Apathy

[Cwalen]

Call me mao.

If I had hope for revolutions I'ld risk the CR and ferment some. The current combat system makes it a very risky game to play.

Even given my difference in time zones I might be able to create horrible breaches in character and pour some of myself through them to attempt to make a few efforts at creating rampaging mobs who composed of sociopaths would still be willing to take a strategy that involved rather than killing, just dragging, or negotiations. What I would have very little influence over would be the reactions of others.

First and foremost in all my attempts in this forum and this game world is an attempt to retain players, both current and future.
Without that we are just rearranging deck chairs.

If we learnt anything from Chairman Mao. Killing or silencing intellectuals is easy, and they are troublesome pricks. We can even kill all the sparrows. When the plague of bugs arrives, then we are up shit creek.

I have a little skill with coding PHP, badly tarnished with time, and anyone who considers me in that role will hit 1 in 10 of something worthwhile and 9/10 of me begging off (consciously and unconsciously) being required to ever have to think again. Running mobs? now that is where most of my education and experience lays.

It was 20 years ago when I was taught how to raise a riot, only done it twice (irl) and learnt to respect the fact that the intelligence of a mob decreases as a square of the number of people involved. Running a game on the people that three of my characters interact with promoting militancy, aggression against the ruling elites, quasi military culture?

Say three months IRL to get the ball rolling? resources, potential candidates, bases of operation. Selecting sargents (agitators, organizers, whatever) Trying to work up some culture. Big chance of failure. Other characters/players objecting and wiping out a militant mob. There are not the IRL mechanisms here. We can't get someone to commit an atrocity to bind them to the path, knowing that they can't enter society again once they came to that choice. They have a potential for 15 other characters, we cant isolate them and make the cause their whole life.

We need good role players who choose to commit some of their characters to the path.

And on that metta level, the only good solution that I see is the ships sailing out to sea, and we need hundreds of them.

Facing up to my personal fears, producing some code that someone in the ProgD could consider an indication that I am worth pissing on if I was on fire. I can do better for Cantr that way.

Local color, breaking up the established social norms, having some of my characters raise something that gives others hope and action? That I can do in the meantime.

[Mykey]

I almost said Mao, then realized he took his best ideas straight from Stalin.

You are definitely right about mobs.... that's why democracy is such a wonderful form of government....

I personally absolutely despise piracy...it's the exact opposite of what I'd aim for.... it's too nomadic to be considered civilization. While it's possible to have an engaging culture at sea, I think it takes away a lot more from culture than it adds. If we could get all these people off the boats and into the cities, there would be a lot more social possibilities. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, and hope some of my characters get the opportunity to join in. Good luck on the coding too.... that is needed badly.

[Cwalen]

I'me just desperate for anything that can bring back some of the golden age. Like a few others I jumped from Cantr being a vibrant economy full of hope and promise, to the current situation, where everything has been mapped, mined, built and gathered.

I hit the panic button too early when I first got on the forums, and have been keeping a lower profile since then. In the mean time we have limited harvesters and lost another 6%? of the player base?

Piracy sucks, like I said I doubt I could raise a mob like that and control it well enough to avoid the damaging aspects. It would take months and a lot of effort to raise, but I fear the looming total collapse where Cantr gets to the point where there are simply not enough english layers left to continue a vibrant society.

There is obviously work being done on the combat system reform, which is essential. hopefully rot and decay is near to completion, and we do have an archive of e-mails so we can recontact people to try to get a new influx once we un break the world.

I'll need more than luck on the coding, I'll need time patience and determination. God help us all.

[kaloryfer]

Coding instead of talking is better.

[Cwalen]

Organizational change-work would be even better again, but a professional effort towards that would make the euro cost of the necessary programming look cheap.

From where I am now (three days before getting close enough to a city to rebuild my dev environment so I can start the process of spinning my programming skills up to the point where they are capable of being a worthwhile contribution rather than a thing of amusement) talk is available. Step up your own programming skills and join the party, but as I have been warned, we have a messy nest of legacy code to wade through to make any changes, and from my own observations a culture of caution that makes getting to a consensus about what coding changes to make just as significant.

My biggest problem at the moment is that one of my drivers has just gone down with pancrititus (sp?) and the contract that I am filling just doesn't leave room for "i'ld rather be playing/recovering my coding skills/putting serious attention into working the culture" If I have to do his work as well as my own.

[RedQueen.exe]

When we go ascribing various causes to the decline of players, we would do well to remember that this is normal for every game, no? Does any game keep around all the players that it has at its peak, or continue to gain more? That is not to say that we can't do better than we are, but we should keep in mind when we go pointing fingers at our suspected causes that at best we're making educated guesses, and not trust our own judgments to be given fact.

[gejyspa]

When we go ascribing various causes to the decline of players, we would do well to remember that this is normal for every game, no? Does any game keep around all the players that it has at its peak, or continue to gain more? That is not to say that we can't do better than we are, but we should keep in mind when we go pointing fingers at our suspected causes that at best we're making educated guesses, and not trust our own judgments to be given fact.

It's posts like that that make us lose players!

[Cwalen]

When we go ascribing various causes to the decline of players, we would do well to remember that this is normal for every game, no? Does any game keep around all the players that it has at its peak, or continue to gain more? That is not to say that we can't do better than we are, but we should keep in mind when we go pointing fingers at our suspected causes that at best we're making educated guesses, and not trust our own judgments to be given fact.

I agree with a lot of that, and I am as guilty as many for making those mistakes.

I think the stagnation of the economy, through the over abundance of everything that could posibaly be needed, would be having a strong effect on the game engines ability to provide motivation for goal orientated activity. It's my judgment and I am proceeding like it is true.

I think the thought that Cantr is declining, for reasons beyond it's self is just dangerous and misleading. I'ts position as a cutting edge game on the internet when it was first released has passed, and the market share for it's style of game might be shrinking. The market on the other hand has expanded massively since it was spawned.

If one in a million people logged into Canrt, the temp alarms on the server would cut in.

Normal for every game? Normal for upstart codebases that attract people and then melt because of poor design? normal for established traditions with a legacy code base and a proud history of still being unique?

I'ts a judgment again, but I do not believe Cantr's attractiveness to players is something that it does not fundamentally still posess, or that it is somehow doomed by being a text based game, I think it just needs to cough up a furball.

[RedQueen.exe]

I'm getting a little burnt out due to the fact that I apparently never run into these amazing characters people talk about, disagree with the extent of the amazingness pronounced by others to the few I do with the exception of some of the truly epic ones most of which are no longer with us, and half of the characters that I find interesting I don't see others mention.

I'm not even really sure why this bothers me since I typically don't care what anyone else thinks. Maybe it has to do with the fact that nothing at all is happening around my characters. I have 15, and if I refresh after an hour or two, I might see someone whisper, or punch a deer. Yet at the same time I have a desire to kill some off because they only ever get busy when I don't want them to. Problem is the ones that are busier are the ones I'd want to keep, the ones I don't care about don't really take up any of my time.

Maybe this should be in the rant section instead.

[SumBum]

I'm guilty of not giving praise where its earned because I don't like to announce my chars. I really need to start a list so that I can post things after-the-fact.

[RedQueen.exe]

Same reason I'm not posting about something else in particular that's irking me. Just keeping to vague generalities and trying to hit other points that are off-putting.

[Armulus Satchula]

If you want to give praise anonymously, I've posted it for other people before and so has Doug. This way its more ambiguous as to who posted it.

[jeremi08]

vague generalities??