I do agree it should have happened earlier, but I don't blame the players for not realizing it.
They were playing the game the way they knew to play the game and doing it to the best of their abilities.
And those abilities were very great indeed.
Of course the abilities of their enemies were very great indeed as well.
I doubt Cagil and Tara ever would have become as strong as they were if they did not have enemies the caliber of Falasan and Abington that drove them to become stronger to survive. It truly was the best of times in one of the greatest continent-wide conflicts ever seen in the game, and the fact that someone truly did "win" and gain effective control over the entire continent was amazing.
I should have been saved for all time. I'm honest here. It should have been enshrined as one of the crowning moments of the game and saved so anyone could log in and look at it to see just what things were like. The database forever paused and never moving another day so people could pop in and take a look whenever they felt like it.
And then Atamara should have been reset on an active server like every war island ever was when someone WON THE GAME. But that wasn't on the players to decide to do. The admins should have done that. I don't blame them for not doing it either. They kept hoping if they tweaked something they could force the players to change how they played and do something different. But the players were stubborn and didn't cooperate because they didn't see the problem.
I didn't see the problem when I was just another player on Atamara. I didn't see the problem until I became Tyrant of Tara and looked around and thought...well...frak. This sucks. What do we do with this pile of crap? I've always assumed that is why the last Tyrant before me stopped playing. He couldn't figure out what to do. Honestly, neither could I. But I did know one thing after my third day as Tyrant. The Cagil-Tara Alliance had to die if there was too be any future on Atamara.
In the end, we did it. The players broke the alliance and started the biggest war since...well...the LAST big war on Atamara. And it was shaping up to drag the whole continent into it with fractured alliances that were going to blow the kittens out of the rafters.
Then the admins sunk Atamara on us.
I don't blame the players for winning on Atamara. And I don't blame the admins for failing to figure out how to fix it. I do credit the players for figuring out how to fix it with the powers they had bringing life back into the continent.
And I blame the admins for sinking it after the players did all of that hard work. They proved that they would punish the players even if the players did everything right and went out of their way to fix things it wasn't normally in their job description to do. And that object lesson was not good for the game. A lot of players left over it and never returned. And that's just a bloody shame in my mind.
