I think I do need to be clear on something though.
BattleMaster is a competition. Everybody is trying to win.
What the Cagil-Tara alliance did was win against EVERYBODY. They beat all the other players on the continent. They beat a game engine designed to weaken large nations and to make it hard for larger alliances to march to support each other. Through diplomacy and military force, the players behind the Cagil-Tara alliance smashed everything and everybody.
I think that is awesome. And admirable. Winning is not a four letter word. They did what all of us wish we could do.
What is best in life? Or games?
In the words of Conan it is "Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women."
The Cagil-Tara alliance did that.
And I honestly and very happily applaud them for that.
What messed up Atamara after that is that there was no gameplay for "after win" in BattleMaster. The game was designed to make winning all but impossible so there was no plan for what to do when it happened. And when it happened nobody came up with one. That's not something I put on the players. The devs should have come up with something. My twenty-twenty hindsight thinks resetting the continent by having all cities secede would have been one way to do that. But that's twenty-twenty hindsight. And I honestly really don't fault the devs for not having a plan either. The game is supposed to stop that. And they didn't want to be in the position of taking away what players built. That's why my twenty-twenty hindsight says to congratulate them, give them some virtual medal of some kind, and then reset the island.
The point in the end is that winning Atamara was not bad. Not having a plan to reset Atamara in case of a win wasn't even really bad.
What was bad was not doing something to reset things. It should have been done. And it should have been the devs that did it.
In the end, we players took the bit into our mouths and did something about the problem. But it should have been handled years earlier. It shouldn't have been up to us players to fix it.
And once again, winning in Atamara was not bad. It was amazing that anybody managed to do it.
It was the lack of follow through after the win that hurt the continent.
