No, no, I actually want to hear this

[Joseph Cao]

But who am I to ignore a directive from the GM team when they ask us to get out of the thread?

But anyway, whatever. If you all want to keep running this game into the ground you are free to proceed as you please. Kind of astonishing how much you've managed to destroy in the last eight months.

The game now has gone to sh**t. I don't think literally anyone would dispute that. And it's the cumulative fault of almost everyone involved.

Since the entire period you specified happens to align perfectly with my presidency (inc. an entire term where I puttered about signing Devout’s bills) I suppose I have an academic interest in hearing about this, but others may want to hear it too.

[Sestak]

Not blaming you at all; I legitimately think this is on a lot of people. The 8 month time mark is because that's when I last held political office. (EDIT: I think it's also how long Mr. R has been back as PPT, and how long this GM by committee has existed, which is why I used it when addressing them. Might be completely wrong on those dates, though) I also considered the defeat of the April Fools - a group who organized their nonsense almost entirely on Discord, avoided the boards as much as possible when discussing anything, and regularly disparaged both Atlasia's position as a forum game and the Atlas Forum itself - to be something of a victory against discordification. So I'm not exactly heartened by what I've seen on that front since then.

Again, I can't blame you for this simply because I know firsthand no one person can solve this - not even if they're the President - and you've consistently been one of the better people on this since when I was an active player. It's just a general sense of frustration that what we did last year seemingly meant nothing in the long run.

Even my own appointment to the Supreme Court wasn't immune to this - I was only reached out to for consideration to the seat fairly late in the process, after two separate nominees had already been put up and the second looked likely to fail. There wasn't even a public call for it put out; as I don't habitually read the registration thread I didn't realize there was a vacancy at all! If I had been available on Discord I have very little doubt things would have gone differently. And I see echoes of this type of thing in almost everything that happens in game - this Greenland stuff was just the one it took to make me annoyed enough to write something, I guess. In part because, with the distance that discordification provides, it looks absolutely absurd in isolation. Like the GM team/whoever is almost playing a joke. In general, trying to pay attention to the game while not being on Discord feels like trying to watch it from a distance, underwater, and with a delay. Not fun.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I intentionally shun discord because of how much of a time sink it is and when I have limited time available, I tend to appropriate it towards the top priorities first.

To make matters worse, as bad as things were for me in the two weeks prior, the present week has been far worse than anything that transpired over that time period. I intend to make a post on this matter in my office thread in the near future.

Sure, the victory over the dengist movement was a "victory against discordification", but it was not a "victory over discordification"

Much of the successful response was itself coordinated on discord, in which Mr. R among others worked to bring together a broad coalition of people behind the scenes.

It is a victory against discordification, to the extent that it highlighted the dangers of balkanized discords, echo-chamber consensus within those discords, and the damage such can bring to the wider community.

However, nothing has been done to shift the community back towards unified community discords, much less back towards the open boards that many of us would obviously prefer. To that end, the passive appeal of that medium has continued to work its seemingly inexorable magic at the expense of the open boards and the wider Atlasian community.

[Mr. Reactionary]

I became PPT in November 2022 which was 4 months ago, not 8. Cao's first term had 2 months of PPT Spark and 2 months of PPT WD (half of which I was banned from the forum for along with DeadPrez and during which Labor deliberately opposed vacating our seats to rig the numbers in their favor).

I had nothing to do with making the GM Team active again, which frankly is way better now than the absentee office it was.

We have more active institutions now. Last session, every party that introduced bills federally had something they wanted pass, including Labor. The session before, the same thing happened. The lawmaking environment generally is frendlier towards getting stuff passed now as long as its not mean, hardcore, partisan stuff.

The Presidency is no longer monopolized by Philcord committee with the sole intent of boxing out half of the game from participating.

We have options now for federal referenda to increase general player activity. Weve had other federal amendments pass too giving us a chance to make structural reforms rather than submit to stagnation.

And we have healthy options for 3rd parties now. Peace is force to be reckoned with and half of the Federalists joined the SNP. We are increasingly a game requiring lots of input from all sides rather than a boring 3 year run where only 1 side gets to do anything.

The game appears to me to be way healthier and more fun than it was 1 year ago, and I find it strange that certain persons feel the opposite.

[Pericles]

PPT Spark?! The Federalists really are a joke party.

[Joseph Cao]

My recollection is of roughly August as the actual activity nadir of my presidency when it was obvious people just didn't want to talk about anything that wasn't the sound of their own farts. There was a budget discussion supposedly going on with Senators posting past each other, a lot more culture war bills that are apparently being resurrected in the legislation thread plus accompanying righteousspeak, and the GMs hadn't gotten off the ground yet. Insofar as debate existed about the GM situation it was mainly that something had to be done to kick the office out of clutch, not that my perspective as a player who entered the game under GM Lumine was particularly useful. But I did think it did part of the job I wanted the change to accomplish.

Frankly the Supreme Court business still baffles me and to pick just one example the Wulfric lobbying candidate list he mentioned in the last Windjammer thread is very strange to me. People in general seem to be interacting through their own filters of whatever situation is at hand and Discord seems to affect that more than any one other factor. Just not sure what else can be fixed if that remains the case even with some semblance of forum activity in the conventional structures of the game.

PPT Spark?! The Federalists really are a joke party.

I’ll give you two guesses which party elected Ishan that time he was spending twelve hours a day on Discord and none on the forum, and WD with the intention of blowing up the entire Senate body, and what that says about its joke status. Small hint, it wasn't the party of the guy who had to clean up after them both times.

Both coincidentally (or not!) very good examples of how discordification has been worse for this game than the object of your sudden fixation in this thread btw.