Lets talk about the wild, shall we?

Discussion in 'Frontier and Player Outposts' started by Mrlegitislegit, Jul 9, 2014.

  1. Or at least I will if no one else posts. :p

    So I have some gripes about the current state of the wild, mostly about the "ego" the wild community has formed over the last few months. Now I will be mentioning some outposts in this rant, and I would like to say I am not hating on them and I ask you guys not to start a flamewar over any criticism I give.

    The Wild has always been a play on EMC where I have been involved, as its the part of EMC where I have the most fun, but has started to lose its fun, mostly because of the "ego" that is being formed by a lot of outposts. This "ego" can be described as acting like certain outposts are the best outpost on EMC and all others are inferior, or acting like they don't need any input from other camps. The camp that I feel falls into this category is no longer functioning, but I will be talking about them anyways. What camp is it? The Second NR

    I am mentioning the Second NR because it was a failure both on the leadership and on the community. It showed us what can happen when an outpost gets an "ego" right out of the gate. A leadership that seemed to try to force the Wild community to bow before it at its very start. The community is also at fault here, including myself. We didn't want to let the Second NR to just barge in and take over, so we did act overly defensive towards it. Yes, being defensive was a good thing, but I feel like we overstated the problem a lot.

    So how can the Wild community deflate it's ego? Well that's hard to say, but I have two outposts that I think can pave the way, one is the LLO, one of the oldest outposts on EMC, and a newcomer, PoC.

    The LLO shows us the great stuff the can happen when the Wild community bands together. It has a great community with a lot of great builds, and it manages all of this with no government, no real leadership, just the voices of its members. Yes, nowadays the LLO isn't as active as it used to be, but it still stands for a time on EMC and in the Wild when it was all about the community.

    PoC is currently the outpost I spend most of my time on, so yes, I may be bias but I won't try to let that rub off. PoC has a great community that seeks to find the best of players on EMC and gives players a supportive place to build and have fun on EMC. Is it going to be the next LLO? No, but not because it can't, but because it isn't meant to be. PoC is a lot more structured than the LLO, which is fine because PoC does have "goals" to fulfill, but these goals are largely out of the interest of both the PoC community, and the EMC community.

    Both of these camps show the way I feel like the Wild should be, full of supportive players and great places to join together and have fun. I feel like if we can do this once again, the Wild will be a much more fun place to be a part of. I have some other opinions on the current state of the Wild, but I wanted to get this out, and if anyone wants to know the rest, I will post those too.
  2. Their are many other great communities out there hell even some only have 1-2 players live there and enjoy it. When someone aims to be biggest or most successful one it's mostly going to fail or very short lived. Having a community driven by goverment doesn't really work because this is minecraft a video game not the real world there is no real conquense to your actions. Only really guild or goverment type group called Delta team and in the end it's leader got greedy and ignorant of his somewhat "status & power." I could go on about what makes succesful outpost but if part of wild community and enjoy people around best luck to uou because that's good outpost. Anyways back to watching planet of apes movie marathon.
  3. *wants*

    Anyways, I agree that the wild isn't what it used to be. When I created sunstreak I wanted something a bit more rigid than the LLO (because that's just me) but still fairly open, which I think it has done (although, apparently I'm an evil dictator :p). I've tried to formulate some more government type things, but I've found that the ones that work, just take too much time.
    zulu9 likes this.
  4. Congratulations Dwight, you share one of my other opinions.

    It seems almost all the camps that are being started strive to be bigger and better, like COD and Battlefield have to be bigger and better than each other. This aspirations are ok, if they are a side-project. In the long run, no one is really going to care if the "government" of your outpost is more structured than the other outposts, because in the long run these big Wild governments just fall to pieces.

    That isn't true, the best type of Wild government is easy to do, just have the members of the outpost vote on ideas and plans, no need to have to have a president or a prime minister.
    zulu9 likes this.
  5. I'm referring to the full on ones with Prime minister or president. Making sure no one gains too much power is just too hard...
    zulu9 likes this.
  6. Which will happen never because no one will put in any checks and balances on an EMC government. Government camps in general are getting annoying, but I will save that for tomorrow.
    607, spartan0405 and mba2012 like this.
  7. So like I promised Mba, onto my gripes about government based camps.

    The first problem with them is that there are too many, and none of them seem to add anything to the idea, save maybe some changes to the names of the positions. It had its run, but in its current state government based camps just don't have any appeal. Just look at the former NR camps, they all seem to be going inactive. Yes, this might not be because other people find the government idea boring, but there has also been a rise in non-government based camps or at least camps without a government that is as structured as the former NR ones. In all honestly, I say the idea of government based camps should be killed at this point. They were fun at first, but now it seems all camps with a government are just the same at this point.

    The second problem I have with them is the over-seriousness some of the camps were. Back when the Second NR was a thing, we had people being called "traitors" for being part of another camp. "You're a traitor because you're part of Estona!" "You're a traitor because you're part of Wrem!" "You're a traitor because you're part of the Second NR!" We had the Second NR declaring "war" on other outposts. Like godsake people, its just a game. You can't even go to war on EMC unless you want to bring all your battles to the PVP arena.

    Government camps had their run, but looking at all the dormant government camps, I think that run is over, and that we should just go back to having fun in the wild or finding a new type of way to run outposts.
  8. /declarewar foobar

    *PVP is now on* (slight bug: pvp enabled for all players as we have no official group registration system!)
  9. I've not ever really been into these things, I agree with you though. (Too bad I missed the delta team)
  10. It seems like all the large camps from the glory days of the wild are all gone and have been replaced with government camps trying to takeover large swaths of the wild. Back in the old days of the wild people weren't going to the wild to try and control it they were going there to join a community and have some fun with friends. As EMC has grown larger as a community we've lost that sense of community.
    zulu9, penfoldex and Mrlegitislegit like this.
  11. Exactly, it feels like the Wild has become a big game of RISK minus the ability to gain meaningful territory.
    pat2011 likes this.
  12. I don't think you should be so quick to put down government-based wild outposts.
    After Duperia apparently flopped, I looked at the concept and started from scratch. I looked at the LLO model; how could I apply a government to enhance it, I asked? I eventually came up with the idea of a National Dividend (free money in the form of a share of surplus outpost income), a legislature, the National Parliamentary Assembly (which has been used very little :p) and later the Points system, and tied it all together into Concordia.

    I believe that if Concordia was launched when the LLO was launched, at the prime of EMC wild activity, Concordia would have taken the place of the LLO as monster-scale outpost. Just my opinion, because I found a way which a government could add to a wild experience, as opposed to taking away from it. In the New Republic, endless elections and constitutional amendments slowed down real governance and created arguments. It took away from the wild experience. Concordia is the New Republic Lite.

    Governments have the ability to succeed where anarchy fails, by creating additional incentives to participate and produce things which benefit the public. The main problem I found in my project was point rewards for labour, as opposed to donating goods, but that's something I hope to address next time, should there be a next time. :p
    MissFable and 607 like this.
  13. My problem with government based isn't the idea, but the overuse of the idea. Yes, Concordia is different and has a different idea, an idea that I do like as far as government camps go. It's all the other camps that just use an NR model, hoping that the NR's former glory rubs off on them.

    As for Concordia taking the LLO's place if they had been launched at the same time, I say no to that. The LLO is special because it allowed people to come and build to their hearts content with little regulation. Concordia doesn't allow that and it fills a smaller niche.
  14. I haven't taken any of the communities that have tried to set up rules seriously, mainly because none of them have the authority to discipline except socially.

    I've often found myself in a leadership position in the communities I've played in but the only real power I had was social which was something that I feel was given me voluntarily by people because they respected my thoughts and felt I would behave reasonably as a leader. The power was more along the lines of civil engineering though, not gameplay. If I decided the neighboring jungle should remain untouched, or if I wanted to keep the beach clear of buildings to preserve the view, the people I was playing with would mostly agree or we would discuss and probably compromise.

    But it was power that was given to me out of trust and respect. I was powerless to stop someone from building or mining if they had other plans. If a stranger decided to "join" our community on his own terms we were powerless to stop them as long as they didn't break server rules (or more often, weren't caught breaking them). What these situations did instead was destroy the social order we created. It set someone up who disagreed with the rules, was unaware of them, or just did not care to be not accepted into the group.

    It is not that it is impossible to create a community like this. I think the fact that it has been attempted so often suggests that many people desire order and rules. I feel though, that given the server rules we have to work with, that the odds are against a community being successful for long beyond a certain number of players. People naturally move on and often because of fear of adding new people to the group, the retention rate will put an end to the group if nothing else does. It might be different if we could restrict people from claimed areas of the Wild, but it is not.

    The LLO has been mentioned as an example of a successful community. In my opinion it actually has been several associated communities that existed both simultaneously and at different times as people came and went. They also really don't have any rules. Basically let them know you were coming and follow server rules from what I understood when I visited there, and I wonder how many people actually bothered to do even that. I think the lack of rules and expectations that they would be followed was probably part of what made them successful. Maybe more importantly I think it was successful because of social connections. Every person that joined had a friend or two who wanted to join them out there and which allowed it to grow as fast or faster than the rate that people left.

    I guess in short, if you want to kill a community, make a bunch of rules then wait until someone who doesn't respect you shows up, then try to enforce them. Make outsiders feel unwelcome and limit the population so that as people leave for whatever reason they are not replaced with other players.
    Kaizimir, Kephras, zulu9 and 6 others like this.
  15. My thoughts exactly. I don't think any of the more 'serious" government have ever really succeeded in their goals. Sure, some, such as Estona, have fared better in keeping on track with their goals, but none of them seem to have done it. What goal am I talking about? I am talking about the goal to have a unified "nation state." Oddly, the one outpost that I think has became a "nation state" is one without a government, which is the LLO. If you ask me, LLO is more of a name that the "neighborhoods" of the LLO are united under than the name of the outpost itself. The only part of the LLO that I consider the original LLO is the desert area but all of the other non-original parts are still part of the LLO but have different names. So maybe all of the more serious camps that set out to become an EMC "nation state" should take a hint from the LLO, which is that in a game like Minecraft, people are going to be pulled towards an outpost that has a great community and offers a lot of fun than an outpost that sets out to be a "nation state."
    zulu9 and mba2012 like this.
  16. I guess I've only posted my problems with the wild currently, so I might as well post some suggestions for the current camps.

    There is a greater influx of new camps right now than I remember being since around the time the LLO was formed. This is a good thing because it gets more people out into the wild and allows for greater variation in camps. Right now the wild is stagnating. Old government camps, especially in SMP9, are clinging onto government for dear life with no real results. What these camps need is a change in both what they offer to EMC and how they are run. My suggestion would be to scrap the governments in general and workout a new idea for leadership. Government camps were in a slow decline after the fall of the NR and have plummeted after the Second NR. (Or whatever you wish to call it at this point.) Another suggestion would be for newer camps to set up in other servers other than SMP9, or at least East SMP9. Not because SMP9 is a bad server, but because of how crowded it seems to be with other outposts. Setting up on another server other than SMP9 gives more choices for people who might not be able to join a camp on SMP9 due to other commitments . My third suggestion is that new outposts should go their own way and try to find out what they think works best for their outpost. Yes government worked for one camp for awhile but it differently hasn't worked well for all camps so instead of going with the flow, dig a new channel in the river and see what happens.
    607 and mba2012 like this.
  17. Honestly, I've run towns on different servers, and I used to even be part of an outpost here. You need some kind of government, or leadership, but you need a good leader. The people who get put into leadership roles quickly turn power lust, and try to control demand a lot from people in their outposts. That's the main problem with some outposts. You say that most government outposts are all the same, or alike except for titles, but I disagree. I've seen, and been in some great outposts that had a different approach because of a good leader. That's what makes or breaks a government outpost, is a leader.
    Kaizimir, 607 and mba2012 like this.
  18. So give me advice on what I should do with Estona, or is our current system fine
  19. I can never read what you say because you use tiny chat : /