What Happened?

[The Southern Acre]

Ok, so I am not sure if anyone is going to come around and read this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

I am just curious as to people's opinions about what happened exactly to RSN that made it fall so quickly. We were quite active there for a while, 100+ nations, alliances, etc, so it confuses me to this day how it ended so quickly.

I originally believed that it was due to a general downturn in participation in NS; however, if you check the NS site, this can be discredited. While NS is not as active as it was in its heyday (actually about a year before RSN was founded), it is still an active area with offsite forums etc. Several large player created regions have emerged since RSN stopped being active, including one called Capitalist Paradise that has over 660 nations. I do not believe that the general downturn in NS participation was as large or as widespread as we initially thought.

Anyway, I was just curious what you all thought. And I had nothing else to do.

[deisel 10]

I think it just kind of happened that all of our most active members got busy all at once. We also had a tough time getting people from the region to come post on the forum, not sure why though. Maybe people outside the core group thought it was too hard to break in, since we were really close, Idk. I think with the exception of Mickey (and maybe Tere? I don't remember which of us joined first), after I joined, we never really got anyone else who was really active to join. People would come in, post a few times, and never come back. I don't know that it's anything we did or didn't do, it just kind of happened that way. I worked my ass off recruiting to no avail, so I stopped. Maybe it was off-putting that a lot of the members on the forum had let our nations die? (Although mine didn't die until well after I had stopped posting regularly, I don't think.)

[utract]

diesel is right, we just became too much of a clique. We were all getting on so well recruiting lost momentum. Our reputation with other regions was largely for banter and spam - those that did come visit from our alliances came to take part in this, not to engage in serious political discourse. Our lack of serious political discussion towards the end made it hard for new members to break in. Ultimately too many of the core clique got too busy at the same time and that was the final catalyst for collapse...

[The Southern Acre]

Interesting... So what I am actually hearing here is that we did too good a job of creating a good regional environment. We got so close etc. that no one new could join. Who would have thought that we should have actually been less friendly if we wanted to form a longer lasting region?

[utract]

It sounds stupid when you word it like that, but at the end of the day banter, in-jokes and our random (ofton totally contrived) inter-personal rivalries basically took over everything. I think new people felt they couldn't break into all that, everything they contributed just got swamped amongst all the chatter from the more active members... No one arrives being mega active, it grows on them, and we never gave them that opportunity.

Also I think we developed a bad rep amongst other regions for so much spam... Which really didn't help when new people were looking around.

[The Southern Acre]

Yeah, I tend to agree with that. What I found in most other regions was that they had a place for spam/ fun conversations between individuals, but the government areas were generally free of it. In RSN the personalities and individual characters spilled over into government affairs rather than just being limited to certain areas. I think this made it difficult for new nations to come in.

You could see near the end that new nations would arrive and make a few posts and then never come back. Now of course, this is something common among almost every region, but I can see how it would be even more pronounced here. It seemed like second nature to us, but it would probably be quite overwhelming to come into a region where the main players were so well established and had been for so long.

On a related topic, it was also probably nearly impossible to really break into the government after a certain point, as most of the positions continued to rotate among the top leaders. If you think about it, there were seven total terms of Presidential government. Prior to that there was the provisional council to form the region's government and afterwords was the sort of revolutionary non-government or whatever it was. Anyway, in those seven terms, only three people served as president. Alyss and Urine for one term each and myself for five terms. All those members had been around since the founding of the region. This may have given new members the impression that if they were not founders they had little hope of being an important member of the region.

Anyway, just thoughts.

[utract]

Yeah, thats very true. I suppose new people felt they had little opportunity to really make a mark on the region.

[The Southern Acre]

Exactly. Which incidentally wasn't really true. It was actually quite easy to get involved in the government.

[utract]

Yes, I suppose we were fairly welcoming. They just found it hard to keep up...

[Micky]

I'd prefer to think of it as they just lacked the natural tenacity required to keep up with our close-knit, fast-paced forum life style :D