[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by Newt

But people don't do that, probably cos they refuse to admit the asc-model is the best (and ok it isn't the best for just one round in my opinion, but for long term high performance .... come on hcs wake up!). I mentioned in another thread that, for example, omen infuriated me in limitting a lot of munin's functionality. In my opinion the gain in keeping some intel secret for a few days was no where near worth how annoyed some members were about it. Nor the waste in the techy's time But not only that, the hc/officers refused to adopt "the asc-way" in lots of ways (secrecy, elite bgs, the defence system, etcetc) - but in other ways did use the asc-model. They were neither one thing (~exi) nor the other (~asc) and the result was pretty shit.

A lot of it comes down to the ways people have always played planetarion I think. I mean what wish and others say on here is right to some extent, ascendancy's not that different in the end results of who steps up, who does stuff, who makes shit happen etc, to pretty much all the other alliances. Primarily, in my opinion, it's a cultural attitude though. Even though a lot of the culture in ascendancy over the last few rounds has refocused on turning ourselves into the most appalling alliance to have to fight in the history of the game the prevailing attitude is still "we're in this together". That's a bit of a trite summation but it covers it all pretty well. Anyone can step up in any way they want to do anything at any time and the only requirement is that you respect the fact that you're not any different from the others. Quite frankly in the other alliances I've played in I haven't seen this as much. The sheer fact there are people with job titles who do know more than you and at the end of the day make the decisions regardless of what you think is fairly irritating. They make the decisions, you might not even agree with them and you're still expected to follow their rules or you're the one letting the team down. I guess there's a sense of isolation present elsewhere that doesn't exist in ascendancy in the same way (although we're an elitist group of dicks at times so it still creeps around in a different way).

Those other alliances and their HCs are quite right though. You get security leaks all the time and having more people with access to shit makes them more likely to happen. I hear we've got them this round. However all in all I'd rather play with 90 cool people in an open way and have some dudes I vaguely know release some information that would probably have gotten out anyways and isn't really that important in there as well than try to reinvent the US Marine Corps for a ****ing spreadsheet game on the internet.

I would be pretty annoyed if I was you, and had created a novel alliance on principles that most people thought were "shit", while you advised other alliances to do the same and even made your tools (or irc tools) opensource. They didn't want to. 5-10 rounds later you're by far the best alliance and those other alliances are kinda forcing you to change.

I wasn't actually responsible at all for the creation of ascendancy! I was just some dude jester invited.

On a final note, and a bit unrelated to the garbage above, I think it should be something pa team does to level the playing field. For example, say you decided to only have 90 ppl + munin added to #ascendancy and you lose next round because of <whatever reasons> - r33 you might well decide to open recruitment properly again, especially if #asc loses a lot of fun people.

I don't think we'll be closing recruitment. Jester said something about trying to do something so utterly mind-bogglingly retarded that 90% of the playerbase just leaves. That seems like fun if I can think of something worthwhile.

Oh and also, you yourself making ascendancy a worse alliance to help the universe is no different really than you being #1 end of this round and kicking people out so that xvx win. They won't exactly feel like they deserved it

It's a bit of a surreal situation alright. Politically speaking this round is just a dead end. The only alliances who had tangible goals to aim for were ascendancy and xvx and I've been told that even xvx didn't think they'd get #1 preround. The simple fact that nobody else really had much to aim for, and as such it's hard to "manipulate" them or whatever way you want to put it made the game very one-dimensional. We could have gone out and divided the universe in a ruthlessly efficient sort of way, killed some people, given round-long agreements to others, had an arrangement with xvx that meant they couldn't hit us with zero notice (seriously I don't know who thought that was a good idea) etc etc. Again I don't really feel that would have proven much. If anything how things went were probably the most interesting way they could have gone. The question of could Ascendancy beat the coalition was asked and the answer was no. Fair enough, I can live with that.