Gone are the days of diplomacy wars where the better side wins. Now is the days of war where the winner picks a fight with the one who cant

Pretty much. But it kinda has always been the case. Blindisiding with coalitions to ensure a beat down is not new.

The impact of the restart bonus is that it favors quantity of countries over quality. It makes it much more difficult for a smaller alliance to win a war.

Allowing the greater humanitarian range does the same thing.

IMO strategy should be favored over quantity and eliminating the restart bonus which adds those ~2 days back into the timeline before a restart can have an impact is a good change.

Make a kill a kill again!!!

This has been said countless times and I've never fully agreed with it. If someone really wants to break in my home they're going to do it, regardless of my double locked doors, alarm system, and steel basement door. But I'm still not going to leave the house stocked full of expensive items and prop the door open while I'm gone.

I see that you're listed as an FA for an clan. Let's consider the following scenarios:

1) A player in your clan is unhappy with a decision that you've made and suicides on all of the leadership, including your country.
2) A player in your clan is bored and deliberately starts a war with a bigger tag. Your clan gets tag killed as a result.
3) A player has a grudge from 15 years ago against M4D. They pretend to be a new player and infiltrate your clan. They suicide on another tag and now you have to pay billions in reps.

As an alliance leader, can you explain to me why those are good things?

Welcome to Earth2025, you summed up this game quite well

As an alliance leader, those are terrible things! Things you've got to address! In other words, events that cause interaction, strife, and action.


Not everything in this game has to be 'good'.




Did you ever play Ultima Online? Probably not. I'll go on anyway.

That game was one of the first big MMORPGs. And it had an AMAZING PvP world. You could get killed almost anywhere, for any reason. You would lose all your fluff, and it would suck. And it created fear. Any time you would leave town, you would be cautious. If you saw a stranger, you'd be weary. You'd have to form large groups of people to protect each other while mining so that PKs (player killers) wouldn't come and kill you in 5 seconds flat.



Then the game created a mirror copy of the world you were in called Trammel. In Trammel, you couldn't PK people. The PvP became all consensual. If you wanted to PK people you'd have to go to Felluca. Now Felucca still survived somewhat, but it split the player base. It split it between those that wanted to do PvP, and those that wanted to 'win' the game by achieving a high score (netting).


Slag - It ruined the game. Giving players a 'safe place' may seem like something they want. But it's actually the opposite. Something earned is something of value. Something given is worthless. If take away all the challenges that netters have in the game, and make the game easier for them, it makes their accomplishments meaningless.

I could provide a similar but opposite anecdote from Asheron's Call (similar to Ultima but less popular) where they had the Darktide server that was for always-on PvP versus the 6 other servers that you had to go on a quest to enable it. The PvP server was horrible - new players would get ganked right out of training. People would offer "help" and then take new players far away, suggest they make a new save zone there, then kill them so that they'd spawn in that death trap forever. There were a number of players who pushed through and enjoyed it, but the numbers were always small and the cruelty ran most players off. The servers where the players had the choice had the most players and the most dynamics (market prices, alliances, raid quests, and community).

All that to say, there's a balance, and one experience in another scenario doesn't always match the goals here. We had some of this struggle in the original game - so there's a historical precedent for it, but there's a reason that the game died out from it's peak of thousands and thousands of players. We all agree netters shouldn't be covered in bubble wrap, never to be harmed, but that doesn't mean making it easy for a small group of griefers to ruin the experience of dozens of other players (look at Josey Wales this set, they have no real politics or communication, they've hit a variety of random players, and they're focused on ruining the netting experience moving forward). Luckily, you are a champion of the server and ready to meet them in battle, BH! =Þ

The alliance server is currently dying. Part of the issue is there is often a negative incentive for alliance leaders to recruit more members into their clans. That's the worst possible situation for player count. What is the alternative that will increase player count more than what is proposed here?

We should have more players next round on Alliance Server than this round due to the active recruiting that has been taking place. People do want to play this game, but we got to teach them how. Time is a big factor. We need more leaders that are able to help or we need to give the alliances and the players the tools they need so they can be more successful.

Imo what would grow membership is doing advertising, creating some buzz and synergy. Utilizing Facebook Ads would be a good start. There are so many people that would enjoy this game but are unfamiliar with it.

There are other things that could be done too, and this is something some of the other players have mentioned about not having access to the same tools. Having a page with strategies wouldn't be hard. Having a direct link to some of the other sites is easy. Even embedding a chat into the HTML so they can in real time talk to other players is really easy, we put one of those on our new clan site in no time.

People want the community aspect of it and some want the PVP/suiciders aspect of it. A lot of the changes proposed address a lot of these things. There's a huge block of players that are boycotting the game due to clan GDI being removed. I don't know how we get them back because there was a huge group of people that was against clan gdi too. Clan gdi had made suiciders obsolete.

Absolutely agreed. But I have seen suiciders hit the people who *ARE* running the double locked doors, the alarm system, steel basement doors of home security. That's the point, griefers will, and do, grief, simply because they can

Not as many as you might think. And for the small handful that might be, it's only been one round so far.

I got rid of the UNAP stuff because I don't care that much about it, but I don't plan on budging on the easier recruitment. Players create new accounts every day on this site but most don't stick around for very long. I am hoping that automatically throwing them into friendly clans improves our conversion rate.

10 4



That does make sense too

It's all trash now.

Learn the game as it was intended.

Forgive me, but I don't see how not needing the password to join a clan encourages players to play?
The whole point of the tag/pass is that players then go and get involved in the community of the clan they choose to join.

Perhaps have a link on the login page, or in the clans window, with wayhs to join a clan,a nd how to get in contact with a clan to join etc?

I think the argument is that it lowers the barrier of entry to finding a community. Now they are given a group they can ask questions to rather than trying to figure out who might be a good contact, etc. It won't solve all the problems, and players may still go inactive, but it could help.

In your stats for new accounts, do most players start with a particular server? I wonder if they should be pushed a little towards some of the solo servers, though the community is the best way to learn, it's focus isn't always on gameplay that works universally. I think primary is quite nice - with the way GDI works there, along with the expectation that you'll get grabbed.

We already have something like this but no one is using it: "There are currently no clans recruiting on this server.
Try checking back later or posting on the forums."

Here's the intended workflow from my perspective:

1) A few friendly clans open up their tags up to anyone.
2) New players are automatically placed into those clans.
3) The clan admin sees the new country and sends them a welcome message urging them to join the clan's discord, irc, or website. (I'd personally recommend against irc for this)
4) Some percentage of new members follow up on the message and join the discord or clan site.
5) Some percentage of those members learn the game from the clan and keep playing it.

Right now we encourage them to play on Tournament.

some folks are getting tired of the constant changes over the years. Old folks don't like spending a lot of time playing this game anymore due to real life catching up to them.

K.I.S.S. Establish a server that incorporates all of your new changes and a server based on the original earth 2025. I would bet we could get some youngin's (a new generation) to bump up the player numbers.
It is primarily the old players looking to change the game to fit their current life style.....you are not going to bring in new, young players like that.

We need to keep reaching out to our older players and get them involved.

Are you saying that the changes themselves or bad, or just that the changes are designed to reduce time commitment/effort?

I disagree that changes are bad. Look at something like Diablo. D3 still had a thriving community across multiple platforms as recently as...whenever Hades came out and I switched to that. The reason is the "seasons" architecture where every reset the meta changes because of tweaks, and occasional complete re-works.