I am old. I was there when we commissioned the sun, invented air, land and sea. A LOT of things have changed in the world since then.

I remember when "Alliance" competition was among the Alliances. NOT individuals. And were recognized as such, even if it were only bragging rights.

Alliance competition statuses based on the following, still are tracked:
"Members" "Total Worth" "Avg Worth" of alliances.

Individual player servers, such as "Primary" easily show individual performance. The Alliance server easily shows the performance of the Alliances.

Have we, in the Alliance server, lost the reason we even have an Alliance server??
Asking for a friend.

No, and yes.

Afaik winning the alliance server has always been the most coveted individual performance, and probably still is. Most of those players who play only alliance server and fight for rank 1 here would easily adapt to compete for rank 1 on all other servers, but those who play only other servers usually wouldn't be able to compete in 1a.

Just look at what happened when enshula decided to play a couple sets on FFA recently, he blew all the records away.

That said the competition between alliances for TNW, ANW and especially for members has become stale like you said.
Primarily I believe that is due to most alliances no longer valuing members, they want to be good 'pound for pound' and want to play in a homogeneous group of friends rather than being inclusive. LaF on the alliance server is more or less the only exception to that when it comes to netting alliances. We take in all sorts of riff-raff, sometimes to our detriment.

Part of the reason alliances no longer value members is because the cost of a bad reqruitment is so high, as has been shown multiple times in the past couple of years by suiciders. Developers have options to give alliance leaders control over who joins them, but we don't have those tools. So most just don't reqruit.
Developers also have options to make reqruiting irl friends, coworkers and family easier, but the rules surrounding this especially in alliance server is too much of a mess so I wouldn't recommend anyone to do that.

Not always. Only when those individuals formed a consensus to change the server :P

Our reqruitment form respondents are about a third each of:
1. People who are either poorly masked suiciders or people who we cant take a chance on
2. Bots that want to sell us cialis
3. People who might want to join for honest reasons.

I've played this game since Solarianet.com (1999ish) until today. I've seen the rise and fall of Earth:2025 as well as the rise of EE.

The Alliance server has always been about an individual player trying to take #1; secondary to that are the other stats TNW, ANW, etc. All of the best individuals have always tried to take that spot, which was what was most coveted.

Back in the day, there was a group of players who liked to compete on the tournament server, which was pretty good. RC, Dabooz, KoD, Rockman... The list goes on.

I think the value of the top 10 or winning the server has been greatly diminished by the current state of play. A server with 250 bots that are nothing but land farms takes away from the prestige of winning. I still talk to a few former high-level players, and their opinion is consistent, "this game is a joke, just farming bots."

There is some truth to that IMO. We allowed the game developer(s) to turn this game into another grind-y game. Log in, farm bots over and over, log out, repeat until you have 400k acres. And don't get me started on war clans; it's even worse. Grind all set, then just throw away your country to a boring arranged war. The best people eat missiles and die or wall and lose all of the lands they grinded for all set.

On a side note, Gerdler the word is recruit and recruitment!

~Have a Swirvey day

Lol we could war who ever we wanted req, but then we would be bullys driving people from the game.

rawr

I’ll grant you that, but how is it any different than any time in the past when a war clan would just first strike someone out of nowhere?

Is it because there’s fewer people now? Or have you always thought it was wrong?

Just a habit at this point.

Yes it is about the player base, back when 50 000 players where on this game it didn't matter. There was war clans with 100 plus membership and a lot of them around. I also had a lot more time to be around and play the game as well. What I don't want nowadays a grudge wars like we had in the past Ie, S.L.I.T wars that lasted multiple sets and made hundreds of people leave the game.

I'll take my nice easy 2 week war at the end of every set over burning myself out grudge warring all set.

That's reasonable I suppose.

detah

There should be only one server the alliance server! All the other servers must pay homage.

WTF

WTF

Nothing like fighting a grudge war with a newborn. Honestly though, Pang and crew could tell us all tomorrow that they were shutting down Alliance, and I am of the opinion we would all laugh at them, move to a server like Primary (for those that don't want to deal with the politics of FFA), and just start back up over there. We are all just to damned stubborn to let it die. Do I miss the numbers? Yes. At the same time though, it is kind of nice to be able to net with the option for a two week pre-planned war. I know I don't have to sit here and making a fluffed up country to be able to war oop. Coming from SoL that fluffing sucked. Regardless of the feelings of just let it die, its already a dead horse, yeah I doubt its going anywhere. They would lose more of the population because no one wants to do anything else. Its ingrained at this point.

Well with so few people the competition gets stale.

And rules / gameplay that worked with a larger and changing playerbase dont work well now.

I dont know how to freshen the game up or change things to work better with fewer players - and most of us are so old and set in our ways any change is going to produce a lot of angst and drama anyway.

----
Best line from above: "We are all just to damned stubborn to let it die."

Suicidal you ARE old. But at least you are not old AND boring. :)

Gerdler you have bots selling cialis? Could you pm me the numbers so I know which ones to, um, block? yeah, block..... :)

yes

Bonus

bonus

bonus

Bonus

I agree and disagree with that statement (Yes I lurk every now and then).
Wars like TIL, SLIT or the UCN wars are all greatly set in our memory. Those era's each have their own legacy and legacy players.

Why because they were epic at a grand scale. Some of these wars organized somewhere betwee 1500 and 3000 players against each other. No other game (as far as I remember has done that). Not to mention politics took work, pacting took work. There were server wide impactful events. Always to a certain degree there was unpredictability. Variables that could not be foreseen or prepared for. Even the RD bots contributed to that. Next to being a fine game it had a certain storytelling to it which people were in love with.

Yes the large wars might (its unsure to really tell due to botting and cheating being cleaned up half way through) have pushed people out but it also bound people to the game. I guess in the end what killed this game is not the wars or forced netting (both those might have sped up the death of 1a). It's time, eventually it catches up to us all.

I was the greatest warchat leader for 1/10th of an Era. But this is unimportant. What's important is..is that we are having fun here.

Death of the whole game...........I just wanted to stick around long enough to see it!!!

I assumed everone on boxcar had that lol. Come get a site on boxcar and you will get them too! :P

I still think we should not destroy countries anymore, but leave them crippled when civs run out. Why build a country all set then lose in in seconds.

After they lose all civs they are occupied until other alliance members drive out the occupying force, then that country can get back into the action. The alliance has a decision to make whether using turns to "free" a country or to destroy(occupy) rival country. Once all countries are occupied war be over.

You still have a serviceable country after a KR, but you can't bounce back immediately. And you're not depressed when you are a 5m nw restart who can only hit at less than 100k and stop showing up to chats.

If we do the same thing over and over we can't be surprised when no one comes back...and up the freaking stored turns already! Sometimes I can't get on and hate that I lose turns.

Are you not entertained?

No.

Well you asked for it so here it is!

Petition to shut down earth forever!

bonus

I second this notion for a petition! All in favor say "Aye" everyone else who wants to be different say "nay"!

Fa me

Nah one way or another this will survive to some extent. We all said the same thing after years of sets of RD. We kept going, we’re all slowly coming back checking things out again.

Doug - PDM

O_O

Iggy!

How would I know you know me? :P

Iggy iggy iggy!


Still a marine?

Nope Sorry. It might be the other iggy
I like humps and fluffs... :)

there's nowhere to run too when death becomes you

Suicide is painless