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BM General Discussion / Re: The Humanity
« on: March 28, 2014, 08:58:09 PM »And this is just a game.
Like I said, it's a metaphor.
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And this is just a game.
Replace amputation with haircut. Problem solved.
The advantage of erring on this side is that if you're right and we are wrong, we can cut off more. If we were to err on the other side and it turns out we are right and you are wrong, we can't put back what we've cut off.
This is the part of the community I don't get. As soon as something - anything - happens, everything suddenly becomes all peacenik. Why? Why stop fighting and do some peaceful migration? Why not throw everything at them now that you have nothing to lose?
This is the one area where BM could never match real life. In real life, when the going gets tough, people get more aggressive, not less.
I am 100% certain that this is false.
If we closed an entire island, many people whose "main" characters are on that island would quit the game. Not only would everything they have worked for be destroyed, there wouldn't even be an island around anymore to remember it by, or a chance of getting it back.
Closing an entire island doesn't give us the freedom to open it up again until and unless we see a huge boost in player numbers.
Glaciating parts of several islands lets us monitor the player density numbers on those islands, and if one of them gets above certain thresholds and remains there for a while, we can begin moving the glaciers back. Land can be returned bit by bit, rather than all or nothing.
You talk as if closing an island would have had people saying, "Well, gosh darn it, I lost everything that made BattleMaster fun for me—but so did my character's enemies, so I guess it's OK! I'll keep playing!" That's obviously unrealistic. I am still convinced that we made the right call by not closing any of our continents, and doing this instead.
Again: There was absolutely no solution to the problems at hand that could be implemented without pissing anybody off.
Speaking from the perspective of a player who has all his characters affected, I think considering the circumstances the devs made the right decision. I see in most affected people a short-sightedness and a selfishness that quite surprised me. Whatever island that'd be sunk, there'd always be a lot of angry people. Even those players I talked about the devs decisions of this I found red-handed on saying 'sink any island but mine' in one way or another.
Remember that in a good compromise noone is happy. Instead of nuking a single continent and erasing a giant chunk of history and culture and whatnot created on that continent, the devs decided to let some 'natural disasters' strike every continent. This way you are allowed to RP it out and still keep your continet's history. Entire realms being wiped because of it is true, but that happened in history too.
Now, imagine that in the real world this would be happening and you'd be forced to move or die. What would you do? What would your characters do? Just erase the devs from this image, and use that in thegame to write and play your characters through this time.
Thumbs up for the devs.
What about real life military symbols. Star for a general, Chevron with one bar for a Marshal, Chevron with no bar for a vice Marshal.
Also the message section could be made to clear it up. When you're in an army instead of saying "Marshal of Army X" it could say "Your Commanding Officer", just like for lords it says "your liege".