business model for growing the game. 

 

The fact that the notion that the game would be vibrant without Oculus is still prominent just means you haven't been paying attention to the patterns of people quitting. It was hard to keep people caring at all even 5 years ago. Even 7 years ago, I had players had started in 2011 telling me they weren't going to play forever.  When I rejoined after a 10 months hiatus between 2012 and 2013 a lot of people had already started leaving and most alliances had difficulty getting people to declare and I had to basically put in a lot of effort to deal with the rampant inactivity in my alliance at the time and some people just were done.  The big merger alliances like NG and TLR showed signs of rotting away for years. People ultimately aren't making the decision to disband because of the politics of the game rather because they're moving on.  Basically all that would happen is someone would lose and wouldn't be able to recover their tech levels while NPO would be able to continue to build up its tech levels.  As long as there are only two alliances that can recruit and move tech around at highly efficient levels due to having the perma tech sellers then there was never going to be much competition in terms of the tech race within a war or two.   Most alliances do not have enough control over their members and haven't for years.

 

At the end of the Oculus isn't particularly formidable below 150k NS, so you could orchestrate plenty of action below that strength level. They have a ton of strength locked up out of range which you can easily avoid.  You could siege a decent amount of people in these alliances even. It's your decision to expect NPO/IRON/etc. to do all the entertaining for you and put the manhours into coalition planning. I can tell you the past big wars like Karma and BiPolar took a lot of effort that people in this game aren't interested in putting. You can have all these forces on paper but when people have been out of touch with their alliance in any real capacity for years, it means nothing.

 

 

Anyway the numbers don't really prove your case.  They may show Oculus is the reason a few alliances quit the game, but that's about it. I remember in Oculus' first war, STA was already on its last legs along with plenty of other alliances.

 

 

If the number of people in the game who actually want to play the game actively were the only ones counted, the game's membercount would be around 1000 or so at most. The game has been propped by people leaving their nations as online memorials. 

 

Here you go, somebody rationally predicted the current count 5 years ago rather than basically "the game would be awesome if it went *my way*  instead"

 

On 11/7/2013 at 3:39 PM, kingly said:

 

 

 

Just a little update on something I did a while ago, above you can see the CN member count over time, good news is we're beating the best case scenario from last year for this time, bad news is we're about to drop below 10k members, and will likely drop below 5k by 2017. Somewhere in the area enclosed between the two extrapolations is the death of cn, my guess being sometime around late 2017 to mid 2018.

Edited November 30, 2018 by Monster

[The Zigur]

Dead game + incredibly toxic alliance governments = Low activity.

Edited November 30, 2018 by The Zigur

[Monster]

The alliance governments are the only half-way active people. Most alliances have always been dependent on a large group of people that would let the leadership do stuff and then show up to fight. When the slightest inconvenience irl means someone is too busy to play the game or click links, then it's over. It's an increasing trend with the browser games as people get older, they don''t want to put any effort into the game anymore. It's just "Oh I started in x year and I'd rather not let it go" until they forget. It would be better if all the inactive alliances disbanded and deleted so we could see the real numbers of players, but that's not going to happen.

[jerdge]

Hey Myth!

 

19 hours ago, Monster said:

The focus has been on older players for a long time and it wasn't a good business model for growing the game.

Even those that still pay any attention to anything don't really care anymore, not even just to complain about anything. Kevin decided to reward seniority over everything else and to look the other way about a lot of bad stuff. And here we are.

 

Who cares, anyway.

Edited November 30, 2018 by jerdge

[The Zigur]

2 hours ago, Monster said:

The alliance governments are the only half-way active people. Most alliances have always been dependent on a large group of people that would let the leadership do stuff and then show up to fight. 

 

That's true, but when I say toxic, I mean the prevalence of government officers who are motivated by exercising petty power-trips over other players.

 

I've lost count of the homophobic insults made by Grub, Term and others towards myself, along with the bragging about driving people from the game. That's a consequence of competent political players leaving the game for greener pastures, but it's also an overlooked catalyst that drives further community decline.

Edited November 30, 2018 by The Zigur

[ericsw]

2 hours ago, The Zigur said:

 

That's true, but when I say toxic, I mean the prevalence of government officers who are motivated by exercising petty power-trips over other players.

 

I've lost count of the homophobic insults made by Grub, Term and others towards myself, along with the bragging about driving people from the game. That's a consequence of competent political players leaving the game for greener pastures, but it's also an overlooked catalyst that drives further community decline.

 

sounds like u might be a homosapien 

[Vaslov]

When people get tired of CyberNations, where do they go? To other games or sims? I know CN was originally inspired by a certain nation simulation that I apparently cannot name here (it is censored).

Edited December 1, 2018 by Vaslov

[The Zigur]

2 hours ago, Vaslov said:

When people get tired of CyberNations, where do they go? To other games or sims? I know CN was originally inspired by a certain nation simulation that I apparently cannot name here (it is censored).

 

I play something completely unrelated, requiring infinitely greater reflexes and skill.

[Monster]

10 hours ago, Vaslov said:

When people get tired of CyberNations, where do they go? To other games or sims? I know CN was originally inspired by a certain nation simulation that I apparently cannot name here (it is censored).

Some people might pretend it's other sims, but it's mostly a small minority that goes to other sims. Most people due to becoming less interested in long-term gaming commitments stick to games where it's one off or it's just one session until the next one. A lot of the time when I used to still try to keep people in CN, I'd have to go up to them on steam and they were usually playing a variety of games. Some popular games are like Call of Duty, League of Legends, Overwatch,  CSGO, Rainbow Six Siege, PUBG,  and others of the sort along with the games that are single player but can be played on one's own schedule like  Nier Automata, Hitman,  Paradox gamesetc. I know some people are also playing EVE Online and other MMOs like Runescape/Final Fantasy.

[General Kanabis]

16 hours ago, Vaslov said:

When people get tired of CyberNations, where do they go? To other games or ...

 

Most people just find something similar because they're masochists.

Edited December 1, 2018 by General Kanabis

[The Big Bad]

14 hours ago, The Zigur said:

 

I play something completely unrelated, requiring infinitely greater reflexes and skill.

 

Your Pokémon Go skills are a legend on the playground.

[Master Hakai]

charts and graphs to explain why treatying the entire game to itself did not kill it

[Monster]

3 hours ago, Master Hakai said:

charts and graphs to explain why treatying the entire game to itself did not kill it

dem stats contradict muh feelings!

Edited December 2, 2018 by Monster
switched to !@#$postmode

[AlmightyGrub]

On 12/1/2018 at 9:34 AM, The Zigur said:

 

That's true, but when I say toxic, I mean the prevalence of government officers who are motivated by exercising petty power-trips over other players.

 

I've lost count of the homophobic insults made by Grub, Term and others towards myself, along with the bragging about driving people from the game. That's a consequence of competent political players leaving the game for greener pastures, but it's also an overlooked catalyst that drives further community decline.

 

Hi Junka. 

You have contributed more to people leaving this world than I ever have (fact).  Your continual ''its all about me me me'' dribble continues to toxify this planet more than any other factor.

You made up the content of the above comment, without regard to facts or evidence.  Terminator may well have said some 'direct' things about you, but you bought every insult aimed at you directly on yourself.  Seriously, stop inventing a narrative based on a delusion.  You are global warming, you are the hole in the ozone layer, you are rising sea levels.  You were not ever good enough, not ever.  Nothing you ever did was significant, you will not be remembered as anything other than a loud mouth failure. 

 

For the record, Bob is dead because it is time for it to be dead, not particularly because anyone did anything to anyone.  The fact there is a few people still going through the motions when they have the time is not the reason thousands of people found other things to do.... they just found other things to do.  Competence will always lose to active. 

 

I used to be your hero, you used to worship me, but you are naive and stupid and immature, even for a try hard. 

 

Stick a fork in it, it is done.

 

 

 

 

 

[Tevron]

I think that people within Oculus understate its impact in killing the game (which is large) but that the problem of individual friendships coinciding with natural decline is much worse. There is also not enough government turn-over in CN to create real moves anymore. Since I joined in 2010 Pacifica went through 6 regime changes, Polaris went through 3, and IRON went through 2. Alliances like those in CnG, as well as the other periphery and Oculus alliances also had very little shakeups. Even with mandatory terms (such as in GATO) there was little shakeup in government because of similarly minded people rising to the top. Alliances like every one Canik has led have had him at the top for as long as I can remember (Love you dude). This CAN be good, but none of the governments in top alliances are at all volatile, which means that when we do become friends even disbandment simply consolidates active leadership that we already know and respect, which leads to situations where we take no political action. If we had more upward mobility, and used those active middle management members who have faded away due to their inability to find a footing in tenured alliances, then I think the game would have a stronger community today. This does require us at the top of our alliances to give up power though, and that is not happening when a lot of us are the most competent people our alliances have left. 

[Master Hakai]

okolous: yo we should sign a treaty with every alliance in cyber nation!

 

*cyber nation dies

 

ockulous:

 

[Monster]

8 hours ago, Tevron said:

I think that people within Oculus understate its impact in killing the game (which is large) but that the problem of individual friendships coinciding with natural decline is much worse. There is also not enough government turn-over in CN to create real moves anymore. Since I joined in 2010 Pacifica went through 6 regime changes, Polaris went through 3, and IRON went through 2. Alliances like those in CnG, as well as the other periphery and Oculus alliances also had very little shakeups. Even with mandatory terms (such as in GATO) there was little shakeup in government because of similarly minded people rising to the top. Alliances like every one Canik has led have had him at the top for as long as I can remember (Love you dude). This CAN be good, but none of the governments in top alliances are at all volatile, which means that when we do become friends even disbandment simply consolidates active leadership that we already know and respect, which leads to situations where we take no political action. If we had more upward mobility, and used those active middle management members who have faded away due to their inability to find a footing in tenured alliances, then I think the game would have a stronger community today. This does require us at the top of our alliances to give up power though, and that is not happening when a lot of us are the most competent people our alliances have left. 

It continued on a statistical trajectory it had been charting. The problem of personnel you bring up is a symptom and not a cause. If alliances don't gain new players that want to do stuff, then the old ones will have to stay or the alliances goes inactive. Alliances always had an issue of limited personnel wanting to do the work and actually stay consistent. Plenty of wanted titles but not the work. There aren't really that many people that would have wanted to preside over adminstering a growingly inactive group of people. Even if there was someone to replace the head of each alliance, there wouldn't be enough people to staff it properly.

 

The politically/alliance government active people along with OWF posters have always been a tiny minority tend to project their own desires onto the rest of the game. The problem with that projection is you need the rest of the game(file and rank) to execute the actions you want to happen. If they're not invested enough in it, it doesn't matter what you do.  Most of the people complaining about the game dying right now were people that either were the tiny minority and didn't have the activity/organizational willpower within their own alliances or they were people that collected every ex-gov reroll they could find to make an active alliance, which isn't  healthy either. If the rank and file of each alliance was interested, then there would be more conflict as it would be difficult to prevent people from going rogue if it went too long.

 

Basically for a game to have a healthy community it has to incorporate that the fact most people won't stick around forever and be attractive to new players. I can tell you most new players don't really get a kick out of a game where they basically are stuck way behind everyone and in most cases will find alliances that are wastelands. This was close to being the case years ago. If they get to leadership even in this context, there is no reason for the out of touch nations in their alliances to listen to them. "who are you".

 

 

2 hours ago, Master Hakai said:

okolous: yo we should sign a treaty with every alliance in cyber nation!

 

*cyber nation dies

 

ockulous:

 

 

 

 

[jerdge]

9 hours ago, Monster said:

Except maybe Hakai wasn't talking of the number of players?

 

While at macro level your reasonings about activity, seniority etc are largely correct (IMHO), at micro level it's still possible to have areas ("islands") of activity and engagement, and it's probably true that Oculus stands in the way of these islands of activity, "unnecessarily" making difficult for them to play and to enjoy the game in an environment open to possibilities.

(I say "probably" because I didn't really pay any attention to it.)

 

The one thing that could probably help this game to (at least) allow the active minority (which is out there) to still have some fun, would be the disbandment of all the ancient alliances that aren't doing anything anymore, but which are still statistically significant.

(Yeah, the GPA could disband too, I'd actually welcome it... on the other hand the GPA is definitely not part of what renders CN this stale.)