From The Rulers Channel on Discord - Small realms

[Zakky]

Yet people keep trying to do it, over and over. They accept the gold loss, they accept the constant region maintenance.

A big problem, at least on Dwi and BT, is the map is too big for the player base. Realms have rogue buffer zones between them. The maps need to be scaled back so they work with the player base we have.

Yes only on Dwi and BT where they can fund themselves by looting rogue regions. When you have another source of income, the penalty becomes somewhat meaningless. There are a lot of infiltrators on Dwi and BT dedicated to stealing gold from rogue regions. Realms on EC would be a better example. Realms that do not have enough reserve gold will suffer. Unfortunately the ones that should suffer are too rich at the moment.

There is no solid solution for Dwi and BT map problem. It is quite hard to close the gap when cities are far apart themselves. Not to mention people not wanting to leave their historical homelands.

[Medron Pryde]

There's also the issue that not everybody agrees on what the "right way of playing" is.

Every time you place a hard restraint in, some people will like it, and some people will hate.

I'm always proud of what we did in Atamara for instance, breaking up the Cagilan-Taran alliance and starting a continent-spanning civil war to drag in every nation.

Then the Devs then announced that they were going to sink the island because they didn't like the Cagilan-Taran alliance.   ::)

To this day, some people like that decision, and some people hate it.  I hate it because we never got to see how the civil war shook out.  That's more of a roleplaying or storytelling issue, though.  I dislike it when a story is halted in mid-chapter.

On the other hand, with the dwindling player base, it was the right decision to close down some islands.  So...your mileage may vary.

And now we have Sirion doing exactly what Cagil and Tara did in the old days, and they have the benefit of our handsight on the issue.

On the issue of noble counts, I would greatly wish that priests and perhaps other "support" nobles not count towards the 1 noble per island limit.    Granted, I am an example of somebody who would benefit, since all three of my noble characters run in that area.  I have taken those roles because the realm or religion NEEDS people to do it.  Somebody had to do it, so I chose in the end to do it.  Because most people want to run around and shoot stuff with their archer or infantry buddies.  Honestly, I would love to do that to, and wish I could.  But because the game still requires support nobles to keep the realms and religions working, I choose to help keep them running so the other players can...well...play.

[Vita`]

Then the Devs then announced that they were going to sink the island because they didn't like the Cagilan-Taran alliance.   ::)

That is a very disingenuous interpretation of what happened. No decision was made because anyone didn't like the alliance. The issue was that what you did in Atamara came too late and should've happened years earlier. Our decision to sink Atamara was made before the any Continental civil war happened.

[Medron Pryde]

Ok.  The right way to say it would be that the dev or admins didn't like what the Cagil-Taran Alliance had DONE to Atamara in years past.

Which was...namely...WIN.  Previous generations of players forged an alliance of brothers between the two realms so strong that that they were inseparable and had done so well in war and politics that they'd done what we all thought was unthinkable outside the war islands.  Win.

I've long maintained that the admins should have congratulated the winners, exactly what is done on the war islands, and reset the island back to its beginning state.  But neither that nor anything else was ever done to force a reset on the island.

So the players decided to create our own reset by breaking up the alliance for the betterment of the island.  We put together an awesome roleplaying reason to do it, kicked it off, and sent the entire island into a rapidly escalating civil war that had already engulfed most of the realms.

And THEN the admins announced they were sinking the island before anybody found out how everything shook out.

I have no idea when they DECIDED to sink the island, but I do when the admins made their intentions to sink the island known to players.  And it was a long, LONG time after we'd put a massive amount of work into FIXING the problem with the island on our own.

Which was...a bit of a kick in the teeth to the players that had worked so hard to fix everything.

[Anaris]

We've heard your opinion on this many times now, Medron. I get that, from some points of view, it was an impressive achievement.

What it was not is any good for BattleMaster.

Which was...namely...WIN. 

Say it with me, people.

You cannot win BattleMaster.

One group of people managed to be so laser-focused on military prowess that they managed to oppress the continent for years, driving away anyone who wanted to play in a different realm or a different way, beating them down until they finally surrendered and joined the behemoth, because what the hell else were they going to do?

So, yeah, by the time we sank Atamara, there was some movement afoot towards something more healthy. But it was much too little, much too late.

If you had decided to do that two years previously, then we might, in fact, have congratulated you. As it stands, your "achievement" was built on the backs of many players' destroyed fun and enjoyment of the game.

[Medron Pryde]

And that's the problem.

We've heard your opinion on this many times now.  I get that, from your point of view, it was a laser-focused military prowess that managed to oppress the continent for years.

But seeing it only as that is NOT any good for BattleMaster.

Say it with me.

Cagil and Tara were brothers.

Period.  !@#$ing.  Dot.

It wasn't a mere military alliance.  It never was.  It was two federated brother nations that had fought to defend the other for over a decade of real life time.  When I started playing in 2006, Tara was down to 3 regions and only the fact that Cagil garrisoned Foda kept the realm alive at all.  It was with Cagilan aid that Tara expanded and took over the nations intent on destroying us, and a decade later their federation still stood when I was Tyrant of Tara.  If there is a single federation in all of BattleMaster that lasted as long as the Cagil-Taran Federation, I'd love to hear about it.  The characters and players who spent all that time fighting at each others' backs, often against alliances three or four times our size, had never known a time when Cagil and Tara were not brothers.  Literally.  Fight to the death to protect the other because we knew the other would do the same for us.  Fighting each other wasn't just unthinkable.  It was unimaginable.  I actually would have kicked off a civil war in Tara to remain brothers with Cagil if anyone had suggested breaking our federation.  I'm not joking.  This was roleplaying, pure and simple, exactly what we are supposed to do in BattleMaster.

I get that you don't like it, because in the end it led to a static situation in Atamara.  But stop blaming the players for playing their characters and the game exactly the way they were supposed to.  I don't think anybody expected us to actually WIN the bloody continent the way we did, and we had no clue how to undo it once we did.  On the war continents, we just reset it so the losers get another go at winning, but it wasn't suppose to be possible on a continent the size of Atamara, so there was no PLAN to reset it.  And I totally get that when that didn't happen on Atamara, it DID affect the enjoyment and fun of other people on the continent.  No one wants to lose and to know they never have a chance of winning.

Something should have been done to shake things up when it became clear what had happened on Atamara.  I totally agree with you.  The difference is that I don't blame the players that didn't know how to fix it for not fixing it at the time.  I get that the admins tried to shake things up with their ice ages and other stuff, but it was much too little, much too late.  If you (admins) had decided to do something drastic years previously, we almost certainly would not have congratulated you at the time.  But breaking up the Cagil-Tara Federation (like the admins have now broken up other large alliances) could have shaken things up.  Doing something drastic like an ice age (call it a volcanic eruption) that separated Cagil and Tara and erased their border areas also could have shaken things up.

But since you didn't do anything drastic to force a change, it came down to the players to muddle our way into finding a way to do it ourselves.  Which we did.  We players chose to sacrifice the one defining trait of our nations over more than a decade of gameplay, and even figured out how to do it in a way that made sense for our characters.  All for the good of the continent so we could revitalize the game and kick off the biggest war in years.

And then the admins thanked us by telling us they were going to sink the continent.

I remember one of the players from Cagil I think saying something after the announcement came down.  It was to the effect of "If we'd know this was going to happen, we wouldn't have betrayed our oaths and just remained brothers to the end."  It's a bittersweet statement that holds true now just as much as it did then.

Years later, people like you continue to blame us for the problem that we went WAY out of our way as players to FIX.

If we'd known you were going to do that, we would have happily remained brothers to the end and given you the collective middle finger as you sank our island around us.  Because that's the kind of brothers Cagil and Foda were to the very end.  The kind of brothers that took no guff from anyone and were always ready to rumble.  Brothers like that made the game FUN, and I will always miss them in these modern days of wishy-washy friends and acquaintances whose words aren't worth the electrons they are printed on...

[Anaris]

Medron, I want to make a couple of things quite clear: First, I applaud you most sincerely for the efforts you made at the end. It's exactly that sort of thingâ€"finding a way, in-character and without just having someone turn around and say, "A-ha! I was actually evil all along!" or something like that, to change longstanding character- and realm-defining characteristics that are creating an unfun environmentâ€"that we need to encourage much, much more of. That was really good, and I want to find ways to incentivize and reward that type of behaviour. I truly do regret the necessity of sinking Atamara, especially since you were starting to pull it out of the death spiral it was in.

Second, there was absolutely more we devs/admins could have done to fix the situation back then. We had never been faced with this kind of problem, and our "player-driven content" ethos really hamstrung us in figuring out how we could make things better. Even without breaking that, there's no reason we couldn't have implemented back then what I'm working on now (an in-game OOC message channel for rulers and admins to connect, with all messages publicly visible).

But as far as Atamara itself goes, basically everyone who was not already part of the Cagil bloc had been telling you guys for many years before the sinkingâ€"years before the island had become totally stagnantâ€"that the bloc's dominance was a problem, it was hurting the game, it was leading to stagnation, etc, etc. And the players within the bloc always just dismissed that as whiners whining because they weren't winning. That is what was not OK then and is not OK now: Deciding that just because you're winning at the war part of the game, that necessarily means you must be doing things "right," and you don't have to listen to any criticisms. And frankly, all I'm hoping for from you is an acknowledgement that yeah, maybe you should've listened earlier, and maybe you didn't do everything perfectlyâ€"maybe you could have stopped and looked ahead at the consequences of what you were doing, and seen that it could be a problem.

[Zakky]

I've seen three types of reaction from sinking of Atamara.

1) People who were angry about getting their favourite island destroyed.

2) People who were glad Atamara was deleted

3) People who were upset that they did not get to enjoy the war that was happening there before Atamara was deleted.

I personally think devs should have let that CE bloc vs Rest sort out before sinking the island but it is too late now. I don't know why CE bloc did not act sooner. Devs could have warned them better I guess. Like literally threatening to sink the island before just telling them they were going to sink AT. It is hard to tell sinking the island did anything positive. The game lost a decent chunk of players from it. We are still seeing large alliance blocs despite having limits. They just won't be all in one group but won't fight each other. Not sure it is something mechanics can solve. Can discourage people by disincentivizing it further maybe.

[Medron Pryde]

I'm strongly in camp three.  Granted, I would have preferred the island not be sunk at all, but I do generally agree that some islands had to be sunk due to the dropping player base.

As for the timing, I agree that somebody should have done something to fix the issue before we did.  What I will say is this.  I had no idea what it was like on the continent when I was just a player.  All I saw was us playing around with the Cagilans and marching around from time to time to do things.  Was it super active compared to other continents?  No.  But we'd built something good and could have fun if we looked for something to do.  Which I did.  I became the Duke of Foda and did stuff.  I think I held tournaments and arranged stuff and...you know...did the stuff players do when they aren't in the middle of a continent-spanning war.  As a player in Tara, I didn't see a problem, because things looked pretty good.  If other people complained that it wasn't fun, it didn't match my experience so I kinda brushed it off.

Then several Tyrants in a row got elected and disappeared, and I could tell that Tara was....in trouble.  So I decided to buckle up and see what I could do stabilize things.  I don't know if anybody ran against me, but I won pretty easy, and then I had access to all the reports of a ruler.  And access to the ruler channels.  And everything else that goes with that.  I started looking first at the entire federation, then the entire alliance the federation was part of, and THEN the nations outside the alliance and I started realizing for the first time that something really was rotten in Atamara.  For one thing, it was almost impossible to really start a war because every nation had allied up with at least one member of the central alliance.  That was just one little thing and there were many others.

As a character, Regstav was still utterly devoted to Cagil, but as a ruling player I could see that the Cagil-Tara federation had to die to shake things up.  The trick was figuring out how to do it.  So I started talking with other rulers who wanted to kill it, and did everything I could to shake things up.  And at the same time, the other rulers who could see the same thing I did started to realize the same thing.  We were literally talking in the main alliance group that had something like a third of the island's population in it about how we were going to kill this thing.  ALL OOC of course.  IC, we were arguing about which one of us was loyal to Cagil and which one was betraying Cagil.  ;)  Which ended up being the stick we used to break it in the end.  Hehehe.

Absolutely, something should have been done earlier.  But it wasn't.  So it ended up being my generation of rulers and governmental leaders who did it.

The main sticking point for me in the end, is that we didn't get to see how things turned out.  It would have been awesome to have seen that one, last glorious war go down and see who fell.  I was privately giving Tara a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, though I was doing everything in my power to tweak those percentages.  I will note that when I became Tyrant, I privately gave Tara a zero chance of surviving a fight with a wet noodle bag due to that succession of Tyrants who got elected, popped up, saw the state of Atamara, and logged out until their characters paused because they did NOT want to deal with THAT crap.

As for what to do now in our current setting to keep Atamara from repeating?  I don't know.  We players got things shaken up in Dwilight and got some nice wars going on, split across the entire continent.  They may have all been one war originally, but they were effectively two or three smaller regional wars from the beginning, which they still are to this day even after the alliances were forced to split up.  I'm rather proud of having helped start up that little rumble in my time as ruler there.  And then Regstav finally found a battle that could kill him after facing battles on three continents that always seemed to miss the mark.  :)

But the East Continent hasn't changed at all with the new alliance rules.  The Sirion alliance or community or whatever still goes all over, blasted anybody it wants to into dustbunnies.  And half the time we can't even engage them in combat because of battle rules that stop us from fighting.  I don't know how to fix that continent.  Granted, I don't have access to the ruler information, but I see enough as a banker to have a good idea of what is up.  And I'm really at a loss as to how to fix it.  I'm on the verge of just voting for "giant meteor" hitting....oh...maybe Evora and wiping out everything within two or three regions of it.  Erase the populations.  Destroy every guild hall, recruitment center, or other city building.  Level the walls.  Put roads straight to worst case.  Maybe even make the regions entirely impassable to force the north and the south to stop fighting each other and let the various simmering local disagreements kick off into smaller wars without the worry of some massive juggernaut crossing the wastes and blasting them while their back is turned.

[Zakky]

AT was selected because it was the least enjoyable continent and little to offer compared to other continents.

Dwilight was too many people's favourite. EC was Tom's baby (he literally stated he'd rather end BM than to see EC gone), Colonies for less active players, and BT offering unique invasions (not anymore but at the time of choosing it was). So AT and FEI were the ones to be destroyed.

[Glaumring the Fox]

Played on Dwilight for near a decade now? And the Astroists realms do not interact or RP with you if you are outside of their realms, ive been on silence with them for years, quite sad on their part, all of our communications are on the forum. IG its very cliquey and tribal without concern for RP or development, if you are outcast its done, the game is you interacting with your realm and that is it.