I really haven't been around here until recently but to me this looks like IOT is just having some problems in it's growing stages. Like you said old players are leaving and new players with different ideas are replacing them. That will inevitably lead to an evolution in the game whether you like it or not. And your argument that change in the game is a bad thing is ridiculously narrow minded of you.
It isn't that mechanics have changed. It is more like
attitudes toward and for the game have changed. Whether it is a good or bad thing is debatable, but being against the current regime isn't narrow-minded.
An example can be seen in soccer history, when the game was first created the offside rule did not exist. As the game progressed the people began to notice that and exploit it, leading to a very broken game. It was essentially one of the forwards standing next to the goal and waiting for the ball to be kicked in his direction so that he could kick it in the goal easily, this occasionally lead to the defenders kicking the forward to put him out of commission. And surprise that didn't work very well either. This issue lead to the creation of offside passes which made passing to a player who was beyond the last defender illegal, and that solved the problem.
On a tangent note, this is why soccer is more interesting than football.
IOT's in comparison were as you said not supposed to have a victory condition, this should have let players create their nation and play however they wanted to. But like you said the combat was completely broken and the system discouraged competitive play. This created a game for niche gamers like yourself who disliked competition and instead enjoyed heavy roleplaying (which i have nothing against) but as the games evolved and your type of players became outnumbered by more competitive types the game began to adapt to serve the majority. Right now it is trying to find a balanced way to carry out a strategy game with elements of soft power and hard power. And it is not surprising that there would be missteps along the way.
I don't think modern IOTs have a victory tradition either.
The last IOT in the main series that would fall within the realm of being more world-builder than competition would be IOT VI, and even that would be a stretched. As basic mechanics for combat were created, more mechanics had to be made to make up for the flaws. In IOT VI, the flaw was that everyone regardless of size had the same amount of attack points and the same size economy. So, RIOT, which was based on IOT VI, made it so each province counted as a point and players could be armies and navies.
But, over time, concepts such as population, industry, and trade became big deals. Iron and Blood popularized a time period, as well as the idea of industrialization. While TF and I embarked on a ruleset arms race that began with one IOT beginning to use population and industry. I then expanded the use of trade and air power and back and forth, leading to MP2 eventually.
From those games came a few spin-offs as well. :shrug:
RIOT/FBR-styled games are still very popular when they pop up, as evidence by Avatar, Mosaic Earth, and FBR.
Your argument that IOT's should have stayed the way they were and accusing competitive players of being "problem players" seems to me like a very reactionary position about the game, but i'll freely admit that you do have some valid points.
He wasn't calling competitive players problem players. He was referring to a hand few early players that mastered the meaning of powergaming, which ultimately resulted in the first hard mechanics to combat it.
Now, which is better is definitely a matter of one's personal opinion, and I don't claim to have a better opinion than anyone else, but I definitely preferred it when economy and mechanics were the underlying blood of IOT, and the most successful games I participated - Fiat Lux and SonRisk II - were both very mechanics-oriented - and the most successful game I ran - Into the Fire - was certainly my least RP-friendly game.
And the difference between Fiat Lux and SonRisk II in terms of complexity are night and day.
Because SonRisk II, with a ruleset that was only really a quarter page long, is a game I consider more complex.
I suppose that is my disconnect with my later rulesets that added mechanics that were so numbers-based that they became meaningless. SonRisk II has very few rules, but one rule, BUILD orders must be public, led to far more thought that the industry or trade rules in Fiat Lux.
And, in another occasion, Sonereal actively searched and eventually found a chatango created for the purpose of DISCUSSING THE WAR PLANS OF A PUBLIC ALLIANCE. Let it be noted that the chat address was only known to alliance members and thus it can be regarded as a non-public chat, and that the alliance was public and thus there was no reason to actively try to find out about it. The fact is that NedimNapoleon didn't delete the log after I insisted, and Sonereal was douchey enough to publicly post the alliance's and my war plans, on which I had spent HOURS.
Actively searched? All I had to do is type in the name.
Wait, at one point, combat was on the verge of being determined by a dance competition? Really?
When doing the aborted "History of IOT" thing, I came to appreciate that great divergence in ideology people had in combat mechanics early on. Today, it seems almost second-nature that combat would be numbers based.
Not so much in those days. You had suggestions ranging from dance videos to using Operation Flashpoint or Red Alert 3.
