The thing I miss most about that island is the friendships I made in Darka and CE. They crossed over the years and many of those people are the reason I continued to login because they made the game that much more interesting Umbar, Indirik, Lavigna (Lavagina), Conquard, Munnegan, Valgin, Gorath, Paxwax, Salvador, Fury, Merlin, Juane, Randall, and Ghostdragon, just to name a few. Few of these people reached even outside of the game and summoned me back to play.
That is Tara for me. I always kept a character or two in Tara just to keep up with friends there. I never had a single role in the government or really did anything of much regard there other than marching when the general sent out orders. But I just enjoyed the nation and the people there. It was my home in BattleMaster more than any other place.
Then I saw several Tyrants disappear one after another, saw Tara in disrepair and ready to fail, and I had the audacity to think I could do something about it. So I ran for the Tyrancy and won.
At first I just did whatever it took to stabilize Tara and make her stronger. I had never looked at Atamara from the slightly-OOC perspective you need as a ruler. It took a few days or maybe a bit more than that. I made some mistakes. Shanandoah for one. I dealt with other leaders. I studied the diplomatic situation on the island. I started to realize that it was locked. Hard. That it stifled good gameplay. And that is when I began to realize why we had lost so many Tyrants recently. They felt helpless. Trapped by the situation as much as anybody else on the island.
So on the one hand, I pushed to make Tara more active. I got an awesome general from Carelia who knew how to do things, and we made Tara fun to play in again. Revitalized it and got things shaking up both inside and outside Tara.
And on the other hand I began working with those who wanted to bring down the federation. Because once I looked at the federation with the slightly OOC-eyes that a ruler should use, I realized that bringing it down was the only way to breath life into ALL of Atamara.
As for this being a ruling clique versus everyone else thread...I see some rulers who didn't get things their way complaining that they didn't get their way and being glad that the devs sunk the island. And I see other rulers who worked with the other rulers to fix things being happy that they did and wishing that we all could have seen the aftermath of that.
