I understand that a lot of people left Atamara because it became PeaceMaster. The rulers figured that out and did what they had to do to fix it. I recognize that the changes in Atamara were too slow and too late for those who had left the island. I've seen the hatred and vitriol that some people aim at the island. But what they hated was gone. What they hated was not what the devs sunk.
Unfortunately, the rulers figured that out about 6 years after the players did.
I tried playing on Atamara for a while in about 2011, and it was already nearly impossible to do anything that even remotely opposed the Cagilan bloc's will.
I would add one more thing, however:
It's not
completely the fault of the Cagilan bloc.
The rulers of the other realms, and the players in the other realms, could have (at least for a while; it would have become impossible towards the end as power consolidated too much) banded together to oppose the Empire and possibly broken it up. But they wouldn't have been able to do so without absolute commitment, and that is
really hard to get. I was in a similar position personally in about 2006 trying to get Beluaterra to band together against Enweil, which was having a similar warping effect on diplomacy there at the time.
Individually, players and realms don't have nearly enough incentive to risk destruction (or near-destruction) at the hands of the behemoth, even if the prize is a continent where there is no behemoth dictating diplomacy. Each one knows, for certain, that if they oppose the behemoth, they
will lose.
And they're right.
Only together—probably with every single realm not a firm member of the bloc, in Atamara's case—would they have had any hope of defeating even a single realm of the bloc and changing the shape of diplomacy on the island. And from what I can tell, at least, that's been true since well before I tried it out 5 years ago.
In the end, the only way to get a continent out of a situation like that is to have a significant fraction of its upper echelon agree to
act against their characters' interests in some manner to cause the bloc to break up, whether it's by committing to a grand alliance against the bloc, or having the bloc start to break up from within. And while that's a hard thing to do, it's important to remember that our characters don't get to dictate our actions. We get to dictate theirs. And if what we feel like our characters "would do" is in direct conflict with what is best for the game...sometimes we need to
find a reason for our characters to do something else.
