Author Topic: From The Rulers Channel on Discord - Small realms  (Read 19677 times)

Anaris

  • Administrator
  • Exalted Emperor
  • *
  • Posts: 8525
    • View Profile
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 thing—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 environment—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 sinking—years before the island had become totally stagnant—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 perfectly—maybe you could have stopped and looked ahead at the consequences of what you were doing, and seen that it could be a problem.
Timothy Collett

"The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire...is your heart." "You are what you do.  Choose again, and change." "One of these days, someone's gonna plug you, and you're going to die saying, 'What did I say? What did I say?'"  ~ Miles Naismith Vorkosigan