Originally Posted by Forest
You can talk about planet numbers, alliance limits, tags, naps, wars etc etc as much as you like.
It won't make the slightest bit of difference.
The game and everything that is hardcoded wont change anything. The truth of it is, players will always play as they want to, regardless of what ingame limits are set.
There is a select few players who by their actions, ruin it for the rest.
Of course they will shout as loudly as they can 'we play for our enjoyment not yours'. They may also claim 'it isn't our job to play how you want us to' or even 'if you can't beat them, why should we help?'
But behind that, you will find absolutely inflexible politics.
The guys who run alliances basically with no aim to win, whilst having the ability. Not only do they affect the ranks by not hitting who is winning, but their 'politics' effectively stop anyone else taking that chance.
Take this round for example.
Pen/Ct/BF could have challenged Ult for the win. But CT were smacked by ND and refused to stop. BF hit Pen at a time when a block started to make moves towards hitting Ult. Smaller alliances can't do squat because everytime they try, someone stops em.
Now whether by design or by 'accident' what has effectively happen is EVERY single time anything happens that might stop Ult, then ND/BF jump in and hit to stop it happening. I also don't believe that it is by accident. Infact I would say it was a classic spore tactic, divide and conquer your enemy. The difference being, Spore were top and heading for the win. In this case, the alliances doing the dividing are alliances who could win but won't because they are busy handing it to Ult.
This has NOTHING to do with hard coding and EVERYTHING to do with the politics of the people who run these alliances. For BF, read Clouds/Noxious.
Clouds in recent memory has ALWAYS agreed to work with an alliance till round end and never broken it. The alliance they chose is nearly always ult/app. They could go for the win, but its effectively an ult second tag. The one round they broke an agreement was in the round Spore won. They broke with Spore. Why? To support Ult.
Noxious is publically favourable towards ult and I have no problem with that, but it gives you two players in an alliance using a tag as a second tag.
I also believe (since Nox left HR) that HR haven't been so pro-ult, so they needed another alliance to help. maniacmagic then leaves BF with souls, joins ND again and make some quite ridiculous political moves to isolate ct and keep hitting ct even after ct twatted them everytime they retaliated.
This isn't a post critisizing the alliances though. It isn't critisizing the player either. It is critisizing the player mentality.
The mentality that makes clouds play for #2 and never go for #1.
The same mentality that makes the bf players happy for it because by napping 60% of the playerbase their players get an easy round.
The mentality that makes people go looking for safety in numbers. The mentality that makes people make agreements to last a round and then keep them, regardless of the impact.
That mentality is human nature, and human nature will NEVER be beaten down by ingame coded measures.
The fact is, the community is the games strongest asset.
But it has no come so far that the community if the games biggest weakness.
Everyone knows everyone too well. There is no new blood. And the old blood makes it a ruined game.
As for tags, well there is clearly no point making them bigger, and its not working keeping them the same. Knock em down to 35, remove late sign-up and see what happens. No-one is gonna permanently quit over one round that wasn't planning to to anyway. I don't think anything will change because of the aforementioned human nature, but what have you got to lose?
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