End of Round 3..discuss

I'm guessing this ok to do now? if not please lock it or remove it. Since Dax's official announcement, I don't think there will be anything happening till Friday.

Good round, I think. All be it, short.


You ask for suggestions, improvements and so on.

Well, one thing I think could be improved on is the role of United Nations, and it's use.

There might be some basic structure available somewhere here for how to post a resolution proposal, or bring up a topic for discussion, but I don't know about it. But if one doesn't exist, then I think some basic 'forms' should be made available to make it easier for everyone regardless of country they are playing, to be able to utilize the United Nations.


Some other suggestions from me.

Everyone that has a country, should have that countries flag as their avatar. I think having random avatars makes the forum look like utter crap and like it's amateur hour in here. Not having a go at any individual, just something that I think would help improve the general feel around the forum.
perhaps some updated links to flags of the same style can be provided?

NPC'ing..
I can't think of any specific examples at the moment, but I do recall looking at a few NPC responses for some countries with a raised eyebrow.
If Country A has political related issues with County F, then Country A is hardly going to vote in favor of something that benefits Country F. Logical. But, while people are required to research the countries they choose to play, they are not required to do so for NPC'ing a country. Which is understandable.
So I think that creating a special moderator whose only authority is to check, and if necessary over rule and change how an NPC'd country votes or behaves, should be created. And yes, I volunteer for that.
Unless of course you want to make us all research the entire planet.


And my final suggestion(for now, till my evil mind comes up with more ways to annoy Dax ), news posts!!!

Two vague lines should not be acceptable at any level as a news post.
I think a bare minimum should be a paragraph. If not that, then half a dozen or so bullet point "Headlines" of random news from that country and/or around the world from other peoples news posts. At least show that there is some sort of effort being made to be creative.
I think I was the only Commonwealth realm country to report Prince Phillips death, all be it by copy/pasting from the UK's news post, with credit given. That is something that would be reported across the Commonwealth. Therefore it should have been reported by every single active Commonwealth country here. Just an example, not trying to have a go at anyone.
Just something that I think could be improved overall by all of us.


Oh and one last thing, I think Kartozeichner should continue as the USA in the next round.

I think everyone does... Have you been looking at players that might have switched countries or gone inactive?

These rounds need to be more coherent. I'd advocate a "Crisis Mode" that actually slows down the game when things happen. China vs. Taiwan a few rounds back, Syrian invasion this round, Spratlys this round, etc.

It feels cheap when China can send up the balloon in the South China Sea and have it already be in the past a few days later. Cut it down to weeks or even days so the world can effectively complain and fight what's going on, rather than just sit idly by.

I agree with Historian about the "crisis mode" Time should be slowed down until the situation is completely resolved thru either role-play or a moderator resolution.

My experience from the last round involved the Spratly Islands where there were four players China (Stok) Malaysia (JCU Spain) Philippines (Evictus) and Vietnam (Soy) were involved.

The China/Vietnam situation was resolved but the other two portions of the role-play were not despite numerous attempts to do so (on my part).

I do not know what to recommend as a solution except better communication between players and mods.

Personally I think the having of a countries CoA as an avatar would look cooler, however that is just me

In terms of next time around I do think the current trend of economic updates should continue in the way they already are. If it was me I would be punishing people for not addressing issues in economics but then that is not covered in the guidelines for events....

Hmmm......perhaps if the EU doesnt address the new and interesting problems in the coming round in a proper sense and/or it ends up not being played perhaps have a simulated spiral of bankruptcy/bigger nations throwing in the towel and cutting loose as quick as they can??

Spot on with Historian. If major events happen, we ought slow down to, say, a day-for-day schedule. People who aren't involved can then use the time to organize military or pre-write some news posts. We could have time-skips up a week or two weeks if necessary, but if major clashes are occuring, time ought to be slowed waaay down to make sure that it can be properly role-played.

I'd also say that people should try to make at least one post per day, at minimum. I haven't kept this exactly, and I'm not saying we ought make a big ol' rule about it, but I think we should all make an effort to stay relatively active so that the game can continue the right way.

Also: d'Awww, thanks TheOne :3

I thought this was a good round. I hope to expand future nations.
If i had to pick another nation to work with it would have to be another African nation or a eastren block nation in Europe. But I would also gladly continue with Chad...er Kanem.

It has been a good round. Thanks to Dax for running that whole economics/forum administration/events thing.

I agree that the round was a quality and interesting one, if short. I'd also posit that a good deal of the credit for that goes to Dax, who did a phenomenal job taking on admin of virtually every aspect of the game.

As an econ guy, I have to say I did like the assigned growth rates instituted towards the end of the round. I would've advocated something similar myself as econ mod if I thought I had the time, so special kudos for going through them all! It has the advantage of ensuring reasonableness and conformity with the State of the World Economy releases while allowing flexibility for those players who really want to take an interest in their economies to petition the mods for a different rate. A keeper if you ask me.

I also agree with making some allowance to slow down time for what are deemed to be major world events. The Spratly Islands thing was a perfect illustration of this: several active players posting in what could have been an extremely engaging conflict with the potential for worldwide involvement, but by the time an a couple of IG quarters went by (not helped by some unavoidable absences) all parties lost interest. It's a tough problem though, and maybe instead of setting up a systematic rule for situations like that the mods should just address it on a case-by-case basis. I honestly don't know although others might.

The Events Team was slightly disappointing (again, through no fault of Dax's and entirely due to our own laziness), but no more so than previous rounds and in fact probably better than the last one. Regional updates were nice while they lasted, but didn't seem to generate a whole lot of player response. I know that's not really their intended purpose (which is as I understand it to provide some continuity and a reference point for players joining mid-round), but it seems a lot of effort was expended for not a whole lot of gain. Perhaps instead of regional updates as mini-news stories, they can be shortened to one-line bullets? That way a much greater breadth could be achieved, it would reduce the burden on the mods considerably, and could even read like a nifty timeline.

That being said, the International Reaction:[EVENT] posts were brilliant. Allows everyone to go on record in the same place and see countries of interest are reacting before making their own response, while keeping the foreign ministries thread free of clutter. I think it actually stimulates diplomatic RPing, too, since people are more likely to post about something if there's a designated thread about it rather than tucking away as a press release that might not get read anyway.

All in all, a good round and looking forward to the next one!

I agree it has been pretty good and I think one thing that stood out to me was the ability for smaller states to be more dominant when the larger states fall inactive or leave altogether. We saw Bugs disappear quite unexpectedly, both China and the United States had periodic inactivity, states like Germany and France were never consistently played but we managed to move through it very successfully. In some cases the loss of such a major figure can cause some instability but in these cases it did not and those that were left just kept on working.

On Kartoz I think keeping him as the United States going on into the next round would be a good idea, I know I did not leave him in the best of positions considering how my anticipated plans had been affected by activity but he jumped straight in and needed very little assistance on my part.

On newsposts as someone who has gone from writing pitifully small ones to dozens per day I think that there should be no accepted style as everyone has their own way of representing things but most definitely there should be short paragraphs at a minimum for each.

I agree to your last, Fish, but I also feel like we should all have an obligation to be keeping up activity. Maybe not daily, but at least every-other-day, for the sake of the other players here. It is very hard to RP when you can't get responses from the other players--when I played here once as Turkey, I lasted about a week because nobody would respond to my attempt to join the EU. This time around, the Spratlys was very disappointing simply because people weren't playing it. We all owe activity to every other player; it is an obligation since we have chosen to sign up here. We all must get posts done either daily or every other day, or else we just aren't being fair to everybody else.

I do agree; I’m not 100% convinced about making it a dead set rule as I would hope that it would be more of an accepted Gentleman’s Agreement. Although I am willing to give it a shot if everyone else is up for it. So long as we can get it started with everyone in the rhythm it should hopefully be good to force people to keep up with it as everyone else will be doing it and otherwise they will fall behind. Activity checking would have to be maintained thoroughly though to prevent people being kicked so easily. Otherwise though it will make the semi-active position more viable and easier to define which could be a useful sign for members that the community does not believe you are being active enough.

I would agree people need to post but makeing it a rule want work, evaryone here has a life, some people are married, school, are work so saying people must post evary day or evary other day just means people will just fall off sooner then they already do. My suggestion would be leave things as they are, maybe do a little tweaking, but over all leave things as they are.

remember guys there's a reason 21c has been around so long when most RP sites die, we have the best moderators and alot of great RP veterans, and we also don't let rounds last longer then they should. The moderators will make small tweak to keep things fresh in evolving im sure, but we must keep are tried and true formula because it works in has been working...

Very true Esco, if people wish to publically stick by such an agreement though – at least to get us started – I’m all for it but we have worked successfully without it. What we really require is all posts to be quality, remember quality not quantity is important, if people see five or six posts in a war that are substantial, in detail and well-reasoned then they will be more impressed than just single line posts such as; ‘4th Tank Squadron moves 40km forward to take the town of BlahBlah’ even if there was dozens of them.

That’s one thing that should be reminded when talking about such an idea, if you cannot post daily as many cannot then it does not matter so long as when you do post you make up for it by having quality replies. This typically works very well in bilateral where you discuss three or so topics at the same time to maximise each reply.

Putting a post limit on players creates an atmosphere that's not good for the game. You don't want people to log on because it's a chore - it reduces the quality of the post that they make and generally pushes people into a pattern of posting only when they are required to by the rules. At the same time, getting more and more low-quality posts tends to deter other more active players from making high-quality posts, because the overall quality level of the RP falls.

Additionally, the areas where you really need activity are things like bilateral and multilateral agreements, but the easiest posts to write up are little news blurbs. So the kind of activity that you get isn't even worthwhile after all those negative externalities.

Wow, this thread's comments have been amazing and I am thankful to TheOne for putting it here. The feedback and comments from our 21c "vets" and brand-spanking new players is both encouraging and heartening.

You guys rock.

The mods may not necessarily have time to address everything right off the bat, but I want you all to know that we are paying attention and appreciate these thoughts (that's why I posted here.) I will try to get to the abundance of topics here as soon as I can.

Historian's idea is wise and one I have brought attention to in... other ... channels. I agree that post limits are a bad idea. Like Tezla I have been around here for far too long, and no one wants to play a chore of a game. We do have very loose rules on activity, and they serve well, I think.

I agree with JCU that regional updates could be done in condensed form. Convey the meaning with as much brevity as possible and reduce the workload there. Perhaps appoint a mod for each region and have the regional mod look after providing headlines and perhaps a brief description on a quarterly basis?

We really do need to get that whole mentorship business going, too, which has been talked about forever and scarcely been implemented. I also think we should look into forging stronger bonds between players with a view to the promotion of regional story arcs, although I realize this isn't always a story arc.

After all, one of the things that I was quite miffed about over the whole Spratly Island thing was that every participant seemed to have completely different conceptions of the affairs in question. It is OK to disagree, but a complete absence of communication up until the event itself is a bad way to start an arc.

On mentorship I do not think this is as much of a problem now as it has been in the past. On a lot of occasions now we are seeing the majority of our new players come in as people with some degree of similar experience which obviously minimises the learning curve. Certain aspects have also been made a lot easier, such as spread sheets. In the past you would get members with absolutely no experience whatsoever being told to calculate their military budgets themselves which led to a vast array of issues. By doing this members are given the numbers, they have a massive GPG to work from, and they can simply do the procurement math gradually expanding on their knowledge as they play.

What really is important is that when there are lesser experienced players we support them as best we can as a community, normally this is always going to involve telling them you cannot do that which does occasionally result in them leaving but really this is often a good sign. If a member is willing to push through with their plans despite the flak, even if it is not 100% accurate, it will often come out for the better and drastically improve their ability. I know myself when I started here and the debate over getting NZ an aircraft carrier, to persuade Schwer and everyone else who was pounding me over it I had to improve the way I roleplayed. News posts gradually got larger and larger, I developed character roleplay between senior military figures and politicians which came out at the end, despite being pretty scruffy at the beginning, to be a pretty decent piece of roleplay.

There are newer players that are fitting into this pattern with us at the moment, so long as we offer them the support they need and allow them to learn from their mistakes it will develop players who have a much better grasp of how to do this and whom will hopefully stick around.

On regional story-arcs this is something that from my observations struggles incredibly in the early years of the game where everyone is scattered around. Later on people seem to naturally form clusters, look at the last few weeks with Iran-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan-Tajikistan and the roleplay that has resulted. When claims are planned together, like the time we had Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the get go and allowed for a subtle background arc that would come back repeatedly till it finally exploded to see the round out.

If you can get the right people interested in neighbouring nations then they should be given the chance to do so, we have seen countless times that it’s not essential to always have nations on every area. We can survive easily with an abandoned Latin America for example. Whilst there are some important nations that must be filled the importance should not be to fill in from the top down. If you do not have minor European states nor an economically minded France and Britain claim then an a German player is not essential if that player has ideas for say the Middle East where you already have several readied claims.

On that I think, and I am fairly sure this was mandated in the last couple of rounds, that people should look around the world with their claims not just a specific region. But at the same time do not just make up suggestions off a list of countries, if you have no real passion for South America and are really into African style poorer countries you do not have to put one down. If you have played African countries before and demonstrated a commitment to them and spread your proposals around the different regions of Africa then the Admins would probably be happy to give you that claim as they understand that not everyone is a globalist. As much as it is nice to have people roleplay around different regions and outside of their comfort zones, unless you are a real supporter of that idea you are probably not going to enjoy it which is going to affect the quality of your roleplay and your activity level which none of us want. As a final point do not try an abuse this just to get pick powerful nations with big procurement budgets, smaller nations can be just as interesting and offer a more fluid play base on things like foreign affairs playing bigger states off each other – look at what was done this round with Georgia and Cuba to affect US-Russia ties, or even on the domestic front as we have seen with the portrayal of Belgium’s split.

-On Dax’s point about the contributions I would have to agree in full. I think one of the key things that has made this game in particular last is that it is a community, whilst it is routine for either Dax or Schwer or Bugs to be the de facto leader of the day their decisions are really always based on the general consensus with very little ‘I’m an admin and I say this so do it’ which is further expressed by the fact that people get together like this completely at an impromptu nature to discuss how things can get better. Not only do we have some really great roleplayers on this site but they are great people too and you can’t ask for much more than that.

On the whole post-activity thing: We definitely shouldn't make a rule, but perhaps something of a Gentleman's Agreement as Fish said. I'm just saying that we should all try to keep activity up, not necessarily that we should require specific amounts of posts per week. This should be a game, not a job.

I was thinking maybe we could have a thread strickley devoted to ideas and discussion, for players. I know alot of times some new players pick a nation in start with 1 or 2 idea's and then kind of run out of idea's for their pertickler nation, So having a place were other players could pass around their idea's and help others, I think would be a great asset. I know we have a cheat bord but I don't think to meny people use it..so having a one stop shop on the 21c bord would be helpful for story arc's,economic, and military planning/idea's.

Sounds like a fair idea, would be stupid at the least not to try it and see how it works for everyone.

Clearly, you never have had to coexist with Sel. Not that I actually have anything against Sel (please don't smite me from the shadows!). I kind of like him, much more than many did.

We have the staging area. No one ever uses it, though. Except when it's too late, of course! I intend to start a regional thread for wherever I end up though, having a few going would be nice.

He was still around as the boss when I first started with the whole thing against Schwer but I tried to stay out of it. Either way that was a couple of years ago and things are different thesedays.

Im talking about a place to throw around idea's not just for war. lets say your iraq and im iran, I have in idea for iraq I would post it their and mybe it was in idea you had not thought of and their for helped you say active. it would basically function as a RP cheat room were anyone could come with in idea for any nation in post and discuss it, like we do with are chat room..but this would be more assessable and visible.