Plans, communication and personal responsibilty

Day 4,086, 21:48 • Published in USA USA • by Colin Lantrip 3

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The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

~ Robert Burns



I sometimes forget that most of you aren't involved in all the daily conversations. The back and forth.. who's doing what, why, what we hope to achieve. Should we try this, she would we try that, oh shit.. how did we miss that.. dammit, dammit, dammit.. it's never ending and it's constantly changing. It's fun and exciting.. frustrating and torturous.. all at the same time.

For a small group of players in every community the game is a 24/7 experience. It competes with real life for your attention and it's easy to forget that that is not the case for an overwhelming majority of you.

Before you judge though, it's likely most of you waste a majority of your non working time on meaningless garbage as well. Over my lifetime it has become the nature of western culture.. entertain me.. indulge me.. make me feel something..

I think of a zdlemmy that grabs a nearly dead community by the collar and pulls them up. Inspiring them almost overnight with excitement, confidence, personality and capability.. or a MaM that quietly and patiently works to build a base over a year and half that takes Turkey from being wiped by Finland to being a Top 5 country. Knowing his goals and never letting himself get distracted from them.

I am neither of those guys. I am irritable, I lack patience AND personality. I don't particularly even like most people, much less give a damn about trying to inspire and motivate them. I have neither the time nor the patience, it's just not who I am. It's not that I'm trying to hurt your feelings or offend your sensitivities, I just don't care about them. Not in the intentionally rude way you would assume, but just the same, I don't. I deliver information the same way I prefer to receive it.. straight and to the point. Save the pleasantries for your mom and your girlfriend, I don't need them.

And.. getting to the point.. this is for the US audience..

I am here to help, but I am neither capable of, nor willing to try and single handedly "save" you. I quietly worked helping to set up lines of communication with allies before I came. put my name on the line to buy you some trust and have worked steadily behind the scenes with every administration since to try and figure out how we get out of this mess.. but I am not the larger than life hero you are looking for. The hero we need is inside each and every one of you.

- If you want to do minimum dmg for every BH and ignore the wall, we're going to keep losing.

- If you want to log into erep once or twice a day to dump all you food fights at once in a TP battle, we’re going to keep losing.

- If you want to just blindly dump your dmg on 80% walls 80 minutes into the battle, we’re going to keep losing.

- If you can't take 30 seconds to look at the feed and go through a few battles to use your damage effectively for the national effort, we're going to keep losing.

*Orders are still not perfect, but they are considerably more consistent now than they have been. The country feed is going to be the primary location for these. It should be the first place you look and don’t be afraid to interact there, comment, say hi, ask questions, make polite suggestions. Just get involved.. As important as war is here, it’s still the social interaction that keeps most of us here.

- If you don't care, why should anybody else? That small group of people I mentioned earlier work their asses off to make sure you can work your companies, have battles to fight in, regions to run for congress from, ect..

Does Legend X, Legend XX, millions of cc from your companies or 50 congress medals really mean anything if your country is constantly wiped and occupied? Why are you even here playing? I don’t get it..

Nobody is suggesting that you spend hours and hours a day here, it’s insane that any of us do. But what you can do.. is use the time you are here, be it 5 mins twice a day, 30 mins a day, 2 hrs a day, whatever.. In the most effective way possible. You’ve got to buy in to the larger goal and contribute in whatever way you can. It all adds up and it matters.. Our problems won’t be solved in one eureka moment, they’ll be solved one wall and one battle at a time.


A few random things..

New administration coming in on the 6th, I’ve avoided politics here and I prefer to keep it that way. But let’s make sure we elect someone with the time and motivation to be active. If that doesn’t apply to you, don’t run.

Carlos has done far more than any of you realize, we are losing a tremendous amount of activity and I will miss telling him "that is your decision not mine". 🙂

We need to have a conversation about “farming”. I am not interested in a bunch of full time farmers, but TW’s and the gold you make in them are a vital part of winning here. I have discouraged TW’s to this point because I felt it would be a distraction and our damage is really inconsistent from one day to the next. I am prepared to reconsider this if we can get enough people paying attention to manage those battles and still do some real fighting. The gold is necessary, but if they turn into a shit show of personal grudges and infighting, they will end. There’ll be more on that soon.



One thing I learned in my years in Albania, you don’t have to be the strongest country to win. You just have to be such a pain in the ass to mess with, that people don’t. The people on the other sides of these screens are real people just like you. They have lives and obligations, things they’d like to do other than set in front of that screen for countless hours every day defending a wall or a BH because they know one of us is going to come flip it or take it. You’d be real surprised what a little consistent harassment can do to even the biggest country. Aside from the hours of their time, many have to farm just to keep themselves in paks. When every round takes hundreds of millions or billions to defend, you disrupt these things, you disrupt their lives and the way they are used to playing the game. They start fighting amongst themselves over who is and isn’t “helping”. It takes more than a day.. or a week, but it works.

That’s it for now.. is getting late and I feel like I haven’t slept in a week. My intentions are good, my desire to be part of a strong active community is great, but that is your responsibility as much as it is mine.

I'd love to see you step up to it.