Round 40 Shaka when the walls fell

From realm assignment, we in #3 had high hopes. Due to my own foolishness, I had joined in to make a 4-pack (with Yeow, his wife, and their son), not knowing it prohibited our realm from having a 5-pack (Cronel confirmed with Fett that we were the only realm without a 5-pack), but we were lucky enough to have jboy and Bobbo land with us, and Cronel's pack with Damdred and Saccora filled us out nicely. Additionally , NaUj (<3) randomed in, though he was upfront about his probable inactivity, but I hooked him up with a sim and we were good to go.

All-in-all, a pretty decent group of players. Early on, seeing the number of potential ops guys in-realm, jboy and Bobbo decided to play fast as a pair of lizards, and Damdred wanting to provide backup did the same. Me and Yeow were planning on slower attacking, but we had 4~ people exploring and likely able to track top op and potentially help with target hunting, so it seemed like a decent enough plan to have some fast attackers.

Pretty much right out the gate, communication was poor in our realm. We had pretty bad ops coverage, and it became pretty clear early on that was going to keep being a problem. It didn't take super long before the FAs hit the wall, we weren't really tracking top op, and the help jboy/bobbo were hoping for from Cronel, Sacc, and NaUj just wasn't there. Well they flipped out a little bit, asking why even bother, etc. which prompted me building more towers and training more spies and wizards in an effort to help out. Also, this is when NaUj abandoned, partly due to a busy work schedule and what Iwill also deem as "creative differences" with the realm. Damdred also abandoned around this time, because of some RIL things, and he was already dead as a FA at this point.

I'm terrible at keeping track of exact days when things happened, but I'd say it was around 7-10 days in and we had not yet declared war on anyone. A travesty, I'm sure, since we had some bloppers who only had any vested interest in casting fireballs on things, and for some reason we had allowed one of them to be monarch from the very beginning. After spending several days saying "okay, so when are we warring #2?" nothing came of it, but I did get to see Cronel make comments in other discord servers complaining that his realm "wouldn't let him war", which was funny to me since there had been only one specific instance where people told him the timing for war wasn't the best, and the rest of the time we were all for warring #2, even if just to slow down the lyc. But I guess reality becomes a bit blurred after you stare into the sun for too long and spend a solid week doing nothing but hammering the "please give me war" button on your keyboard in between sampling the wide range of flavors one can discover while licking public door handles.

So when the war on #12 was decided (largely due to Cronel waiting too long to war #2, which was the rest of our faults, apparently), Bobbo tagged us all and the countdown began. I want to make this clear, we were all fully aware of the impending war declaration on #12 going in, but one of us didn't see these notifications, and that man is named Yeow. Well the war was declared, and the realm that was chosen was possibly the worst one to choose, since about half of #12 were pretty well suited to blopping the everloving hell out of us. Lo and behold, who did they select to blop? Yeow. The one who didn't see we were going to war. Well he didn't take too kindly to this, and the insults began. And the blood continued to flow out of Yeow's mouth and butthole for at least a couple days.

This realm had a wonder we were hoping to take, but with Yeow out of commission, two mostly-dead FA's, an abandon, and whatever the hell you want to call what Yeow's kid was doing, it would really have been tough for us to muster up the OP to take the damn thing, so after asking the realm if we wanted to orchestrate anything and getting pretty empty responses, we saw then that this wasn't a war for a wonder at all. It was ultimately being maintained as a vanity project for Cronel to get some fireballs to climb up the FB rankings. Well that just made Yeow even angrier, having been sunk and exploded to a point where he couldn't do anything anymore, and finding out it was all for nothing. Jboy told him he had time to train and prepare for the war, which infuriated Yeow. More to follow on that later.

So, with Cronel only having 3 votes for the monarchy and us being well past the 48-hour mark in war, I suggested to Yeow that he and his family just vote for him and cancel the war himself. The idea was that he could undeclare, and in doing so get to feel as though he had some kind of control over it. Since he had lost all power during the war itself, I felt it would help him to feel better by being able to end the war, then we could figure out what to do with the monarchy later on. Not a big deal, honestly, but it quickly was made into a big deal because Cronel wanted to end the war relatively soon himself (and later admitted that he was just going to war someone else immediately afterwards, anyway) and took this as an act of aggression.

Well, this started its own little snowball effect. Cronel went into domchat and the Blops network to openly complain about a coup and tried to instigate war declarations against us as a realm because of it. Nice job breaking the actual rules of the game, btw, which clearly state you cannot conspire with other players outside of your realm or act in a way that would be of detriment to your realm. He also went so far as to accuse Yeow and his family of cheating, because apparently you can't play the game with your family in separate realms without it being called cheating OR play with them in your own realm without it being called cheating. Lesson of the day: don't have a family, because that's cheating, but actually breaking the rules isn't cheating, that's totally fine. Write that down, Lud.

So after all the tensions there, I started messaging Cronel directly and told him what was going on there. It wasn't a personal thing, just wanted to let my packie have his little moment after having gotten absolutely blasted and pretty much have it tank the rest of his round. On a personal level Ilike talking with Cronel, but that's not what my story is about. My story is about him being a jackass, so l'll proceed.

I don't remember exactly how much time passed after this, but at some point we had votes in our realm for 3 different people, with Cronel, Sacc, and Bobbo voting for Cronel, Yeow and his +2 voting for himself, and jboy, Titus (who Ihaven't brought up yet not because he wasn't active, but because he skillfully avoided all the drama), and myself all voting for boy.

After accusations against Yeow by Cronel (remember, at this point in time I was still trying to play peacekeeper), I thought a third party monarch would be the best option here, and jboy is a great player with a good head on his shoulders (seriously, he's an awesome realmie, I'm gonna miss playing with him), so he seemed like a great option. That monarchy wouldn't happen until later. So Idon't remember how exactly, but Cronel became monarch again and relatively shortly after re-taking the crown we found ourselves in another war. This time there was no warning, just Cronel popping on to say he'd been having a rough time and felt like fire balling would help him feel better. We were pretty grumpy about it, but didn't feel like making it into a huge thing. Well I got lucky this time around and it was jboy who found himself the target of their blops. But the real issue I was having around this time was in how Cronel openly complained about how he was robbed of the monarchy, accused everyone of cheating, tried to get war declared on us, then got the monarchy back after throwing his little fits, and immediately afterwards proved why he shouldn't be allowed near swimming pools without his water wings on.

This war was just as pointless as the last one, but since jboy had already pretty much died off as FA well before the war, he didn't seem too upset by taking the fireballs. But eventually the novelty wore off, and one of the non-discorders threw a vote onto jboy, which turned it into a 4-3-3 since the totally- not-a-multi who had voted for Cronel had already been moved to realm 0, so 4 was all that was required to take it back. So we had a real monarch now, though Yeow was still bitter about boy's comment earlier on. But Cronel was still busy finding new spots on the windows in his building to lick, so all was well. For like a day or two, at least.

After the previous war had ended, jboy did the kind of thing you might hope from a monarch and asked what the realm wanted to do in regards to war. I, being the only living or relatively strong attacker in the realm, said I selfishly didn't want to go to war because I knew I would be the one and only person in our realm to be targeted by bloppers, and a couple other players in our realm chimed in saying they didn't want war. Cronel and Sacc both wanted to war, but they'd already had a couple of them at this point, so the rest of us didn't care what they wanted, especially after the disrespectful way that last war was thrust upon us. Somewhere along the way one of us (maybe it was even me, I don't recall) changed our votes around and the monarchy was back to a 3-3-3 tie.

Well, out of nowhere and only 24 hours after Cronel made a comment on the Blops network about how our realm was in a 3-way split vote for the monarchy, we had a late player sign up, vote for Cronel, and never log in again. Definitely not fishy at all. So after Cronel huffed some glue and ate a few paint chips, he was ready to rock, and this not- shady-at-all series of events was followed pretty quickly by our second unannounced war declaration. This time Igot lit up like a Christmas tree.
So I was mad. Knowing that, once again, we were going into a war that served no purpose to us or anyone else, Cronel took the monarchy back and even after seeing and acknowledging that this war would be terrible for the only decent looking attacker in the realm, did it anyway. It was just too much. We were fed up at this point, as Cronel had deliberately sabotaged us multiple times, conspired openly against us, and was barely even talking to us at all by this point in the round. So this war was definitely different. Not only was it an unannounced one, but this time Cronel didn't even have the decency to say a single word to anyone in the realm even after he did it. So after having previously discussed how I would be the sole target if we declared, I could only take this as a direct insult and a giant "f@#$ you" to me, who hadn't really done anything (outside of "sTaGiNg AcOuP") but try to mediate and instill the realm and round a little friendly banter and positivity. Well I had had enough and I started to go off a bit. I'm not proud of that, and as I'm not a terribly competitive or aggressive person, it was more insulting to me as a person than anything in-game. Not to go too far into it, but it was an ugly thing. After a day or so I cooled off, but it definitely wasn't a highlight for me. I have since apologized because I was being an ass, but I will at least defend myself as having been justified to a certain degree in how frustrating that whole ordeal was.

Eventually I was able to convince Yeow to vote for jboy, who took the monarchy and made me general so I'd be able to cancel war when the time came. Because I'd been so stalled out from the blops, Ihad definitely fallen down a tier, but was able to orchestrate a wonder takedown, and because of some really crazy luck and a massive hit on the BFing vampire ni #4, it al worked out. But the realm chat was pretty much dead from this point on. Jboy along with Damdred, who in spite of having abandoned weeks beforehand was still popping into discord somewhat regularly, were all gung-ho on me making a very risky hit, which definitely increased activity in the realm chat for a bit there, but it didn't last long.

There would sometimes be 2 full days without a single comment, and it stayed a ghost town up until Cronel took the monarchy back yet again by getting votes from other people who didn't really use discord, but at that point I couldn't even pretend to care anymore. So jboy and yeow would go on discord to call Cronel a stupid ass, etc. but it didn't really matter at that point. Just a long slow march to the end.

My personal frustrations with that war spawned largely from the fact that Cronel had lied to me yet again in private messages about the future of war in our realm. Absolutely pointless lying, too, so it was just the kind of thing you could only expect from someone who was deliberately trying to sabotage and punish his realm for committing imaginary crimes.

What a shitshow.