Number Ninety-Nine: Just As I Am

Day 700, 11:09 • Published in USA USA • by Emerick

Well America, the Great War is over, and we stand now at the threshold of the Great Boredom, if all goes just according to keikaku(*translator's note: keikaku means plan). To fill this boredom, a great many Americans have reinstated the Great Hospital Debate - a debate as old as America itself. The saying goes, "if all else fails, argue about hospitals."

I'm not going to sit here and say that everyone in the argument is an idiot, because I see what you're trying to do and respect your goals. As I see it, the argument for more hospitals stems from noob care and worry about a near-dead industry.

The first point is easy to address. The logic behind more hospitals is that we, a nation of 51 original regions, will have people popping up unforeseeably in those 51 regions, and, in order to retain the most possible, it would help if they had a hospital in their region. It's more than regional pride, too - noobs can't really afford moving tickets to the fortress states if they know about them, and if they don't, then there's another issue.

But there's a better way. Under my administration, the mentor program was supposed to become more aggressive by pming noobs instead of passively waiting for the noobs to come to them. If they do this now, then the mentors simply have to let the noobs know about the fortress situation.

As for the issue concerning how to get tickets into the noobs' hands, I suggest that congress considers adding moving tickets to Meals on Wheels. It's fitting; it'd add wheels to the meals.

Communication and distribution. It's as simple as that.

You're over thinking the problem, and not helping anyone in the process.

That's one of the problems with America. We don't address the problems that we're trying to solve. Instead, we attack it sideways, and in the process, forget what our goal is. Not only that, but we live in a narcissistic society in real life. Everyone wants to have their name on something. Everyone wants a big accomplishment under their belt. Everyone wants to own everything. To put it bluntly, everyone wants to be known for doing something, but no one wants to do anything useful. People come into this game hoping to become a well-known politician, and some of them never find out that no one knows the politicians in this game. The president is well-known, but that's about it as far as politicians. You won't find a large chunk of our society who knows who came to the conclusion that 20% taxes were best, and I challenge you to find 50 people in the US who know who first did the calculations that told us that we were better off with a few fortress states instead of putting hospitals everywhere we can. But these people changed America. They did the work, and their work paid off. These are the policies that dictate our country today. They did the work, not for fame and glory, but for the betterment of US. Excuse me while I get philosophical, but our country is US, not ME. I once had a boss who said "there's no 'fuck you' in 'team,'" and I think he was right.

However, we like to fuck each other. It's the old "survival of the fittest" mentality. It's a fine way to go, but you're thinking about it wrong. Instead of getting yourself to the top, you should be working on getting US to the top.

Recently, George Barker asked http://eusforum.com/index.php/topic,12644.0.html>what the goal of the US was. It was meant to be a thought exercise to get us to think about where we want to take the US, and how we think we can get there. He asked us, in the general discussion portion of the forum, not the president, and not congress. He asked us, the population, because we're the people who move the country. We dictate the policies, and the politicians just make our options. That is democracy. And no matter what the government tries to do, they can't take democracy from us. Because they can't change the code in the game.



Now, the bigger issue at hand, which I named in the first paragraph, is boredom. This is a world-wide phenomenon, player retention, but let's not talk about the rest of the world right now, let's talk about US.

When people come into this game, they have a certain expectation. Some expect this to be politics, and some expect it to be world domination. There are others, I'm sure, but those are the ones that are easy to identify. We, as the established people of the US need to identify people's expectations, and help them do what they want to do in order to keep them satisfied and coming back.

One thing that people may not expect, but may stay for, is drama. Yes, that thing that your girlfriend does for a few days once a month can actually keep people in The Game. It did it for me, and I know that plenty of goons and Pakis stayed around to see what they could do to Koroush and the Turks. I came into the game when the Pakistani Empire was at its height. Long before they owned China and India, Pakistan owned the forums, and boy did they stir things up. Watching their arguments and trollings against Koroush and the Swedes was really fun, and it kept me logging in day after day. Now, I'm not going to say that America should just pick a target(UK) and just start going to town on them(troll the UK), I'm just saying that people like a good story, and they'll stick around to see what happens. And in an interactive game like this, they can participate, too, and that's loads of fun.

The point is that we need something to entertain our people. Some want war, some want to play politics, and some want to just see what they can do. Let's help our people help our people. DEEP.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjw5UmL8w9c>Daisy