Hot Takes in 2024
Ooh boy, let’s see those hottest takes imaginable!
Most of you are deranged and you should touch grass immediately.
Oh…
Well, I was like, I know some people have been having controversial takes on Civ, so of course for the last newsletter let’s just say “screw it” and go for the chaos. So let’s take a look at what the past couple of years has brought people:
Admins SHOULD be pushing meta changing features as often as they want to play around with mechanics. Playerbase hate it? Revert. Else we will be stuck in the same dull server until Wing finishes a new and revamped sneaker collection of his own and closes the server.
This was a sentiment that really counters the idea of the admin’s strategy on the Meteoric Iron update. I mentioned in a previous poll writeup that while it’s not a satisfying thing where admins just throw a significant update onto prod without any feedback, but sometimes this is what you need to get new features out the door these days.
In typical Civ mainstream cycles, “meta changing features” would usually be developed by an experimental server, typically Realms or Devoted, but CivMC seems to be the sole server this cycle, so it tends to be difficult to play both the mainstay of the iteration and the driver of new ideas.
People Focus too much on making their nation secure or making their nation #1. All that infra is meaningless if you don’t have fun on civ
This is why I tend to focus closer to world building in this newsletter, because making defensive infra is boring.
Crayon claiming is not an issue. It’s a mindset issue. Every newfriend wants their own nation, yes, but there’s so many nations it’s hard to not find a nation that’s suitable for you, and what you want to do. (assuming the newfriend is not a shitter) Granted, some newfriends do just want to have the power but… you don’t really need power in CivMC to have a good time. [response continues on refuting crayon claiming as a concept and recommends players join nations]
Bronnakus, are you listening? New players overclaiming their OMNs is generally peak newfriend. What is not worth complaining about (which is mentioned and really mostly contributes to this argument) is if you claim a lot of land but intends to use it, which is literally the entire point of the IF.
Civ would be better with more admin intervention. Peak civ would be like GTA RP, where only admins lead factions.
Well, skewing more into that direction makes it closer to CivEx where wars are essentially mandated, and nobody likes fake world-building.
Even More Hot Takes
Yoahtl is always right
10/10, no notes, hail pigeon
Vaults are the COOLEST thing to come out of civ and its plugins, but people are too paranoid and secretive of them to use them for advertising purposes, and as a result lose a significant amount of advertising potential
Historical players will know vaults are hard to advertise because once you show your hand, it’s relatively easy to break. That being said, nearly every vault break within the last 5-7 years has been skybridge-based, not ground-based. I have no authority to speak on that, but vaults are a rather interesting concept that we always have more content on these days.
Ban waves are bad, and the majority of people that have been should be unbanned.
Ohh boy, what a take this one is. The reason why most players are on the ban list are for doxxing, harrassment and other “really bad” issues, so that second point I feel is just moot from a morality standpoint. Ban waves aren’t inherently bad — I think it’s a thing where it has to be pretty justified. Some recent times have been a little less and more panic triggers, but I’ve been trusting the admins with their judgement lately.
Winning a civ war through a ban wave or insiding is pathetic. People that have insided like ComradeNick, FastestGrass, Antea, now have zero trust within the community.
Yeah, I do feel this is while not pathetic, is extremely tragic. I’ve already talked about ban waves in the previous comment, but insiding especially in the Grasslands Gambit was especially damaging to the community, and I’ve never heard from any of these people (outside of Nick occasionally talking in Yoahtl discord). It just really feels bad when you’re just entirely sidelined in the community and not even have a chance to redeem yourself.
There was a conversation about pearling costs/lengths the other day… and it got me thinking that moderation should at times take a more hands-on approach when it comes to player toxicity and in-game harassment. […] Ultimately I’d say the admins should be prioritizing in moderation and design community health above all else and that does require some degree of intervention in combat, war, and raiding to prevent long and demoralizing periods of global conflict that destroy healthy communities and prevent new ones from growing.
On the other hand, this is exactly the antithesis to the previous point. Moderation and community health have been a core factor to the admins this iteration. But most players really don’t know how well they have it, it’s probably the most well-moderated Civ iteration to date. I think this is definitely something the admins are good about although in future Civ server this is a case study that people need to keep in mind.
not everything needs to be botted and sometimes the admins lean too hard into the bunkies crowd
Being a vault friend is a wasteful and unnecessary part of Civ
Vault warfare, as is, permanently relegated Civcraft into a very small niche that will always be small
It doesn’t really help the tech tree is so heavily imbalanced towards just climbing it in that direction. It would be nice in future Civ servers to completely overhaul the tech tree in order so that something like this just simply doesn’t exist and allow nations to have better specializations, but because defense is the gameplay on Civ, one can dream.
People do a REALLY good job at scaring away any new players, far more than any server imbalance does (which is still bad btw).
I will say, I don’t help.
You haven’t truly experienced civ if you’ve stuck to one player ‘archetype’. If you were always the grinder, always the pvper or always the builder you have only experienced a small part of civ.
The one thing I will say about being a newsletter writer is that it’s definitely opened me up to so many different parts of the world. I can at least say that I’m at least a little more versed in how PvP and strategy works instead of it being a black box. I think this iteration more so has allowed people to really discover what they can really bring to the table; it’s really the culmination of every “fun” feature that Civ has brought to the table thus far.