The Death of IOT

[christos200]

War and terror. And many strikes.

 

[Sonereal]

!!Fun!!

 

[Tani Coyote]

I'll be updating IOT X today I think, in line with the Classic IOT basis of this thread.

However, I'm more than willing to hand the keys over to Thor if he would like to attempt to recreate the games of old.

Or anyone else really. MP3 is on the horizon.

 

[Jehoshua]

You could just give it to Tibet, the serene emptiness of submission to Buddhism and the nirvana of eventual non-existence for non Tibetan entities should be incentive enough for the world to keel over to the waves of the Tibetan ocean.

Oh and I did put in my orders right ???

 

[Deaths Advocate]

An this is the crumbling throne you elect me too?

It seems you need a new shining light to lead you to the promised land.

Ailedhoo called forth my name, I have answered his call.

 

[Sonereal]

An this is the crumbling throne you elect me too?

It seems you need a new shining light to lead you to the promised land.

Ailedhoo called forth my name, I have answered his call.

What is this? Is this a pretender?

This is heresy of the highest order!

 

[Deaths Advocate]

You are best to embrace my hand now lest it lash out an leave you stunned.

 

[Ailedhoo]

Then let us lead to the salvation of IOT!

Spread the word of IOT across the land!

 

[NinjaCow64]

An this is the crumbling throne you elect me too?

It seems you need a new shining light to lead you to the promised land.

Ailedhoo called forth my name, I have answered his call.

Welcome mate. Glad to have you.

 

[Deaths Advocate]

BTW all this fluff and bluster about removing players from your game is ridiculous.

On CFC the mods obviously get their knickers in a twist about it, so you keep them out of it.

You don't outright tell a player he is banned. That just causes fights.
You sadly say "Sorry dude, I can't handle more players in the game".
You fill your roster before launching the game.
You fill your roster in chat, or a social group.
You create a thread for sign-ups, and include a laborious process for admittance.
Finally, if they make it into your game and they are still asshats, kill them off! Not in an obvious way, but over one or two turns, they will get bored of losing and leave.
Who knows, it might actually reform them into a decent player!
There are winners and losers in these games, no moderator action could ever keep track of things like this.
I've been involved in forum games elsewhere and this is how we dealt with it.

Don't go crying to the moderators for help, they only cause more problems. Sort your issues in house! You are providing an invaluable service by running a game, it is entirely up to you who you take the effort to run the game for. It is beyond ridiculous that the moderation expect you to play happy families even if someone is spamming and trolling without pause.

 

[Mosher]

BTW all this fluff and bluster about removing players from your game is ridiculous.

On CFC the mods obviously get their knickers in a twist about it, so you keep them out of it.

You don't outright tell a player he is banned. That just causes fights.
You sadly say "Sorry dude, I can't handle more players in the game".
You fill your roster before launching the game.
You fill your roster in chat, or a social group.
You create a thread for sign-ups, and include a laborious process for admittance.
Finally, if they make it into your game and they are still asshats, kill them off! Not in an obvious way, but over one or two turns, they will get bored of losing and leave.
Who knows, it might actually reform them into a decent player!
There are winners and losers in these games, no moderator action could ever keep track of things like this.
I've been involved in forum games elsewhere and this is how we dealt with it.

Don't go crying to the moderators for help, they only cause more problems. Sort your issues in house! You are providing an invaluable service by running a game, it is entirely up to you who you take the effort to run the game for. It is beyond ridiculous that the moderation expect you to play happy families even if someone is spamming and trolling without pause.

I like you. Care to stick around?

 

[Deaths Advocate]

I intend too

I have joined a "lite" IOT and am reading the stickies etc.

 

[kiwitt]

+1 to that.

 

[mayor]

You should visit the chat sometimes. Now where did I leave that link... Ah there it is. http://soniot.chatango.com/

EDIT: No Kiwitt, you may like me to adress this to you, but Ninjaing me isn't doing that. I was clearly talking to Death over there, so please take a seat.

 

[CivOasis]

BTW all this fluff and bluster about removing players from your game is ridiculous.

On CFC the mods obviously get their knickers in a twist about it, so you keep them out of it.

You don't outright tell a player he is banned. That just causes fights.
You sadly say "Sorry dude, I can't handle more players in the game".
You fill your roster before launching the game.
You fill your roster in chat, or a social group.
You create a thread for sign-ups, and include a laborious process for admittance.
Finally, if they make it into your game and they are still asshats, kill them off! Not in an obvious way, but over one or two turns, they will get bored of losing and leave.
Who knows, it might actually reform them into a decent player!
There are winners and losers in these games, no moderator action could ever keep track of things like this.
I've been involved in forum games elsewhere and this is how we dealt with it.

Don't go crying to the moderators for help, they only cause more problems. Sort your issues in house! You are providing an invaluable service by running a game, it is entirely up to you who you take the effort to run the game for. It is beyond ridiculous that the moderation expect you to play happy families even if someone is spamming and trolling without pause.

On one hand, yes, that is a way to handle it.

On another, you don't post that in a place the moderators see it, because then they keep an eye out for it. A bit self-defeating here.

On the third (yes, I am aware that most of us lack a third hand), that's not fair. A GM has to follow their rules just as much as the players, and violating them because you find someone annoying or difficult to deal with isn't right.

 

[Deaths Advocate]

It may not be "right", but the player being an asshat in the first place is forcing their hand. The rest of the community would benefit. An as I said, one would hope to actually turn the bad player rather then remove them.

Back on the second hand, with so many layers, they really would have no way of knowing. I know it may seem blase, but really, they would be much happier if we didn't drag them into every schoolground fight.

If you do it right, no one even knows it is happening.

 

[schlaufuchs]

A death of IOT thread and I wasn't invited! For shame!

Anyways, I guess I'll throw my scattershot thoughts on whatever this thread has turned into, I skimmed like half of it so I wouldn't know. Take this as more of a response to the OP is anything.

I've been playing IOT since it literally began (and I'm like 90% sure my invasion of Mathalamus in the Altered Maps thread is what caused the original chain reaction that founded IOT , so literally the beginning), so I remember the early games, and I don't recall them being anything like Thorvald described them. Maybe its my faulty memory, but I feel like his recanting is much too rose-tinted for its own good.

For one, the early games, albeit fun, were spammy like hell. I mean, by god, they were awful. You think the spam is bad now? Try keeping up with a thread that advanced 20 pages in 2 hours, it was inaccessible except for the most hardcore of players. I wouldn't really call that more RP based than IOT's nowadays, in fact, I would say there are similar amounts of RP in today's IOT's compared to the anarchic early days. Don't confuse endless spam for RP.

Two, war didn't cause the death of early IOT's, it was the circumstances that surrounded the war that did. War would usually be preceded by a massive spam fest between two nations calling each other names and failing at anything diplomatic. These two nations would of course be a part of the two massive alliances that contained every player in the game, so when it broke out, everyone was at war. And that point, the GM had an aneurysm and gave up. I don't recall people ever shunning war, in fact, we had a ton of fun with it in IV with ANTIEDO vs. my Japan and Cull's China. What people did end up shunning usually did end up being a couple players who got ragged on every game (to be honest, they didn't really deserve all the crap we gave them) and the spam. Spam was the killer. Yet we all participated in the spam cause we didn't know how to handle it otherwise.

I think IOT's have come very far from those early, chaotic days, and for the better. For one, spam has been more or less stabbed to death through several rather ingenious mechanisms (banning spam in the thread, the using of user groups). This made is to that threads could actually contain, well, RP, and people could easily access it without having to dig through pages of crap. Things like stats and actual numbers have only solidified games, and at least for me, made them so much more enjoyable. Not to rag on you Thorvald, or IOT IV, but to be honest, I have much better memories of Iron and Blood than I do of IV. Don't get me wrong, IV was fun, being warmonger Japan, but it never got to the high point I&B did. The diplomatic situations, the wars, the evolution of the ATK, the world, felt more real, more tense and more challenging in I&B compared to IV. Hell, you can ask GamezRule if you want, I still reminisce with him about the final standoff between his alliance and mine in the final years of I&B, why things went the way they did, and possible alt-scenarios. This doesn't happen to me with IV, whenever I think of that game its more along the lines of "haha we had fun didn't we" rather than "if only I did this, maybe the entire course of the game would have been different". I know that's poorly explain, but the basic gist is that I've had so much more fun with evolved IOT's compared to the original batch.

And although I don't really like the idea of victory in IOT games, and when I do play (I need to play more ) its almost never to achieve victory, blaming the addition as a point of decline is silly IMO. I distinctly remember back in the "glory days" players, although not out to achieve victory, were just as much out for each others throats as they were for "cooperation". As I said in IV, I played a blatant warmonger state that plunged China into a civil with the distinct purpose of eliminating northern China and forming the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet you signify IV as one of the high points, despite this cutthroat-ery. Although the player base has changed, and IOT has evolved far, death and destruction have always been a common theme throughout all iterations of the game, and hell, its what started it in the first place!

Anyways, this is getting a tad long, so I'll wrap up. Thorvald, I think you're looking at the old-IOT much too nostalgically. They were fun, don't get me wrong, and revolutionary for the time, but they were nothing like how you describe them. Where you remember RP and cooperation, I remember spam and warmongering. I believe the IOT's now are some of the best ever, with the continual evolution bringing in new fresh ideas, building upon the old ones, fixing their failures, and creating overall better games. I wish I could find the time to play some more, since I have such great memories of playing some of the newer IOT's, but college is just a time killer. I do really hope that once summer comes around I can actually start up again (and possibly host, I would love to).

False alarm. King's alive and kicking it.
See, look at him, he's happy as can be!

Haha, man those were some good times. Personally, looking back at the first few IOTs (the only ones I participated in) I thought the system as a whole worked for the same reason it collapsed horrifically at the end. That is to say, it was a decently intimate affair between a wide array of characters. On the one hand you had players like me who were really only in it to participate in imaginary nationalist wankery with the occasional trolling (and maybe once in awhile take things seriously), on another you had the out and out trolls (like Perfectionist in the original AH series and the first IOT), you had the players that wore their heart on their sleeves like CG, the players that took the game waaaaaaaaaay too seriously like Mathalamus, and you had people who just wanted to RP and draw ridiculous maps to their hearts' content. All of these people colluded to make seriously entertaining fake-geopolitical situations that were buckets of fun. To be honest, the fact that war was a very real problem at every point of every one of the first 4 games meant that the moments just prior to the game-ending wars were THE most fun parts of all of them. At the end of the day, the first couple IOTs were just a good group of friends having a laugh. No matter how much I dislike the tack IOTs have taken since I&B I will always remember the early days of IOT with fondness.

But I think you've ultimately hit the nail on the head joe. The development of rigid stats isn't prima facie a bad thing. I remember as early as IOTIV I was petitioning heavily for more rules, specifically to deal with issues you outlined above (and I seem to recall you fighting hard against me to not include them ). But at the end of the day you can't really have a strong RP-based (or StoryNES) style of game without a strong-willed moderator to keep things in line, and IOT has since its inception been about blowing off the moderator and building a giant steel dome around your 80 million population Constantinople anyway. So more rules it is!

I hope that made sense, really it was just me reminiscing in a rambly way.

 

[CivOasis]

GM's do not play games.

Topping that all off, it's kind of impossible not to involve the person running the game.

And last of all, I think you missed the part where I said it isn't fair or proper. It's not something that should be done. At the very least, I would expect that if I did that in my games, players would lose faith in my integrity, and I would certainly think so of other GMs if I found that they did so.

 

[Deaths Advocate]

GM's do not play games.

Topping that all off, it's kind of impossible not to involve the person running the game.

And last of all, I think you missed the part where I said it isn't fair or proper. It's not something that should be done. At the very least, I would expect that if I did that in my games, players would lose faith in my integrity, and I would certainly think so of other GMs if I found that they did so.

Sorry, editted for clarity, I had miss understood you.
I am sure the players would not judge you for finding a solution to a problem, even if it ment tweaking things behind the scenes a little.

If you do your pre-game sign-ups and your first few updates properly, you should be able to weed out such players before they ruin a game anyway.

 

[CivOasis]

Again, there is still the matter of "right".
It is not appropriate to make a player lose, however subtly you may do so. It's cheating in its own right, and no better than guaranteeing somebody victory just because you like them more.

That being said, if someone actually does break the rules once in-game, I have absolutely no problem with calling in BirdJag to boot them for their behavior.