OpenDominion - User contributions [en]

Round 45 Dr Evil

2025-07-28T13:57:39Z

Rush:

'''FOREWORD'''

I wasn't going to play this round. Honestly, it was supposed to just be one little draft round and then I was done. But here I am again, writing another roundfail. I sound like a relapsing addict. It's Rio's fault really, you get off the juice and he comes into your DMs pushing promises of war and suddenly you're right back in the rollercoaster car about to drop into another round.

Actually, it wasn't the promise of war that sold me. It was the promise of proving whether or not blops are actually still worth anything in this game. We are inching, with painfully small baby steps, towards fireball not being totally useless - GPC had just unveiled a very welcome and long overdue change to how mutual war affects rejuvenation, as well as a nerf to the overbearing mutual war op bonus, reducing it by 2% overall. Would it be enough to tip the balance? I wasn't sure, but at least we definitely weren't going down the route of adding friendly spells that bring roasted peasants instantly back to life, like Jcinnz had previously announced. Forget the crack cocaine of playing OpenDominion, I want what he's on.

Rio wanted to run two bloppers, two attackers, and we had a fifth slot available as a bit of a flexible position. An opper, or an attacker, or another blopper could fill it depending on who was available. We would play slow-ish, but deliberately exercise war to slow down fast attackers.

"Either it works, or it will prove how poor blops really are," said Rio.

I sighed, wrapping the cord around my forearm and pulling it tight with my teeth, readying the OD needle. Through gritted teeth, I said: "Alright, let's do it."

Last round I successfully dragged AgFx out of retirement, but this round I set my sights on Swamp Fox. I knew it was going to be difficult - of everyone that had disavowed themselves of the community after the Dark Times, Swamp Fox was the one that had most successfully disconnected from it. He simply went back to reality and lived his life in a non-tick-based format. No more worrying about making hits. No more worrying about dp. No more discord. No more hiding in car parks to guest on niche podcasts. Just an OD-free existence. So I knew I had my work cut out for me.

'''Rush:''' "Hey Swamp, can I tempt you back to OD?"

'''Swamp Fox:''' "You son of a bitch I'm in."

That went a little easier than I'd anticipated.

Rio drafted Gothia to be the second attacker, and we mulled over options for a fifth player. I initially asked Lud, who said the same thing he says every round - "oh I'm not playing next round, I want to be productive" - before he inevitably signs up and plays anyway. But you can't just point that out to the guy - that would be rude, right?

'''Lud:''' "Oh I'm definitely not playing next round. It is insane how productive I can be when I'm not playing OD."

'''Rush:''' "You say that every round! And then you end up getting drawn in like a moth to the flame."

'''Lud:''' "Yeah... but I'm trying to be strong."

So Lud was out. Spoiler alert, he signed up anyway and ended up being one of the biggest pains in our collective asses.

With the fifth position in our pack open, and Rio suggesting a third blopper might be the best fit anyway, I suggested Cronel.

Blopping used to be more viable than it is now. You had some economic support, they took that away. In those days, Cronel would consistently finish in the 4k acres zone. In recent rounds, he's consistently in the high 5ks and mid 6ks. So to say he's improved a bit as time has gone by is a bit of an understatement. He finally figured out that balance between ratios and economy and dp that lets a blopper walk the tightrope between safely pelting enemies with wet noodleballs and being ripped apart by sharks as soon as their name touches the Town Crier. Most dedicated bloppers never manage this. A lot of positions at the top end of the Rush Ranks are riddled with liability players that will feed your competition at some point, often at the worst possible moment. You've gotta be careful who you draft when you want bloppers, we're a real minefield. But I was confident Cronel had evolved beyond that stage. From caterpillar crawling along at 4k, to butterfly finishing on decent 6ks, Cronelus Monarcha was the blopper for the job. I asked if he was free and he said aye. We had our five.

'''WEEK 1 - MULTIVERSE DREAM TEAM?'''

At realm assignment we landed with mris, mdk, Kongb, Phage, MusicDJ2555, Gwyn, Syscero - and oh yay, Elf Woods. Mris, mdk and Kongb did make for a potentially broken realm coupled with Gothia and Rio, with the kind of blops and ops support Cronel, Swamp Fox and myself could provide. It's usually what you'd describe as a "lottery win realm". I don't know how it happened - we know realm assignment was going haywire this round, with the Emperor creating infinite realms, and at one point the round countdown timer was even going backwards. And this was the realm composition that fett collapsed our infinite quantum superposition into when he intervened to kill the loop. It all felt out of place, like things weren't meant to be like this. I kept half expecting to find out that this version of mris was from a parallel universe where preying mantises were the dominant species. But no, turns out, it was our mris.

Meanwhile, over in realm #7, Dave was doing his John Travolta gif impression wondering where all his active realmies were at. They're all in our realm Dave.

In contrast to last round where the theme directive was "uhh anime", this round it was a bit more prescriptive: pick a character from the Austin Powers universe. Why? Because it's giffable. Job done. Naturally I grabbed Dr Evil before Cronel could. Muahahaha. Muahahaha. Muahahaha! We got a lot of gif mileage out of our theme.

I struggled a bit at race selection because Gothia wanted to go Sylvan, and with Cronel and Swamp Fox already taking Undead and Vampire respectively, there just wasn't a good wiz blops race to choose. I considered Icekin for a bit: despite not being a naturally blops friendly race I usually do quite well with them, hitting 7k last time I played one. But Rio and mdk both questioned this choice, and mdk suggested Demon instead. I hadn't played Demon before, but by all accounts from attackers and bloppers that have played it alike, it wasn't great. Mdk said it had a cheap 6pt defence unit for 10% swamps so what was there to think about as a blopper? Fuck it, I figured I might as well give them a shot and see what all the griping was about. Looking at the race, that swamps requirement for cheap elite dp was literally the only perk in my favour, and the rest was attacker-oriented trash: a racial spell I couldn't use, an op bonus and a spec dp unit perk I probably wouldn't see much use from. Demon do also have Miasma, a war-only spell, but I probably wouldn't find a use for it in our heavy wiz race realm. It's an okay-ish-maybe counterblops spell - but the best offence, as the saying goes, is a fuckload of fireballs. I probably wasn't going to be wasting wiz str on Miasma. In fact, by the end of the round, I'd have cast it precisely zero times. I forgot it even existed. Performance-wise, Demon seemed to grow somewhat slower than Sylvan, and was otherwise flavourless to play. If boring was a race, Demon is it.

Overall, the realm strategy was to play slow and war often. So the majority of our attackers went for wiz races and a mid or slow speed attack style. With my blopper hat on, if I looked at our realm, it would be a hard pass for war. Four dark elves, three sylvans, two icekins and a mix of vampires, demons and undead and nothing else. The plan was to war as soon as blops went live and start limiting FA realms.

We got off to a rocky start. In the first two days, our all-star realm had some rookie moments. Gothia sent out knowingly unsafe on a bot and got hit by an Orc:

''2025-06-08 06:59:51 Fun Dip and Cherry Coke (SugarJon) (#7) invaded Felicity Shagwell (Gothia) (#5) and captured 45 land.''

In fairness to Gothia, Fun Dip had better targets. It later transpired that Fun Dip just basically had no ops support to find them.

Meanwhile, sim issues plagued Rio and mdk. Rio discovered his sim, given to him by mris, was short on docks and was limiting his army, while mdk's sim had so many issues with it that he hadn't spotted (such as razing temples) that it completely gimped him as an attacker, and he was forced to deconvert on day three of the round. To his credit, instead of losing interest, he became an invaluable asset on the ops and blops side instead. Switched-on attackers know all their own weaknesses and can predict when they're coming down the pipeline for others, and intuitively know when's best to strike thinking about the longer term. And mdk really shone in that role.

Music, a school kid, did not have the activity level needed to defend his dominion and also seemed quite resilient to discord notifications, so would constantly miss advice that would help him stay safe. I got the impression that in addition to a big window of inactivty while asleep, his school must have had some sort of no smartphone policy, meaning that for ~16 hours a day this guy was not logging in. He also didn't seem to use automations. So he unavoidably became a prime feeder for spirits because he didn't have consistent dp coming in, but had tons of drafts from his sporadic activity, protecting him against regular attackers while assassination was disabled. It was unfortunate, but he would later become pretty clutch in some borderline blops scenarios where we needed someone on insane spies to get us over the line, so he went from being a liability to being invaluable as the round progressed.

And, of course, Elf Woods bounced his first hit. Didn't even bother updating ops and just yolo'd.

As we approached day 4, which as we all know is when the round actually begins, it became pretty clear that #3's halfling, Bunk beds: +3 barracks housing (Rury), was going to be the one to run. He was significantly ahead of the scrum. It was difficult to get blops ready while he was breathing down everyone's necks, modded up and spamming specs while we were bringing in 10% towers and defenceless wizards, and we could barely grow because we needed to focus so much dp. Thank god for the rejuv changes making mutual more of a question mark. There were more than a few hairy moments where some of us were very borderline on dp - but as is always the case in OD, there's always someone fatter and less defended out there than me, even with the blops dp / econ sacrifice. Someone gets a hot sim, flies ahead, doesn't pay enough attention, gets smashed. The meat shields above us served us well to get us into position to take action. The same hour blops went live, we declared war.

2025-06-10 18:30:03 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on War: Now available at a random time on day 3 (#3).

Bunk beds' blops preparation was lacklustre but it wasn't nothing. He had some Wizard Guilds, just not enough to dissuade us, and had brought in wizards, but again, not enough. It was weird; he'd semi-committed but still left himself open. It seemed indecisive. Wizard blops are very weak compared to their former iterations, perhaps he figured it wasn't worth investing in defences - but then why go half-way?

We assassinated every last wizard we could and set him on fire. Then we did the same to their lyc, Sprite -0.5 DP (Poige). Poige would spend the rest of the round spitting feathers about our realm and blaming us for ruining the round. Dwarf Miner: -5r (Oment) had plenty of time to make an effort to bring in defences before our second wave assault started, but elected not to, so we roasted him too. We also considered burning Spirit: Spectre +1 DP (Vinn) for a bit, who after seeing the blops damage we were doling out to his team mates did eventually build some WGs - but too late if we decided to go after him. There was some debate about it.

Gothia wanted us to hit him before his WGs came in and extend the war a bit until rejuv kicked in. He suspected because of the nomad's obssessively precise training figures (all 5s and 10s) that it was probably Vinn. Mdk on the other hand, wanted to move on and address other emergent threats.

'''Gothia:''' "Can we please roast him before we move on? Vinn is very skilled and he will win a round soon, let's make sure it's not this one."

'''Rush:''' "We'll need to continue the war if we burn the nomad. It's significant resources from us just to limit him a relatively small amount."

'''Mdk:''' "We can always come back for Vinn later. I'm more worried about #1's three gnomes and their human, #2's big nomad and #4's human converter."

The Underground Society had also dropped again, which is an excellent Wonder for bloppers but also fantastic for attackers, acting like a quasi-Armada wonder as well as a 24/7 Fool's Gold. If we had that wonder, Rio wouldn't have to wake up in the middle of the night suffering from panic attacks over lamb stealing his 1-hour's worth of platinum production for as long as we held it. I wanted us to move on from #3 and focus on grabbing it as soon as possible. And so maybe-Vinn was spared the rod.

We cancelled the war but we still had to keep an eye on the halfer's op with the lingering war bonus. Despite limiting him he was still clearly ahead - he had the land lead. Towards the end of the war Cronel was potentially hittable if they assassed his drafts. He works night shift so I'd expected him to be awake, but he'd fallen asleep at work instead. He needed to drop dp specs to be safe but we couldn't reach him for over two hours, by which point he was firmly in the danger zone. Fortunately, #3 seemingly did not check beyond a cursory look at a few of us about 10h before the end of the war bonus. Instead they went for a spirit in #8 instead.

''2025-06-13 07:16:25 Bunk beds: +3 barracks housing (Rury) (#3) invaded Church Burners (Omnialloy) (#8) and captured 71 land.''

Wonder take-downs are usually a stress point in the round, at least for me. This round, though, it actually wasn't too bad. Once the Americans finally woke up after their Friday morning lie-in, we were able to take it down pretty quickly.

''2025-06-13 11:14:52 The Underground Society has been destroyed and rebuilt by Gentlemen, welcome to my underground lair... (#5).''

Even changed the realm name for maximum cosplay. That's just how organised we were.

With the Society secured (for my second round in a row), bolstering both our bloppers and our attackers, we were able to turn our attention back to the next new runaway threat: the lyc in #10, Werego Vespucci (Weaser). This one was a little different to the halfer - he'd obviously seen what we'd done to his rival and decided he didn't want to meet the same chargrilled fate. He wasn't the only one, we detected several other realms bringing in blops defences after we fired the laser (though as would later become obvious, plenty others would still try to fly light, and would rightly suffer for it). But Werego had brought in a staggering nearly 50 WGs. When you consider the meta to fob bloppers off was 30, he clearly wasn't taking any chances. I went through historical barracks spies and spotted that he had also been bringing in Archmages, which could mean his blops defences were both high and unstabbable. I ran the numbers on his docks and he wasn't sinkable either, and with his wiz defences, the likely scenario was we could kill maybe 3k peasants.

Rio had noticed that Werego was curiously behind schedule in joining the Royal Guard, which meant he was also going to be slower than others to get into the Elite Guard - which would take him out of range of most of us bloppers except for Swamp Fox, who would have to become a One Man Army and wage most of the blops war solo, flinging maintenance fireballs after the rest of us volleyed him down to base. But it gave us the window of opportunity we needed to recharge just enough after knocking down the Society to go and fling fireballs at a single target, if we wanted to go for it.

There was some debate in realm chat as to whether or not the proposed war with #10 was even worth it.

'''Gothia:''' If we only fry 3k pez for 18 hours, I'm not really sure it's in our interest to war the lyc at the moment.

'''Rio:''' We've gotta slow a potential runaway, regardless. Otherwise he pulls away with a bunch of large explorers to help him target hunt.

'''Gothia:''' I agree that he needs to be stopped, but your statement assumes we're the only ones capable of doing it.

'''Rio:''' We're the only ones willing even if others are capable. We're positioned to blop. Others will have to do their part in pushing op, which we can't do right now.

'''Syscero:''' We needed another realm to step up while we dealt with bunk.

'''Rush:''' This would be a hard pass from me usually. 3k pez is not worth the resources and risk. And it's our boy Swamp Fox that'll be in the danger zone all war, the rest of us will fall out of range pretty swiftly.

But we all knew Rio was right. And it's not like we had better targets, or that it was even a nuanced situation. And if Swamp Fox could manage the op bonus, it was low risk to us even if the damage was also trivial. And so we warmed up the laser.

''2025-06-13 18:59:09 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Together we can sea the world (#10).''

I had a whole bit here about Swamp Fox waging a one-man blops war against the top threat, our canary in the coal mine, but then I deleted about two hours worth of this roundfail by accidentally overwriting the file so you'll just have to use your imaginations. Sorry Swamp, your moment in the sun was eaten by Microsoft.

Anyway, depending on the strength of your imagination, that was either an incredible action sequence, with one puny little fire mage against a giant angry wolf, or... maybe like two stick figures, with one throwing noodles at the other? Or maybe you're one of those people that literally cannot picture things in your mind, and if that's the case, I'm not really sure you're getting anything out of this paragraph, so perhaps it's best we move on.

With the #10 lyc lightly singed and slinking off into the Elite Guard, we turned our attention to a second wave target... except we didn't really have one. None of the attackers in our realm seemed to have an opinion on who we should roast, which meant they weren't worried about any of the others in #10. The new guy, Syscero, wanted to burn their Monarch, Laura Bingham (B). And so Laura Bingham was burned.

Let's just quickly recap this first week in three lines to make a point here:

''2025-06-10 18:30:03 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on War: Now available at a random time on day 3 (#3).''

''2025-06-13 11:14:52 The Underground Society has been destroyed and rebuilt by Gentlemen, welcome to my underground lair... (#5).''

''2025-06-13 18:59:09 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Together we can sea the world (#10).''

I've seen a lot of impressive blops feats in my time, but coming out of a war against top op, knocking down a Wonder and then starting another war with the next top op, in the span of just 48 hours, is up there. Our realm had a ruthless kind of organisation to it and was pursuing its goals aggressively - slowing top ops, bolstering our bloppers and attackers, and trying to keep the environment conducive to an eventual realm win. It wasn't an easy balance: the early war with #3 had damaged the econs of us bloppers, having to bring in massive towers and spywiz units instead of dp, while staying ahead of modded-up, specced-up and probably coked-up fast attackers. It's tantamount to fireballing yourself with how much it hurts. Towards the end of the war with #10, mris remarked with shock at how tiny we were, and admonished us for not focusing our econs. Like, hello?

Mris was right about one thing though, we did need to seriously pivot back towards efficiency. Only Swamp Fox was able to get a decent econ going, able to play a bit faster as Vampire, so he became our nominated canary in the coalmine and was tasked with going pure efficient to try and stay in range. I was trailing him by about 100 acres as Demon, which I was beginning to think of as essentially a much worse version of Sylvan for blops, while Cronel and Syscero were trailing me by about the same amount as Undead and Icekin respectively, and mdk even further behind. We were almost all built for slow, but in all the early chaos, we were growing so slowly even Wurst's famous crack team of snails from yester-year would look on and blush.

Whenever I land with a bunch of veteran attackers, as I had this round, I like to ask them for their read of the round at the one week mark. It's always interesting to see how they expect things develop and compare it end round with how the round plays out. Unfortunately, this round none of the attackers seemed willing to make any educated guesses. I can only assume they were paralysed with fear of having their potentially inaccurate predictions recorded in this roundfail, forever showing them up as charlatans and pretenders. Or they're just lazy.

So to make up for the fact that I've got nothing to share, here's a video that, I think, effectively captures the essence of our realm and its influence on the round at this point. And, let's be honest, it is way more educational than anything that bunch of layabouts was ever gonna come up with:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T1swuHPA1OU

Right?

'''WEEK 2 - GOTHIA REVENGE ARC'''

Remember that orc that hit Gothia on day one? Well, Gothia hadn't forgotten. Fun Dip (SugarJon) in #7 had smashed him on day one when he'd made a risky send and, although taking hits earlier on seem to be easier to recover from, it was still a setback for Gothia.

Now that the runaways had all sauntered off out of range of our blops, we had to gear shift and start looking around at the slow threats that might cause problems for us later. Unfortunately for Fun Dip, he was assessed to be one of them - and had the dubious honour of being the only person to negatively impact our realm so far, which just increased his Most Wanted rating.

Mris did the scouting for this war, and had narrowed it down to three possible realms to go after.

'''Mris:''' Realm #2 has an obviously strong nomad but also no op in their realm for us to worry about, and an orc that we can also hit. Realm #8 is top op for many of us so doesn't make sense for us to go after them while we're all making an economic push. Realm #7 has the strongest orc and strongest human. Again no op in their realm for us to worry about.

'''Rio:''' I like #7 as a target. Good options, no immediate threats - and we get revenge for their orc hit on Gothia.

Kong agreed with a humblebrag:

'''Kong:''' The orc is a bit concerning. He has the same numbers as I did last round even though I bounced a hit oop.

Gothia, unsurprisingly, was in favour of the war too:

'''Gothia:''' I like warring #7.

So. We were warring #7.

''2025-06-16 21:31:00 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on LFO: Liza Flying Over 🌈 (#7).''

The plan was to fireball and sink the orc, but we didn't have enough bloppers around immediately at war dec to do quite enough sink damage and the guy had hundreds and hundreds of spare boats just lying around. We needed one more blopper to sink him but after pinging Gwyn and Music and a bunch of others, we just could not get it over the line and the orc was able to chortle his way to a bot hit.

''2025-06-16 22:00:18 Fun Dip and Cherry Coke (#7) invaded Sinking without thinking (#0) and captured 58 land.''

Gothia was not impressed. We were three wars in and this had been our first fail, but since the orc was still getting lit up, it wasn't all bad.

We burned the orc and probably someone else as well, I forget who. I spent two hours writing about the tail-end of week 1 and pretty much all of week 2 and then overwrote my notes so I'm mostly working from memory here in week 3 here.

[Post-round edit: the second target was Grapes. Sorry Grapes! That's what happens when you turn your back on the path of chaos I guess...]

Oh, I almost forgot until Cronel randomly reminded me - we also warred #11 and roasted the goblin Delta Forks (Disco), their gnome McRangers (Crazy Guy) and dwarf Don't live in someone else's Shadow (Empoy). After the war, it was pointed out that we almost helped feed their goblin to the lyc, which instigated some mixed reactions from our attackers in realm. Some were all "not our problem", others were "fuck 'em, they need to manage their doms better", while very few (okay just one) conceded that it was something we should be more mindful of in future wars. In the end, though, it was the Demon, Meal Team 6 (Slice) who we hadn't even touched that ended up feeding Werego when he carelessly explored into range massively underdefended.

''2025-06-21 13:59:22 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded Meal Team 6 (#11) and captured 113 land.''

And so Swamp Fox sighed and clicked explore.

Unfortunately the lyc then found another huge hit pretty much immediately. Another explorer slacking on his Ares casts.

''2025-06-22 20:00:14 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded 🧄Garlic-Tunneler Goulash🍲 (Jcinnz) (#12) and captured 169 land.''

And so Swamp Fox sighed and clicked explore. He'd be doing that a lot this round.

'''WEEK 3 - SCHRODINGER'S CRONEL'''

We missed the perfect opportunity to mess with #1 because Cronel was sleeping again.

It had become an emergent theme this round that when we needed blops, someone key - usually Cronel - was asleep and limiting what we could do. We were a mix of Euros and Americans, so our timezones were a big factor to plan around. Cronel had said he operated on EU time, since he worked night shift, but in practice that turned out not to be the case. Middle of the day blops needed? Oh it's a Thursday, Cronel sleeps all day on Thursdays. Saturday night blops needed? Oh that's Cronel's usual sleeping hours. Monday morning blops needed? Cronel is technically at work - but is also ASLEEP AT WORK. I shit you not, I'm not even making this up for a bit, he was just asleep at work. He was Schrodinger's Comatose Cat. Open the lid of his box and it was only in that moment the universe would decide whether he was awake or asleep. And mostly it was the latter. There was no pinging him back to the waking world, you just had to wait for him to rise from his coffin on his own time - which could be anywhere from three to eighteen hours later. It was like he'd studied under Jmerc's tutelage last round and decided that being randomly AWOL when he was needed most would only add to his reputation for chaos.

It wasn't all Cronel of course. Swamp Fox was caught red-handed sleeping in one day instead of blopping, and then spluttered that he was in fact fixing a sink first thing in the morning and his fingers were too covered in plumber's putty to use his phone. Naturally nobody believed him.

Gothia was becoming increasingly agitated as the hours ticked by and we still didn't have the numbers to effectively sink Michael Jordan (zooj) in #1, who looked in a very strong position. He had plenty of op to make a hit and it was only a matter of time before he sent, and we needed seven people online at the same time to ensure we could sink him enough to limit him. We had five, once Swamp Fox had washed his hands. We could probably do it with six. It was prime EU hours, so of course Cronel was asleep. Our backup American bloppers, Phage and Music, were also asleep. Mris, the caretaker of these two young ODers, resolutely refused to wake them up early to blop. What sort of American values does that instill, I wonder, if you aren't teaching your kids to enjoy the smell of war in the morning?

''2025-06-23 12:58:28 Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (zooj) (#1) invaded ...I sHaLl bE BaCk... (#0) and captured 107 land.''

Gothia was not impressed.

This was our second 'war fail' and this time, we had fumbled so hard we hadn't even managed to declare war. And for the next 24 painful hours, we would wait for him to build his land (to ensure he didn't bring in docks), then try to organise enough people online again to sink and fireball him, and once again fail to do so. The plan for war was firmly in the EU dead zone, between 2am and 6am, so I was definitely asleep. Cronel, who was always asleep, was also asleep. Swamp Fox was our General, and the only other person who could declare besides me, so of course he went to bed early, tuckered out from fixing sinks. And so war was off the cards until I woke up the next day. When I woke up, I was glad I had spent my wiz str the previous evening flooding merfolk and lizzies.

It had taken us a whole day to get our acts together and even then, it was still borderline whether we could pull it off or not.

''2025-06-24 11:20:11 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Elon Musk Playing Starship Simulator (#1).''

[Post-round edit: That's right. We went to war on zooj. I never thought I'd see the day!]

It was still amazing to us that after the blops capability we'd demonstrated so far, and our ruthless focus on taking down any competitors to our realm, that so many dominions were caught with their pants around their ankles, playing greedy like there wasn't this pack of scorpions out there waiting to sting you to death if you started to look intimidating. Once we sunk MJ, we kept him sunk, and watched as he did virtually nothing except build docks from a daily bonus to protect himself. It wasn't enough. He was going to be stuck for several days while his boats regenerated. I have a rare tip for attackers here: if you get sunk, build lots of docks. It's always your better option than doing nothing, or trying to rely on DBs. I suspect zooj didn't have the experience dealing with blops to know what to do in this situation. Maybe he'll know for next rounds. Our veteran attackers picked him out as a threat so he'll likely have to deal with them again in future.

Someone who wasn't Michael Jordan in realm #1, but was in realm #1, sent me a DM on the off-chance I was in #5 and one of the bloppers currently wreaking havoc on their realmie to plead for mercy, and suggested that all we were doing was griefing that player. I'm not gonna say who it was because I do have some sympathy for their intentions, which weren't to maliciously influence the game, but this is what would later lead to accusations of me cheating by Sly on the Rules Committee. I floated the sentiments to the realm. Rio seemed a bit skittish about the griefing accusation, while mdk was more hardline that it was a war game and sometimes your risks don't play out.

'''Rio:''' In fairness, we can move on. But he has also done the bare minimal effort to help himself.

'''mdk:''' These blops are nothing compared to what they used to be... The guy can seriously rezone smithies to docks if he wants to, but if he refuses that's on him. And fireballs are 20-24 hours, and half your peasants are protected for free.

'''Cronel:''' He finally has docks coming in.

'''mdk:''' Only his DBs. They have been targeted once when they are looking strong.

'''Gothia:''' The thing is, he did nothing to prevent it. If he did rezone to docks and invested in harbour and trained spies, then I would understand.

'''mdk:''' Calculated risk. But then you can't cry about it when you eat blops because of it.

'''Gothia:''' Exactly.

'''Rio:''' Players complaining usually can't see past their own perspective. "I want them to do X as it benefits them and me. What?? They did Y and that hurts me and not sure it helps them right now!" - I say it in pretty much every win I've had. Sometimes I'll do something that hurts me a little if it hurts someone else a lot. As long as it doesn't benefit your main threat, if it helps someone else, it's usually okay.

'''Gothia:''' Amen brother.

'''Rio:''' A lot of these wars have been to position our sylvans ahead of the people we're taking down. I don't see the lyc as the main competition for the win at this point: it is humans, sylvans, dwarves and gnomes.

'''Rush:''' War cancel is three ticks away, I take it we are not extending?

'''Gothia:''' Yeah we should cancel once their big gnome gets rejuv.

'''Rush:''' I think his rejuv kicks in at the same time war cancel is available.

'''Gothia:''' Perfect timing.

'Griefing' is a term that has only really come to the fore of our community in relatively recent rounds and is bandied about far to leisurely in my opinion. It's used as a cudgel to condemn blops by people who either don't like blops, or who are upset that they are being used effectively against them in the moment. Or both. There's a lot of crossover in those two groups. It is not griefing to target a threat and neutralise them. It is not griefing to target a greedy player and punish them for it. It is not griefing to use the tightly controlled blackop mechanics available to you in a war game to hurt players outside of your realm. Tattoo these three sentences on the inside of your eyelids please.

Regardless, it was time to move on.

''2025-06-26 11:33:47 I always cry at endings… even evil ones. (#5) has CANCELED war against Basil Exposition Playing Cooking Simulator (#1).''

''2025-06-26 11:34:24 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on The Young and Free (#2).''

Mdk had been keeping tabs on the #2 nomad, Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp), and had expected him to hit at the end of the previous tick (while we were still locked into war). He was in the middle of "9hr-ing", a playstyle for certain races whose troops get home in 9 hours instead of 12, and crucially before their first hit's land arrives, meaning they can hit twice on the same land. But Taj had not sent at the end of the tick when cancel became available to us. We had planned to war immediately war #2 anyway and fireball the nomad, but when he didn't send, sinking him in the middle of a 9hr became the new strategy.

'''Kong:''' That's killer for a nomad. After pushing 5% mods for a hit.

'''Gothia:''' He will be able to send quite fast again if he just builds docks.

We sank him. The timing could not have been more perfect from our perspective - and of course, it was very unfortunate timing for him. Unlike the previous realm, however, his reaction was to immediately bring in lots of docks, limiting the long term harm immediately. This guy's been sunk before, methinks.

We weren't done yet though. This war wasn't just about bloppers sinking some attacker. It was time for some real showboating.

With the war bonus, and without Ares, #2's court magister, the undead Breakdancing at the Great Wall (Karpatheo) with "the gifted" title, was hittable by Rio. And not just hittable, triple chainable by Gothia and mris. And not just triple chainable, potentially quad chainable by Kong if the stars aligned and somehow we managed to keep Ares off for six ticks. That last one was unlikely, and required Music with his insane 1.3 spy ratio to wake up and keep him snared, and also for the entire playerbase to ignore the target for several hours. But hey, you never know. Shoot for the stars.

With some coordination and some sleep-rousing the Americans, we got enough of a motley crew together to pull off the snare when Breakdancing was at 3 hours left to recast.

''2025-06-27 13:09:59 Victorious on the battlefield, Nigel Powers (#5) conquered 165 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).''

''2025-06-27 13:10:06 Victorious on the battlefield, Felicity Shagwell (#5) conquered 148 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).''

''2025-06-27 13:11:04 Victorious on the battlefield, Goldmember (#5) conquered 140 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).''

Gothia, at last, was impressed.

'''Swamp Fox:''' This will be a great part to Rush’s story. Less than 24 hours from "we should look for war hits" to "let’s snare and triple tap this guy" 🤣

Shortly after, our mercy blops target from #1 managed to cobble enough boats together to make a hit and got instantly gobbled up for it.

''2025-06-27 13:41:47 Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (zooj) (#1) invaded Land Of The Tainted (#0) and captured 91 land.''

''2025-06-27 13:59:55 Business Cat Rides Again (Lud) (#11) invaded Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (#1) and captured 126 land.''

'''Rio:''' His boats situation meant he needed to leave more dp home. He just went mad on op after our blops. Annoying that we worked for a hit and 11 sylvan just got one for free.

Business Cat in #11 was a constant source of consternation in our realm. Everything we did seemed to also benefit him indirectly, and when it couldn't, he found another way to keep the advantage. And he'd taken precautions againsts us, running high docks and making himself virtually unassailable by our laser.

But he wasnt the only regular beneficiary. Fenrir (King Jota) in #9 was also often a net benefactor from our efforts, but he was afforded more respect given their realm's more pro-active approach to war.

'''WEEK 4 - POUNDING ALOTTA FAGINA'''

Quite the spectacular week, but a terrible start for us. Kong, our hotshot top attacker who was ahead of everyone else in the realm and our best chance for the win, sent out on a hit that would ultimately cost him his shot at the round.

''2025-06-29 18:18:26 Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) invaded Moshing at Machu Picchu (Cosula) (#2) and captured 123 land.''

The realm hadn't checked the sleepy nomad in #2 that we'd sank in the middle of his 9h and, well, it soon became apparent that this was a massive oversight.

''2025-06-29 18:29:29 Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp) (#2) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 207 land.''

''2025-06-29 18:45:28 Purple Wolf Tail And Raging Fiery Hobpot (playt0i) (#12) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 169 land.''

''2025-06-29 18:48:55 Delta Forks (Disco) (#11) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 153 land.''

''2025-06-29 18:59:59 Business Cat Rides Again (Lud) (#11) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 149 land.''

Kong was absolutely demolished in 30 minutes flat. Everyone was aghast. I don't know how you send out without checking the top threats aren't ready to stomp you, but that's what happened here. Mdk blamed himself harshly for not playing lookout and fell on his sword. It was all very dramatic. Kong, on the other hand, seemed quite relaxed about the whole thing. And our pack welcomed our fallen realmie onto Team Blops.

Ops in general, despite the massive amount of experience and activity in our realm, were not our strongest suit. I was constantly flying by the seat of my pants with no spywiz strength to run checks and our attackers were mostly pretty comfy updating people once every 1-2 days(!) while they knew they were safe from all-ins sitting at home. I couldn't even use Swamp - who was the only explorer ahead of me - as a meat shield because he was constantly prepping to defend Werego, which meant he generally carried about 25% more dp than I did. I was 150a behind him and had 4-7 threats to second-guess. I tethered my dp to another Demon who was a few% bigger than me and just hoped he was paying attention. He had an annoyingly high spy ratio so it was often more costly than I liked just to check up on him.

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about our disastrous start to the week. Alotta Fagina wasn't the only one of us to get royally fucked.

You see, veteran player and four-time roundwinner Rio, did not understand how guard works and kept resetting his application to the Elite Guard. Just four hours before he was due to join the EG, he took a clear sight on someone marginally outside of his range, which reset his application. It wasn't long before an eagle-eyed #10 took notice.

Two hours after he would've been in EG were it not for that op:

''2025-06-29 14:56:58 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded fellow dominion Nigel Powers (Rio) (#5) and captured 134 land.''

Rio then got carried away with revenge blops and reset his application a second time. This one's not his fault though, it was a bug. Not that it mattered much though, because he then reset his application a third time by taking ANOTHER op on someone out of range. And so Werego came round for seconds.

''2025-06-30 18:49:46 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded fellow dominion Nigel Powers (#5) and captured 134 land.''

Of course I am being a bit glib here - it's obviously very easy to just forget the weird red tape of the guard application process and take an op. There really should be an "are you sure?" prompt that gets in the way, or something that forces you to cancel your application before you just get hard reset like that. Or just do away with info ops resetting your guard application entirely, what's that all about anyway?

That said, he did make the exact same mistake twice in 24 hours. We're into meme territory. I updated the realm message:

"Message of the Day: Day 25 of asking, is Rio in elite guard yet?"

It made a change from every other update of asking, "is Swamp Fox in range yet?"

Naturally Rio brought out his "in every round I've won I've been hit at least once" line to remind everyone that he wins lots of rounds, and mainline some copium that this wasn't a major setback. Still, if anyone could claw back an advantage, he could.

I recorded a podcast on the round with AgFx, Volv and Lud, and we discussed some of the current events. Until Kong's insta-death and Rio's guard shenanigans I had been planning to loc-post myself so I could go into more detail about #5's behaviour, but I decided I didn't really want to have to explain all those misplays that had just happened so I decided against it. These guys were clearly just trying to embarrass me before the pod record.

During the pod, I also made brief mention of the fact that I'd received a DM asking us to stop "griefing" during our earlier war with #1. Sly, who was on the rules committee, caught wind of this, and started giving me shit in DMs for not reporting it. Which was fair enough, that's his role. It's just that he couldn't seem to stop his obvious dislike of me from getting in the way of some basic fact finding. And so after reading his messages, dripping with his trademark condescension, I told him to get lost.

Sly would grow increasingly bitter and erratic as the round developed, and it would not be the last time #5 heard from him in his role as attack dog of the Rules Committee.

'''WEEK 5 - COLLUSION!'''

We had been intending to war #9 and sink Fenrir, so Rio could push suicidal op and nail the #11 sylvan once the lyc sent. Sinking the DE meant Rio could probably get away with it.

Unfortunately, this incredible plan all fell apart with one simple question.

'''Rush:''' DE is sinkable?

'''Mdk:''' Hmm, he has a lot of docks.

'''Rush:''' Is that a no? lol

'''Rio:''' Hmm, probably not.

Oh well, there goes that plan.

Rio instead suggested we snare an explorer in #10 instead, and while we didn't have a concrete plan, we knew we were going down the spy blops route in the near future, so we aimed to get our ratios up. Mdk and I pushed to 1.0, while the ever-scrimping Swamp Fox plumped for a 0.7. Cronel, of course, already had more than a 1.0, but pushed it up to a 1.2 anyway just to flex on the rest of us.

At some point Gothia noticed a scav drop on the lyc, which was bad news. It meant he had a target. We started scouting around, and confirmed our suspicions.

Screaming Mimis (Craghack) (#8), had inexplicably entered range underdefended. Realm #8 had others bigger than him able to get ops on the lyc, so they must have known his op, so this had to be a case of blindly exploring without paying attention. Screaming Mimis put himself on the lyc's radar relying on 6.3k draftees for defence - which would just be assassinated by the lyc's team of elite explorers. Even worse, Screaming Mimis, having entered range, also did not slam defence. The guy seemed to be completely oblivious to the danger he was in. It became imperative that we had to intervene, and on Mimis' schedule.

We identified Laura Bingham (B) as the best snare target - high land, lowest dp of all the super explorers, and the worst estimated spy ratio - somewhere between 0.3 and 0.6 depending on whether they were spies or assassins. A 1.0+ should in theory stomp him.

There were two problems: due to the timing of the lyc's planned hit, we had to snare Bingham at Ares 8, which is a very long snare campaign and the mechanics of the game push back hard to try and prevent long snares, giving the subject resilience which massively boosts wizard strength recovery over time.

The second problem was RNG. We needed a 70-80% estimated success rate to pull this off. It needed every single player in range to contribute, even our attackers on - and lets phrase this generously - suboptimal ratios. We couldn't waste any snares, so we needed to know when to stop before we saw 0. And we needed to wait and not snare between ticks to let resilience drop a little to improve our success chances.

Gothia calculated that a hit on Bingham would be 418+418 acres if the lyc went for the merf anyway, which was frankly obscene.

Swamp Fox was not impressed with this plan. He gave it a zero percent chance to succeed, saying Bingham would be getting 10%+ wizard strength recovery per tick, and that we didn't have the numbers or the ratios to pull this off. He was in an unusually downbeat mood considering we were about to war. It perhaps explained his disinterest in pushing his ratios to 1.0, and instead he elected to focus on acres. He was also constantly hovering on the cusp of entering Elite Guard to avoid getting bottomfed, and us needing him to participate in a war snare campaign had the dual effect of making him the preferred option for a lyc snack while also resetting his guard application to its maximum duration.

I hadn't done the maths - we had mdk and Kong, both with bigger brains than me, for that stuff - but I wasn't as pessimistic about our chances. I knew long snare campaigns were hard but I also knew they weren't impossible with broken realms. And our realm fit the definition of broken. If anyone could pull it off, it was us.

So it was time to brush the dust off the old laser.

''2025-07-09 14:06:08 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on ---> https://youtu.be/jVSZdsAq4Bo?si=vbHsuSwN6L8APWtn (#10).''

The plan was for a group of us on high SPA to snare and then stop at 8 successes each. Then disband, assuming he had any spies to get rid of. Then a secondary group with lower SPA to take over.

You might think disbanding first would make more sense, but snare is the most time-senstive op in the game. You have to hit them hard and fast and you don't have time to mess about, because if you fuck it up, you are stuck in what is essentially a failed war for three days. Also it's embarrassing.

It took all 15 snares from me to see 8 successes. Others in our group were reporting similar success rates. RNG was massively fucking us over, taking us closer to a 50-60% success rate instead of the projected 70-80% we needed. Swamp Fox, it seemed, was going to be proven right.

Even worse, the second I declared war, one of our key first wave snarers, mdk, straight up vanished. As we all reported our snare successes, he was worryingly absent and not responding to pings.

'''Gothia:''' Where is mdk?

'''Kong:''' @mdk

'''Swamp Fox:''' ...

'''Gothia:''' @mdk

'''Kong:''' lol

'''Gothia:''' Fucking hell.

'''Rio:''' I'm here now.

'''Gothia:''' Oh we have Rio.

It was Rio to the rescue. He filled in for the missing snares we needed from mdk, and the group successfully took him below 25% - but he wasn't at 0. Mdk would end up on the reserve group instead, assuming he hadn't dropped off the face of the Earth.

'''Rush:''' Where tf did mdk go, wasn't this whole plan his idea? lol

'''Rio:''' Mdk taking the Cronel approach, sleeping.

'''Swamp Fox:''' We need to keep him at zero to keep this easily managed.

'''Gothia:''' Yeah, when mdk gets here he can take him to zero.

'''Rush:''' I'd rather he was at zero right now.

'''Rio:''' Mdk in fairness is probably off saving someone's life from cancer.

'''Rush:''' That can wait!

'''Rio:''' Priorities.

Mdk did show up after about 15 minutes and it was down to some crazy shit going down at his hospital. Someone better have been dying to risk our snare campaign!

I'll save you eight hours of excruciating detail and just say the snare campaign seemed borderline as hell initially but our recovery was decent and we had good coordination (ie not wasting snares) and some clutch successes from Cronel's superior SPA that put us into more comfortable territory as the campaign went on. End result: we successfully stripped Bingham of his Ares, and kept it off.

The result of this war forced the lyc to make a choice. He either took the hit he had lined up, and Gothia got insane acres from hitting his Monarch, or he sat and protected him, potentially missing the opportunity to hit the merfolk. We couldn't keep Bingham snared forever, and we were essentially babysitting the #8 merfolk, praying that at some point he realised the danger he was in and started taking his defence seriously.

So it was good news for Bingham, but it was still a very bad scenario for the lyc, who had to pass on an easy 75%. And anything that was bad news for the lyc was an avenue we were going to pursue. We had some idea of when Bingham probably went to sleep based on automations and fools gold, so we pushed the snare a few hours longer just to see if he'd give up and go to bed with no spells, but he did recast as soon as he had the wiz str. I think we pulled off a 10-hour snare in the end, and it could have gone a few hours longer before we were tapped out too. Meanwhile, Gothia found another hit:

''2025-07-10 18:15:59 Victorious on the battlefield, Felicity Shagwell (#5) conquered 253 land from Fire-starting in the Hanging Gardens (Mongoose) (#2).''

Rio laid out the two ways it could have gone:

That war/snare job meant instead of:
Lyc + 500
Gothia + 850
Sylvan + 400
DE + 400
Nomad + 400
Dwarf + 400

It is:
Lyc: 0
Gothia: +500
Sylvan: 0
DE: 0
Nomad: 0
Dwarf: 0

It hurt all of our competition but still helped Gothia, and Rio still had his suicide card if the lyc bottomfed. But that card had an imminent expiry date.

Our realm's attackers post-round credited this as the pivotal moment that the lyc lost the round. I don't know if that's really true or if it's a bit of back-patting. It could well have led to Gothia winning the round had he taken a different decision.

This chain of events meant that this war was going to turn out to be one of the strangest non-wars I've ever seen, more a game of nuance and edging than fireballs and big hits. From the outside - at least according to the peanut gallery in the main discord - it looked like absolutely nothing was happening. I don't blame them; if I was on the outside looking in, I doubt I'd be taking a wide enough view of the landscape to include the merfolk in #8 in the equation. There are very few players in this game that look at the bigger picture, and a lot of them were already in our realm.

Without the hit on the merfolk, it became likely that as soon as the lyc could escape Rio's suicidal op, which he would do at some point during the war, he was safe to drop guard and bottomfeed. And one of us would be the target.

Swamp Fox took himself off the menu by entering Elite Guard, which left me on the chopping block.

I was given a temporary reprieve (and potential out) when Taj cocked up and made a hit that would take him sailing into the lyc's range, then inexplicably didn't slam dp and just got slapped straight back out of range again.

''2025-07-11 19:54:30 Werego Vespucci (Weaser) (#10) invaded Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp) (#2) and captured 275 land.''

At this point if we'd cancelled the war, I might have dodged getting chomped entirely. Unfortunately it was a few minutes into the next tick when I had a brief discussion with Gothia and we decided to cancel, which turned out to be a huge mistake, because it meant he could still hit me with the war bonus on his return - and worse, we couldn't blop him back from dropping EG.

''2025-07-12 07:58:20 Werego Vespucci (Weaser) (#10) invaded Dr Evil (Rush) (#5) and captured 202 land.''

Gothia blamed himself. I blamed myself. Rio blamed both of us. It wasn't our finest moment.

I get hit so rarely that I'd forgotten how much it sucks. And this was the first time I'd ever been bottomfed. It absolutely tanked my econ and I spend the rest of the round trying to recover. I think I finished on only slightly higher pez than I had before the hit.

'''FINAL WEEKS - COMING UNDONE'''

Business Cat and Fenrir were now the likely winners if they could outplay Werego. Our realm was starting to arrive at the conclusion that we weren't going to win this without a hefty injection of luck. Business Cat and Fenrir had outmanouevred Gothia with a combination of skill and their own luck, and he found himself further and further behind, his op to low and his dp too high from dealing with Werego to make the hits he needed to catch up. Being further ahead, but at the wrong moments, and not able to capitalise on scenarios that could benefit him if the wind blew even slightly in his direction, seemed to have crippled him.

At some point, during one of our regular wars with #10, I said what many of us were thinking: that we weren't going to win this.

Syscero offered to full send on #10's Wonder if it helped. The guy was an absolute legend. But taking down their Wonder and probably getting hit in return was not an outcome I wanted to see.

'''Rush:''' "I don't think we're going to win this, so at this point it's more about making sure other realms don't get free land."

'''Mris:''' "We can still win this."

I admired mris' unflappable optimism. It's what we all needed to hear. Someone to pick up our spirits in the dark times. As long as Business Cat and Fenrir didn't get any more legs up on us, maybe we could still pull through after all and win this.

''2025-07-13 10:23:38 Victorious on the battlefield, Goldmember (mris) (#5) conquered 191 land from Lizardfolk: Ore Mines now protect boats (#3).''

''2025-07-13 10:47:35 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (#9) invaded fellow dominion Goldmember (#5) and captured 278 land.''

''2025-07-13 10:50:34 Business Cat Rides Again (#11) invaded fellow dominion Goldmember (#5) and captured 251 land.''

I cancelled my plans to attend mris' upcoming self-help seminar.

Business Cat later surprised Werego with a sneaky (and as far as I know, unprecedented) move that enabled an all-in hit against the runaway. He'd released a chunk of his own dp units and retrained them as spec op, and Werego's gang of super explorers had missed it. Internally a few realmies were quite agitated by Business Cat's constant profiteering off our efforts, and also held the sentiment that he seemed to lack the 'killer instinct' to take risks, having played things differently than they would have in a few situations. But this move certainly shocked and impressed all of his detractors.

There was some further drama from Sly who started accusing mdk of having access to his realm discord chat after mdk made a comment about Sly 'whining for weeks' about his round. This would be Sly's second public paranoid fit of pique in a couple of weeks and it left mdk totally nonplussed. At one point mdk was told there were discussions within the Rules Committee about locking him over his comment. He also mentioned that Sly seemed to be convinced I was a cheater and that I went out of my way to target him, and that I seemed to be 'living rent free' in his head - this was reflected in a comment he'd made publicly that he was planning to start smurfing (essentially creating a new account to evade proper realm assignment - as a regular solo player Sly would consistently complain about landing in ghettos), to which he then followed up by saying I would somehow find him anyway, implying again that I was a cheater. I'm not even sure why I was involved in the discussion at all since I had nothing to do with any of it.

I don't feel a great need to defend my character against these accusations though so I'll skip over my feelings of outrage etc and just say that I don't know where this sentiment comes from. These are the facts. Historically I don't think I've been involved in taking Sly down directly in any blops war; I always try my best to target who I perceive to be threats in competitive rounds. And if I'm rank chasing instead, I'm not targeting FAs. And even if I was fed his location, it still wouldn't change anything. I just don't target people for silly disagreements or past grudges I have with them in the discord. There are bloppers that will do this - Cronel has his famous List for example - but I can confidently say I have and will never target someone for being toxic, because that in itself would be toxic. And meeting toxicity with more toxicity would just be the very definition of hypocritical. A bit like someone on the Rules Committee suggesting they'll start using a smurf account, in violation of the rules they helped write.

Fortunately it seems rationality still prevailed on the RC in spite all these theatrics, and mdk did not get locked.

Back to the round. In the final week, it all fell apart for #10. I felt a little bad for their realm, which had performed well and which had, against the odds, kept a solo fast attacker that had randomed into their realm last-minute ahead of the scrum for so long. But they hadn't learned from a lesson we'd taught them early on: snare was their achilles' heel, as it often is for efficiency explorers. We had kept Bingham without Ares for 10+ hours earlier in the round while we babysat an efficiency explorer with a serious dp deficiency, and yet, Bingham didn't seem to have prioritised upping his spy ratio and instead tried to keep pace with the rest of his pack of super explorers - a challenge given we'd dented his econ in an earlier war. This decision to hoover up as many acres as possible instead of bolstering his spy defences left him vulnerable, and #9, who had already demonstrated a willingness to war, were able to take full advantage.

''2025-07-19 22:53:00 Myths and Mistakes (#9) has declared WAR on Eat Sleep Explore Repeat (#10).''

''2025-07-20 00:01:17 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (King Jota) (#9) invaded Laura Bingham (B) (#10) and captured 510 land.''

At this point, every efficiency explorer on Fenrir's menu should have been amping Ares and dumping spies, keeping it above 12h but at the very bare minimum above 9h. This was the final stretch. If Fenrir got another snare hit, it was ov-

''2025-07-21 00:04:42 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (#9) invaded Leif Erikson (DavetheGoliath) (#10) and captured 524 land.''

Oh no.

Welp. Congrats #9!

We finished off our round by indulging in the first and only frivolous rank-chasing war of the round:

''2025-07-21 20:51:39 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Eat Sleep Explore Repeat (#10).''

I lit up Bodhidharma (Chunk)'s frankly obscene castle and, taking advantage of Lightning Storm, was able to leapfrog mdk in the electrofancy ranks and steal the title from Moshing at Machu Pichu (Cosula), who was more preoccupied with stealing the top fireballer rank from Cronel, beating him by 19k at the finish line. It was the first time in the entire round our blopping numbers had looked good. It's slim pickings out there targeting all these top attacker threats you know! They have sweet fuck all peasants to roast to begin with and at best middling investments to crush. Hey let's add some sort of peasant value modifier based on prestige. One FA's peasant has got to be worth 10x an explorer's, right?

'''CONCLUSION'''

I hope I've been able to do my realm some justice with this roundfail, but I'm afraid I probably haven't. I haven't even covered every war, and there were a few doozies in there where we really screwed up, like our late-round war on #9 where we seem to have done basically no homework and had a "fuck it lets go" approach to snaring the target (Serving Thyestes' Family Dinner (mcgeeal)), who had a massive stock of plat that he just invested into walls and took our hit off the table. This round I have irl been probably the busiest I have ever been when trying to keep on top of my notes, so I'm certain I've missed a ton of key details. I didn't even talk about the time Swamp Fox joined EG by accident. Rio can't get in the damn thing and somehow Swamp Fox can't stay out of it? What is going on with guard applications? Or anything on a timer, really. Spare a thought for Oment who accidentally abandoned for a tick. At least we all know now we get one fake abandon per round if we choose to. Just say it wasn't for realsies and you didn't mean it.

That said, realm #5 and this round has been one of the most fun experiences I've had in OD. Every war was a blast, and there was real excitement in our realm making all these bold plays. From the concept of our pack, to the realm comp at realm assignment, to the ruthlessness and effectiveness of our wars, to the chaos and even our mistakes, it was a wild ride from start to finish. We did something truly unique this round with the whole realm on-board. And Rio did what I thought was impossible: he proved Loki's early concept of a 'combat blopper' Dark Elf (ref: [[Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery|roundfail round 41]] ) viable. Dangerous top attacker threat, then sui threat, finishing 8th in land and 7th in the Rush Rankings this round. He's just showing off at this point. If only he could figure out how guard works, he'd be unstoppable.

Rio had also proven what I had doubted: that blops are effective in their current state. Our realm was pretty unrepresentative of a normal realm, and we likely won't see anything like this again for a while, but we were a pretty terrifying realm if you found yourself in our crosshairs. Unless your name is mcgeeal. It's the first time in a very, very long time that it felt like our blops were capable of consistently altering the course of the round in our favour. In concept and (mostly) in execution, our realm was monstrous. And so, my opinion on blops as it currently stands, for whatever it's worth: I think wiz blops are sufficiently punishing early, but they do fall off quite hard in the mid to late game. I think spy blops are somewhat inaccessible without a lot of dedicated ops and blops players, although Rio's combat blopper playstyle showed you can also be pivotal in tipping the balance as an attacker, helping to make the difference between uncertain and successful in war snare and sink campaigns. And maybe spy blops are okay like that. If you have lots of ops and blops players in your pack, you have less attackers and are forced to rely more on chance at realm assignment, which is a balance in itself.

The Underground Society was amazing for us this round. It really was the jewel in our deadly blops realm crown. There was a scramble for it from several realms when realm #2 sent it back to #0 during one of our wars as a "fuck you", including from #11 who did significant damage to it. Ultimately it came down to a single cyclone who got it back. While we were discussing to coordinate a chain of hits to take it down (we had estimated that it was on much higher hp than it actually was), Cronel had woken up and thrown a single cyclone at it without reading the chat, rendering it once again the property of realm #5. Other realms should count themselves lucky they didn't snipe it - it would have brought all hell down on them. But we were also lucky they didn't too, because we didn't want to have to deal with being diverted into time-wasting and damaging Wonder-wars either.

Thanks to packmates Rio, Gothia, Cronel and Swamp Fox. Great dudes all. And thanks to mdk, kong, mris, phage, Music, Syscero and Gwyn for completing such a fantastic realm. Syscero in particular was a pleasant surprise for everyone - an old returning player from classic, new to OD, he picked all of the concepts up effortlessly and was exceptionally helpful with blops early on, before converting and having the usual first-time converter experience. It would have gone a lot better for him in his conversion if he hadn't been so helpful on the blops side to begin with!

And while I was glad I could pull Swamp Fox out of retirement, it was not without cost. It seems every time I play with that guy our realm causes seismic waves of antiblops sentiments and this round was no different. Almost every threatening realm felt our laser at one point or another. Of course, those that got truly atomised by it only have themselves to blame - greed is risk, and you can't get angry when your gamble doesn't pay off. Well, you shouldn't get angry, anyway. And hey, if you don't agree, I've got the number for a great tattoo artist I can give you. Tell 'em Rush sent ya and they'll hide all the lasers so you don't get triggered when you arrive.

Congrats to King Jota and realm #9 for the win. You guys made a great team, picked your wars wisely and coordinated well. And Jota's had a win due to him for a long time now. Glad to see he finally got it in the bag.

I was Dr Evil, and I finished on 6,296 acres, and 40th place for land. Quite a bad finishing position for me, but I did suffer a dirty bottomfeed in the late game.

To wrap up with a bit of fun, here's a handful of AI-generated images from realm #5 and of course the highlight of the round: https://imgur.com/a/muN2b6S

'''TL;DR'''

From the discord of realm #5, this round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/8aLZ3UD

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 45 Dr Evil

2025-07-28T13:49:11Z

Rush:

'''FOREWORD'''

I wasn't going to play this round. Honestly, it was supposed to just be one little draft round and then I was done. But here I am again, writing another roundfail. I sound like a relapsing addict. It's Rio's fault really, you get off the juice and he comes into your DMs pushing promises of war and suddenly you're right back in the rollercoaster car about to drop into another round.

Actually, it wasn't the promise of war that sold me. It was the promise of proving whether or not blops are actually still worth anything in this game. We are inching, with painfully small baby steps, towards fireball not being totally useless - GPC had just unveiled a very welcome and long overdue change to how mutual war affects rejuvenation, as well as a nerf to the overbearing mutual war op bonus, reducing it by 2% overall. Would it be enough to tip the balance? I wasn't sure, but at least we definitely weren't going down the route of adding friendly spells that bring roasted peasants instantly back to life, like Jcinnz had previously announced. Forget the crack cocaine of playing OpenDominion, I want what he's on.

Rio wanted to run two bloppers, two attackers, and we had a fifth slot available as a bit of a flexible position. An opper, or an attacker, or another blopper could fill it depending on who was available. We would play slow-ish, but deliberately exercise war to slow down fast attackers.

"Either it works, or it will prove how poor blops really are," said Rio.

I sighed, wrapping the cord around my forearm and pulling it tight with my teeth, readying the OD needle. Through gritted teeth, I said: "Alright, let's do it."

Last round I successfully dragged AgFx out of retirement, but this round I set my sights on Swamp Fox. I knew it was going to be difficult - of everyone that had disavowed themselves of the community after the Dark Times, Swamp Fox was the one that had most successfully disconnected from it. He simply went back to reality and lived his life in a non-tick-based format. No more worrying about making hits. No more worrying about dp. No more discord. No more hiding in car parks to guest on niche podcasts. Just an OD-free existence. So I knew I had my work cut out for me.

Rush: "Hey Swamp, can I tempt you back to OD?"

Swamp Fox: "You son of a bitch I'm in."

That went a little easier than I'd anticipated.

Rio drafted Gothia to be the second attacker, and we mulled over options for a fifth player. I initially asked Lud, who said the same thing he says every round - "oh I'm not playing next round, I want to be productive" - before he inevitably signs up and plays anyway. But you can't just point that out to the guy - that would be rude, right?

Lud: "Oh I'm definitely not playing next round. It is insane how productive I can be when I'm not playing OD."

Rush: "You say that every round! And then you end up getting drawn in like a moth to the flame."

Lud: "Yeah... but I'm trying to be strong."

So Lud was out. Spoiler alert, he signed up anyway and ended up being one of the biggest pains in our collective asses.

With the fifth position in our pack open, and Rio suggesting a third blopper might be the best fit anyway, I suggested Cronel.

Blopping used to be more viable than it is now. You had some economic support, they took that away. In those days, Cronel would consistently finish in the 4k acres zone. In recent rounds, he's consistently in the high 5ks and mid 6ks. So to say he's improved a bit as time has gone by is a bit of an understatement. He finally figured out that balance between ratios and economy and dp that lets a blopper walk the tightrope between safely pelting enemies with wet noodleballs and being ripped apart by sharks as soon as their name touches the Town Crier. Most dedicated bloppers never manage this. A lot of positions at the top end of the Rush Ranks are riddled with liability players that will feed your competition at some point, often at the worst possible moment. You've gotta be careful who you draft when you want bloppers, we're a real minefield. But I was confident Cronel had evolved beyond that stage. From caterpillar crawling along at 4k, to butterfly finishing on decent 6ks, Cronelus Monarcha was the blopper for the job. I asked if he was free and he said aye. We had our five.

'''WEEK 1 - MULTIVERSE DREAM TEAM?'''

At realm assignment we landed with mris, mdk, Kongb, Phage, MusicDJ2555, Gwyn, Syscero - and oh yay, Elf Woods. Mris, mdk and Kongb did make for a potentially broken realm coupled with Gothia and Rio, with the kind of blops and ops support Cronel, Swamp Fox and myself could provide. It's usually what you'd describe as a "lottery win realm". I don't know how it happened - we know realm assignment was going haywire this round, with the Emperor creating infinite realms, and at one point the round countdown timer was even going backwards. And this was the realm composition that fett collapsed our infinite quantum superposition into when he intervened to kill the loop. It all felt out of place, like things weren't meant to be like this. I kept half expecting to find out that this version of mris was from a parallel universe where preying mantises were the dominant species. But no, turns out, it was our mris.

Meanwhile, over in realm #7, Dave was doing his John Travolta gif impression wondering where all his active realmies were at. They're all in our realm Dave.

In contrast to last round where the theme directive was "uhh anime", this round it was a bit more prescriptive: pick a character from the Austin Powers universe. Why? Because it's giffable. Job done. Naturally I grabbed Dr Evil before Cronel could. Muahahaha. Muahahaha. Muahahaha! We got a lot of gif mileage out of our theme.

I struggled a bit at race selection because Gothia wanted to go Sylvan, and with Cronel and Swamp Fox already taking Undead and Vampire respectively, there just wasn't a good wiz blops race to choose. I considered Icekin for a bit: despite not being a naturally blops friendly race I usually do quite well with them, hitting 7k last time I played one. But Rio and mdk both questioned this choice, and mdk suggested Demon instead. I hadn't played Demon before, but by all accounts from attackers and bloppers that have played it alike, it wasn't great. Mdk said it had a cheap 6pt defence unit for 10% swamps so what was there to think about as a blopper? Fuck it, I figured I might as well give them a shot and see what all the griping was about. Looking at the race, that swamps requirement for cheap elite dp was literally the only perk in my favour, and the rest was attacker-oriented trash: a racial spell I couldn't use, an op bonus and a spec dp unit perk I probably wouldn't see much use from. Demon do also have Miasma, a war-only spell, but I probably wouldn't find a use for it in our heavy wiz race realm. It's an okay-ish-maybe counterblops spell - but the best offence, as the saying goes, is a fuckload of fireballs. I probably wasn't going to be wasting wiz str on Miasma. In fact, by the end of the round, I'd have cast it precisely zero times. I forgot it even existed. Performance-wise, Demon seemed to grow somewhat slower than Sylvan, and was otherwise flavourless to play. If boring was a race, Demon is it.

Overall, the realm strategy was to play slow and war often. So the majority of our attackers went for wiz races and a mid or slow speed attack style. With my blopper hat on, if I looked at our realm, it would be a hard pass for war. Four dark elves, three sylvans, two icekins and a mix of vampires, demons and undead and nothing else. The plan was to war as soon as blops went live and start limiting FA realms.

We got off to a rocky start. In the first two days, our all-star realm had some rookie moments. Gothia sent out knowingly unsafe on a bot and got hit by an Orc:

2025-06-08 06:59:51 Fun Dip and Cherry Coke (SugarJon) (#7) invaded Felicity Shagwell (Gothia) (#5) and captured 45 land.

In fairness to Gothia, Fun Dip had better targets. It later transpired that Fun Dip just basically had no ops support to find them.

Meanwhile, sim issues plagued Rio and mdk. Rio discovered his sim, given to him by mris, was short on docks and was limiting his army, while mdk's sim had so many issues with it that he hadn't spotted (such as razing temples) that it completely gimped him as an attacker, and he was forced to deconvert on day three of the round. To his credit, instead of losing interest, he became an invaluable asset on the ops and blops side instead. Switched-on attackers know all their own weaknesses and can predict when they're coming down the pipeline for others, and intuitively know when's best to strike thinking about the longer term. And mdk really shone in that role.

Music, a school kid, did not have the activity level needed to defend his dominion and also seemed quite resilient to discord notifications, so would constantly miss advice that would help him stay safe. I got the impression that in addition to a big window of inactivty while asleep, his school must have had some sort of no smartphone policy, meaning that for ~16 hours a day this guy was not logging in. He also didn't seem to use automations. So he unavoidably became a prime feeder for spirits because he didn't have consistent dp coming in, but had tons of drafts from his sporadic activity, protecting him against regular attackers while assassination was disabled. It was unfortunate, but he would later become pretty clutch in some borderline blops scenarios where we needed someone on insane spies to get us over the line, so he went from being a liability to being invaluable as the round progressed.

And, of course, Elf Woods bounced his first hit. Didn't even bother updating ops and just yolo'd.

As we approached day 4, which as we all know is when the round actually begins, it became pretty clear that #3's halfling, Bunk beds: +3 barracks housing (Rury), was going to be the one to run. He was significantly ahead of the scrum. It was difficult to get blops ready while he was breathing down everyone's necks, modded up and spamming specs while we were bringing in 10% towers and defenceless wizards, and we could barely grow because we needed to focus so much dp. Thank god for the rejuv changes making mutual more of a question mark. There were more than a few hairy moments where some of us were very borderline on dp - but as is always the case in OD, there's always someone fatter and less defended out there than me, even with the blops dp / econ sacrifice. Someone gets a hot sim, flies ahead, doesn't pay enough attention, gets smashed. The meat shields above us served us well to get us into position to take action. The same hour blops went live, we declared war.

2025-06-10 18:30:03 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on War: Now available at a random time on day 3 (#3).

Bunk beds' blops preparation was lacklustre but it wasn't nothing. He had some Wizard Guilds, just not enough to dissuade us, and had brought in wizards, but again, not enough. It was weird; he'd semi-committed but still left himself open. It seemed indecisive. Wizard blops are very weak compared to their former iterations, perhaps he figured it wasn't worth investing in defences - but then why go half-way?

We assassinated every last wizard we could and set him on fire. Then we did the same to their lyc, Sprite -0.5 DP (Poige). Poige would spend the rest of the round spitting feathers about our realm and blaming us for ruining the round. Dwarf Miner: -5r (Oment) had plenty of time to make an effort to bring in defences before our second wave assault started, but elected not to, so we roasted him too. We also considered burning Spirit: Spectre +1 DP (Vinn) for a bit, who after seeing the blops damage we were doling out to his team mates did eventually build some WGs - but too late if we decided to go after him. There was some debate about it.

Gothia wanted us to hit him before his WGs came in and extend the war a bit until rejuv kicked in. He suspected because of the nomad's obssessively precise training figures (all 5s and 10s) that it was probably Vinn. Mdk on the other hand, wanted to move on and address other emergent threats.

Gothia: "Can we please roast him before we move on? Vinn is very skilled and he will win a round soon, let's make sure it's not this one."

Rush: "We'll need to continue the war if we burn the nomad. It's significant resources from us just to limit him a relatively small amount."

Mdk: "We can always come back for Vinn later. I'm more worried about #1's three gnomes and their human, #2's big nomad and #4's human converter."

The Underground Society had also dropped again, which is an excellent Wonder for bloppers but also fantastic for attackers, acting like a quasi-Armada wonder as well as a 24/7 Fool's Gold. If we had that wonder, Rio wouldn't have to wake up in the middle of the night suffering from panic attacks over lamb stealing his 1-hour's worth of platinum production for as long as we held it. I wanted us to move on from #3 and focus on grabbing it as soon as possible. And so maybe-Vinn was spared the rod.

We cancelled the war but we still had to keep an eye on the halfer's op with the lingering war bonus. Despite limiting him he was still clearly ahead - he had the land lead. Towards the end of the war Cronel was potentially hittable if they assassed his drafts. He works night shift so I'd expected him to be awake, but he'd fallen asleep at work instead. He needed to drop dp specs to be safe but we couldn't reach him for over two hours, by which point he was firmly in the danger zone. Fortunately, #3 seemingly did not check beyond a cursory look at a few of us about 10h before the end of the war bonus. Instead they went for a spirit in #8 instead.

2025-06-13 07:16:25 Bunk beds: +3 barracks housing (Rury) (#3) invaded Church Burners (Omnialloy) (#8) and captured 71 land.

Wonder take-downs are usually a stress point in the round, at least for me. This round, though, it actually wasn't too bad. Once the Americans finally woke up after their Friday morning lie-in, we were able to take it down pretty quickly.

2025-06-13 11:14:52 The Underground Society has been destroyed and rebuilt by Gentlemen, welcome to my underground lair... (#5).

Even changed the realm name for maximum cosplay. That's just how organised we were.

With the Society secured (for my second round in a row), bolstering both our bloppers and our attackers, we were able to turn our attention back to the next new runaway threat: the lyc in #10, Werego Vespucci (Weaser). This one was a little different to the halfer - he'd obviously seen what we'd done to his rival and decided he didn't want to meet the same chargrilled fate. He wasn't the only one, we detected several other realms bringing in blops defences after we fired the laser (though as would later become obvious, plenty others would still try to fly light, and would rightly suffer for it). But Werego had brought in a staggering nearly 50 WGs. When you consider the meta to fob bloppers off was 30, he clearly wasn't taking any chances. I went through historical barracks spies and spotted that he had also been bringing in Archmages, which could mean his blops defences were both high and unstabbable. I ran the numbers on his docks and he wasn't sinkable either, and with his wiz defences, the likely scenario was we could kill maybe 3k peasants.

Rio had noticed that Werego was curiously behind schedule in joining the Royal Guard, which meant he was also going to be slower than others to get into the Elite Guard - which would take him out of range of most of us bloppers except for Swamp Fox, who would have to become a One Man Army and wage most of the blops war solo, flinging maintenance fireballs after the rest of us volleyed him down to base. But it gave us the window of opportunity we needed to recharge just enough after knocking down the Society to go and fling fireballs at a single target, if we wanted to go for it.

There was some debate in realm chat as to whether or not the proposed war with #10 was even worth it.

Gothia: If we only fry 3k pez for 18 hours, I'm not really sure it's in our interest to war the lyc at the moment.

Rio: We've gotta slow a potential runaway, regardless. Otherwise he pulls away with a bunch of large explorers to help him target hunt.

Gothia: I agree that he needs to be stopped, but your statement assumes we're the only ones capable of doing it.

Rio: We're the only ones willing even if others are capable. We're positioned to blop. Others will have to do their part in pushing op, which we can't do right now.

Syscero: We needed another realm to step up while we dealt with bunk.

Rush: This would be a hard pass from me usually. 3k pez is not worth the resources and risk. And it's our boy Swamp Fox that'll be in the danger zone all war, the rest of us will fall out of range pretty swiftly.

But we all knew Rio was right. And it's not like we had better targets, or that it was even a nuanced situation. And if Swamp Fox could manage the op bonus, it was low risk to us even if the damage was also trivial. And so we warmed up the laser.

2025-06-13 18:59:09 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Together we can sea the world (#10).

I had a whole bit here about Swamp Fox waging a one-man blops war against the top threat, our canary in the coal mine, but then I deleted about two hours worth of this roundfail by accidentally overwriting the file so you'll just have to use your imaginations. Sorry Swamp, your moment in the sun was eaten by Microsoft.

Anyway, depending on the strength of your imagination, that was either an incredible action sequence, with one puny little fire mage against a giant angry wolf, or... maybe like two stick figures, with one throwing noodles at the other? Or maybe you're one of those people that literally cannot picture things in your mind, and if that's the case, I'm not really sure you're getting anything out of this paragraph, so perhaps it's best we move on.

With the #10 lyc lightly singed and slinking off into the Elite Guard, we turned our attention to a second wave target... except we didn't really have one. None of the attackers in our realm seemed to have an opinion on who we should roast, which meant they weren't worried about any of the others in #10. The new guy, Syscero, wanted to burn their Monarch, Laura Bingham (B). And so Laura Bingham was burned.

Let's just quickly recap this first week in three lines to make a point here:

2025-06-10 18:30:03 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on War: Now available at a random time on day 3 (#3).

2025-06-13 11:14:52 The Underground Society has been destroyed and rebuilt by Gentlemen, welcome to my underground lair... (#5).

2025-06-13 18:59:09 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Together we can sea the world (#10).

I've seen a lot of impressive blops feats in my time, but coming out of a war against top op, knocking down a Wonder and then starting another war with the next top op, in the span of just 48 hours, is up there. Our realm had a ruthless kind of organisation to it and was pursuing its goals aggressively - slowing top ops, bolstering our bloppers and attackers, and trying to keep the environment conducive to an eventual realm win. It wasn't an easy balance: the early war with #3 had damaged the econs of us bloppers, having to bring in massive towers and spywiz units instead of dp, while staying ahead of modded-up, specced-up and probably coked-up fast attackers. It's tantamount to fireballing yourself with how much it hurts. Towards the end of the war with #10, mris remarked with shock at how tiny we were, and admonished us for not focusing our econs. Like, hello?

Mris was right about one thing though, we did need to seriously pivot back towards efficiency. Only Swamp Fox was able to get a decent econ going, able to play a bit faster as Vampire, so he became our nominated canary in the coalmine and was tasked with going pure efficient to try and stay in range. I was trailing him by about 100 acres as Demon, which I was beginning to think of as essentially a much worse version of Sylvan for blops, while Cronel and Syscero were trailing me by about the same amount as Undead and Icekin respectively, and mdk even further behind. We were almost all built for slow, but in all the early chaos, we were growing so slowly even Wurst's famous crack team of snails from yester-year would look on and blush.

Whenever I land with a bunch of veteran attackers, as I had this round, I like to ask them for their read of the round at the one week mark. It's always interesting to see how they expect things develop and compare it end round with how the round plays out. Unfortunately, this round none of the attackers seemed willing to make any educated guesses. I can only assume they were paralysed with fear of having their potentially inaccurate predictions recorded in this roundfail, forever showing them up as charlatans and pretenders. Or they're just lazy.

So to make up for the fact that I've got nothing to share, here's a video that, I think, effectively captures the essence of our realm and its influence on the round at this point. And, let's be honest, it is way more educational than anything that bunch of layabouts was ever gonna come up with:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T1swuHPA1OU

Right?

'''WEEK 2 - GOTHIA REVENGE ARC'''

Remember that orc that hit Gothia on day one? Well, Gothia hadn't forgotten. Fun Dip (SugarJon) in #7 had smashed him on day one when he'd made a risky send and, although taking hits earlier on seem to be easier to recover from, it was still a setback for Gothia.

Now that the runaways had all sauntered off out of range of our blops, we had to gear shift and start looking around at the slow threats that might cause problems for us later. Unfortunately for Fun Dip, he was assessed to be one of them - and had the dubious honour of being the only person to negatively impact our realm so far, which just increased his Most Wanted rating.

Mris did the scouting for this war, and had narrowed it down to three possible realms to go after.

Mris: Realm #2 has an obviously strong nomad but also no op in their realm for us to worry about, and an orc that we can also hit. Realm #8 is top op for many of us so doesn't make sense for us to go after them while we're all making an economic push. Realm #7 has the strongest orc and strongest human. Again no op in their realm for us to worry about.

Rio: I like #7 as a target. Good options, no immediate threats - and we get revenge for their orc hit on Gothia.

Kong agreed with a humblebrag:

Kong: The orc is a bit concerning. He has the same numbers as I did last round even though I bounced a hit oop.

Gothia, unsurprisingly, was in favour of the war too:

Gothia: I like warring #7.

So. We were warring #7.

2025-06-16 21:31:00 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on LFO: Liza Flying Over 🌈 (#7).

The plan was to fireball and sink the orc, but we didn't have enough bloppers around immediately at war dec to do quite enough sink damage and the guy had hundreds and hundreds of spare boats just lying around. We needed one more blopper to sink him but after pinging Gwyn and Music and a bunch of others, we just could not get it over the line and the orc was able to chortle his way to a bot hit.

2025-06-16 22:00:18 Fun Dip and Cherry Coke (#7) invaded Sinking without thinking (#0) and captured 58 land.

Gothia was not impressed. We were three wars in and this had been our first fail, but since the orc was still getting lit up, it wasn't all bad.

We burned the orc and probably someone else as well, I forget who. I spent two hours writing about the tail-end of week 1 and pretty much all of week 2 and then overwrote my notes so I'm mostly working from memory here in week 3 here.

[Post-round edit: the second target was Grapes. Sorry Grapes! That's what happens when you turn your back on the path of chaos I guess...]

Oh, I almost forgot until Cronel randomly reminded me - we also warred #11 and roasted the goblin Delta Forks (Disco), their gnome McRangers (Crazy Guy) and dwarf Don't live in someone else's Shadow (Empoy). After the war, it was pointed out that we almost helped feed their goblin to the lyc, which instigated some mixed reactions from our attackers in realm. Some were all "not our problem", others were "fuck 'em, they need to manage their doms better", while very few (okay just one) conceded that it was something we should be more mindful of in future wars. In the end, though, it was the Demon, Meal Team 6 (Slice) who we hadn't even touched that ended up feeding Werego when he carelessly explored into range massively underdefended.

2025-06-21 13:59:22 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded Meal Team 6 (#11) and captured 113 land.

And so Swamp Fox sighed and clicked explore.

Unfortunately the lyc then found another huge hit pretty much immediately. Another explorer slacking on his Ares casts.

2025-06-22 20:00:14 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded 🧄Garlic-Tunneler Goulash🍲 (Jcinnz) (#12) and captured 169 land.

And so Swamp Fox sighed and clicked explore. He'd be doing that a lot this round.

'''WEEK 3 - SCHRODINGER'S CRONEL'''

We missed the perfect opportunity to mess with #1 because Cronel was sleeping again.

It had become an emergent theme this round that when we needed blops, someone key - usually Cronel - was asleep and limiting what we could do. We were a mix of Euros and Americans, so our timezones were a big factor to plan around. Cronel had said he operated on EU time, since he worked night shift, but in practice that turned out not to be the case. Middle of the day blops needed? Oh it's a Thursday, Cronel sleeps all day on Thursdays. Saturday night blops needed? Oh that's Cronel's usual sleeping hours. Monday morning blops needed? Cronel is technically at work - but is also ASLEEP AT WORK. I shit you not, I'm not even making this up for a bit, he was just asleep at work. He was Schrodinger's Comatose Cat. Open the lid of his box and it was only in that moment the universe would decide whether he was awake or asleep. And mostly it was the latter. There was no pinging him back to the waking world, you just had to wait for him to rise from his coffin on his own time - which could be anywhere from three to eighteen hours later. It was like he'd studied under Jmerc's tutelage last round and decided that being randomly AWOL when he was needed most would only add to his reputation for chaos.

It wasn't all Cronel of course. Swamp Fox was caught red-handed sleeping in one day instead of blopping, and then spluttered that he was in fact fixing a sink first thing in the morning and his fingers were too covered in plumber's putty to use his phone. Naturally nobody believed him.

Gothia was becoming increasingly agitated as the hours ticked by and we still didn't have the numbers to effectively sink Michael Jordan (zooj) in #1, who looked in a very strong position. He had plenty of op to make a hit and it was only a matter of time before he sent, and we needed seven people online at the same time to ensure we could sink him enough to limit him. We had five, once Swamp Fox had washed his hands. We could probably do it with six. It was prime EU hours, so of course Cronel was asleep. Our backup American bloppers, Phage and Music, were also asleep. Mris, the caretaker of these two young ODers, resolutely refused to wake them up early to blop. What sort of American values does that instill, I wonder, if you aren't teaching your kids to enjoy the smell of war in the morning?

2025-06-23 12:58:28 Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (zooj) (#1) invaded ...I sHaLl bE BaCk... (#0) and captured 107 land.

Gothia was not impressed.

This was our second 'war fail' and this time, we had fumbled so hard we hadn't even managed to declare war. And for the next 24 painful hours, we would wait for him to build his land (to ensure he didn't bring in docks), then try to organise enough people online again to sink and fireball him, and once again fail to do so. The plan for war was firmly in the EU dead zone, between 2am and 6am, so I was definitely asleep. Cronel, who was always asleep, was also asleep. Swamp Fox was our General, and the only other person who could declare besides me, so of course he went to bed early, tuckered out from fixing sinks. And so war was off the cards until I woke up the next day. When I woke up, I was glad I had spent my wiz str the previous evening flooding merfolk and lizzies.

It had taken us a whole day to get our acts together and even then, it was still borderline whether we could pull it off or not.

2025-06-24 11:20:11 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Elon Musk Playing Starship Simulator (#1).

[Post-round edit: That's right. We went to war on zooj. I never thought I'd see the day!]

It was still amazing to us that after the blops capability we'd demonstrated so far, and our ruthless focus on taking down any competitors to our realm, that so many dominions were caught with their pants around their ankles, playing greedy like there wasn't this pack of scorpions out there waiting to sting you to death if you started to look intimidating. Once we sunk MJ, we kept him sunk, and watched as he did virtually nothing except build docks from a daily bonus to protect himself. It wasn't enough. He was going to be stuck for several days while his boats regenerated. I have a rare tip for attackers here: if you get sunk, build lots of docks. It's always your better option than doing nothing, or trying to rely on DBs. I suspect zooj didn't have the experience dealing with blops to know what to do in this situation. Maybe he'll know for next rounds. Our veteran attackers picked him out as a threat so he'll likely have to deal with them again in future.

Someone who wasn't Michael Jordan in realm #1, but was in realm #1, sent me a DM on the off-chance I was in #5 and one of the bloppers currently wreaking havoc on their realmie to plead for mercy, and suggested that all we were doing was griefing that player. I'm not gonna say who it was because I do have some sympathy for their intentions, which weren't to maliciously influence the game, but this is what would later lead to accusations of me cheating by Sly on the Rules Committee. I floated the sentiments to the realm. Rio seemed a bit skittish about the griefing accusation, while mdk was more hardline that it was a war game and sometimes your risks don't play out.

Rio: In fairness, we can move on. But he has also done the bare minimal effort to help himself.

mdk: These blops are nothing compared to what they used to be... The guy can seriously rezone smithies to docks if he wants to, but if he refuses that's on him. And fireballs are 20-24 hours, and half your peasants are protected for free.

Cronel: He finally has docks coming in.

mdk: Only his DBs. They have been targeted once when they are looking strong.

Gothia: The thing is, he did nothing to prevent it. If he did rezone to docks and invested in harbour and trained spies, then I would understand.

mdk: Calculated risk. But then you can't cry about it when you eat blops because of it.

Gothia: Exactly.

Rio: Players complaining usually can't see past their own perspective. "I want them to do X as it benefits them and me. What?? They did Y and that hurts me and not sure it helps them right now!" - I say it in pretty much every win I've had. Sometimes I'll do something that hurts me a little if it hurts someone else a lot. As long as it doesn't benefit your main threat, if it helps someone else, it's usually okay.

Gothia: Amen brother.

Rio: A lot of these wars have been to position our sylvans ahead of the people we're taking down. I don't see the lyc as the main competition for the win at this point: it is humans, sylvans, dwarves and gnomes.

Rush: War cancel is three ticks away, I take it we are not extending?

Gothia: Yeah we should cancel once their big gnome gets rejuv.

Rush: I think his rejuv kicks in at the same time war cancel is available.

Gothia: Perfect timing.

'Griefing' is a term that has only really come to the fore of our community in relatively recent rounds and is bandied about far to leisurely in my opinion. It's used as a cudgel to condemn blops by people who either don't like blops, or who are upset that they are being used effectively against them in the moment. Or both. There's a lot of crossover in those two groups. It is not griefing to target a threat and neutralise them. It is not griefing to target a greedy player and punish them for it. It is not griefing to use the tightly controlled blackop mechanics available to you in a war game to hurt players outside of your realm. Tattoo these three sentences on the inside of your eyelids please.

Regardless, it was time to move on.

2025-06-26 11:33:47 I always cry at endings… even evil ones. (#5) has CANCELED war against Basil Exposition Playing Cooking Simulator (#1).

2025-06-26 11:34:24 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on The Young and Free (#2).

Mdk had been keeping tabs on the #2 nomad, Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp), and had expected him to hit at the end of the previous tick (while we were still locked into war). He was in the middle of "9hr-ing", a playstyle for certain races whose troops get home in 9 hours instead of 12, and crucially before their first hit's land arrives, meaning they can hit twice on the same land. But Taj had not sent at the end of the tick when cancel became available to us. We had planned to war immediately war #2 anyway and fireball the nomad, but when he didn't send, sinking him in the middle of a 9hr became the new strategy.

Kong: That's killer for a nomad. After pushing 5% mods for a hit.

Gothia: He will be able to send quite fast again if he just builds docks.

We sank him. The timing could not have been more perfect from our perspective - and of course, it was very unfortunate timing for him. Unlike the previous realm, however, his reaction was to immediately bring in lots of docks, limiting the long term harm immediately. This guy's been sunk before, methinks.

We weren't done yet though. This war wasn't just about bloppers sinking some attacker. It was time for some real showboating.

With the war bonus, and without Ares, #2's court magister, the undead Breakdancing at the Great Wall (Karpatheo) with "the gifted" title, was hittable by Rio. And not just hittable, triple chainable by Gothia and mris. And not just triple chainable, potentially quad chainable by Kong if the stars aligned and somehow we managed to keep Ares off for six ticks. That last one was unlikely, and required Music with his insane 1.3 spy ratio to wake up and keep him snared, and also for the entire playerbase to ignore the target for several hours. But hey, you never know. Shoot for the stars.

With some coordination and some sleep-rousing the Americans, we got enough of a motley crew together to pull off the snare when Breakdancing was at 3 hours left to recast.

2025-06-27 13:09:59 Victorious on the battlefield, Nigel Powers (#5) conquered 165 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).

2025-06-27 13:10:06 Victorious on the battlefield, Felicity Shagwell (#5) conquered 148 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).

2025-06-27 13:11:04 Victorious on the battlefield, Goldmember (#5) conquered 140 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).

Gothia, at last, was impressed.

Swamp Fox: This will be a great part to Rush’s story. Less than 24 hours from "we should look for war hits" to "let’s snare and triple tap this guy" 🤣

Shortly after, our mercy blops target from #1 managed to cobble enough boats together to make a hit and got instantly gobbled up for it.

2025-06-27 13:41:47 Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (zooj) (#1) invaded Land Of The Tainted (#0) and captured 91 land.

2025-06-27 13:59:55 Business Cat Rides Again (Lud) (#11) invaded Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (#1) and captured 126 land.

Rio: His boats situation meant he needed to leave more dp home. He just went mad on op after our blops. Annoying that we worked for a hit and 11 sylvan just got one for free.

Business Cat in #11 was a constant source of consternation in our realm. Everything we did seemed to also benefit him indirectly, and when it couldn't, he found another way to keep the advantage. And he'd taken precautions againsts us, running high docks and making himself virtually unassailable by our laser.

But he wasnt the only regular beneficiary. Fenrir (King Jota) in #9 was also often a net benefactor from our efforts, but he was afforded more respect given their realm's more pro-active approach to war.

'''WEEK 4 - POUNDING ALOTTA FAGINA'''

Quite the spectacular week, but a terrible start for us. Kong, our hotshot top attacker who was ahead of everyone else in the realm and our best chance for the win, sent out on a hit that would ultimately cost him his shot at the round.

2025-06-29 18:18:26 Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) invaded Moshing at Machu Picchu (Cosula) (#2) and captured 123 land.

The realm hadn't checked the sleepy nomad in #2 that we'd sank in the middle of his 9h and, well, it soon became apparent that this was a massive oversight.

2025-06-29 18:29:29 Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp) (#2) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 207 land.

2025-06-29 18:45:28 Purple Wolf Tail And Raging Fiery Hobpot (playt0i) (#12) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 169 land.

2025-06-29 18:48:55 Delta Forks (Disco) (#11) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 153 land.

2025-06-29 18:59:59 Business Cat Rides Again (Lud) (#11) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 149 land.

Kong was absolutely demolished in 30 minutes flat. Everyone was aghast. I don't know how you send out without checking the top threats aren't ready to stomp you, but that's what happened here. Mdk blamed himself harshly for not playing lookout and fell on his sword. It was all very dramatic. Kong, on the other hand, seemed quite relaxed about the whole thing. And our pack welcomed our fallen realmie onto Team Blops.

Ops in general, despite the massive amount of experience and activity in our realm, were not our strongest suit. I was constantly flying by the seat of my pants with no spywiz strength to run checks and our attackers were mostly pretty comfy updating people once every 1-2 days(!) while they knew they were safe from all-ins sitting at home. I couldn't even use Swamp - who was the only explorer ahead of me - as a meat shield because he was constantly prepping to defend Werego, which meant he generally carried about 25% more dp than I did. I was 150a behind him and had 4-7 threats to second-guess. I tethered my dp to another Demon who was a few% bigger than me and just hoped he was paying attention. He had an annoyingly high spy ratio so it was often more costly than I liked just to check up on him.

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about our disastrous start to the week. Alotta Fagina wasn't the only one of us to get royally fucked.

You see, veteran player and four-time roundwinner Rio, did not understand how guard works and kept resetting his application to the Elite Guard. Just four hours before he was due to join the EG, he took a clear sight on someone marginally outside of his range, which reset his application. It wasn't long before an eagle-eyed #10 took notice.

Two hours after he would've been in EG were it not for that op:

2025-06-29 14:56:58 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded fellow dominion Nigel Powers (Rio) (#5) and captured 134 land.

Rio then got carried away with revenge blops and reset his application a second time. This one's not his fault though, it was a bug. Not that it mattered much though, because he then reset his application a third time by taking ANOTHER op on someone out of range. And so Werego came round for seconds.

2025-06-30 18:49:46 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded fellow dominion Nigel Powers (#5) and captured 134 land.

Of course I am being a bit glib here - it's obviously very easy to just forget the weird red tape of the guard application process and take an op. There really should be an "are you sure?" prompt that gets in the way, or something that forces you to cancel your application before you just get hard reset like that. Or just do away with info ops resetting your guard application entirely, what's that all about anyway?

That said, he did make the exact same mistake twice in 24 hours. We're into meme territory. I updated the realm message:

"Message of the Day: Day 25 of asking, is Rio in elite guard yet?"

It made a change from every other update of asking, "is Swamp Fox in range yet?"

Naturally Rio brought out his "in every round I've won I've been hit at least once" line to remind everyone that he wins lots of rounds, and mainline some copium that this wasn't a major setback. Still, if anyone could claw back an advantage, he could.

I recorded a podcast on the round with AgFx, Volv and Lud, and we discussed some of the current events. Until Kong's insta-death and Rio's guard shenanigans I had been planning to loc-post myself so I could go into more detail about #5's behaviour, but I decided I didn't really want to have to explain all those misplays that had just happened so I decided against it. These guys were clearly just trying to embarrass me before the pod record.

During the pod, I also made brief mention of the fact that I'd received a DM asking us to stop "griefing" during our earlier war with #1. Sly, who was on the rules committee, caught wind of this, and started giving me shit in DMs for not reporting it. Which was fair enough, that's his role. It's just that he couldn't seem to stop his obvious dislike of me from getting in the way of some basic fact finding. And so after reading his messages, dripping with his trademark condescension, I told him to get lost.

Sly would grow increasingly bitter and erratic as the round developed, and it would not be the last time #5 heard from him in his role as attack dog of the Rules Committee.

'''WEEK 5 - COLLUSION!'''

We had been intending to war #9 and sink Fenrir, so Rio could push suicidal op and nail the #11 sylvan once the lyc sent. Sinking the DE meant Rio could probably get away with it.

Unfortunately, this incredible plan all fell apart with one simple question.

Rush: DE is sinkable?

Mdk: Hmm, he has a lot of docks.

Rush: Is that a no? lol

Rio: Hmm, probably not.

Oh well, there goes that plan.

Rio instead suggested we snare an explorer in #10 instead, and while we didn't have a concrete plan, we knew we were going down the spy blops route in the near future, so we aimed to get our ratios up. Mdk and I pushed to 1.0, while the ever-scrimping Swamp Fox plumped for a 0.7. Cronel, of course, already had more than a 1.0, but pushed it up to a 1.2 anyway just to flex on the rest of us.

At some point Gothia noticed a scav drop on the lyc, which was bad news. It meant he had a target. We started scouting around, and confirmed our suspicions.

Screaming Mimis (Craghack) (#8), had inexplicably entered range underdefended. Realm #8 had others bigger than him able to get ops on the lyc, so they must have known his op, so this had to be a case of blindly exploring without paying attention. Screaming Mimis put himself on the lyc's radar relying on 6.3k draftees for defence - which would just be assassinated by the lyc's team of elite explorers. Even worse, Screaming Mimis, having entered range, also did not slam defence. The guy seemed to be completely oblivious to the danger he was in. It became imperative that we had to intervene, and on Mimis' schedule.

We identified Laura Bingham (B) as the best snare target - high land, lowest dp of all the super explorers, and the worst estimated spy ratio - somewhere between 0.3 and 0.6 depending on whether they were spies or assassins. A 1.0+ should in theory stomp him.

There were two problems: due to the timing of the lyc's planned hit, we had to snare Bingham at Ares 8, which is a very long snare campaign and the mechanics of the game push back hard to try and prevent long snares, giving the subject resilience which massively boosts wizard strength recovery over time.

The second problem was RNG. We needed a 70-80% estimated success rate to pull this off. It needed every single player in range to contribute, even our attackers on - and lets phrase this generously - suboptimal ratios. We couldn't waste any snares, so we needed to know when to stop before we saw 0. And we needed to wait and not snare between ticks to let resilience drop a little to improve our success chances.

Gothia calculated that a hit on Bingham would be 418+418 acres if the lyc went for the merf anyway, which was frankly obscene.

Swamp Fox was not impressed with this plan. He gave it a zero percent chance to succeed, saying Bingham would be getting 10%+ wizard strength recovery per tick, and that we didn't have the numbers or the ratios to pull this off. He was in an unusually downbeat mood considering we were about to war. It perhaps explained his disinterest in pushing his ratios to 1.0, and instead he elected to focus on acres. He was also constantly hovering on the cusp of entering Elite Guard to avoid getting bottomfed, and us needing him to participate in a war snare campaign had the dual effect of making him the preferred option for a lyc snack while also resetting his guard application to its maximum duration.

I hadn't done the maths - we had mdk and Kong, both with bigger brains than me, for that stuff - but I wasn't as pessimistic about our chances. I knew long snare campaigns were hard but I also knew they weren't impossible with broken realms. And our realm fit the definition of broken. If anyone could pull it off, it was us.

So it was time to brush the dust off the old laser.

2025-07-09 14:06:08 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on ---> https://youtu.be/jVSZdsAq4Bo?si=vbHsuSwN6L8APWtn (#10).

The plan was for a group of us on high SPA to snare and then stop at 8 successes each. Then disband, assuming he had any spies to get rid of. Then a secondary group with lower SPA to take over.

You might think disbanding first would make more sense, but snare is the most time-senstive op in the game. You have to hit them hard and fast and you don't have time to mess about, because if you fuck it up, you are stuck in what is essentially a failed war for three days. Also it's embarrassing.

It took all 15 snares from me to see 8 successes. Others in our group were reporting similar success rates. RNG was massively fucking us over, taking us closer to a 50-60% success rate instead of the projected 70-80% we needed. Swamp Fox, it seemed, was going to be proven right.

Even worse, the second I declared war, one of our key first wave snarers, mdk, straight up vanished. As we all reported our snare successes, he was worryingly absent and not responding to pings.

Gothia: Where is mdk?

Kong: @mdk

Swamp Fox: ...

Gothia: @mdk

Kong: lol

Gothia: Fucking hell.

Rio: I'm here now.

Gothia: Oh we have Rio.

It was Rio to the rescue. He filled in for the missing snares we needed from mdk, and the group successfully took him below 25% - but he wasn't at 0. Mdk would end up on the reserve group instead, assuming he hadn't dropped off the face of the Earth.

Rush: Where tf did mdk go, wasn't this whole plan his idea? lol

Rio: Mdk taking the Cronel approach, sleeping.

Swamp Fox: We need to keep him at zero to keep this easily managed.

Gothia: Yeah, when mdk gets here he can take him to zero.

Rush: I'd rather he was at zero right now.

Rio: Mdk in fairness is probably off saving someone's life from cancer.

Rush: That can wait!

Rio: Priorities.

Mdk did show up after about 15 minutes and it was down to some crazy shit going down at his hospital. Someone better have been dying to risk our snare campaign!

I'll save you eight hours of excruciating detail and just say the snare campaign seemed borderline as hell initially but our recovery was decent and we had good coordination (ie not wasting snares) and some clutch successes from Cronel's superior SPA that put us into more comfortable territory as the campaign went on. End result: we successfully stripped Bingham of his Ares, and kept it off.

The result of this war forced the lyc to make a choice. He either took the hit he had lined up, and Gothia got insane acres from hitting his Monarch, or he sat and protected him, potentially missing the opportunity to hit the merfolk. We couldn't keep Bingham snared forever, and we were essentially babysitting the #8 merfolk, praying that at some point he realised the danger he was in and started taking his defence seriously.

So it was good news for Bingham, but it was still a very bad scenario for the lyc, who had to pass on an easy 75%. And anything that was bad news for the lyc was an avenue we were going to pursue. We had some idea of when Bingham probably went to sleep based on automations and fools gold, so we pushed the snare a few hours longer just to see if he'd give up and go to bed with no spells, but he did recast as soon as he had the wiz str. I think we pulled off a 10-hour snare in the end, and it could have gone a few hours longer before we were tapped out too. Meanwhile, Gothia found another hit:

2025-07-10 18:15:59 Victorious on the battlefield, Felicity Shagwell (#5) conquered 253 land from Fire-starting in the Hanging Gardens (Mongoose) (#2).

Rio laid out the two ways it could have gone:

That war/snare job meant instead of:
Lyc + 500
Gothia + 850
Sylvan + 400
DE + 400
Nomad + 400
Dwarf + 400

It is:
Lyc: 0
Gothia: +500
Sylvan: 0
DE: 0
Nomad: 0
Dwarf: 0

It hurt all of our competition but still helped Gothia, and Rio still had his suicide card if the lyc bottomfed. But that card had an imminent expiry date.

Our realm's attackers post-round credited this as the pivotal moment that the lyc lost the round. I don't know if that's really true or if it's a bit of back-patting. It could well have led to Gothia winning the round had he taken a different decision.

This chain of events meant that this war was going to turn out to be one of the strangest non-wars I've ever seen, more a game of nuance and edging than fireballs and big hits. From the outside - at least according to the peanut gallery in the main discord - it looked like absolutely nothing was happening. I don't blame them; if I was on the outside looking in, I doubt I'd be taking a wide enough view of the landscape to include the merfolk in #8 in the equation. There are very few players in this game that look at the bigger picture, and a lot of them were already in our realm.

Without the hit on the merfolk, it became likely that as soon as the lyc could escape Rio's suicidal op, which he would do at some point during the war, he was safe to drop guard and bottomfeed. And one of us would be the target.

Swamp Fox took himself off the menu by entering Elite Guard, which left me on the chopping block.

I was given a temporary reprieve (and potential out) when Taj cocked up and made a hit that would take him sailing into the lyc's range, then inexplicably didn't slam dp and just got slapped straight back out of range again.

2025-07-11 19:54:30 Werego Vespucci (Weaser) (#10) invaded Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp) (#2) and captured 275 land.

At this point if we'd cancelled the war, I might have dodged getting chomped entirely. Unfortunately it was a few minutes into the next tick when I had a brief discussion with Gothia and we decided to cancel, which turned out to be a huge mistake, because it meant he could still hit me with the war bonus on his return - and worse, we couldn't blop him back from dropping EG.

2025-07-12 07:58:20 Werego Vespucci (Weaser) (#10) invaded Dr Evil (Rush) (#5) and captured 202 land.

Gothia blamed himself. I blamed myself. Rio blamed both of us. Whoops.

I get hit so rarely that I'd forgotten how much it sucks. And this was the first time I'd ever been bottomfed. It absolutely tanked my econ and I spend the rest of the round trying to recover. I think I finished on only slightly higher pez than I had before the hit.

'''FINAL WEEKS - COMING UNDONE'''

Business Cat and Fenrir were now the likely winners if they could outplay Werego. Our realm was starting to arrive at the conclusion that we weren't going to win this without a hefty injection of luck. Business Cat and Fenrir had outmanouevred Gothia with a combination of skill and their own luck, and he found himself further and further behind, his op to low and his dp too high from dealing with Werego to make the hits he needed to catch up. Being further ahead, but at the wrong moments, and not able to capitalise on scenarios that could benefit him if the wind blew even slightly in his direction, seemed to have crippled him.

At some point, during one of our regular wars with #10, I said what many of us were thinking: that we weren't going to win this.

Syscero offered to full send on #10's Wonder if it helped. The guy was an absolute legend. But taking down their Wonder and probably getting hit in return was not an outcome I wanted to see.

Rush: "I don't think we're going to win this, so at this point it's more about making sure other realms don't get free land."

Mris: "We can still win this."

I admired mris' unflappable optimism. It's what we all needed to hear. Someone to pick up our spirits in the dark times. As long as Business Cat and Fenrir didn't get any more legs up on us, maybe we could still pull through after all and win this.

2025-07-13 10:23:38 Victorious on the battlefield, Goldmember (mris) (#5) conquered 191 land from Lizardfolk: Ore Mines now protect boats (#3).

2025-07-13 10:47:35 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (#9) invaded fellow dominion Goldmember (#5) and captured 278 land.

2025-07-13 10:50:34 Business Cat Rides Again (#11) invaded fellow dominion Goldmember (#5) and captured 251 land.

I cancelled my plans to attend mris' upcoming self-help seminar.

Business Cat later surprised Werego with a sneaky (and as far as I know, unprecedented) move that enabled an all-in hit against the runaway. He'd released a chunk of his own dp units and retrained them as spec op, and Werego's gang of super explorers had missed it. Internally a few realmies were quite agitated by Business Cat's constant profiteering off our efforts, and also held the sentiment that he seemed to lack the 'killer instinct' to take risks, having played things differently than they would have in a few situations. But this move certainly shocked and impressed all of his detractors.

There was some further drama from Sly who started accusing mdk of having access to his realm discord chat after mdk made a comment about Sly 'whining for weeks' about his round. This would be Sly's second public paranoid fit of pique in a couple of weeks and it left mdk totally nonplussed. At one point mdk was told there were discussions within the Rules Committee about locking him over his comment. He also mentioned that Sly seemed to be convinced I was a cheater and that I went out of my way to target him, and that I seemed to be 'living rent free' in his head - this was reflected in a comment he'd made publicly that he was planning to start smurfing (essentially creating a new account to evade proper realm assignment - as a regular solo player Sly would consistently complain about landing in ghettos), to which he then followed up by saying I would somehow find him anyway, implying again that I was a cheater. I'm not even sure why I was involved in the discussion at all since I had nothing to do with any of it.

I don't feel a great need to defend my character against these accusations though so I'll skip over my feelings of outrage etc and just say that I don't know where this sentiment comes from. Grievances aside, these are the facts: historically I don't think I've been involved in taking Sly down directly in any blops war; I always try my best to target who I perceive to be threats in competitive rounds. And if I'm rank chasing instead, I'm not targeting FAs. And even if I was fed his location, it still wouldn't change anything. I just don't target people for silly disagreements or past grudges I have with them in the discord. There are bloppers that will do this - Cronel has his famous List for example - but I can confidently say I have and will never target someone for being toxic, because that in itself would be toxic. And meeting toxicity with more toxicity would just be the very definition of hypocritical. A bit like someone on the Rules Committee suggesting they'll start using a smurf account, in violation of the rules they helped write.

Fortunately it seems rationality still prevailed on the RC in spite all these theatrics, and mdk did not get locked.

Back to the round. In the final week, it all fell apart for #10. I felt a little bad for their realm, which had performed well and which had, against the odds, kept a solo fast attacker that had randomed into their realm last-minute ahead of the scrum for so long. But they hadn't learned from a lesson we'd taught them early on: snare was their achilles' heel, as it often is for efficiency explorers. We had kept Bingham without Ares for 10+ hours earlier in the round while we babysat an efficiency explorer with a serious dp deficiency, and yet, Bingham didn't seem to have prioritised upping his spy ratio and instead tried to keep pace with the rest of his pack of super explorers - a challenge given we'd dented his econ in an earlier war. This decision to hoover up as many acres as possible instead of bolstering his spy defences left him vulnerable, and #9, who had already demonstrated a willingness to war, were able to take full advantage.

2025-07-19 22:53:00 Myths and Mistakes (#9) has declared WAR on Eat Sleep Explore Repeat (#10).

2025-07-20 00:01:17 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (King Jota) (#9) invaded Laura Bingham (B) (#10) and captured 510 land.

At this point, every efficiency explorer on Fenrir's menu should have been amping Ares and dumping spies, keeping it above 12h but at the very bare minimum above 9h. This was the final stretch. If Fenrir got another snare hit, it was ov-

2025-07-21 00:04:42 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (#9) invaded Leif Erikson (DavetheGoliath) (#10) and captured 524 land.

Oh no.

Welp. Congrats #9!

We finished off our round by indulging in the first and only frivolous rank-chasing war of the round:

2025-07-21 20:51:39 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Eat Sleep Explore Repeat (#10).

I lit up Bodhidharma (Chunk)'s frankly obscene castle and, taking advantage of Lightning Storm, was able to leapfrog mdk in the electrofancy ranks and steal the title from Moshing at Machu Pichu (Cosula), who was more preoccupied with stealing the top fireballer rank from Cronel, beating him by 19k at the finish line. It was the first time in the entire round our blopping numbers had looked good. It's slim pickings out there targeting all these top attacker threats you know! They have sweet fuck all peasants to roast to begin with and at best middling investments to crush. Hey let's add some sort of peasant value modifier based on prestige. One FA's peasant has got to be worth 10x an explorer's, right?

'''CONCLUSION'''

I hope I've been able to do my realm some justice with this roundfail, but I'm afraid I probably haven't. I haven't even covered every war, and there were a few doozies in there where we really screwed up, like our late-round war on #9 where we seem to have done basically no homework and had a "fuck it lets go" approach to snaring the target (Serving Thyestes' Family Dinner (mcgeeal)), who had a massive stock of plat that he just invested into walls and took our hit off the table. This round I have irl been probably the busiest I have ever been when trying to keep on top of my notes, so I'm certain I've missed a ton of key details. I didn't even talk about the time Swamp Fox joined EG by accident. Rio can't get in the damn thing and somehow Swamp Fox can't stay out of it? What is going on with guard applications? Or anything on a timer, really. Spare a thought for Oment who accidentally abandoned for a tick. At least we all know now we get one fake abandon per round if we choose to. Just say it wasn't for realsies and you didn't mean it.

That said, realm #5 and this round has been one of the most fun experiences I've had in OD. Every war was a blast, and there was real excitement in our realm making all these bold plays. From the concept of our pack, to the realm comp at realm assignment, to the ruthlessness and effectiveness of our wars, to the chaos and even our mistakes, it was a wild ride from start to finish. We did something truly unique this round with the whole realm on-board. And Rio did what I thought was impossible: he proved Loki's early concept of a 'combat blopper' Dark Elf (ref: [[Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery|roundfail round 41]] ) viable. Dangerous top attacker threat, then sui threat, finishing 8th in land and 7th in the Rush Rankings this round. He's just showing off at this point. If only he could figure out how guard works, he'd be unstoppable.

Rio had also proven what I had doubted: that blops are effective in their current state. Our realm was pretty unrepresentative of a normal realm, and we likely won't see anything like this again for a while, but we were a pretty terrifying realm if you found yourself in our crosshairs. Unless your name is mcgeeal. It's the first time in a very, very long time that it felt like our blops were capable of consistently altering the course of the round in our favour. In concept and (mostly) in execution, our realm was monstrous. And so, my opinion on blops as it currently stands, for whatever it's worth: I think wiz blops are sufficiently punishing early, but they do fall off quite hard in the mid to late game. I think spy blops are somewhat inaccessible without a lot of dedicated ops and blops players, although Rio's combat blopper playstyle showed you can also be pivotal in tipping the balance as an attacker, helping to make the difference between uncertain and successful in war snare and sink campaigns. And maybe spy blops are okay like that. If you have lots of ops and blops players in your pack, you have less attackers and are forced to rely more on chance at realm assignment, which is a balance in itself.

The Underground Society was amazing for us this round. It really was the jewel in our deadly blops realm crown. There was a scramble for it from several realms when realm #2 sent it back to #0 during one of our wars as a "fuck you", including from #11 who did significant damage to it. Ultimately it came down to a single cyclone who got it back. While we were discussing to coordinate a chain of hits to take it down (we had estimated that it was on much higher hp than it actually was), Cronel had woken up and thrown a single cyclone at it without reading the chat, rendering it once again the property of realm #5. Other realms should count themselves lucky they didn't snipe it - it would have brought all hell down on them. But we were also lucky they didn't too, because we didn't want to have to deal with being diverted into time-wasting and damaging Wonder-wars either.

Thanks to packmates Rio, Gothia, Cronel and Swamp Fox. Great dudes all. And thanks to mdk, kong, mris, phage, Music, Syscero and Gwyn for completing such a fantastic realm. Syscero in particular was a pleasant surprise for everyone - an old returning player from classic, new to OD, he picked all of the concepts up effortlessly and was exceptionally helpful with blops early on, before converting and having the usual first-time converter experience. It would have gone a lot better for him in his conversion if he hadn't been so helpful on the blops side to begin with!

And while I was glad I could pull Swamp Fox out of retirement, it was not without cost. It seems every time I play with that guy our realm causes seismic waves of antiblops sentiments and this round was no different. Almost every threatening realm felt our laser at one point or another. Of course, those that got truly atomised by it only have themselves to blame - greed is risk, and you can't get angry when your gamble doesn't pay off. Well, you shouldn't get angry, anyway. And hey, if you don't agree, I've got the number for a great tattoo artist I can give you. Tell 'em Rush sent ya and they'll hide all the lasers so you don't get triggered when you arrive.

Congrats to King Jota and realm #9 for the win. You guys made a great team, picked your wars wisely and coordinated well. And Jota's had a win due to him for a long time now. Glad to see he finally got it in the bag.

I was Dr Evil, and I finished on 6,296 acres, and 40th place for land. Quite a bad finishing position for me, but I did suffer a dirty bottomfeed in the late game.

To wrap up with a bit of fun, here's a handful of AI-generated images from realm #5 and of course the highlight of the round: https://imgur.com/a/muN2b6S

'''TL;DR'''

From the discord of realm #5, this round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/8aLZ3UD

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 45 Dr Evil

2025-07-28T13:47:49Z

Rush: Wizardry on overdrive

'''FOREWORD'''

I wasn't going to play this round. Honestly, it was supposed to just be one little draft round and then I was done. But here I am again, writing another roundfail. I sound like a relapsing addict. It's Rio's fault really, you get off the juice and he comes into your DMs pushing promises of war and suddenly you're right back in the rollercoaster car about to drop into another round.

Actually, it wasn't the promise of war that sold me. It was the promise of proving whether or not blops are actually still worth anything in this game. We are inching, with painfully small baby steps, towards fireball not being totally useless - GPC had just unveiled a very welcome and long overdue change to how mutual war affects rejuvenation, as well as a nerf to the overbearing mutual war op bonus, reducing it by 2% overall. Would it be enough to tip the balance? I wasn't sure, but at least we definitely weren't going down the route of adding friendly spells that bring roasted peasants instantly back to life, like Jcinnz had previously announced. Forget the crack cocaine of playing OpenDominion, I want what he's on.

Rio wanted to run two bloppers, two attackers, and we had a fifth slot available as a bit of a flexible position. An opper, or an attacker, or another blopper could fill it depending on who was available. We would play slow-ish, but deliberately exercise war to slow down fast attackers.

"Either it works, or it will prove how poor blops really are," said Rio.

I sighed, wrapping the cord around my forearm and pulling it tight with my teeth, readying the OD needle. Through gritted teeth, I said: "Alright, let's do it."

Last round I successfully dragged AgFx out of retirement, but this round I set my sights on Swamp Fox. I knew it was going to be difficult - of everyone that had disavowed themselves of the community after the Dark Times, Swamp Fox was the one that had most successfully disconnected from it. He simply went back to reality and lived his life in a non-tick-based format. No more worrying about making hits. No more worrying about dp. No more discord. No more hiding in car parks to guest on niche podcasts. Just an OD-free existence. So I knew I had my work cut out for me.

Rush: "Hey Swamp, can I tempt you back to OD?"

Swamp Fox: "You son of a bitch I'm in."

That went a little easier than I'd anticipated.

Rio drafted Gothia to be the second attacker, and we mulled over options for a fifth player. I initially asked Lud, who said the same thing he says every round - "oh I'm not playing next round, I want to be productive" - before he inevitably signs up and plays anyway. But you can't just point that out to the guy - that would be rude, right?

Lud: "Oh I'm definitely not playing next round. It is insane how productive I can be when I'm not playing OD."

Rush: "You say that every round! And then you end up getting drawn in like a moth to the flame."

Lud: "Yeah... but I'm trying to be strong."

So Lud was out. Spoiler alert, he signed up anyway and ended up being one of the biggest pains in our collective asses.

With the fifth position in our pack open, and Rio suggesting a third blopper might be the best fit anyway, I suggested Cronel.

Blopping used to be more viable than it is now. You had some economic support, they took that away. In those days, Cronel would consistently finish in the 4k acres zone. In recent rounds, he's consistently in the high 5ks and mid 6ks. So to say he's improved a bit as time has gone by is a bit of an understatement. He finally figured out that balance between ratios and economy and dp that lets a blopper walk the tightrope between safely pelting enemies with wet noodleballs and being ripped apart by sharks as soon as their name touches the Town Crier. Most dedicated bloppers never manage this. A lot of positions at the top end of the Rush Ranks are riddled with liability players that will feed your competition at some point, often at the worst possible moment. You've gotta be careful who you draft when you want bloppers, we're a real minefield. But I was confident Cronel had evolved beyond that stage. From caterpillar crawling along at 4k, to butterfly finishing on decent 6ks, Cronelus Monarcha was the blopper for the job. I asked if he was free and he said aye. We had our five.

'''WEEK 1 - MULTIVERSE DREAM TEAM?'''

At realm assignment we landed with mris, mdk, Kongb, Phage, MusicDJ2555, Gwyn, Syscero - and oh yay, Elf Woods. Mris, mdk and Kongb did make for a potentially broken realm coupled with Gothia and Rio, with the kind of blops and ops support Cronel, Swamp Fox and myself could provide. It's usually what you'd describe as a "lottery win realm". I don't know how it happened - we know realm assignment was going haywire this round, with the Emperor creating infinite realms, and at one point the round countdown timer was even going backwards. And this was the realm composition that fett collapsed our infinite quantum superposition into when he intervened to kill the loop. It all felt out of place, like things weren't meant to be like this. I kept half expecting to find out that this version of mris was from a parallel universe where preying mantises were the dominant species. But no, turns out, it was our mris.

Meanwhile, over in realm #7, Dave was doing his John Travolta gif impression wondering where all his active realmies were at. They're all in our realm Dave.

In contrast to last round where the theme directive was "uhh anime", this round it was a bit more prescriptive: pick a character from the Austin Powers universe. Why? Because it's giffable. Job done. Naturally I grabbed Dr Evil before Cronel could. Muahahaha. Muahahaha. Muahahaha! We got a lot of gif mileage out of our theme.

I struggled a bit at race selection because Gothia wanted to go Sylvan, and with Cronel and Swamp Fox already taking Undead and Vampire respectively, there just wasn't a good wiz blops race to choose. I considered Icekin for a bit: despite not being a naturally blops friendly race I usually do quite well with them, hitting 7k last time I played one. But Rio and mdk both questioned this choice, and mdk suggested Demon instead. I hadn't played Demon before, but by all accounts from attackers and bloppers that have played it alike, it wasn't great. Mdk said it had a cheap 6pt defence unit for 10% swamps so what was there to think about as a blopper? Fuck it, I figured I might as well give them a shot and see what all the griping was about. Looking at the race, that swamps requirement for cheap elite dp was literally the only perk in my favour, and the rest was attacker-oriented trash: a racial spell I couldn't use, an op bonus and a spec dp unit perk I probably wouldn't see much use from. Demon do also have Miasma, a war-only spell, but I probably wouldn't find a use for it in our heavy wiz race realm. It's an okay-ish-maybe counterblops spell - but the best offence, as the saying goes, is a fuckload of fireballs. I probably wasn't going to be wasting wiz str on Miasma. In fact, by the end of the round, I'd have cast it precisely zero times. I forgot it even existed. Performance-wise, Demon seemed to grow somewhat slower than Sylvan, and was otherwise flavourless to play. If boring was a race, Demon is it.

Overall, the realm strategy was to play slow and war often. So the majority of our attackers went for wiz races and a mid or slow speed attack style. With my blopper hat on, if I looked at our realm, it would be a hard pass for war. Four dark elves, three sylvans, two icekins and a mix of vampires, demons and undead and nothing else. The plan was to war as soon as blops went live and start limiting FA realms.

We got off to a rocky start. In the first two days, our all-star realm had some rookie moments. Gothia sent out knowingly unsafe on a bot and got hit by an Orc:

2025-06-08 06:59:51 Fun Dip and Cherry Coke (SugarJon) (#7) invaded Felicity Shagwell (Gothia) (#5) and captured 45 land.

In fairness to Gothia, Fun Dip had better targets. It later transpired that Fun Dip just basically had no ops support to find them.

Meanwhile, sim issues plagued Rio and mdk. Rio discovered his sim, given to him by mris, was short on docks and was limiting his army, while mdk's sim had so many issues with it that he hadn't spotted (such as razing temples) that it completely gimped him as an attacker, and he was forced to deconvert on day three of the round. To his credit, instead of losing interest, he became an invaluable asset on the ops and blops side instead. Switched-on attackers know all their own weaknesses and can predict when they're coming down the pipeline for others, and intuitively know when's best to strike thinking about the longer term. And mdk really shone in that role.

Music, a school kid, did not have the activity level needed to defend his dominion and also seemed quite resilient to discord notifications, so would constantly miss advice that would help him stay safe. I got the impression that in addition to a big window of inactivty while asleep, his school must have had some sort of no smartphone policy, meaning that for ~16 hours a day this guy was not logging in. He also didn't seem to use automations. So he unavoidably became a prime feeder for spirits because he didn't have consistent dp coming in, but had tons of drafts from his sporadic activity, protecting him against regular attackers while assassination was disabled. It was unfortunate, but he would later become pretty clutch in some borderline blops scenarios where we needed someone on insane spies to get us over the line, so he went from being a liability to being invaluable as the round progressed.

And, of course, Elf Woods bounced his first hit. Didn't even bother updating ops and just yolo'd.

As we approached day 4, which as we all know is when the round actually begins, it became pretty clear that #3's halfling, Bunk beds: +3 barracks housing (Rury), was going to be the one to run. He was significantly ahead of the scrum. It was difficult to get blops ready while he was breathing down everyone's necks, modded up and spamming specs while we were bringing in 10% towers and defenceless wizards, and we could barely grow because we needed to focus so much dp. Thank god for the rejuv changes making mutual more of a question mark. There were more than a few hairy moments where some of us were very borderline on dp - but as is always the case in OD, there's always someone fatter and less defended out there than me, even with the blops dp / econ sacrifice. Someone gets a hot sim, flies ahead, doesn't pay enough attention, gets smashed. The meat shields above us served us well to get us into position to take action. The same hour blops went live, we declared war.

2025-06-10 18:30:03 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on War: Now available at a random time on day 3 (#3).

Bunk beds' blops preparation was lacklustre but it wasn't nothing. He had some Wizard Guilds, just not enough to dissuade us, and had brought in wizards, but again, not enough. It was weird; he'd semi-committed but still left himself open. It seemed indecisive. Wizard blops are very weak compared to their former iterations, perhaps he figured it wasn't worth investing in defences - but then why go half-way?

We assassinated every last wizard we could and set him on fire. Then we did the same to their lyc, Sprite -0.5 DP (Poige). Poige would spend the rest of the round spitting feathers about our realm and blaming us for ruining the round. Dwarf Miner: -5r (Oment) had plenty of time to make an effort to bring in defences before our second wave assault started, but elected not to, so we roasted him too. We also considered burning Spirit: Spectre +1 DP (Vinn) for a bit, who after seeing the blops damage we were doling out to his team mates did eventually build some WGs - but too late if we decided to go after him. There was some debate about it.

Gothia wanted us to hit him before his WGs came in and extend the war a bit until rejuv kicked in. He suspected because of the nomad's obssessively precise training figures (all 5s and 10s) that it was probably Vinn. Mdk on the other hand, wanted to move on and address other emergent threats.

Gothia: "Can we please roast him before we move on? Vinn is very skilled and he will win a round soon, let's make sure it's not this one."

Rush: "We'll need to continue the war if we burn the nomad. It's significant resources from us just to limit him a relatively small amount."

Mdk: "We can always come back for Vinn later. I'm more worried about #1's three gnomes and their human, #2's big nomad and #4's human converter."

The Underground Society had also dropped again, which is an excellent Wonder for bloppers but also fantastic for attackers, acting like a quasi-Armada wonder as well as a 24/7 Fool's Gold. If we had that wonder, Rio wouldn't have to wake up in the middle of the night suffering from panic attacks over lamb stealing his 1-hour's worth of platinum production for as long as we held it. I wanted us to move on from #3 and focus on grabbing it as soon as possible. And so maybe-Vinn was spared the rod.

We cancelled the war but we still had to keep an eye on the halfer's op with the lingering war bonus. Despite limiting him he was still clearly ahead - he had the land lead. Towards the end of the war Cronel was potentially hittable if they assassed his drafts. He works night shift so I'd expected him to be awake, but he'd fallen asleep at work instead. He needed to drop dp specs to be safe but we couldn't reach him for over two hours, by which point he was firmly in the danger zone. Fortunately, #3 seemingly did not check beyond a cursory look at a few of us about 10h before the end of the war bonus. Instead they went for a spirit in #8 instead.

2025-06-13 07:16:25 Bunk beds: +3 barracks housing (Rury) (#3) invaded Church Burners (Omnialloy) (#8) and captured 71 land.

Wonder take-downs are usually a stress point in the round, at least for me. This round, though, it actually wasn't too bad. Once the Americans finally woke up after their Friday morning lie-in, we were able to take it down pretty quickly.

2025-06-13 11:14:52 The Underground Society has been destroyed and rebuilt by Gentlemen, welcome to my underground lair... (#5).

Even changed the realm name for maximum cosplay. That's just how organised we were.

With the Society secured (for my second round in a row), bolstering both our bloppers and our attackers, we were able to turn our attention back to the next new runaway threat: the lyc in #10, Werego Vespucci (Weaser). This one was a little different to the halfer - he'd obviously seen what we'd done to his rival and decided he didn't want to meet the same chargrilled fate. He wasn't the only one, we detected several other realms bringing in blops defences after we fired the laser (though as would later become obvious, plenty others would still try to fly light, and would rightly suffer for it). But Werego had brought in a staggering nearly 50 WGs. When you consider the meta to fob bloppers off was 30, he clearly wasn't taking any chances. I went through historical barracks spies and spotted that he had also been bringing in Archmages, which could mean his blops defences were both high and unstabbable. I ran the numbers on his docks and he wasn't sinkable either, and with his wiz defences, the likely scenario was we could kill maybe 3k peasants.

Rio had noticed that Werego was curiously behind schedule in joining the Royal Guard, which meant he was also going to be slower than others to get into the Elite Guard - which would take him out of range of most of us bloppers except for Swamp Fox, who would have to become a One Man Army and wage most of the blops war solo, flinging maintenance fireballs after the rest of us volleyed him down to base. But it gave us the window of opportunity we needed to recharge just enough after knocking down the Society to go and fling fireballs at a single target, if we wanted to go for it.

There was some debate in realm chat as to whether or not the proposed war with #10 was even worth it.

Gothia: If we only fry 3k pez for 18 hours, I'm not really sure it's in our interest to war the lyc at the moment.

Rio: We've gotta slow a potential runaway, regardless. Otherwise he pulls away with a bunch of large explorers to help him target hunt.

Gothia: I agree that he needs to be stopped, but your statement assumes we're the only ones capable of doing it.

Rio: We're the only ones willing even if others are capable. We're positioned to blop. Others will have to do their part in pushing op, which we can't do right now.

Syscero: We needed another realm to step up while we dealt with bunk.

Rush: This would be a hard pass from me usually. 3k pez is not worth the resources and risk. And it's our boy Swamp Fox that'll be in the danger zone all war, the rest of us will fall out of range pretty swiftly.

But we all knew Rio was right. And it's not like we had better targets, or that it was even a nuanced situation. And if Swamp Fox could manage the op bonus, it was low risk to us even if the damage was also trivial. And so we warmed up the laser.

2025-06-13 18:59:09 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Together we can sea the world (#10).

I had a whole bit here about Swamp Fox waging a one-man blops war against the top threat, our canary in the coal mine, but then I deleted about two hours worth of this roundfail by accidentally overwriting the file so you'll just have to use your imaginations. Sorry Swamp, your moment in the sun was eaten by Microsoft.

Anyway, depending on the strength of your imagination, that was either an incredible action sequence, with one puny little fire mage against a giant angry wolf, or... maybe like two stick figures, with one throwing noodles at the other? Or maybe you're one of those people that literally cannot picture things in your mind, and if that's the case, I'm not really sure you're getting anything out of this paragraph, so perhaps it's best we move on.

With the #10 lyc lightly singed and slinking off into the Elite Guard, we turned our attention to a second wave target... except we didn't really have one. None of the attackers in our realm seemed to have an opinion on who we should roast, which meant they weren't worried about any of the others in #10. The new guy, Syscero, wanted to burn their Monarch, Laura Bingham (B). And so Laura Bingham was burned.

Let's just quickly recap this first week in three lines to make a point here:

2025-06-10 18:30:03 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on War: Now available at a random time on day 3 (#3).

2025-06-13 11:14:52 The Underground Society has been destroyed and rebuilt by Gentlemen, welcome to my underground lair... (#5).

2025-06-13 18:59:09 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Together we can sea the world (#10).

I've seen a lot of impressive blops feats in my time, but coming out of a war against top op, knocking down a Wonder and then starting another war with the next top op, in the span of just 48 hours, is up there. Our realm had a ruthless kind of organisation to it and was pursuing its goals aggressively - slowing top ops, bolstering our bloppers and attackers, and trying to keep the environment conducive to an eventual realm win. It wasn't an easy balance: the early war with #3 had damaged the econs of us bloppers, having to bring in massive towers and spywiz units instead of dp, while staying ahead of modded-up, specced-up and probably coked-up fast attackers. It's tantamount to fireballing yourself with how much it hurts. Towards the end of the war with #10, mris remarked with shock at how tiny we were, and admonished us for not focusing our econs. Like, hello?

Mris was right about one thing though, we did need to seriously pivot back towards efficiency. Only Swamp Fox was able to get a decent econ going, able to play a bit faster as Vampire, so he became our nominated canary in the coalmine and was tasked with going pure efficient to try and stay in range. I was trailing him by about 100 acres as Demon, which I was beginning to think of as essentially a much worse version of Sylvan for blops, while Cronel and Syscero were trailing me by about the same amount as Undead and Icekin respectively, and mdk even further behind. We were almost all built for slow, but in all the early chaos, we were growing so slowly even Wurst's famous crack team of snails from yester-year would look on and blush.

Whenever I land with a bunch of veteran attackers, as I had this round, I like to ask them for their read of the round at the one week mark. It's always interesting to see how they expect things develop and compare it end round with how the round plays out. Unfortunately, this round none of the attackers seemed willing to make any educated guesses. I can only assume they were paralysed with fear of having their potentially inaccurate predictions recorded in this roundfail, forever showing them up as charlatans and pretenders. Or they're just lazy.

So to make up for the fact that I've got nothing to share, here's a video that, I think, effectively captures the essence of our realm and its influence on the round at this point. And, let's be honest, it is way more educational than anything that bunch of layabouts was ever gonna come up with:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T1swuHPA1OU

Right?

'''WEEK 2 - GOTHIA REVENGE ARC'''

Remember that orc that hit Gothia on day one? Well, Gothia hadn't forgotten. Fun Dip (SugarJon) in #7 had smashed him on day one when he'd made a risky send and, although taking hits earlier on seem to be easier to recover from, it was still a setback for Gothia.

Now that the runaways had all sauntered off out of range of our blops, we had to gear shift and start looking around at the slow threats that might cause problems for us later. Unfortunately for Fun Dip, he was assessed to be one of them - and had the dubious honour of being the only person to negatively impact our realm so far, which just increased his Most Wanted rating.

Mris did the scouting for this war, and had narrowed it down to three possible realms to go after.

Mris: Realm #2 has an obviously strong nomad but also no op in their realm for us to worry about, and an orc that we can also hit. Realm #8 is top op for many of us so doesn't make sense for us to go after them while we're all making an economic push. Realm #7 has the strongest orc and strongest human. Again no op in their realm for us to worry about.

Rio: I like #7 as a target. Good options, no immediate threats - and we get revenge for their orc hit on Gothia.

Kong agreed with a humblebrag:

Kong: The orc is a bit concerning. He has the same numbers as I did last round even though I bounced a hit oop.

Gothia, unsurprisingly, was in favour of the war too:

Gothia: I like warring #7.

So. We were warring #7.

2025-06-16 21:31:00 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on LFO: Liza Flying Over 🌈 (#7).

The plan was to fireball and sink the orc, but we didn't have enough bloppers around immediately at war dec to do quite enough sink damage and the guy had hundreds and hundreds of spare boats just lying around. We needed one more blopper to sink him but after pinging Gwyn and Music and a bunch of others, we just could not get it over the line and the orc was able to chortle his way to a bot hit.

2025-06-16 22:00:18 Fun Dip and Cherry Coke (#7) invaded Sinking without thinking (#0) and captured 58 land.

Gothia was not impressed. We were three wars in and this had been our first fail, but since the orc was still getting lit up, it wasn't all bad.

We burned the orc and probably someone else as well, I forget who. I spent two hours writing about the tail-end of week 1 and pretty much all of week 2 and then overwrote my notes so I'm mostly working from memory here in week 3 here.

[Post-round edit: the second target was Grapes. Sorry Grapes! That's what happens when you turn your back on the path of chaos I guess...]

Oh, I almost forgot until Cronel randomly reminded me - we also warred #11 and roasted the goblin Delta Forks (Disco), their gnome McRangers (Crazy Guy) and dwarf Don't live in someone else's Shadow (Empoy). After the war, it was pointed out that we almost helped feed their goblin to the lyc, which instigated some mixed reactions from our attackers in realm. Some were all "not our problem", others were "fuck 'em, they need to manage their doms better", while very few (okay just one) conceded that it was something we should be more mindful of in future wars. In the end, though, it was the Demon, Meal Team 6 (Slice) who we hadn't even touched that ended up feeding Werego when he carelessly explored into range massively underdefended.

2025-06-21 13:59:22 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded Meal Team 6 (#11) and captured 113 land.

And so Swamp Fox sighed and clicked explore.

Unfortunately the lyc then found another huge hit pretty much immediately. Another explorer slacking on his Ares casts.

2025-06-22 20:00:14 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded 🧄Garlic-Tunneler Goulash🍲 (Jcinnz) (#12) and captured 169 land.

And so Swamp Fox sighed and clicked explore. He'd be doing that a lot this round.

'''WEEK 3 - SCHRODINGER'S CRONEL'''

We missed the perfect opportunity to mess with #1 because Cronel was sleeping again.

It had become an emergent theme this round that when we needed blops, someone key - usually Cronel - was asleep and limiting what we could do. We were a mix of Euros and Americans, so our timezones were a big factor to plan around. Cronel had said he operated on EU time, since he worked night shift, but in practice that turned out not to be the case. Middle of the day blops needed? Oh it's a Thursday, Cronel sleeps all day on Thursdays. Saturday night blops needed? Oh that's Cronel's usual sleeping hours. Monday morning blops needed? Cronel is technically at work - but is also ASLEEP AT WORK. I shit you not, I'm not even making this up for a bit, he was just asleep at work. He was Schrodinger's Comatose Cat. Open the lid of his box and it was only in that moment the universe would decide whether he was awake or asleep. And mostly it was the latter. There was no pinging him back to the waking world, you just had to wait for him to rise from his coffin on his own time - which could be anywhere from three to eighteen hours later. It was like he'd studied under Jmerc's tutelage last round and decided that being randomly AWOL when he was needed most would only add to his reputation for chaos.

It wasn't all Cronel of course. Swamp Fox was caught red-handed sleeping in one day instead of blopping, and then spluttered that he was in fact fixing a sink first thing in the morning and his fingers were too covered in plumber's putty to use his phone. Naturally nobody believed him.

Gothia was becoming increasingly agitated as the hours ticked by and we still didn't have the numbers to effectively sink Michael Jordan (zooj) in #1, who looked in a very strong position. He had plenty of op to make a hit and it was only a matter of time before he sent, and we needed seven people online at the same time to ensure we could sink him enough to limit him. We had five, once Swamp Fox had washed his hands. We could probably do it with six. It was prime EU hours, so of course Cronel was asleep. Our backup American bloppers, Phage and Music, were also asleep. Mris, the caretaker of these two young ODers, resolutely refused to wake them up early to blop. What sort of American values does that instill, I wonder, if you aren't teaching your kids to enjoy the smell of war in the morning?

2025-06-23 12:58:28 Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (zooj) (#1) invaded ...I sHaLl bE BaCk... (#0) and captured 107 land.

Gothia was not impressed.

This was our second 'war fail' and this time, we had fumbled so hard we hadn't even managed to declare war. And for the next 24 painful hours, we would wait for him to build his land (to ensure he didn't bring in docks), then try to organise enough people online again to sink and fireball him, and once again fail to do so. The plan for war was firmly in the EU dead zone, between 2am and 6am, so I was definitely asleep. Cronel, who was always asleep, was also asleep. Swamp Fox was our General, and the only other person who could declare besides me, so of course he went to bed early, tuckered out from fixing sinks. And so war was off the cards until I woke up the next day. When I woke up, I was glad I had spent my wiz str the previous evening flooding merfolk and lizzies.

It had taken us a whole day to get our acts together and even then, it was still borderline whether we could pull it off or not.

2025-06-24 11:20:11 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Elon Musk Playing Starship Simulator (#1).

[Post-round edit: That's right. We went to war on zooj. I never thought I'd see the day!]

It was still amazing to us that after the blops capability we'd demonstrated so far, and our ruthless focus on taking down any competitors to our realm, that so many dominions were caught with their pants around their ankles, playing greedy like there wasn't this pack of scorpions out there waiting to sting you to death if you started to look intimidating. Once we sunk MJ, we kept him sunk, and watched as he did virtually nothing except build docks from a daily bonus to protect himself. It wasn't enough. He was going to be stuck for several days while his boats regenerated. I have a rare tip for attackers here: if you get sunk, build lots of docks. It's always your better option than doing nothing, or trying to rely on DBs. I suspect zooj didn't have the experience dealing with blops to know what to do in this situation. Maybe he'll know for next rounds. Our veteran attackers picked him out as a threat so he'll likely have to deal with them again in future.

Someone who wasn't Michael Jordan in realm #1, but was in realm #1, sent me a DM on the off-chance I was in #5 and one of the bloppers currently wreaking havoc on their realmie to plead for mercy, and suggested that all we were doing was griefing that player. I'm not gonna say who it was because I do have some sympathy for their intentions, which weren't to maliciously influence the game, but this is what would later lead to accusations of me cheating by Sly on the Rules Committee. I floated the sentiments to the realm. Rio seemed a bit skittish about the griefing accusation, while mdk was more hardline that it was a war game and sometimes your risks don't play out.

Rio: In fairness, we can move on. But he has also done the bare minimal effort to help himself.

mdk: These blops are nothing compared to what they used to be... The guy can seriously rezone smithies to docks if he wants to, but if he refuses that's on him. And fireballs are 20-24 hours, and half your peasants are protected for free.

Cronel: He finally has docks coming in.

mdk: Only his DBs. They have been targeted once when they are looking strong.

Gothia: The thing is, he did nothing to prevent it. If he did rezone to docks and invested in harbour and trained spies, then I would understand.

mdk: Calculated risk. But then you can't cry about it when you eat blops because of it.

Gothia: Exactly.

Rio: Players complaining usually can't see past their own perspective. "I want them to do X as it benefits them and me. What?? They did Y and that hurts me and not sure it helps them right now!" - I say it in pretty much every win I've had. Sometimes I'll do something that hurts me a little if it hurts someone else a lot. As long as it doesn't benefit your main threat, if it helps someone else, it's usually okay.

Gothia: Amen brother.

Rio: A lot of these wars have been to position our sylvans ahead of the people we're taking down. I don't see the lyc as the main competition for the win at this point: it is humans, sylvans, dwarves and gnomes.

Rush: War cancel is three ticks away, I take it we are not extending?

Gothia: Yeah we should cancel once their big gnome gets rejuv.

Rush: I think his rejuv kicks in at the same time war cancel is available.

Gothia: Perfect timing.

'Griefing' is a term that has only really come to the fore of our community in relatively recent rounds and is bandied about far to leisurely in my opinion. It's used as a cudgel to condemn blops by people who either don't like blops, or who are upset that they are being used effectively against them in the moment. Or both. There's a lot of crossover in those two groups. It is not griefing to target a threat and neutralise them. It is not griefing to target a greedy player and punish them for it. It is not griefing to use the tightly controlled blackop mechanics available to you in a war game to hurt players outside of your realm. Tattoo these three sentences on the inside of your eyelids please.

Regardless, it was time to move on.

2025-06-26 11:33:47 I always cry at endings… even evil ones. (#5) has CANCELED war against Basil Exposition Playing Cooking Simulator (#1).

2025-06-26 11:34:24 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on The Young and Free (#2).

Mdk had been keeping tabs on the #2 nomad, Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp), and had expected him to hit at the end of the previous tick (while we were still locked into war). He was in the middle of "9hr-ing", a playstyle for certain races whose troops get home in 9 hours instead of 12, and crucially before their first hit's land arrives, meaning they can hit twice on the same land. But Taj had not sent at the end of the tick when cancel became available to us. We had planned to war immediately war #2 anyway and fireball the nomad, but when he didn't send, sinking him in the middle of a 9hr became the new strategy.

Kong: That's killer for a nomad. After pushing 5% mods for a hit.

Gothia: He will be able to send quite fast again if he just builds docks.

We sank him. The timing could not have been more perfect from our perspective - and of course, it was very unfortunate timing for him. Unlike the previous realm, however, his reaction was to immediately bring in lots of docks, limiting the long term harm immediately. This guy's been sunk before, methinks.

We weren't done yet though. This war wasn't just about bloppers sinking some attacker. It was time for some real showboating.

With the war bonus, and without Ares, #2's court magister, the undead Breakdancing at the Great Wall (Karpatheo) with "the gifted" title, was hittable by Rio. And not just hittable, triple chainable by Gothia and mris. And not just triple chainable, potentially quad chainable by Kong if the stars aligned and somehow we managed to keep Ares off for six ticks. That last one was unlikely, and required Music with his insane 1.3 spy ratio to wake up and keep him snared, and also for the entire playerbase to ignore the target for several hours. But hey, you never know. Shoot for the stars.

With some coordination and some sleep-rousing the Americans, we got enough of a motley crew together to pull off the snare when Breakdancing was at 3 hours left to recast.

2025-06-27 13:09:59 Victorious on the battlefield, Nigel Powers (#5) conquered 165 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).

2025-06-27 13:10:06 Victorious on the battlefield, Felicity Shagwell (#5) conquered 148 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).

2025-06-27 13:11:04 Victorious on the battlefield, Goldmember (#5) conquered 140 land from Breakdancing at the Great Wall (#2).

Gothia, at last, was impressed.

Swamp Fox: This will be a great part to Rush’s story. Less than 24 hours from "we should look for war hits" to "let’s snare and triple tap this guy" 🤣

Shortly after, our mercy blops target from #1 managed to cobble enough boats together to make a hit and got instantly gobbled up for it.

2025-06-27 13:41:47 Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (zooj) (#1) invaded Land Of The Tainted (#0) and captured 91 land.

2025-06-27 13:59:55 Business Cat Rides Again (Lud) (#11) invaded Michael Jordan playing G.O.A.T simulator (#1) and captured 126 land.

Rio: His boats situation meant he needed to leave more dp home. He just went mad on op after our blops. Annoying that we worked for a hit and 11 sylvan just got one for free.

Business Cat in #11 was a constant source of consternation in our realm. Everything we did seemed to also benefit him indirectly, and when it couldn't, he found another way to keep the advantage. And he'd taken precautions againsts us, running high docks and making himself virtually unassailable by our laser.

But he wasnt the only regular beneficiary. Fenrir (King Jota) in #9 was also often a net benefactor from our efforts, but he was afforded more respect given their realm's more pro-active approach to war.

'''WEEK 4 - POUNDING ALOTTA FAGINA'''

Quite the spectacular week, but a terrible start for us. Kong, our hotshot top attacker who was ahead of everyone else in the realm and our best chance for the win, sent out on a hit that would ultimately cost him his shot at the round.

2025-06-29 18:18:26 Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) invaded Moshing at Machu Picchu (Cosula) (#2) and captured 123 land.

The realm hadn't checked the sleepy nomad in #2 that we'd sank in the middle of his 9h and, well, it soon became apparent that this was a massive oversight.

2025-06-29 18:29:29 Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp) (#2) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 207 land.

2025-06-29 18:45:28 Purple Wolf Tail And Raging Fiery Hobpot (playt0i) (#12) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 169 land.

2025-06-29 18:48:55 Delta Forks (Disco) (#11) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 153 land.

2025-06-29 18:59:59 Business Cat Rides Again (Lud) (#11) invaded Alotta Fagina (Kong) (#5) and captured 149 land.

Kong was absolutely demolished in 30 minutes flat. Everyone was aghast. I don't know how you send out without checking the top threats aren't ready to stomp you, but that's what happened here. Mdk blamed himself harshly for not playing lookout and fell on his sword. It was all very dramatic. Kong, on the other hand, seemed quite relaxed about the whole thing. And our pack welcomed our fallen realmie onto Team Blops.

Ops in general, despite the massive amount of experience and activity in our realm, were not our strongest suit. I was constantly flying by the seat of my pants with no spywiz strength to run checks and our attackers were mostly pretty comfy updating people once every 1-2 days(!) while they knew they were safe from all-ins sitting at home. I couldn't even use Swamp - who was the only explorer ahead of me - as a meat shield because he was constantly prepping to defend Werego, which meant he generally carried about 25% more dp than I did. I was 150a behind him and had 4-7 threats to second-guess. I tethered my dp to another Demon who was a few% bigger than me and just hoped he was paying attention. He had an annoyingly high spy ratio so it was often more costly than I liked just to check up on him.

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about our disastrous start to the week. Alotta Fagina wasn't the only one of us to get royally fucked.

You see, veteran player and four-time roundwinner Rio, did not understand how guard works and kept resetting his application to the Elite Guard. Just four hours before he was due to join the EG, he took a clear sight on someone marginally outside of his range, which reset his application. It wasn't long before an eagle-eyed #10 took notice.

Two hours after he would've been in EG were it not for that op:

2025-06-29 14:56:58 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded fellow dominion Nigel Powers (Rio) (#5) and captured 134 land.

Rio then got carried away with revenge blops and reset his application a second time. This one's not his fault though, it was a bug. Not that it mattered much though, because he then reset his application a third time by taking ANOTHER op on someone out of range. And so Werego came round for seconds.

2025-06-30 18:49:46 Werego Vespucci (#10) invaded fellow dominion Nigel Powers (#5) and captured 134 land.

Of course I am being a bit glib here - it's obviously very easy to just forget the weird red tape of the guard application process and take an op. There really should be an "are you sure?" prompt that gets in the way, or something that forces you to cancel your application before you just get hard reset like that. Or just do away with info ops resetting your guard application entirely, what's that all about anyway?

That said, he did make the exact same mistake twice in 24 hours. We're into meme territory. I updated the realm message:

"Message of the Day: Day 25 of asking, is Rio in elite guard yet?"

It made a change from every other update of asking, "is Swamp Fox in range yet?"

Naturally Rio brought out his "in every round I've won I've been hit at least once" line to remind everyone that he wins lots of rounds, and mainline some copium that this wasn't a major setback. Still, if anyone could claw back an advantage, he could.

I recorded a podcast on the round with AgFx, Volv and Lud, and we discussed some of the current events. Until Kong's insta-death and Rio's guard shenanigans I had been planning to loc-post myself so I could go into more detail about #5's behaviour, but I decided I didn't really want to have to explain all those misplays that had just happened so I decided against it. These guys were clearly just trying to embarrass me before the pod record.

During the pod, I also made brief mention of the fact that I'd received a DM asking us to stop "griefing" during our earlier war with #1. Sly, who was on the rules committee, caught wind of this, and started giving me shit in DMs for not reporting it. Which was fair enough, that's his role. It's just that he couldn't seem to stop his obvious dislike of me from getting in the way of some basic fact finding. And so after reading his messages, dripping with his trademark condescension, I told him to get lost.

Sly would grow increasingly bitter and erratic as the round developed, and it would not be the last time #5 heard from him in his role as attack dog of the Rules Committee.

'''WEEK 5 - COLLUSION!'''

We had been intending to war #9 and sink Fenrir, so Rio could push suicidal op and nail the #11 sylvan once the lyc sent. Sinking the DE meant Rio could probably get away with it.

Unfortunately, this incredible plan all fell apart with one simple question.

Rush: DE is sinkable?

Mdk: Hmm, he has a lot of docks.

Rush: Is that a no? lol

Rio: Hmm, probably not.

Oh well, there goes that plan.

Rio instead suggested we snare an explorer in #10 instead, and while we didn't have a concrete plan, we knew we were going down the spy blops route in the near future, so we aimed to get our ratios up. Mdk and I pushed to 1.0, while the ever-scrimping Swamp Fox plumped for a 0.7. Cronel, of course, already had more than a 1.0, but pushed it up to a 1.2 anyway just to flex on the rest of us.

At some point Gothia noticed a scav drop on the lyc, which was bad news. It meant he had a target. We started scouting around, and confirmed our suspicions.

Screaming Mimis (Craghack) (#8), had inexplicably entered range underdefended. Realm #8 had others bigger than him able to get ops on the lyc, so they must have known his op, so this had to be a case of blindly exploring without paying attention. Screaming Mimis put himself on the lyc's radar relying on 6.3k draftees for defence - which would just be assassinated by the lyc's team of elite explorers. Even worse, Screaming Mimis, having entered range, also did not slam defence. The guy seemed to be completely oblivious to the danger he was in. It became imperative that we had to intervene, and on Mimis' schedule.

We identified Laura Bingham (B) as the best snare target - high land, lowest dp of all the super explorers, and the worst estimated spy ratio - somewhere between 0.3 and 0.6 depending on whether they were spies or assassins. A 1.0+ should in theory stomp him.

There were two problems: due to the timing of the lyc's planned hit, we had to snare Bingham at Ares 8, which is a very long snare campaign and the mechanics of the game push back hard to try and prevent long snares, giving the subject resilience which massively boosts wizard strength recovery over time.

The second problem was RNG. We needed a 70-80% estimated success rate to pull this off. It needed every single player in range to contribute, even our attackers on - and lets phrase this generously - suboptimal ratios. We couldn't waste any snares, so we needed to know when to stop before we saw 0. And we needed to wait and not snare between ticks to let resilience drop a little to improve our success chances.

Gothia calculated that a hit on Bingham would be 418+418 acres if the lyc went for the merf anyway, which was frankly obscene.

Swamp Fox was not impressed with this plan. He gave it a zero percent chance to succeed, saying Bingham would be getting 10%+ wizard strength recovery per tick, and that we didn't have the numbers or the ratios to pull this off. He was in an unusually downbeat mood considering we were about to war. It perhaps explained his disinterest in pushing his ratios to 1.0, and instead he elected to focus on acres. He was also constantly hovering on the cusp of entering Elite Guard to avoid getting bottomfed, and us needing him to participate in a war snare campaign had the dual effect of making him the preferred option for a lyc snack while also resetting his guard application to its maximum duration.

I hadn't done the maths - we had mdk and Kong, both with bigger brains than me, for that stuff - but I wasn't as pessimistic about our chances. I knew long snare campaigns were hard but I also knew they weren't impossible with broken realms. And our realm fit the definition of broken. If anyone could pull it off, it was us.

So it was time to brush the dust off the old laser.

2025-07-09 14:06:08 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on ---> https://youtu.be/jVSZdsAq4Bo?si=vbHsuSwN6L8APWtn (#10).

The plan was for a group of us on high SPA to snare and then stop at 8 successes each. Then disband, assuming he had any spies to get rid of. Then a secondary group with lower SPA to take over.

You might think disbanding first would make more sense, but snare is the most time-senstive op in the game. You have to hit them hard and fast and you don't have time to mess about, because if you fuck it up, you are stuck in what is essentially a failed war for three days. Also it's embarrassing.

It took all 15 snares from me to see 8 successes. Others in our group were reporting similar success rates. RNG was massively fucking us over, taking us closer to a 50-60% success rate instead of the projected 70-80% we needed. Swamp Fox, it seemed, was going to be proven right.

Even worse, the second I declared war, one of our key first wave snarers, mdk, straight up vanished. As we all reported our snare successes, he was worryingly absent and not responding to pings.

Gothia: Where is mdk?

Kong: @mdk

Swamp Fox: ...

Gothia: @mdk

Kong: lol

Gothia: Fucking hell.

Rio: I'm here now.

Gothia: Oh we have Rio.

It was Rio to the rescue. He filled in for the missing snares we needed from mdk, and the group successfully took him below 25% - but he wasn't at 0. Mdk would end up on the reserve group instead, assuming he hadn't dropped off the face of the Earth.

Rush: Where tf did mdk go, wasn't this whole plan his idea? lol

Rio: Mdk taking the Cronel approach, sleeping.

Swamp Fox: We need to keep him at zero to keep this easily managed.

Gothia: Yeah, when mdk gets here he can take him to zero.

Rush: I'd rather he was at zero right now.

Rio: Mdk in fairness is probably off saving someone's life from cancer.

Rush: That can wait!

Rio: Priorities.

Mdk did show up after about 15 minutes and it was down to some crazy shit going down at his hospital. Someone better have been dying to risk our snare campaign!

I'll save you eight hours of excruciating detail and just say the snare campaign seemed borderline as hell initially but our recovery was decent and we had good coordination (ie not wasting snares) and some clutch successes from Cronel's superior SPA that put us into more comfortable territory as the campaign went on. End result: we successfully stripped Bingham of his Ares, and kept it off.

The result of this war forced the lyc to make a choice. He either took the hit he had lined up, and Gothia got insane acres from hitting his Monarch, or he sat and protected him, potentially missing the opportunity to hit the merfolk. We couldn't keep Bingham snared forever, and we were essentially babysitting the #8 merfolk, praying that at some point he realised the danger he was in and started taking his defence seriously.

So it was good news for Bingham, but it was still a very bad scenario for the lyc, who had to pass on an easy 75%. And anything that was bad news for the lyc was an avenue we were going to pursue. We had some idea of when Bingham probably went to sleep based on automations and fools gold, so we pushed the snare a few hours longer just to see if he'd give up and go to bed with no spells, but he did recast as soon as he had the wiz str. I think we pulled off a 10-hour snare in the end, and it could have gone a few hours longer before we were tapped out too. Meanwhile, Gothia found another hit:

2025-07-10 18:15:59 Victorious on the battlefield, Felicity Shagwell (#5) conquered 253 land from Fire-starting in the Hanging Gardens (Mongoose) (#2).

Rio laid out the two ways it could have gone:

That war/snare job meant instead of:
Lyc + 500
Gothia + 850
Sylvan + 400
DE + 400
Nomad + 400
Dwarf + 400

It is:
Lyc: 0
Gothia: +500
Sylvan: 0
DE: 0
Nomad: 0
Dwarf: 0

It hurt all of our competition but still helped Gothia, and Rio still had his suicide card if the lyc bottomfed. But that card had an imminent expiry date.

Our realm's attackers post-round credited this as the pivotal moment that the lyc lost the round. I don't know if that's really true or if it's a bit of back-patting. It could well have led to Gothia winning the round had he taken a different decision.

This chain of events meant that this war was going to turn out to be one of the strangest non-wars I've ever seen, more a game of nuance and edging than fireballs and big hits. From the outside - at least according to the peanut gallery in the main discord - it looked like absolutely nothing was happening. I don't blame them; if I was on the outside looking in, I doubt I'd be taking a wide enough view of the landscape to include the merfolk in #8 in the equation. There are very few players in this game that look at the bigger picture, and a lot of them were already in our realm.

Without the hit on the merfolk, it became likely that as soon as the lyc could escape Rio's suicidal op, which he would do at some point during the war, he was safe to drop guard and bottomfeed. And one of us would be the target.

Swamp Fox took himself off the menu by entering Elite Guard, which left me on the chopping block.

I was given a temporary reprieve (and potential out) when Taj cocked up and made a hit that would take him sailing into the lyc's range, then inexplicably didn't slam dp and just got slapped straight back out of range again.

2025-07-11 19:54:30 Werego Vespucci (Weaser) (#10) invaded Tailgating at Taj Mahal (SlyPimp) (#2) and captured 275 land.

At this point if we'd cancelled the war, I might have dodged getting chomped entirely. Unfortunately it was a few minutes into the next tick when I had a brief discussion with Gothia and we decided to cancel, which turned out to be a huge mistake, because it meant he could still hit me with the war bonus on his return - and worse, we couldn't blop him back from dropping EG.

2025-07-12 07:58:20 Werego Vespucci (Weaser) (#10) invaded Dr Evil (Rush) (#5) and captured 202 land.

Gothia blamed himself. I blamed myself. Rio blamed both of us. Whoops.

I get hit so rarely that I'd forgotten how much it sucks. And this was the first time I'd ever been bottomfed. It absolutely tanked my econ and I spend the rest of the round trying to recover. I think I finished on only slightly higher pez than I had before the hit.

'''FINAL WEEKS - COMING UNDONE'''

Business Cat and Fenrir were now the likely winners if they could outplay Werego. Our realm was starting to arrive at the conclusion that we weren't going to win this without a hefty injection of luck. Business Cat and Fenrir had outmanouevred Gothia with a combination of skill and their own luck, and he found himself further and further behind, his op to low and his dp too high from dealing with Werego to make the hits he needed to catch up. Being further ahead, but at the wrong moments, and not able to capitalise on scenarios that could benefit him if the wind blew even slightly in his direction, seemed to have crippled him.

At some point, during one of our regular wars with #10, I said what many of us were thinking: that we weren't going to win this.

Syscero offered to full send on #10's Wonder if it helped. The guy was an absolute legend. But taking down their Wonder and probably getting hit in return was not an outcome I wanted to see.

Rush: "I don't think we're going to win this, so at this point it's more about making sure other realms don't get free land."

Mris: "We can still win this."

I admired mris' unflappable optimism. It's what we all needed to hear. Someone to pick up our spirits in the dark times. As long as Business Cat and Fenrir didn't get any more legs up on us, maybe we could still pull through after all and win this.

2025-07-13 10:23:38 Victorious on the battlefield, Goldmember (mris) (#5) conquered 191 land from Lizardfolk: Ore Mines now protect boats (#3).

2025-07-13 10:47:35 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (#9) invaded fellow dominion Goldmember (#5) and captured 278 land.

2025-07-13 10:50:34 Business Cat Rides Again (#11) invaded fellow dominion Goldmember (#5) and captured 251 land.

I cancelled my plans to attend mris' upcoming self-help seminar.

Business Cat later surprised Werego with a sneaky (and as far as I know, unprecedented) move that enabled an all-in hit against the runaway. He'd released a chunk of his own dp units and retrained them as spec op, and Werego's gang of super explorers had missed it. Internally a few realmies were quite agitated by Business Cat's constant profiteering off our efforts, and also held the sentiment that he seemed to lack the 'killer instinct' to take risks, having played things differently than they would have in a few situations. But this move certainly shocked and impressed all of his detractors.

There was some further drama from Sly who started accusing mdk of having access to his realm discord chat after mdk made a comment about Sly 'whining for weeks' about his round. This would be Sly's second public paranoid fit of pique in a couple of weeks and it left mdk totally nonplussed. At one point mdk was told there were discussions within the Rules Committee about locking him over his comment. He also mentioned that Sly seemed to be convinced I was a cheater and that I went out of my way to target him, and that I seemed to be 'living rent free' in his head - this was reflected in a comment he'd made publicly that he was planning to start smurfing (essentially creating a new account to evade proper realm assignment - as a regular solo player Sly would consistently complain about landing in ghettos), to which he then followed up by saying I would somehow find him anyway, implying again that I was a cheater. I'm not even sure why I was involved in the discussion at all since I had nothing to do with any of it.

I don't feel a great need to defend my character against these accusations though so I'll skip over my feelings of outrage etc and just say that I don't know where this sentiment comes from. Grievances aside, these are the facts: historically I don't think I've been involved in taking Sly down directly in any blops war; I always try my best to target who I perceive to be threats in competitive rounds. And if I'm rank chasing instead, I'm not targeting FAs. And even if I was fed his location, it still wouldn't change anything. I just don't target people for silly disagreements or past grudges I have with them in the discord. There are bloppers that will do this - Cronel has his famous List for example - but I can confidently say I have and will never target someone for being toxic, because that in itself would be toxic. And meeting toxicity with more toxicity would just be the very definition of hypocritical. A bit like someone on the Rules Committee suggesting they'll start using a smurf account, in violation of the rules they helped write.

Fortunately it seems rationality still prevailed on the RC in spite all these theatrics, and mdk did not get locked.

Back to the round. In the final week, it all fell apart for #10. I felt a little bad for their realm, which had performed well and which had, against the odds, kept a solo fast attacker that had randomed into their realm last-minute ahead of the scrum for so long. But they hadn't learned from a lesson we'd taught them early on: snare was their achilles' heel, as it often is for efficiency explorers. We had kept Bingham without Ares for 10+ hours earlier in the round while we babysat an efficiency explorer with a serious dp deficiency, and yet, Bingham didn't seem to have prioritised upping his spy ratio and instead tried to keep pace with the rest of his pack of super explorers - a challenge given we'd dented his econ in an earlier war. This decision to hoover up as many acres as possible instead of bolstering his spy defences left him vulnerable, and #9, who had already demonstrated a willingness to war, were able to take full advantage.

2025-07-19 22:53:00 Myths and Mistakes (#9) has declared WAR on Eat Sleep Explore Repeat (#10).

2025-07-20 00:01:17 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (King Jota) (#9) invaded Laura Bingham (B) (#10) and captured 510 land.

At this point, every efficiency explorer on Fenrir's menu should have been amping Ares and dumping spies, keeping it above 12h but at the very bare minimum above 9h. This was the final stretch. If Fenrir got another snare hit, it was ov-

2025-07-21 00:04:42 Presenting Fenrir to Masters Agility Championship (#9) invaded Leif Erikson (DavetheGoliath) (#10) and captured 524 land.

Oh no.

Welp. Congrats #9!

We finished off our round by indulging in the first and only frivolous rank-chasing war of the round:

2025-07-21 20:51:39 FIRE THE LASER! (#5) has declared WAR on Eat Sleep Explore Repeat (#10).

I lit up Bodhidharma (Chunk)'s frankly obscene castle and, taking advantage of Lightning Storm, was able to leapfrog mdk in the electrofancy ranks and steal the title from Moshing at Machu Pichu (Cosula), who was more preoccupied with stealing the top fireballer rank from Cronel, beating him by 19k at the finish line. It was the first time in the entire round our blopping numbers had looked good. It's slim pickings out there targeting all these top attacker threats you know! They have sweet fuck all peasants to roast to begin with and at best middling investments to crush. Hey let's add some sort of peasant value modifier based on prestige. One FA's peasant has got to be worth 10x an explorer's, right?

'''CONCLUSION'''

I hope I've been able to do my realm some justice with this roundfail, but I'm afraid I probably haven't. I haven't even covered every war, and there were a few doozies in there where we really screwed up, like our late-round war on #9 where we seem to have done basically no homework and had a "fuck it lets go" approach to snaring the target (Serving Thyestes' Family Dinner (mcgeeal)), who had a massive stock of plat that he just invested into walls and took our hit off the table. This round I have irl been probably the busiest I have ever been when trying to keep on top of my notes, so I'm certain I've missed a ton of key details. I didn't even talk about the time Swamp Fox joined EG by accident. Rio can't get in the damn thing and somehow Swamp Fox can't stay out of it? What is going on with guard applications? Or anything on a timer, really. Spare a thought for Oment who accidentally abandoned for a tick. At least we all know now we get one fake abandon per round if we choose to. Just say it wasn't for realsies and you didn't mean it.

That said, realm #5 and this round has been one of the most fun experiences I've had in OD. Every war was a blast, and there was real excitement in our realm making all these bold plays. From the concept of our pack, to the realm comp at realm assignment, to the ruthlessness and effectiveness of our wars, to the chaos and even our mistakes, it was a wild ride from start to finish. We did something truly unique this round with the whole realm on-board. And Rio did what I thought was impossible: he proved Loki's early concept of a 'combat blopper' Dark Elf (ref: [[Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery|roundfail round 41]] ) viable. Dangerous top attacker threat, then sui threat, finishing 8th in land and 7th in the Rush Rankings this round. He's just showing off at this point. If only he could figure out how guard works, he'd be unstoppable.

Rio had also proven what I had doubted: that blops are effective in their current state. Our realm was pretty unrepresentative of a normal realm, and we likely won't see anything like this again for a while, but we were a pretty terrifying realm if you found yourself in our crosshairs. Unless your name is mcgeeal. It's the first time in a very, very long time that it felt like our blops were capable of consistently altering the course of the round in our favour. In concept and (mostly) in execution, our realm was monstrous. And so, my opinion on blops as it currently stands, for whatever it's worth: I think wiz blops are sufficiently punishing early, but they do fall off quite hard in the mid to late game. I think spy blops are somewhat inaccessible without a lot of dedicated ops and blops players, although Rio's combat blopper playstyle showed you can also be pivotal in tipping the balance as an attacker, helping to make the difference between uncertain and successful in war snare and sink campaigns. And maybe spy blops are okay like that. If you have lots of ops and blops players in your pack, you have less attackers and are forced to rely more on chance at realm assignment, which is a balance in itself.

The Underground Society was amazing for us this round. It really was the jewel in our deadly blops realm crown. There was a scramble for it from several realms when realm #2 sent it back to #0 during one of our wars as a "fuck you", including from #11 who did significant damage to it. Ultimately it came down to a single cyclone who got it back. While we were discussing to coordinate a chain of hits to take it down (we had estimated that it was on much higher hp than it actually was), Cronel had woken up and thrown a single cyclone at it without reading the chat, rendering it once again the property of realm #5. Other realms should count themselves lucky they didn't snipe it - it would have brought all hell down on them. But we were also lucky they didn't too, because we didn't want to have to deal with being diverted into time-wasting and damaging Wonder-wars either.

Thanks to packmates Rio, Gothia, Cronel and Swamp Fox. Great dudes all. And thanks to mdk, kong, mris, phage, Music, Syscero and Gwyn for completing such a fantastic realm. Syscero in particular was a pleasant surprise for everyone - an old returning player from classic, new to OD, he picked all of the concepts up effortlessly and was exceptionally helpful with blops early on, before converting and having the usual first-time converter experience. It would have gone a lot better for him in his conversion if he hadn't been so helpful on the blops side to begin with!

And while I was glad I could pull Swamp Fox out of retirement, it was not without cost. It seems every time I play with that guy our realm causes seismic waves of antiblops sentiments and this round was no different. Almost every threatening realm felt our laser at one point or another. Of course, those that got truly atomised by it only have themselves to blame - greed is risk, and you can't get angry when your gamble doesn't pay off. Well, you shouldn't get angry, anyway. And hey, if you don't agree, I've got the number for a great tattoo artist I can give you. Tell 'em Rush sent ya and they'll hide all the lasers so you don't get triggered when you arrive.

Congrats to King Jota and realm #9 for the win. You guys made a great team, picked your wars wisely and coordinated well. And Jota's had a win due to him for a long time now. Glad to see he finally got it in the bag.

I was Dr Evil, and I finished on 6,296 acres, and 40th place for land. Quite a bad finishing position for me, but I did suffer a dirty bottomfeed in the late game.

To wrap up with a bit of fun, here's a handful of AI-generated images from realm #5 and of course the highlight of the round: https://imgur.com/a/muN2b6S

'''TL;DR'''

From the discord of realm #5, this round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/8aLZ3UD

Round 44 draft

2025-03-24T15:23:28Z

Rush:

== Notes ==

Round 44 was the fourth Draft Round. Unlike previous drafts where captains were selected by vote or based on previous teams, this round captains volunteered themselves and were automatically entered into the draft.

The draft was organised by draftmaster Erix and assistant-to-the-draftmaster Damdred. It was carried out privately and then announced in a collaborative podcast between RiolTalk and Rush Hour, featuring their regular hosts Rio, Merf, Rush and AgFx. Damdred also guested briefly.

The podcast was published to announce the draft, as well as discuss player picks and potential team strategies, and is available to listen to on Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/40OCpyPINw10hpXmBsGBtw?si=78e63975f8cc4b77

The teams were as follows:

{| class="wikitable"
!Captain
![[R44Jmerc|Jmerc13]]
![[R44Damdred|Damdred]]
![[R44Scrornch|Scratch]]
![[R44Cerbrus87|Cerbrus]]
![[R44Mcgeeal|Mcgeeal]]
![[R44Mithrandir|Mithrandir]]
![[R44Ivetza|Ivetza]]
![[R44Rompar|Rompar]]
|-
|''Co-Captain''
|''Rush''
|''Wurstmeyer''
|''B''
|''Weaser''
|''Internetfett''
|''Erix''
|''Harm''
|''Rio''
|-
|Second Round
|AgFx
|DanTheMan
|SugarJon
|Lamb
|Bobbo
|DownrightDave
|Mannowrath
|Chunk
|-
|Third Round
|Disco
|SlyPimp
|BigBell
|King Jota
|ZachSmack
|GrapesofMath
|Zar
|Zedijar
|-
|Fourth Round
|Cronel
|Sizzler
|Tidnab
|Chud
|Merf
|Jboy
|Jocke
|Neruht
|-
|Fifth Round
|Shanulf
|DavetheGoliath
|Highlow
|Sharkey
|Alison
|Squanchy
|Jaerock
|OMG Noob
|-
|Sixth Round
|Mattyvanhalen
|Psychosophy
|Noodle
|Blafiora
|TheThing
|Lokiramza
|Kenshiro
|Slice
|-
|Seventh Round
|Empoy
|Cosula
|Yeeow
|Nurtho
|Jamo
|P@qz
|Manus
|Meesax
|-
|Eighth Round
|Zooj
|KingTitus
|KingCT
|Temo
|Gwyn
|Skubasteve
|Beta52
|Squarewave
|-
|Ninth Round
|Bazzaroony
|Extravadanza
|Buckshot
|Finnisher
|DJSoegaard
|Palaiyot
|Taldarin
|Uruk Hai
|-
|Tenth Round
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|SatansArsonMilitia
|Drads
|Saimon
|}

Each team was also rated based on their Rio rank. Ordered from best rating to worst rating, the teams are as follows:

Team Rompar (1st | score 86.8)
Team Damdred (2nd | score 88.8)
Team Mithrandir (3rd | score 90.7)
Team Mcgeeal (3rd | score 90.7)
Team Ivetza (4th | score 92.5)
Team Cerbrus (5th | score 97.9)
Team Scratch (6th | score 125.4)
Team Jmerc (7th | score 126.5)

Unranked players were given a rating of 210 (the default last-place score), which mostly affected Scratch's team rating as he selected three unranked players. Team Ivetza, Team Mithrandir and Team Jmerc had no unranked players on their rosters.

Team Mcgeeal, Team Rompar and Team Ivetza feature the most roundwinners with each team sporting two on their rosters.

== Wishlists and Reasoning ==

Captains were asked to supply a wishlist of their ideal picks before the draft started, as well as reasoning for their actual picks after the draft concluded. These are supplied below, along with the AI summaries of their reasoning that were read out on the draft round podcast.

'''Team Jmerc'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Rush - he’s my guy. Strong blop support

AGFX - again blops support and frickin sweet tracker tool

Cronel - strong blops support (you see the theme)

DownrightDave - can attack and manage blops simultaneously

Harm - strong attacker

Zooj - no explanation needed. Love zooj

Mannowrath - strong ops support (think he falls outside the time zones I’m heavy on)

Disco - super strong fast attacker. Unless he isn’t and abandons but I’ll take that risk

Zachsmack - haven’t played with my boy in forever, strong at pretty much whatever

Cosula - landed with him a few times recently. He is turning to the dark side of blops nicely Not exactly my #1 team, but not an impossible lineup to actually pull off

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Not created.

'''Actual Text'''

Not supplied. Instead Rush, Jmerc's co-captain, gave his theoretical reasoning as to what he thought Jmerc may have been thinking on the podcast.

'''Team Damdred'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

My plan for this draft is to pick a competitive team who I believe I can have fun with, min/maxing as well as going for the win.

Initially I have Wurst targeted as my first pick.

I have a suspicion that Jmerc will select Rush with his first pick, and in this slot I feel as selecting the best available player is the correct decision, if Gothia hadn’t of dropped out I would have debated.

For my second round pick I have another player who can attack pinpointed, the four I am watching most closely in this round are Downrightdave (I don’t believe he will make it to me), dantheman (doubtful he makes it), Eric (won’t make it), and sugarjon (possibly will make it). The goal here is to get a reasonably effective fast attacker who I feel will free up Wurst to play to his strengths.

Third round I am looking for an ops/support player, grapes (chance he won’t be here, noodle (take a slight flyer here based on reputation of a newer player), those are my top two choices I believe jmerc will take cronel here anyway. I haven’t strategised past the third round currently due to unknown variables.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Wurst was my ideal first pick—he covers all attacking needs, from slow to fast to converting, and he’s great with numbers. Second round didn’t go exactly as planned since Dave and Erix were taken early, but I still landed a top attacker in Dan, who I’ve played with before and really enjoy teaming up with. I cross-referenced my list with Wurst’s attacker recommendations and picked up Sly, a solid and consistent performer. Siz was Wurst’s suggestion—he’s been inactive for a while, but he’s a strong attacker and will shake off the rust. Dave was an easy pick as an all-around talent, and Psychosophy was the steal of the draft—god-tier on ops and fills a key time zone gap. Cosula and Titus are reliable ops players, and Danza is a new player I brought in from another game, making him my responsibility.

'''Actual Text'''

first round; went as I hoped, wurst was available, he takes care of the biggest need which is attacking he can handle slow fast and converting and is a numbers guy we need. Second round: some of my top picks were taken in this spot, I was a little disappointed that Dave was taken by mith and that Eric was taken first round and didn’t fall into my lap. I suspect that Dan would of been taken as well if he had marked high activity, I was fortunate to land a great attacker here, I’ve played with him several times and I really enjoy playing with him so it’s a win
I made a list of people who I wanted to play with and cross referenced it with people that wurst suggested as well who were excellent attackers I had a large amount of them still available at this point. Sly is an excellent investment as a team mate, he has a great deal of knowledge and has consistent results across his rounds. It was an easy pickup and complemented Dan and wurst.
Siz was someone I was not aware of but wurst recommended and loved the pick. He hadn’t played in quite some time so rust is a bit of a factor maybe. However, he will pick it back up and he’s a very solid attacker for the team
At this point I knew I needed to pick best player
Dave I know Dave from a round or two we packed together, excellent all around player can attack is great at ops and has a great deal of activity. Perfect for what I want
Psy, how on gods green earth this man was this low idk, to me this is the steal of the draft. Excellent if not god tier on ops, high activity covers a time zone that we are a little weaker in (or can be support when most Americans can be busy). Super happy with this pickup
7/8. cosula and Titus are ops players who are dependable and I figured scratch wanted them.
Danza is a new player who I brought over from another game my responsibility

'''Team Scratch'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

I've been asked (by a very naggy, old, balding man) to write a little bit about what I hope to gain from my team as I draft them. I signed up as a captain excited at the possibility of being able to play with so many great and fun people who I've not yet had a chance to pack with. Sadly, none of those players decided to sign up, so I had to settle for these clowns.

Basically my goal is to find a balanced team full of players who can take on many different roles depending on what we all decide together. My major deciding factor outside of that will be discord activity, as I'm hoping to not take anyone who I haven't seen talk.

With my first pick, I wanted to make sure I picked someone I haven't had a chance to play with, but who I am familiar with or talked to. It really came down to downrightdave or B, but since I want to actually do well, it has to be B. Also, he wanted to be a captain this round so that he'd have a chance to put together a strong and competitive team, so I thought it would be especially funny to take himself myself and throw those hopes and dreams right out the window.

Since I decided to go with an early pick, a great deal of what happens beyond that point is dependent on the competence of my fellow captains. Needless to say, I fully anticipate my plans will go through without a hitch.

I want to get one of the Dave/Grapes/Jon pack if possible, but I'm not too picky on which one because they're all the same person anyway. Beyond that, I've got a whole notebook page full of people I'd be happy to get, and it doesn't even include some of the obvious names. Really I just want to have a fun round with some cool people, and maybe we can sneak out a win through sheer willpower and friendship <3

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I went into this draft with a clear plan, and while things didn’t always go perfectly, I’m really happy with how my team shaped up. B was my first pick because he’s a great player and someone whose game philosophy aligns with mine. Sugarjon was an easy second-round choice since I wanted someone from the Dave/Jon/Grapes group, and with Dave off the board, he was the natural fit. BigBell came next, mostly because my original target got sniped, but he meshes well with B’s timezone, so it worked out. Tidnab was a no-brainer—our past Diplomacy chats and his compatibility with the team made this pick feel like destiny. Noodle & HighLow were great picks, even if it meant losing my next turn, and I could tell I made the right call when Mith cursed me out right after. Yeeeoow was a total self-indulgent pick, since he plays like me—badly but with style—so naturally, I love it. Kingct was a fun wildcard pick, mostly to screw over Damdred, and Buckshot is a bit of a mystery, but I like his attitude. Also, fun fact about me: I like to lick windows. Not sure how that’ll play into my strategy as a draft captain but I’m confident that I’ll find a way*.

(*Final sentence may have been edited in by Rush. Allegedly.)

Scratch took the time to roast some of the other teams before getting into his own reasoning. Here are some of the best ones:

Team Ivetza: He put together a very solid team here. Too bad Ivetza has to be in it.

Team Mcgeeal: Sort of like looking at a high school basketball coach try to relive his glory days, Mcgeeal clearly hasn't moved on from his round win.

Team Jmerc: Omg look at me I'm so chaotic! <-- that's probably what beardy boy was thinking when he picked the most obvious team imaginable. Does chaos generally entail doing everything in the most predictable way? I just feel bad for Disco, the dude is probably gonna abandon twice.

'''Actual Text'''

First round, B: I haven't played with him, but I've talked to him a decent amount and find myself lining up with his approach to the game and philosophies overall pretty well. Also he's actually a really good player, unlike myself, so I'm really happy with him as my first pick overall. Every good group needs a cornerstone "glue guy", and that's what I think B will B. Second round, Sugarjon: from the beginning of the draft I knew I wanted one of the Dave/Jon/Grapes coalition. Since I nabbed up someone from a different major 5-pack with B, this was pretty much my only shot to get to play with one of these guys, so when Mith took Dave a few spots before me, it made my decision even easier. When I really thought about it, the one I've probably talked to the most was Sugarjon, so this was an easy selection for me. Third round, BigBell: B suggested SlyPimp in this slot, so when he got taken by Damdred (who is an evil bastard) right before my turn I went into panic mode. "Panic mode" will be a recurring theme, btw. Then BigBell's name came up, and with him fitting more closely with B's timezone, it seemed like a nice idea to throw another Euro his way, and I enjoyed BigBell when I played with him before, so I was happy with this choice. Part of me wanted to go with Tidnab here, but oh well. Maybe some other round we'll random together.

Fourth round, Tidnab: Oh, lookie here, I found myself a Tidnab. Another person whose timezone works well with B, and someone else who I haven't had the pleasure of playing with. Oh how the stars have aligned! I've played Diplomacy with him, talked to him about (sand) pirates, this was a slam dunk pick. In fact, this pick was so good it almost makes the rest of them feel like trash. And speaking of trash... Fifth round, Noodle & HighLow: I'm just kidding, these two are great picks and it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know them over the past few months. While I'm very happy to grab these two here (Mithrandir messaged me with a simple "fuck you" immediately after I made this pick, so while he already does this pretty frequently, that to me showed I made the right choice), it did put me in a bit of a bind, as I had to relinquish my next pick afterwards. Sixth round, psychosoph- oh wait, nevermind. Seventh round, Yeeeoow: Completely abandoning my plan of mostly taking people I haven't played with much, I drafted the person I probably have played with the most of anyone in the entire game. He doesn't play strategies that work, gets hit all the time, and gets in fights with someone new almost every single round. In essence, I just drafted myself, which makes this the best pick of the entire draft.

Eighth round, Kingct: An import from a game Damdred plays, he had been all excited to take this sleeper pick right at the very end, but I've heard good things about this guy and Damdred deserves to not get what he wants, so that made this selection very easy for me. I love encountering newer players who actually try, so hopefully that's exactly what I drafted here. Ninth round, Buckshot: I don't want to be rude, but apart from seeing his name show up making a couple discord comments about not wanting to disappoint anyone by not being very good/active (which I see as a positive sign, anyone who feels bad about dragging the team down is a kindred spirit), I don't really know this guy at all. But I look forward to seeing how he works out. Welcome to Team Scratch.

Team Rompar: I mean, Rio put his activity level at "low" and he still picked him first, so I think that choice speaks for itself. He's got some cool people on here, but some of his choices and the timing for them felt like some RNG shit. Team Ivetza: He put together a very solid team here. Too bad Ivetza has to be in it. Team Mithrandir: One of the best teams in here, solid picks pretty much across the board. No real scathing notes here apart from a simple "fuck you". Tag, you're it. Team Mcgeeal: Sort of like looking at a high school basketball coach try to relive his glory days, Mcgeeal clearly hasn't moved on from his round win. Team Cerbrus: Pretty well rounded team, I could see them doing pretty well. No real roasts here, good job, babe. Team Damdred: I thought it would be fun drafting a team right next to my buddy. I was wrong, this dude pissed me off almost every pick. We basically wanted the exact same team, and I think we ended up with teams that feel pretty similar. Team Jmerc: Omg look at me I'm so chaotic! <-- that's probably what beardy boy was thinking when he picked the most obvious team imaginable. Does chaos generally entail doing everything in the most predictable way? I just feel bad for Disco, the dude is probably gonna abandon twice.

'''Team Cerbrus'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

(Cerb did not pick up any of his originally intended picks)

Rio - he plays fast attackers and slow/mid attacker at a high level and consistently has good finishes. He is a good leader and strategist. Also, last time we played together in a draft round he won

Wurstmeyer - he is an excellent strategist, his pre round game plan and simming are top notch. His expertise will help guide the realm with multiple scenario options. He consistently has strong finishes

Dantheman- we were packmates in the early stages of coming back to the game, I would like to play with him again. He is an excellent fast attacker with the balls to make the big hit even if it sinks his round. Putting the realm first is a quality I look for

Grapesofmath- he can be an attacker or blopper, when i have played with him he has been a team player and helped get hits from killing drafts. Having a blop leader would be good early and mid round

Chunk - I think he recently said he would join the draft. I can’t remember playing with him and would like to. I know he is a solid fast attacker and mid attacker. Even while exploring I think he could provide great advice and guidance

Internetfett - who wouldn’t want the one and only fett. Good fast attacker and solid mid attacker. Great with numbers/strats and insights. Is a fun player to play with Manno- ops guys are important, has a high ranking and is wanting to play slower style. Heard good things about him

Disco- I think he plays a high risk/reward playstyle with fast attacking. Having him paired with another solid fast attacker and soild ops could help him break free
Cronel- chaos, disrupter, enough said

Sugarjon- a solid attacker who can go the blops route if needed. Good teammate/realmie

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

The draft process was fast-paced and chaotic, forcing a shift from my original plan of building a balanced team to prioritizing top-tier players. The first pick, Weaser, was chosen for his consistency as a mid-speed attacker, a dominant playstyle in recent rounds. Lamb and King Jota followed as familiar and reliable mid-speed attackers, while Chud was picked purely for value. Sharkey brought leadership and versatility, making him a key addition. Blaforia added speed and veteran experience, while Nurtho’s flexibility made him a strong choice. The last picks, Temo and Finnisher, were more of a gamble due to limited knowledge. Overall, I think the team looks solid, with a strong mix of experience, adaptability, and firepower—ready to perform!

'''Actual Text'''

When I was thinking of my ideal team I had in mind a nice mix of fast attackers, mid speed/converters, ops/blops guys with a sprinkle of veteran leadership. Of the 10 players I selected for my “ideal” team I ended up taking none of them. Some due to others picking them first and another because they put activity level as low, like Rio. The draft went so fast, players were picking faster than in the dom fantasy draft. I was at work and trying to make big decisions in a matter of mins from the constant pings lol. I knew I wanted to take the “best” players first, disregarding my want to form a well-rounded group.

My first pick was Weaser, I am pretty sure I played with him but I quickly looked at his stats and he was a solid, consistent performer. Consistency with the first pick I felt was key. He had some really good finishes as a convert/mid speed attacker and that seems to be the winner lately so I picked him up. He also had a decent fast attacker round

My second pick was lamb, one who I have packed with and played with numerous times. He is also a consistent mid speed attacker. I am hoping the familiarity will help us and he has 24 rounds on OD under his belt.

My third pick as King Jota, another consistent mid speed attacker. He really impressed me with his round as gob converter “Wife vs OD round 31”, great name BTW as we can all relate.

Fourth pick was chud, yet another solid mid speed attacker. He was the best pick available by far so I picked him up Fifth pick was Sharkey, my brother from another mother. We have been packing together since round 23. His insight and knowledge of the game is second to none. He is versatile and can play anything. He has great leadership and planning

Sixth pick was blaforia, he is a great fast attacker and is a vet Seventh pick was nurtho. I have played with him before and he is a great teammate. He can play multiple roles Eight pick was Temo, I do not know much about him

Ninth pick was finnisher, do not know much about him I am very happy with my team, I think we will perform great! Let’s go!

'''Team Mcgeeal'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Okay in other drafts, high activity FAs are at a premium, so thinking I use my first pick on that. I’m hoping to grab someone I know can do math and sim, because I am not that guy, pal. More of the hype-man captain. I think top of my board will look something like this, only a little different from their rio ranks tbh:

Fett: Only played with once and is a fun teammate, though he’s marked ‘medium’ activity, I question how ‘medium’ looks to him.

Weazer: Look at that rio rank and good at mathing, high activity

Erix: The fellow hype man, is good at the game and also guarantees an active fun realm

Lamb: A wildcard pick in terms of realmmate, I don’t think we’ve played before but is good and marked high activity.

Chunk** who isn’t FA but I’ve never played with and want to - we’ve had a couple of fun races to the finish line as explorers, and can still do math. Plus I can finally interrogate him on his darn calculator! Just not sure how good an idea it is to pick explorer so high, maybe he falls to second rd pick?

Harm: good dude, good player, here for the gangbang

Bobbo: Always in the FA mix, will pull over to attack on time. Also a TFT buddy, but I don’t know if he’s a simmer

Wurst: Really good at the game, think I’ve only played with him once but he stayed in pack chat mostly, so loses points.

Jota: Is indeed grumpy on the outside but good at the game and I’ve had good experience playing with him as a noob.

B: Don’t think I’ve played with him at all, is kind of a wildcard pick. I don’t really know what to expect in terms of fun/engagement with some people that I haven’t played with, even though that’s a bit of the point. The rest I’m just looking for folks who I think are fun mostly.

Team comp we’ll figure out later. I do want another good explorer - whether that’s Chunk, Zedi, or Manno.

Reuniting with Rush / AGFX would be awesome, but I kind of expect Jmerc to reach for them tbh.

Some other dark horses for competitiveness in the later rounds I like are Tidnab, Alison, Zar, ZOOJ, Merf if his ‘low’ activity scares away captains

Notable un-mentions are the Hydra and Sharkey, who are all great and fun to play with and guys that I’ve been in-realm with many times now. If the draft is an opportunity to play with some new people, I ought to take it. Don’t be surprised if I actually panic-pick some of this list though. In fact, I play based on vibes, I doubt any of this is actually that useful, it’ll all come down to what I’m feeling in the moment that it’s my turn to pick.

Joker_Man_With_A_Plan.GIF

In the late-late rounds, when it comes to the new players, I hope to get someone who marked they’re open to playing Ops role, so I can help keep an eye on them and mentor. Not so good at doing that for an attacker.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I ended up with a team similar to my Round 38 win, which I’m happy about, though I didn’t land any big names I haven’t played with before—just some I haven’t teamed up with often. We’re stacked with high-powered options like Fett, Bobbo, Merf, TheThing, and Zach, built to run fast, but we’ve also got solid slower play choices. TheThing dropped in the draft because he’s “leaving on May 4th,” but I’ll take the steal. I just missed out on Beta52, and my last pick was a new player outside the US time zone, but it was late, and options were limited.

'''Actual Text'''

Short version, I’m a busy man: I basically stumbled into assembling a similar comp to my round 38 win, so happy about that, but i failed to get any well-known people who I haven’t played with yet. That said I’ve chosen folks who I haven’t gotten to play with very often* Obviously I have the best team, multiple high-octane options as FAs with Fett, Bobbo, Merf, TheThing, and Zach, we’re built to run and not look back. If we have to pass the buck, we’re in good hands with whoever will join Alison in a slower playstyle. We’ve Gwyn, myself, a couple new players, as well as probably one of the attacking options already mentioned for ops.
Notably, TheThing “is leaving on May 4th” which made him fall in the draft, I don’t really know what that means but he was a steal, May the Fourth be Damned! Jamo was noted as an up-and-comer by Fett, I was hoping to nab him and Beta52 late, but just missed out on Beta (he was a big steal that late as well). My apologies to the single pick of mine, a new player who isn’t in the US-time zone, but it was late and I had few options left.

'''Team Mithrandir'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Attacker im targeting in kind of order: Erix Wurst Jboy Rio Jota Fett Weaser B Harm SugarJon DownrightDave Lamb Merf Blaf Matty BigBell Thething
Top Ops guys im targeting: Chunk Manno Zed Zar shanulf jocke cronel empoy loki nurtho
Others: Disco Zooj (low key great ops guy) Sharkey Grapes

general plan is to get 1-2 attackers on my list, maybe a top ops guy 2nd pick then back to attackers. Taking value over needs in general but ideally 2 guys that can FA, 1 good strategy guy and the rest ops guys and hybrid players. It will really come down to best available and value over everything. Time zones not too much of a concern. I “can” lead but prefer another elite player to co lead the pack.

I’m hoping other captains are incompetent and skip over high value guys

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I somehow landed Erix, which gives me insider draft knowledge and a solid attacker. Dave was an easy pick as a top FA and fun teammate, and Grapes was the obvious choice for ops, especially with Dave around—Cocaine and waffles approved. Jboy fooled everyone about his activity and will carry us to victory. Squanchy is underrated but always online, Loki slipped way too far, P@qz brings versatility, and skubasteve is another nonstop ops machine. Satansarsonmilitia rounds it out as Mr. Irrelevant. I wanted FA power, strong ops, and a slow/convert attacker—got all that and stole Jboy. Best draft team by a mile, Merf 99% realm win incoming.

'''Actual Text'''

Erix - easy pick, idk how he fell to me. I get draft insider knowledge and secrets. Also i guess hes an okay attacker. Dave - Top FA, very fun to play with, easy pick Grapes - The obvious choice for a top ops guy and i have dave. Cocaine and waffles approved. Jboy - everyone slept on his lie about low activity. Hes going to win us the rnd. Elite elite player Squanchy - underrated top ops guy, easy pick and he is on 24/7 Loki - idk how he fell. Maybe bc taking rnd off but he said hes going to be active as fuk and willing to go on overnight. Easy pick and jmerc/rush cant have him. Win win P@qz - great player, willing to fa or sui build and ops after. Easy choice as he is very versatile. skubasteve - solid ops guy, willing to do overnight ops. Very active. Another easy pick satansarsonmilitia - mr irrelevant. Excited to play with him. Going in I wanted 2-3 FA, tons of ops and a solid slow/convert attacker, which i got the steal of the draft on in jboy. All in all I got the dream team draft team. It really doesn’t get any better. Easily the best draft team and 2nd best isn’t even close. I give us a Merf 99% chance of a realm win and ill get started on the rnd win story asap.

'''Team Ivetza'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

“I think my pack will end as some kind of beautiful disaster” is the only response we were able to extract from Ivetza, who refused to do his homework.

The player beautiful disaster was not available to be drafted.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Not created.

'''Actual Text'''

''Initially supplied:''

And I don't have any idea why I pick all that Tortuga scums, how to explain to them I just need 100 souls to avoid 10 years service on the Dutchman which remind me I need more alcoholics so please Fett change realm max players to 101. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

''This was then presumably later fed into ChatGPT and Ivetza supplied the following (largely empty of reasoning) reasoning:''

I’ve got no clue why I keep picking up all that Tortuga scum, but here we are. Look, I just need 100 souls to dodge ten years aboard the Dutchman—simple math, really. So I’ve been recruiting, and what a fine mess of scallywags we’ve got!

Harm got picked just for showin’ up to the great gangbang of piracy—no questions asked. MannoWrath joined the crew thanks to his mighty man-of-war and even mightier name, now forever fused as HarmNoWrath. With fire in their sails and questionable morals, they were a natural fit.

Then there’s Zar. Just pure awesomeness. Zar Zar har har! The crew shouted it so loud the kraken blushed. Join our ship, ahoy, or walk the metaphorical plank of mediocrity!

Jocke’s aboard too, ‘cause things in dom were gettin’ too serious. We needed more jockes and fewer blockes. Then came Jaerock, our discord shouter extraordinaire. No lady is safe, no eardrum left undamaged.

Kenshiro—aye, the warrior with fists of fury—joined us so we can set sail for distant lands and bring back barrels of sake. He also kicks like a mule, so that’s a bonus.

Then we’ve got M4nus007. The name’s Bond. James Bond. Smooth-talkin’ spy who can charm us out of cannonfire and into a brothel with one eyebrow raise.

Beta52 hopped aboard because, let's face it, what pirate crew doesn't need a math nerd? Someone’s gotta calculate the rum-to-crew ratio and ensure our loot splits properly. Love you, Beta.

Taldarin2020 came to remind us of the cursed year when our ships were locked down and we had to plunder via Zoom. A dark time. We drank sanitizer. Never again.

And finally, the cherry on this rum-soaked pie: Drads. The legend. The anchor. The wind in our sails. With Drads aboard, the team’s so damn almighty, even Poseidon takes notes.

So Fett, do us all a favor—raise the realm limit to 101. I’m still short a few souls, and I hear there’s a bar full of alcoholics just down the shore.

Yo ho ho, and a bottle of “don’t ask what’s in it”!

'''Team Rompar'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Round 1
Rio - there is no single draft round I haven't been with him so he is a natural first pick Wurst - great player with lots of knowledge and skills never been with him in a full round looking forward to this moment
Internetfett - if one of the best wonders is Fountain of Youth, then fett must be called the Spring of Knowledge
Harm - very friendly active player who I really enjoyed playing with, having a tool for posting Top Op
Jboy - winner from the last round, come on who doesn't want to have a winner in his team

Round 2
Slypimp - very good player who I have been before and we do get along so would love to have him
Eric - suicidal tendency I love it, seriously very active player ready to sacrifice his own round for the greater good
B - being ready to step in as a captain in case we don't have enough, means he might have a plan, means I can only get an advantage with him on board
Jocke,Manowrath and Neruht - one of the greatest opers I have been with who can say no to that

Round 3
DantheMan, Sugarjohn, Merf, Kenshiro - great FA can be helped to win the round or used to stall the dynamics and help realmies who come from behind

Rush, AgFx, Cronel, Grapes - devoted bloper but can also provide huge ops support

Sharkey, Zar - player I do get along with able to attack but also always in the top ops ranking

Ofc if ppl from higher ranked pick are still available I may go for them

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I stuck with my usual first pick, Rio—no surprise there, since he runs the Rio Ranks. Chunk was a must-have for his top op calculator, and Zedijar, the first OD-winning explorer, adds some history to the team. Neruht might not be a well-known name yet, but his tracking skills last round made him an easy pick. OMGnoob brings top-tier attacking experience, while Slice, Mesaxx, and Squarewave round out the squad with versatility and activity. Uruk Hai adds some brute force, and as for Saimon? Well, Saimon says we win.

'''Actual Text'''

1st pick Rio - what is a draft round without us pairing? Active or not he is the one who makes the Rio Ranks so no wo der I will end up on top there 2nd pick Chunk - the guy who runs the top op calculator most of the ppl are using this days is the guy you must have and that is for sure pick number 2 for our team 3rd pick Zedijar - not many explorers ever won but he was the first in OD, ladies and gents please welcome to our team Zedijar 4th pick Neruht - a name that most of you don't know just yet but you are about to remember Neruht The guys was able to explore and single handly track the top op last round so another name that is a must 5th pick OMGnoob - highly ranked experienced attacker who will bring that extra versatile attacking experience that we just need 6th pick Slice - if you want a piece of cake you must Slice it first 7th pick Mesaxx - being with us last time and the only time when draf realm won the round tells it all 8th pick Squarewave - an extra active player who will provide lots of ops and blops whenever they are needed 9th pick Uruk Hai - all the hordes of goblins and orc will need an Uruk Hai to lead them 10th pick Saimon - Saimon says we win

Round 44 draft

2025-03-24T14:21:47Z

Rush:

== Notes ==

Round 44 was the fourth Draft Round. Unlike previous drafts where captains were selected by vote or based on previous teams, this round captains volunteered themselves and were automatically entered into the draft.

The draft was organised by draftmaster Erix and assistant-to-the-draftmaster Damdred. It was carried out privately and then announced in a collaborative podcast between RiolTalk and Rush Hour, featuring their regular hosts Rio, Merf, Rush and AgFx. Damdred also guested briefly.

The podcast was published to announce the draft, as well as discuss player picks and potential team strategies, and is available to listen to on Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/40OCpyPINw10hpXmBsGBtw?si=78e63975f8cc4b77

The teams were as follows:

{| class="wikitable"
!Captain
![[R44Jmerc|Jmerc13]]
![[R44Damdred|Damdred]]
![[R44Scrornch|Scratch]]
![[R44Cerbrus87|Cerbrus]]
![[R44Mcgeeal|Mcgeeal]]
![[R44Mithrandir|Mithrandir]]
![[R44Ivetza|Ivetza]]
![[R44Rompar|Rompar]]
|-
|''Co-Captain''
|''Rush''
|''Wurstmeyer''
|''B''
|''Weaser''
|''Internetfett''
|''Erix''
|''Harm''
|''Rompar''
|-
|Second Round
|AgFx
|DanTheMan
|SugarJon
|Lamb
|Bobbo
|DownrightDave
|Mannowrath
|Rio
|-
|Third Round
|Disco
|SlyPimp
|BigBell
|King Jota
|ZachSmack
|GrapesofMath
|Zar
|Zedijar
|-
|Fourth Round
|Cronel
|Sizzler
|Tidnab
|Chud
|Merf
|Jboy
|Jocke
|Neruht
|-
|Fifth Round
|Shanulf
|DavetheGoliath
|Highlow
|Sharkey
|Alison
|Squanchy
|Jaerock
|OMG Noob
|-
|Sixth Round
|Mattyvanhalen
|Psychosophy
|Noodle
|Blafiora
|TheThing
|Lokiramza
|Kenshiro
|Slice
|-
|Seventh Round
|Empoy
|Cosula
|Yeeow
|Nurtho
|Jamo
|P@qz
|Manus
|Meesax
|-
|Eighth Round
|Zooj
|KingTitus
|KingCT
|Temo
|Gwyn
|Skubasteve
|Beta52
|Squarewave
|-
|Ninth Round
|Bazzaroony
|Extravadanza
|Buckshot
|Finnisher
|DJSoegaard
|Palaiyot
|Taldarin
|Uruk Hai
|-
|Tenth Round
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|SatansArsonMilitia
|Drads
|Saimon
|}

Each team was also rated based on their Rio rank. Ordered from best rating to worst rating, the teams are as follows:

Team Rompar (1st | score 86.8)
Team Damdred (2nd | score 88.8)
Team Mithrandir (3rd | score 90.7)
Team Mcgeeal (3rd | score 90.7)
Team Ivetza (4th | score 92.5)
Team Cerbrus (5th | score 97.9)
Team Scratch (6th | score 125.4)
Team Jmerc (7th | score 126.5)

Unranked players were given a rating of 210 (the default last-place score), which mostly affected Scratch's team rating as he selected three unranked players. Team Ivetza, Team Mithrandir and Team Jmerc had no unranked players on their rosters.

Team Mcgeeal, Team Rompar and Team Ivetza feature the most roundwinners with each team sporting two on their rosters.

== Wishlists and Reasoning ==

Captains were asked to supply a wishlist of their ideal picks before the draft started, as well as reasoning for their actual picks after the draft concluded. These are supplied below, along with the AI summaries of their reasoning that were read out on the draft round podcast.

'''Team Jmerc'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Rush - he’s my guy. Strong blop support

AGFX - again blops support and frickin sweet tracker tool

Cronel - strong blops support (you see the theme)

DownrightDave - can attack and manage blops simultaneously

Harm - strong attacker

Zooj - no explanation needed. Love zooj

Mannowrath - strong ops support (think he falls outside the time zones I’m heavy on)

Disco - super strong fast attacker. Unless he isn’t and abandons but I’ll take that risk

Zachsmack - haven’t played with my boy in forever, strong at pretty much whatever

Cosula - landed with him a few times recently. He is turning to the dark side of blops nicely Not exactly my #1 team, but not an impossible lineup to actually pull off

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Not created.

'''Actual Text'''

Not supplied. Instead Rush, Jmerc's co-captain, gave his theoretical reasoning as to what he thought Jmerc may have been thinking on the podcast.

'''Team Damdred'''

Pre-draft Wishlist

My plan for this draft is to pick a competitive team who I believe I can have fun with, min/maxing as well as going for the win.

Initially I have Wurst targeted as my first pick.

I have a suspicion that Jmerc will select Rush with his first pick, and in this slot I feel as selecting the best available player is the correct decision, if Gothia hadn’t of dropped out I would have debated.

For my second round pick I have another player who can attack pinpointed, the four I am watching most closely in this round are Downrightdave (I don’t believe he will make it to me), dantheman (doubtful he makes it), Eric (won’t make it), and sugarjon (possibly will make it). The goal here is to get a reasonably effective fast attacker who I feel will free up Wurst to play to his strengths.

Third round I am looking for an ops/support player, grapes (chance he won’t be here, noodle (take a slight flyer here based on reputation of a newer player), those are my top two choices I believe jmerc will take cronel here anyway. I haven’t strategised past the third round currently due to unknown variables.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Wurst was my ideal first pick—he covers all attacking needs, from slow to fast to converting, and he’s great with numbers. Second round didn’t go exactly as planned since Dave and Erix were taken early, but I still landed a top attacker in Dan, who I’ve played with before and really enjoy teaming up with. I cross-referenced my list with Wurst’s attacker recommendations and picked up Sly, a solid and consistent performer. Siz was Wurst’s suggestion—he’s been inactive for a while, but he’s a strong attacker and will shake off the rust. Dave was an easy pick as an all-around talent, and Psychosophy was the steal of the draft—god-tier on ops and fills a key time zone gap. Cosula and Titus are reliable ops players, and Danza is a new player I brought in from another game, making him my responsibility.

'''Actual Text'''

first round; went as I hoped, wurst was available, he takes care of the biggest need which is attacking he can handle slow fast and converting and is a numbers guy we need. Second round: some of my top picks were taken in this spot, I was a little disappointed that Dave was taken by mith and that Eric was taken first round and didn’t fall into my lap. I suspect that Dan would of been taken as well if he had marked high activity, I was fortunate to land a great attacker here, I’ve played with him several times and I really enjoy playing with him so it’s a win
I made a list of people who I wanted to play with and cross referenced it with people that wurst suggested as well who were excellent attackers I had a large amount of them still available at this point. Sly is an excellent investment as a team mate, he has a great deal of knowledge and has consistent results across his rounds. It was an easy pickup and complemented Dan and wurst.
Siz was someone I was not aware of but wurst recommended and loved the pick. He hadn’t played in quite some time so rust is a bit of a factor maybe. However, he will pick it back up and he’s a very solid attacker for the team
At this point I knew I needed to pick best player
Dave I know Dave from a round or two we packed together, excellent all around player can attack is great at ops and has a great deal of activity. Perfect for what I want
Psy, how on gods green earth this man was this low idk, to me this is the steal of the draft. Excellent if not god tier on ops, high activity covers a time zone that we are a little weaker in (or can be support when most Americans can be busy). Super happy with this pickup
7/8. cosula and Titus are ops players who are dependable and I figured scratch wanted them.
Danza is a new player who I brought over from another game my responsibility

'''Team Scratch'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

I've been asked (by a very naggy, old, balding man) to write a little bit about what I hope to gain from my team as I draft them. I signed up as a captain excited at the possibility of being able to play with so many great and fun people who I've not yet had a chance to pack with. Sadly, none of those players decided to sign up, so I had to settle for these clowns.

Basically my goal is to find a balanced team full of players who can take on many different roles depending on what we all decide together. My major deciding factor outside of that will be discord activity, as I'm hoping to not take anyone who I haven't seen talk.

With my first pick, I wanted to make sure I picked someone I haven't had a chance to play with, but who I am familiar with or talked to. It really came down to downrightdave or B, but since I want to actually do well, it has to be B. Also, he wanted to be a captain this round so that he'd have a chance to put together a strong and competitive team, so I thought it would be especially funny to take himself myself and throw those hopes and dreams right out the window.

Since I decided to go with an early pick, a great deal of what happens beyond that point is dependent on the competence of my fellow captains. Needless to say, I fully anticipate my plans will go through without a hitch.

I want to get one of the Dave/Grapes/Jon pack if possible, but I'm not too picky on which one because they're all the same person anyway. Beyond that, I've got a whole notebook page full of people I'd be happy to get, and it doesn't even include some of the obvious names. Really I just want to have a fun round with some cool people, and maybe we can sneak out a win through sheer willpower and friendship <3

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I went into this draft with a clear plan, and while things didn’t always go perfectly, I’m really happy with how my team shaped up. B was my first pick because he’s a great player and someone whose game philosophy aligns with mine. Sugarjon was an easy second-round choice since I wanted someone from the Dave/Jon/Grapes group, and with Dave off the board, he was the natural fit. BigBell came next, mostly because my original target got sniped, but he meshes well with B’s timezone, so it worked out. Tidnab was a no-brainer—our past Diplomacy chats and his compatibility with the team made this pick feel like destiny. Noodle & HighLow were great picks, even if it meant losing my next turn, and I could tell I made the right call when Mith cursed me out right after. Yeeeoow was a total self-indulgent pick, since he plays like me—badly but with style—so naturally, I love it. Kingct was a fun wildcard pick, mostly to screw over Damdred, and Buckshot is a bit of a mystery, but I like his attitude. Also, fun fact about me: I like to lick windows. Not sure how that’ll play into my strategy as a draft captain but I’m confident that I’ll find a way*.

(Final sentence may have been edited in by Rush. Allegedly.)

Scratch took the time to roast some of the other teams before getting into his own reasoning. Here are some of the best ones:

Team Ivetza: He put together a very solid team here. Too bad Ivetza has to be in it.

Team Mcgeeal: Sort of like looking at a high school basketball coach try to relive his glory days, Mcgeeal clearly hasn't moved on from his round win.

Team Jmerc: Omg look at me I'm so chaotic! <-- that's probably what beardy boy was thinking when he picked the most obvious team imaginable. Does chaos generally entail doing everything in the most predictable way? I just feel bad for Disco, the dude is probably gonna abandon twice.

'''Actual Text'''

First round, B: I haven't played with him, but I've talked to him a decent amount and find myself lining up with his approach to the game and philosophies overall pretty well. Also he's actually a really good player, unlike myself, so I'm really happy with him as my first pick overall. Every good group needs a cornerstone "glue guy", and that's what I think B will B. Second round, Sugarjon: from the beginning of the draft I knew I wanted one of the Dave/Jon/Grapes coalition. Since I nabbed up someone from a different major 5-pack with B, this was pretty much my only shot to get to play with one of these guys, so when Mith took Dave a few spots before me, it made my decision even easier. When I really thought about it, the one I've probably talked to the most was Sugarjon, so this was an easy selection for me. Third round, BigBell: B suggested SlyPimp in this slot, so when he got taken by Damdred (who is an evil bastard) right before my turn I went into panic mode. "Panic mode" will be a recurring theme, btw. Then BigBell's name came up, and with him fitting more closely with B's timezone, it seemed like a nice idea to throw another Euro his way, and I enjoyed BigBell when I played with him before, so I was happy with this choice. Part of me wanted to go with Tidnab here, but oh well. Maybe some other round we'll random together.

Fourth round, Tidnab: Oh, lookie here, I found myself a Tidnab. Another person whose timezone works well with B, and someone else who I haven't had the pleasure of playing with. Oh how the stars have aligned! I've played Diplomacy with him, talked to him about (sand) pirates, this was a slam dunk pick. In fact, this pick was so good it almost makes the rest of them feel like trash. And speaking of trash... Fifth round, Noodle & HighLow: I'm just kidding, these two are great picks and it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know them over the past few months. While I'm very happy to grab these two here (Mithrandir messaged me with a simple "fuck you" immediately after I made this pick, so while he already does this pretty frequently, that to me showed I made the right choice), it did put me in a bit of a bind, as I had to relinquish my next pick afterwards. Sixth round, psychosoph- oh wait, nevermind. Seventh round, Yeeeoow: Completely abandoning my plan of mostly taking people I haven't played with much, I drafted the person I probably have played with the most of anyone in the entire game. He doesn't play strategies that work, gets hit all the time, and gets in fights with someone new almost every single round. In essence, I just drafted myself, which makes this the best pick of the entire draft.

Eighth round, Kingct: An import from a game Damdred plays, he had been all excited to take this sleeper pick right at the very end, but I've heard good things about this guy and Damdred deserves to not get what he wants, so that made this selection very easy for me. I love encountering newer players who actually try, so hopefully that's exactly what I drafted here. Ninth round, Buckshot: I don't want to be rude, but apart from seeing his name show up making a couple discord comments about not wanting to disappoint anyone by not being very good/active (which I see as a positive sign, anyone who feels bad about dragging the team down is a kindred spirit), I don't really know this guy at all. But I look forward to seeing how he works out. Welcome to Team Scratch.

Team Rompar: I mean, Rio put his activity level at "low" and he still picked him first, so I think that choice speaks for itself. He's got some cool people on here, but some of his choices and the timing for them felt like some RNG shit. Team Ivetza: He put together a very solid team here. Too bad Ivetza has to be in it. Team Mithrandir: One of the best teams in here, solid picks pretty much across the board. No real scathing notes here apart from a simple "fuck you". Tag, you're it. Team Mcgeeal: Sort of like looking at a high school basketball coach try to relive his glory days, Mcgeeal clearly hasn't moved on from his round win. Team Cerbrus: Pretty well rounded team, I could see them doing pretty well. No real roasts here, good job, babe. Team Damdred: I thought it would be fun drafting a team right next to my buddy. I was wrong, this dude pissed me off almost every pick. We basically wanted the exact same team, and I think we ended up with teams that feel pretty similar. Team Jmerc: Omg look at me I'm so chaotic! <-- that's probably what beardy boy was thinking when he picked the most obvious team imaginable. Does chaos generally entail doing everything in the most predictable way? I just feel bad for Disco, the dude is probably gonna abandon twice.

'''Team Cerbrus'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

(Cerb did not pick up any of his originally intended picks)

Rio - he plays fast attackers and slow/mid attacker at a high level and consistently has good finishes. He is a good leader and strategist. Also, last time we played together in a draft round he won

Wurstmeyer - he is an excellent strategist, his pre round game plan and simming are top notch. His expertise will help guide the realm with multiple scenario options. He consistently has strong finishes

Dantheman- we were packmates in the early stages of coming back to the game, I would like to play with him again. He is an excellent fast attacker with the balls to make the big hit even if it sinks his round. Putting the realm first is a quality I look for

Grapesofmath- he can be an attacker or blopper, when i have played with him he has been a team player and helped get hits from killing drafts. Having a blop leader would be good early and mid round

Chunk - I think he recently said he would join the draft. I can’t remember playing with him and would like to. I know he is a solid fast attacker and mid attacker. Even while exploring I think he could provide great advice and guidance

Internetfett - who wouldn’t want the one and only fett. Good fast attacker and solid mid attacker. Great with numbers/strats and insights. Is a fun player to play with Manno- ops guys are important, has a high ranking and is wanting to play slower style. Heard good things about him

Disco- I think he plays a high risk/reward playstyle with fast attacking. Having him paired with another solid fast attacker and soild ops could help him break free
Cronel- chaos, disrupter, enough said

Sugarjon- a solid attacker who can go the blops route if needed. Good teammate/realmie

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

The draft process was fast-paced and chaotic, forcing a shift from my original plan of building a balanced team to prioritizing top-tier players. The first pick, Weaser, was chosen for his consistency as a mid-speed attacker, a dominant playstyle in recent rounds. Lamb and King Jota followed as familiar and reliable mid-speed attackers, while Chud was picked purely for value. Sharkey brought leadership and versatility, making him a key addition. Blaforia added speed and veteran experience, while Nurtho’s flexibility made him a strong choice. The last picks, Temo and Finnisher, were more of a gamble due to limited knowledge. Overall, I think the team looks solid, with a strong mix of experience, adaptability, and firepower—ready to perform!

'''Actual Text'''

When I was thinking of my ideal team I had in mind a nice mix of fast attackers, mid speed/converters, ops/blops guys with a sprinkle of veteran leadership. Of the 10 players I selected for my “ideal” team I ended up taking none of them. Some due to others picking them first and another because they put activity level as low, like Rio. The draft went so fast, players were picking faster than in the dom fantasy draft. I was at work and trying to make big decisions in a matter of mins from the constant pings lol. I knew I wanted to take the “best” players first, disregarding my want to form a well-rounded group.

My first pick was Weaser, I am pretty sure I played with him but I quickly looked at his stats and he was a solid, consistent performer. Consistency with the first pick I felt was key. He had some really good finishes as a convert/mid speed attacker and that seems to be the winner lately so I picked him up. He also had a decent fast attacker round

My second pick was lamb, one who I have packed with and played with numerous times. He is also a consistent mid speed attacker. I am hoping the familiarity will help us and he has 24 rounds on OD under his belt.

My third pick as King Jota, another consistent mid speed attacker. He really impressed me with his round as gob converter “Wife vs OD round 31”, great name BTW as we can all relate.

Fourth pick was chud, yet another solid mid speed attacker. He was the best pick available by far so I picked him up Fifth pick was Sharkey, my brother from another mother. We have been packing together since round 23. His insight and knowledge of the game is second to none. He is versatile and can play anything. He has great leadership and planning

Sixth pick was blaforia, he is a great fast attacker and is a vet Seventh pick was nurtho. I have played with him before and he is a great teammate. He can play multiple roles Eight pick was Temo, I do not know much about him

Ninth pick was finnisher, do not know much about him I am very happy with my team, I think we will perform great! Let’s go!

'''Team Mcgeeal'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Okay in other drafts, high activity FAs are at a premium, so thinking I use my first pick on that. I’m hoping to grab someone I know can do math and sim, because I am not that guy, pal. More of the hype-man captain. I think top of my board will look something like this, only a little different from their rio ranks tbh:

Fett: Only played with once and is a fun teammate, though he’s marked ‘medium’ activity, I question how ‘medium’ looks to him.

Weazer: Look at that rio rank and good at mathing, high activity

Erix: The fellow hype man, is good at the game and also guarantees an active fun realm

Lamb: A wildcard pick in terms of realmmate, I don’t think we’ve played before but is good and marked high activity.

Chunk** who isn’t FA but I’ve never played with and want to - we’ve had a couple of fun races to the finish line as explorers, and can still do math. Plus I can finally interrogate him on his darn calculator! Just not sure how good an idea it is to pick explorer so high, maybe he falls to second rd pick?

Harm: good dude, good player, here for the gangbang

Bobbo: Always in the FA mix, will pull over to attack on time. Also a TFT buddy, but I don’t know if he’s a simmer

Wurst: Really good at the game, think I’ve only played with him once but he stayed in pack chat mostly, so loses points.

Jota: Is indeed grumpy on the outside but good at the game and I’ve had good experience playing with him as a noob.

B: Don’t think I’ve played with him at all, is kind of a wildcard pick. I don’t really know what to expect in terms of fun/engagement with some people that I haven’t played with, even though that’s a bit of the point. The rest I’m just looking for folks who I think are fun mostly.

Team comp we’ll figure out later. I do want another good explorer - whether that’s Chunk, Zedi, or Manno.

Reuniting with Rush / AGFX would be awesome, but I kind of expect Jmerc to reach for them tbh.

Some other dark horses for competitiveness in the later rounds I like are Tidnab, Alison, Zar, ZOOJ, Merf if his ‘low’ activity scares away captains

Notable un-mentions are the Hydra and Sharkey, who are all great and fun to play with and guys that I’ve been in-realm with many times now. If the draft is an opportunity to play with some new people, I ought to take it. Don’t be surprised if I actually panic-pick some of this list though. In fact, I play based on vibes, I doubt any of this is actually that useful, it’ll all come down to what I’m feeling in the moment that it’s my turn to pick.

Joker_Man_With_A_Plan.GIF

In the late-late rounds, when it comes to the new players, I hope to get someone who marked they’re open to playing Ops role, so I can help keep an eye on them and mentor. Not so good at doing that for an attacker.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I ended up with a team similar to my Round 38 win, which I’m happy about, though I didn’t land any big names I haven’t played with before—just some I haven’t teamed up with often. We’re stacked with high-powered options like Fett, Bobbo, Merf, TheThing, and Zach, built to run fast, but we’ve also got solid slower play choices. TheThing dropped in the draft because he’s “leaving on May 4th,” but I’ll take the steal. I just missed out on Beta52, and my last pick was a new player outside the US time zone, but it was late, and options were limited.

'''Actual Text'''

Short version, I’m a busy man: I basically stumbled into assembling a similar comp to my round 38 win, so happy about that, but i failed to get any well-known people who I haven’t played with yet. That said I’ve chosen folks who I haven’t gotten to play with very often* Obviously I have the best team, multiple high-octane options as FAs with Fett, Bobbo, Merf, TheThing, and Zach, we’re built to run and not look back. If we have to pass the buck, we’re in good hands with whoever will join Alison in a slower playstyle. We’ve Gwyn, myself, a couple new players, as well as probably one of the attacking options already mentioned for ops.
Notably, TheThing “is leaving on May 4th” which made him fall in the draft, I don’t really know what that means but he was a steal, May the Fourth be Damned! Jamo was noted as an up-and-comer by Fett, I was hoping to nab him and Beta52 late, but just missed out on Beta (he was a big steal that late as well). My apologies to the single pick of mine, a new player who isn’t in the US-time zone, but it was late and I had few options left.

'''Team Mithrandir'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Attacker im targeting in kind of order: Erix Wurst Jboy Rio Jota Fett Weaser B Harm SugarJon DownrightDave Lamb Merf Blaf Matty BigBell Thething
Top Ops guys im targeting: Chunk Manno Zed Zar shanulf jocke cronel empoy loki nurtho
Others: Disco Zooj (low key great ops guy) Sharkey Grapes

general plan is to get 1-2 attackers on my list, maybe a top ops guy 2nd pick then back to attackers. Taking value over needs in general but ideally 2 guys that can FA, 1 good strategy guy and the rest ops guys and hybrid players. It will really come down to best available and value over everything. Time zones not too much of a concern. I “can” lead but prefer another elite player to co lead the pack.

I’m hoping other captains are incompetent and skip over high value guys

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I somehow landed Erix, which gives me insider draft knowledge and a solid attacker. Dave was an easy pick as a top FA and fun teammate, and Grapes was the obvious choice for ops, especially with Dave around—Cocaine and waffles approved. Jboy fooled everyone about his activity and will carry us to victory. Squanchy is underrated but always online, Loki slipped way too far, P@qz brings versatility, and skubasteve is another nonstop ops machine. Satansarsonmilitia rounds it out as Mr. Irrelevant. I wanted FA power, strong ops, and a slow/convert attacker—got all that and stole Jboy. Best draft team by a mile, Merf 99% realm win incoming.

'''Actual Text'''

Erix - easy pick, idk how he fell to me. I get draft insider knowledge and secrets. Also i guess hes an okay attacker. Dave - Top FA, very fun to play with, easy pick Grapes - The obvious choice for a top ops guy and i have dave. Cocaine and waffles approved. Jboy - everyone slept on his lie about low activity. Hes going to win us the rnd. Elite elite player Squanchy - underrated top ops guy, easy pick and he is on 24/7 Loki - idk how he fell. Maybe bc taking rnd off but he said hes going to be active as fuk and willing to go on overnight. Easy pick and jmerc/rush cant have him. Win win P@qz - great player, willing to fa or sui build and ops after. Easy choice as he is very versatile. skubasteve - solid ops guy, willing to do overnight ops. Very active. Another easy pick satansarsonmilitia - mr irrelevant. Excited to play with him. Going in I wanted 2-3 FA, tons of ops and a solid slow/convert attacker, which i got the steal of the draft on in jboy. All in all I got the dream team draft team. It really doesn’t get any better. Easily the best draft team and 2nd best isn’t even close. I give us a Merf 99% chance of a realm win and ill get started on the rnd win story asap.

'''Team Ivetza'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

“I think my pack will end as some kind of beautiful disaster” is the only response we were able to extract from Ivetza, who refused to do his homework.

The player beautiful disaster was not available to be drafted.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Not created.

'''Actual Text'''

''Initially supplied:''

And I don't have any idea why I pick all that Tortuga scums, how to explain to them I just need 100 souls to avoid 10 years service on the Dutchman which remind me I need more alcoholics so please Fett change realm max players to 101. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

''This was then presumably later fed into ChatGPT and Ivetza supplied the following (largely empty of reasoning) reasoning:''

I’ve got no clue why I keep picking up all that Tortuga scum, but here we are. Look, I just need 100 souls to dodge ten years aboard the Dutchman—simple math, really. So I’ve been recruiting, and what a fine mess of scallywags we’ve got!

Harm got picked just for showin’ up to the great gangbang of piracy—no questions asked. MannoWrath joined the crew thanks to his mighty man-of-war and even mightier name, now forever fused as HarmNoWrath. With fire in their sails and questionable morals, they were a natural fit.

Then there’s Zar. Just pure awesomeness. Zar Zar har har! The crew shouted it so loud the kraken blushed. Join our ship, ahoy, or walk the metaphorical plank of mediocrity!

Jocke’s aboard too, ‘cause things in dom were gettin’ too serious. We needed more jockes and fewer blockes. Then came Jaerock, our discord shouter extraordinaire. No lady is safe, no eardrum left undamaged.

Kenshiro—aye, the warrior with fists of fury—joined us so we can set sail for distant lands and bring back barrels of sake. He also kicks like a mule, so that’s a bonus.

Then we’ve got M4nus007. The name’s Bond. James Bond. Smooth-talkin’ spy who can charm us out of cannonfire and into a brothel with one eyebrow raise.

Beta52 hopped aboard because, let's face it, what pirate crew doesn't need a math nerd? Someone’s gotta calculate the rum-to-crew ratio and ensure our loot splits properly. Love you, Beta.

Taldarin2020 came to remind us of the cursed year when our ships were locked down and we had to plunder via Zoom. A dark time. We drank sanitizer. Never again.

And finally, the cherry on this rum-soaked pie: Drads. The legend. The anchor. The wind in our sails. With Drads aboard, the team’s so damn almighty, even Poseidon takes notes.

So Fett, do us all a favor—raise the realm limit to 101. I’m still short a few souls, and I hear there’s a bar full of alcoholics just down the shore.

Yo ho ho, and a bottle of “don’t ask what’s in it”!

'''Team Rompar'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Round 1
Rio - there is no single draft round I haven't been with him so he is a natural first pick Wurst - great player with lots of knowledge and skills never been with him in a full round looking forward to this moment
Internetfett - if one of the best wonders is Fountain of Youth, then fett must be called the Spring of Knowledge
Harm - very friendly active player who I really enjoyed playing with, having a tool for posting Top Op
Jboy - winner from the last round, come on who doesn't want to have a winner in his team

Round 2
Slypimp - very good player who I have been before and we do get along so would love to have him
Eric - suicidal tendency I love it, seriously very active player ready to sacrifice his own round for the greater good
B - being ready to step in as a captain in case we don't have enough, means he might have a plan, means I can only get an advantage with him on board
Jocke,Manowrath and Neruht - one of the greatest opers I have been with who can say no to that

Round 3
DantheMan, Sugarjohn, Merf, Kenshiro - great FA can be helped to win the round or used to stall the dynamics and help realmies who come from behind

Rush, AgFx, Cronel, Grapes - devoted bloper but can also provide huge ops support

Sharkey, Zar - player I do get along with able to attack but also always in the top ops ranking

Ofc if ppl from higher ranked pick are still available I may go for them

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I stuck with my usual first pick, Rio—no surprise there, since he runs the Rio Ranks. Chunk was a must-have for his top op calculator, and Zedijar, the first OD-winning explorer, adds some history to the team. Neruht might not be a well-known name yet, but his tracking skills last round made him an easy pick. OMGnoob brings top-tier attacking experience, while Slice, Mesaxx, and Squarewave round out the squad with versatility and activity. Uruk Hai adds some brute force, and as for Saimon? Well, Saimon says we win.

'''Actual Text'''

1st pick Rio - what is a draft round without us pairing? Active or not he is the one who makes the Rio Ranks so no wo der I will end up on top there 2nd pick Chunk - the guy who runs the top op calculator most of the ppl are using this days is the guy you must have and that is for sure pick number 2 for our team 3rd pick Zedijar - not many explorers ever won but he was the first in OD, ladies and gents please welcome to our team Zedijar 4th pick Neruht - a name that most of you don't know just yet but you are about to remember Neruht The guys was able to explore and single handly track the top op last round so another name that is a must 5th pick OMGnoob - highly ranked experienced attacker who will bring that extra versatile attacking experience that we just need 6th pick Slice - if you want a piece of cake you must Slice it first 7th pick Mesaxx - being with us last time and the only time when draf realm won the round tells it all 8th pick Squarewave - an extra active player who will provide lots of ops and blops whenever they are needed 9th pick Uruk Hai - all the hordes of goblins and orc will need an Uruk Hai to lead them 10th pick Saimon - Saimon says we win

Round 44 draft

2025-03-24T14:19:54Z

Rush: Created page with " == Notes == Round 44 was the fourth Draft Round. Unlike previous drafts where captains were selected by vote or based on previous teams, this round captains volunteered them..."

== Notes ==

Round 44 was the fourth Draft Round. Unlike previous drafts where captains were selected by vote or based on previous teams, this round captains volunteered themselves and were automatically entered into the draft.

The draft was organised by draftmaster Erix and assistant-to-the-draftmaster Damdred. It was carried out privately and then announced in a collaborative podcast between RiolTalk and Rush Hour, featuring their regular hosts Rio, Merf, Rush and AgFx. Damdred also guested briefly.

The podcast was published to announce the draft, as well as discuss player picks and potential team strategies, and is available to listen to on Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/40OCpyPINw10hpXmBsGBtw?si=78e63975f8cc4b77

The teams were as follows:

{| class="wikitable"
!Captain
![[R44Jmerc|Jmerc13]]
![[R44Damdred|Damdred]]
![[R44Scrornch|Scratch]]
![[R44Cerbrus87|Cerbrus]]
![[R44Mcgeeal|Mcgeeal]]
![[R44Mithrandir|Mithrandir]]
![[R44Ivetza|Ivetza]]
![[R44Rompar|Rompar]]
|-
|''Co-Captain''
|''Rush''
|''Wurstmeyer''
|''B''
|''Weaser''
|''Internetfett''
|''Erix''
|''Harm''
|''Rompar''
|-
|Second Round
|AgFx
|DanTheMan
|SugarJon
|Lamb
|Bobbo
|DownrightDave
|Mannowrath
|Rio
|-
|Third Round
|Disco
|SlyPimp
|BigBell
|King Jota
|ZachSmack
|GrapesofMath
|Zar
|Zedijar
|-
|Fourth Round
|Cronel
|Sizzler
|Tidnab
|Chud
|Merf
|Jboy
|Jocke
|Neruht
|-
|Fifth Round
|Shanulf
|DavetheGoliath
|Highlow
|Sharkey
|Alison
|Squanchy
|Jaerock
|OMG Noob
|-
|Sixth Round
|Mattyvanhalen
|Psychosophy
|Noodle
|Blafiora
|TheThing
|Lokiramza
|Kenshiro
|Slice
|-
|Seventh Round
|Empoy
|Cosula
|Yeeow
|Nurtho
|Jamo
|P@qz
|Manus
|Meesax
|-
|Eighth Round
|Zooj
|KingTitus
|KingCT
|Temo
|Gwyn
|Skubasteve
|Beta52
|Squarewave
|-
|Ninth Round
|Bazzaroony
|Extravadanza
|Buckshot
|Finnisher
|DJSoegaard
|Palaiyot
|Taldarin
|Uruk Hai
|-
|Tenth Round
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|(Empty)
|SatansArsonMilitia
|Drads
|Saimon
|}

Each team was also rated based on their Rio rank. Ordered from best rating to worst rating, the teams are as follows:

Team Rompar (1st | score 86.8)
Team Damdred (2nd | score 88.8)
Team Mithrandir (3rd | score 90.7)
Team Mcgeeal (3rd | score 90.7)
Team Ivetza (4th | score 92.5)
Team Cerbrus (5th | score 97.9)
Team Scratch (6th | score 125.4)
Team Jmerc (7th | score 126.5)

Unranked players were given a rating of 210 (the default last-place score), which mostly affected Scratch's team rating as he selected three unranked players. Team Ivetza, Team Mithrandir and Team Jmerc had no unranked players on their rosters.

Team Mcgeeal, Team Rompar and Team Ivetza feature the most roundwinners with each team sporting two on their rosters.

== Wishlists and Reasoning ==

Captains were asked to supply a wishlist of their ideal picks before the draft started, as well as reasoning for their actual picks after the draft concluded. These are supplied below, along with the AI summaries of their reasoning that were read out on the draft round podcast.

'''Team Jmerc'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Rush - he’s my guy. Strong blop support

AGFX - again blops support and frickin sweet tracker tool

Cronel - strong blops support (you see the theme)

DownrightDave - can attack and manage blops simultaneously

Harm - strong attacker

Zooj - no explanation needed. Love zooj

Mannowrath - strong ops support (think he falls outside the time zones I’m heavy on)

Disco - super strong fast attacker. Unless he isn’t and abandons but I’ll take that risk

Zachsmack - haven’t played with my boy in forever, strong at pretty much whatever

Cosula - landed with him a few times recently. He is turning to the dark side of blops nicely Not exactly my #1 team, but not an impossible lineup to actually pull off

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Not created.

'''Actual Text'''

Not supplied. Instead Rush, Jmerc's co-captain, gave his theoretical reasoning as to what he thought Jmerc may have been thinking on the podcast.

'''Team Damdred'''

Pre-draft Wishlist

My plan for this draft is to pick a competitive team who I believe I can have fun with, min/maxing as well as going for the win.

Initially I have Wurst targeted as my first pick.

I have a suspicion that Jmerc will select Rush with his first pick, and in this slot I feel as selecting the best available player is the correct decision, if Gothia hadn’t of dropped out I would have debated.

For my second round pick I have another player who can attack pinpointed, the four I am watching most closely in this round are Downrightdave (I don’t believe he will make it to me), dantheman (doubtful he makes it), Eric (won’t make it), and sugarjon (possibly will make it). The goal here is to get a reasonably effective fast attacker who I feel will free up Wurst to play to his strengths.

Third round I am looking for an ops/support player, grapes (chance he won’t be here, noodle (take a slight flyer here based on reputation of a newer player), those are my top two choices I believe jmerc will take cronel here anyway. I haven’t strategised past the third round currently due to unknown variables.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Wurst was my ideal first pick—he covers all attacking needs, from slow to fast to converting, and he’s great with numbers. Second round didn’t go exactly as planned since Dave and Erix were taken early, but I still landed a top attacker in Dan, who I’ve played with before and really enjoy teaming up with. I cross-referenced my list with Wurst’s attacker recommendations and picked up Sly, a solid and consistent performer. Siz was Wurst’s suggestion—he’s been inactive for a while, but he’s a strong attacker and will shake off the rust. Dave was an easy pick as an all-around talent, and Psychosophy was the steal of the draft—god-tier on ops and fills a key time zone gap. Cosula and Titus are reliable ops players, and Danza is a new player I brought in from another game, making him my responsibility.

'''Actual Text'''

first round; went as I hoped, wurst was available, he takes care of the biggest need which is attacking he can handle slow fast and converting and is a numbers guy we need. Second round: some of my top picks were taken in this spot, I was a little disappointed that Dave was taken by mith and that Eric was taken first round and didn’t fall into my lap. I suspect that Dan would of been taken as well if he had marked high activity, I was fortunate to land a great attacker here, I’ve played with him several times and I really enjoy playing with him so it’s a win
I made a list of people who I wanted to play with and cross referenced it with people that wurst suggested as well who were excellent attackers I had a large amount of them still available at this point. Sly is an excellent investment as a team mate, he has a great deal of knowledge and has consistent results across his rounds. It was an easy pickup and complemented Dan and wurst.
Siz was someone I was not aware of but wurst recommended and loved the pick. He hadn’t played in quite some time so rust is a bit of a factor maybe. However, he will pick it back up and he’s a very solid attacker for the team
At this point I knew I needed to pick best player
Dave I know Dave from a round or two we packed together, excellent all around player can attack is great at ops and has a great deal of activity. Perfect for what I want
Psy, how on gods green earth this man was this low idk, to me this is the steal of the draft. Excellent if not god tier on ops, high activity covers a time zone that we are a little weaker in (or can be support when most Americans can be busy). Super happy with this pickup
7/8. cosula and Titus are ops players who are dependable and I figured scratch wanted them.
Danza is a new player who I brought over from another game my responsibility

'''Team Scratch'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

I've been asked (by a very naggy, old, balding man) to write a little bit about what I hope to gain from my team as I draft them. I signed up as a captain excited at the possibility of being able to play with so many great and fun people who I've not yet had a chance to pack with. Sadly, none of those players decided to sign up, so I had to settle for these clowns.

Basically my goal is to find a balanced team full of players who can take on many different roles depending on what we all decide together. My major deciding factor outside of that will be discord activity, as I'm hoping to not take anyone who I haven't seen talk.

With my first pick, I wanted to make sure I picked someone I haven't had a chance to play with, but who I am familiar with or talked to. It really came down to downrightdave or B, but since I want to actually do well, it has to be B. Also, he wanted to be a captain this round so that he'd have a chance to put together a strong and competitive team, so I thought it would be especially funny to take himself myself and throw those hopes and dreams right out the window.

Since I decided to go with an early pick, a great deal of what happens beyond that point is dependent on the competence of my fellow captains. Needless to say, I fully anticipate my plans will go through without a hitch.

I want to get one of the Dave/Grapes/Jon pack if possible, but I'm not too picky on which one because they're all the same person anyway. Beyond that, I've got a whole notebook page full of people I'd be happy to get, and it doesn't even include some of the obvious names. Really I just want to have a fun round with some cool people, and maybe we can sneak out a win through sheer willpower and friendship <3

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I went into this draft with a clear plan, and while things didn’t always go perfectly, I’m really happy with how my team shaped up. B was my first pick because he’s a great player and someone whose game philosophy aligns with mine. Sugarjon was an easy second-round choice since I wanted someone from the Dave/Jon/Grapes group, and with Dave off the board, he was the natural fit. BigBell came next, mostly because my original target got sniped, but he meshes well with B’s timezone, so it worked out. Tidnab was a no-brainer—our past Diplomacy chats and his compatibility with the team made this pick feel like destiny. Noodle & HighLow were great picks, even if it meant losing my next turn, and I could tell I made the right call when Mith cursed me out right after. Yeeeoow was a total self-indulgent pick, since he plays like me—badly but with style—so naturally, I love it. Kingct was a fun wildcard pick, mostly to screw over Damdred, and Buckshot is a bit of a mystery, but I like his attitude. Also, fun fact about me: I like to lick windows. Not sure how that’ll play into my strategy as a draft captain but I’m confident that I’ll find a way*.

(Final sentence may have been edited in by Rush. Allegedly.)

Scratch took the time to roast some of the other teams before getting into his own reasoning. Here are some of the best ones:

Team Ivetza: He put together a very solid team here. Too bad Ivetza has to be in it.

Team Mcgeeal: Sort of like looking at a high school basketball coach try to relive his glory days, Mcgeeal clearly hasn't moved on from his round win.

Team Jmerc: Omg look at me I'm so chaotic! <-- that's probably what beardy boy was thinking when he picked the most obvious team imaginable. Does chaos generally entail doing everything in the most predictable way? I just feel bad for Disco, the dude is probably gonna abandon twice.

'''Actual Text'''

First round, B: I haven't played with him, but I've talked to him a decent amount and find myself lining up with his approach to the game and philosophies overall pretty well. Also he's actually a really good player, unlike myself, so I'm really happy with him as my first pick overall. Every good group needs a cornerstone "glue guy", and that's what I think B will B. Second round, Sugarjon: from the beginning of the draft I knew I wanted one of the Dave/Jon/Grapes coalition. Since I nabbed up someone from a different major 5-pack with B, this was pretty much my only shot to get to play with one of these guys, so when Mith took Dave a few spots before me, it made my decision even easier. When I really thought about it, the one I've probably talked to the most was Sugarjon, so this was an easy selection for me. Third round, BigBell: B suggested SlyPimp in this slot, so when he got taken by Damdred (who is an evil bastard) right before my turn I went into panic mode. "Panic mode" will be a recurring theme, btw. Then BigBell's name came up, and with him fitting more closely with B's timezone, it seemed like a nice idea to throw another Euro his way, and I enjoyed BigBell when I played with him before, so I was happy with this choice. Part of me wanted to go with Tidnab here, but oh well. Maybe some other round we'll random together.

Fourth round, Tidnab: Oh, lookie here, I found myself a Tidnab. Another person whose timezone works well with B, and someone else who I haven't had the pleasure of playing with. Oh how the stars have aligned! I've played Diplomacy with him, talked to him about (sand) pirates, this was a slam dunk pick. In fact, this pick was so good it almost makes the rest of them feel like trash. And speaking of trash... Fifth round, Noodle & HighLow: I'm just kidding, these two are great picks and it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know them over the past few months. While I'm very happy to grab these two here (Mithrandir messaged me with a simple "fuck you" immediately after I made this pick, so while he already does this pretty frequently, that to me showed I made the right choice), it did put me in a bit of a bind, as I had to relinquish my next pick afterwards. Sixth round, psychosoph- oh wait, nevermind. Seventh round, Yeeeoow: Completely abandoning my plan of mostly taking people I haven't played with much, I drafted the person I probably have played with the most of anyone in the entire game. He doesn't play strategies that work, gets hit all the time, and gets in fights with someone new almost every single round. In essence, I just drafted myself, which makes this the best pick of the entire draft.

Eighth round, Kingct: An import from a game Damdred plays, he had been all excited to take this sleeper pick right at the very end, but I've heard good things about this guy and Damdred deserves to not get what he wants, so that made this selection very easy for me. I love encountering newer players who actually try, so hopefully that's exactly what I drafted here. Ninth round, Buckshot: I don't want to be rude, but apart from seeing his name show up making a couple discord comments about not wanting to disappoint anyone by not being very good/active (which I see as a positive sign, anyone who feels bad about dragging the team down is a kindred spirit), I don't really know this guy at all. But I look forward to seeing how he works out. Welcome to Team Scratch.

Team Rompar: I mean, Rio put his activity level at "low" and he still picked him first, so I think that choice speaks for itself. He's got some cool people on here, but some of his choices and the timing for them felt like some RNG shit. Team Ivetza: He put together a very solid team here. Too bad Ivetza has to be in it. Team Mithrandir: One of the best teams in here, solid picks pretty much across the board. No real scathing notes here apart from a simple "fuck you". Tag, you're it. Team Mcgeeal: Sort of like looking at a high school basketball coach try to relive his glory days, Mcgeeal clearly hasn't moved on from his round win. Team Cerbrus: Pretty well rounded team, I could see them doing pretty well. No real roasts here, good job, babe. Team Damdred: I thought it would be fun drafting a team right next to my buddy. I was wrong, this dude pissed me off almost every pick. We basically wanted the exact same team, and I think we ended up with teams that feel pretty similar. Team Jmerc: Omg look at me I'm so chaotic! <-- that's probably what beardy boy was thinking when he picked the most obvious team imaginable. Does chaos generally entail doing everything in the most predictable way? I just feel bad for Disco, the dude is probably gonna abandon twice.

'''Team Cerbrus'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

(Cerb did not pick up any of his originally intended picks)

Rio - he plays fast attackers and slow/mid attacker at a high level and consistently has good finishes. He is a good leader and strategist. Also, last time we played together in a draft round he won

Wurstmeyer - he is an excellent strategist, his pre round game plan and simming are top notch. His expertise will help guide the realm with multiple scenario options. He consistently has strong finishes

Dantheman- we were packmates in the early stages of coming back to the game, I would like to play with him again. He is an excellent fast attacker with the balls to make the big hit even if it sinks his round. Putting the realm first is a quality I look for

Grapesofmath- he can be an attacker or blopper, when i have played with him he has been a team player and helped get hits from killing drafts. Having a blop leader would be good early and mid round

Chunk - I think he recently said he would join the draft. I can’t remember playing with him and would like to. I know he is a solid fast attacker and mid attacker. Even while exploring I think he could provide great advice and guidance

Internetfett - who wouldn’t want the one and only fett. Good fast attacker and solid mid attacker. Great with numbers/strats and insights. Is a fun player to play with Manno- ops guys are important, has a high ranking and is wanting to play slower style. Heard good things about him

Disco- I think he plays a high risk/reward playstyle with fast attacking. Having him paired with another solid fast attacker and soild ops could help him break free
Cronel- chaos, disrupter, enough said

Sugarjon- a solid attacker who can go the blops route if needed. Good teammate/realmie

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

The draft process was fast-paced and chaotic, forcing a shift from my original plan of building a balanced team to prioritizing top-tier players. The first pick, Weaser, was chosen for his consistency as a mid-speed attacker, a dominant playstyle in recent rounds. Lamb and King Jota followed as familiar and reliable mid-speed attackers, while Chud was picked purely for value. Sharkey brought leadership and versatility, making him a key addition. Blaforia added speed and veteran experience, while Nurtho’s flexibility made him a strong choice. The last picks, Temo and Finnisher, were more of a gamble due to limited knowledge. Overall, I think the team looks solid, with a strong mix of experience, adaptability, and firepower—ready to perform!

'''Actual Text'''

When I was thinking of my ideal team I had in mind a nice mix of fast attackers, mid speed/converters, ops/blops guys with a sprinkle of veteran leadership. Of the 10 players I selected for my “ideal” team I ended up taking none of them. Some due to others picking them first and another because they put activity level as low, like Rio. The draft went so fast, players were picking faster than in the dom fantasy draft. I was at work and trying to make big decisions in a matter of mins from the constant pings lol. I knew I wanted to take the “best” players first, disregarding my want to form a well-rounded group.

My first pick was Weaser, I am pretty sure I played with him but I quickly looked at his stats and he was a solid, consistent performer. Consistency with the first pick I felt was key. He had some really good finishes as a convert/mid speed attacker and that seems to be the winner lately so I picked him up. He also had a decent fast attacker round

My second pick was lamb, one who I have packed with and played with numerous times. He is also a consistent mid speed attacker. I am hoping the familiarity will help us and he has 24 rounds on OD under his belt.

My third pick as King Jota, another consistent mid speed attacker. He really impressed me with his round as gob converter “Wife vs OD round 31”, great name BTW as we can all relate.

Fourth pick was chud, yet another solid mid speed attacker. He was the best pick available by far so I picked him up Fifth pick was Sharkey, my brother from another mother. We have been packing together since round 23. His insight and knowledge of the game is second to none. He is versatile and can play anything. He has great leadership and planning

Sixth pick was blaforia, he is a great fast attacker and is a vet Seventh pick was nurtho. I have played with him before and he is a great teammate. He can play multiple roles Eight pick was Temo, I do not know much about him

Ninth pick was finnisher, do not know much about him I am very happy with my team, I think we will perform great! Let’s go!

'''Team Mcgeeal'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Okay in other drafts, high activity FAs are at a premium, so thinking I use my first pick on that. I’m hoping to grab someone I know can do math and sim, because I am not that guy, pal. More of the hype-man captain. I think top of my board will look something like this, only a little different from their rio ranks tbh:

Fett: Only played with once and is a fun teammate, though he’s marked ‘medium’ activity, I question how ‘medium’ looks to him.

Weazer: Look at that rio rank and good at mathing, high activity

Erix: The fellow hype man, is good at the game and also guarantees an active fun realm

Lamb: A wildcard pick in terms of realmmate, I don’t think we’ve played before but is good and marked high activity.

Chunk** who isn’t FA but I’ve never played with and want to - we’ve had a couple of fun races to the finish line as explorers, and can still do math. Plus I can finally interrogate him on his darn calculator! Just not sure how good an idea it is to pick explorer so high, maybe he falls to second rd pick?

Harm: good dude, good player, here for the gangbang

Bobbo: Always in the FA mix, will pull over to attack on time. Also a TFT buddy, but I don’t know if he’s a simmer

Wurst: Really good at the game, think I’ve only played with him once but he stayed in pack chat mostly, so loses points.

Jota: Is indeed grumpy on the outside but good at the game and I’ve had good experience playing with him as a noob.

B: Don’t think I’ve played with him at all, is kind of a wildcard pick. I don’t really know what to expect in terms of fun/engagement with some people that I haven’t played with, even though that’s a bit of the point. The rest I’m just looking for folks who I think are fun mostly.

Team comp we’ll figure out later. I do want another good explorer - whether that’s Chunk, Zedi, or Manno.

Reuniting with Rush / AGFX would be awesome, but I kind of expect Jmerc to reach for them tbh.

Some other dark horses for competitiveness in the later rounds I like are Tidnab, Alison, Zar, ZOOJ, Merf if his ‘low’ activity scares away captains

Notable un-mentions are the Hydra and Sharkey, who are all great and fun to play with and guys that I’ve been in-realm with many times now. If the draft is an opportunity to play with some new people, I ought to take it. Don’t be surprised if I actually panic-pick some of this list though. In fact, I play based on vibes, I doubt any of this is actually that useful, it’ll all come down to what I’m feeling in the moment that it’s my turn to pick.

Joker_Man_With_A_Plan.GIF

In the late-late rounds, when it comes to the new players, I hope to get someone who marked they’re open to playing Ops role, so I can help keep an eye on them and mentor. Not so good at doing that for an attacker.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I ended up with a team similar to my Round 38 win, which I’m happy about, though I didn’t land any big names I haven’t played with before—just some I haven’t teamed up with often. We’re stacked with high-powered options like Fett, Bobbo, Merf, TheThing, and Zach, built to run fast, but we’ve also got solid slower play choices. TheThing dropped in the draft because he’s “leaving on May 4th,” but I’ll take the steal. I just missed out on Beta52, and my last pick was a new player outside the US time zone, but it was late, and options were limited.

'''Actual Text'''

Short version, I’m a busy man: I basically stumbled into assembling a similar comp to my round 38 win, so happy about that, but i failed to get any well-known people who I haven’t played with yet. That said I’ve chosen folks who I haven’t gotten to play with very often* Obviously I have the best team, multiple high-octane options as FAs with Fett, Bobbo, Merf, TheThing, and Zach, we’re built to run and not look back. If we have to pass the buck, we’re in good hands with whoever will join Alison in a slower playstyle. We’ve Gwyn, myself, a couple new players, as well as probably one of the attacking options already mentioned for ops.
Notably, TheThing “is leaving on May 4th” which made him fall in the draft, I don’t really know what that means but he was a steal, May the Fourth be Damned! Jamo was noted as an up-and-comer by Fett, I was hoping to nab him and Beta52 late, but just missed out on Beta (he was a big steal that late as well). My apologies to the single pick of mine, a new player who isn’t in the US-time zone, but it was late and I had few options left.

'''Team Mithrandir'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Attacker im targeting in kind of order: Erix Wurst Jboy Rio Jota Fett Weaser B Harm SugarJon DownrightDave Lamb Merf Blaf Matty BigBell Thething
Top Ops guys im targeting: Chunk Manno Zed Zar shanulf jocke cronel empoy loki nurtho
Others: Disco Zooj (low key great ops guy) Sharkey Grapes

general plan is to get 1-2 attackers on my list, maybe a top ops guy 2nd pick then back to attackers. Taking value over needs in general but ideally 2 guys that can FA, 1 good strategy guy and the rest ops guys and hybrid players. It will really come down to best available and value over everything. Time zones not too much of a concern. I “can” lead but prefer another elite player to co lead the pack.

I’m hoping other captains are incompetent and skip over high value guys

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I somehow landed Erix, which gives me insider draft knowledge and a solid attacker. Dave was an easy pick as a top FA and fun teammate, and Grapes was the obvious choice for ops, especially with Dave around—Cocaine and waffles approved. Jboy fooled everyone about his activity and will carry us to victory. Squanchy is underrated but always online, Loki slipped way too far, P@qz brings versatility, and skubasteve is another nonstop ops machine. Satansarsonmilitia rounds it out as Mr. Irrelevant. I wanted FA power, strong ops, and a slow/convert attacker—got all that and stole Jboy. Best draft team by a mile, Merf 99% realm win incoming.

'''Actual Text'''

Erix - easy pick, idk how he fell to me. I get draft insider knowledge and secrets. Also i guess hes an okay attacker. Dave - Top FA, very fun to play with, easy pick Grapes - The obvious choice for a top ops guy and i have dave. Cocaine and waffles approved. Jboy - everyone slept on his lie about low activity. Hes going to win us the rnd. Elite elite player Squanchy - underrated top ops guy, easy pick and he is on 24/7 Loki - idk how he fell. Maybe bc taking rnd off but he said hes going to be active as fuk and willing to go on overnight. Easy pick and jmerc/rush cant have him. Win win P@qz - great player, willing to fa or sui build and ops after. Easy choice as he is very versatile. skubasteve - solid ops guy, willing to do overnight ops. Very active. Another easy pick satansarsonmilitia - mr irrelevant. Excited to play with him. Going in I wanted 2-3 FA, tons of ops and a solid slow/convert attacker, which i got the steal of the draft on in jboy. All in all I got the dream team draft team. It really doesn’t get any better. Easily the best draft team and 2nd best isn’t even close. I give us a Merf 99% chance of a realm win and ill get started on the rnd win story asap.

'''Team Ivetza'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

“I think my pack will end as some kind of beautiful disaster” is the only response we were able to extract from Ivetza, who refused to do his homework.

The player beautiful disaster was not available to be drafted.

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

Not created.

'''Actual Text'''

''Initially supplied:''

And I don't have any idea why I pick all that Tortuga scums, how to explain to them I just need 100 souls to avoid 10 years service on the Dutchman which remind me I need more alcoholics so please Fett change realm max players to 101. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

''This was then presumably later fed into ChatGPT and Ivetza supplied the following (largely empty of reasoning) reasoning:''

I’ve got no clue why I keep picking up all that Tortuga scum, but here we are. Look, I just need 100 souls to dodge ten years aboard the Dutchman—simple math, really. So I’ve been recruiting, and what a fine mess of scallywags we’ve got!

Harm got picked just for showin’ up to the great gangbang of piracy—no questions asked. MannoWrath joined the crew thanks to his mighty man-of-war and even mightier name, now forever fused as HarmNoWrath. With fire in their sails and questionable morals, they were a natural fit.

Then there’s Zar. Just pure awesomeness. Zar Zar har har! The crew shouted it so loud the kraken blushed. Join our ship, ahoy, or walk the metaphorical plank of mediocrity!

Jocke’s aboard too, ‘cause things in dom were gettin’ too serious. We needed more jockes and fewer blockes. Then came Jaerock, our discord shouter extraordinaire. No lady is safe, no eardrum left undamaged.

Kenshiro—aye, the warrior with fists of fury—joined us so we can set sail for distant lands and bring back barrels of sake. He also kicks like a mule, so that’s a bonus.

Then we’ve got M4nus007. The name’s Bond. James Bond. Smooth-talkin’ spy who can charm us out of cannonfire and into a brothel with one eyebrow raise.

Beta52 hopped aboard because, let's face it, what pirate crew doesn't need a math nerd? Someone’s gotta calculate the rum-to-crew ratio and ensure our loot splits properly. Love you, Beta.

Taldarin2020 came to remind us of the cursed year when our ships were locked down and we had to plunder via Zoom. A dark time. We drank sanitizer. Never again.

And finally, the cherry on this rum-soaked pie: Drads. The legend. The anchor. The wind in our sails. With Drads aboard, the team’s so damn almighty, even Poseidon takes notes.

So Fett, do us all a favor—raise the realm limit to 101. I’m still short a few souls, and I hear there’s a bar full of alcoholics just down the shore.

Yo ho ho, and a bottle of “don’t ask what’s in it”!

'''Team Rompar'''

'''Pre-draft Wishlist'''

Round 1
Rio - there is no single draft round I haven't been with him so he is a natural first pick Wurst - great player with lots of knowledge and skills never been with him in a full round looking forward to this moment
Internetfett - if one of the best wonders is Fountain of Youth, then fett must be called the Spring of Knowledge
Harm - very friendly active player who I really enjoyed playing with, having a tool for posting Top Op
Jboy - winner from the last round, come on who doesn't want to have a winner in his team

Round 2
Slypimp - very good player who I have been before and we do get along so would love to have him
Eric - suicidal tendency I love it, seriously very active player ready to sacrifice his own round for the greater good
B - being ready to step in as a captain in case we don't have enough, means he might have a plan, means I can only get an advantage with him on board
Jocke,Manowrath and Neruht - one of the greatest opers I have been with who can say no to that

Round 3
DantheMan, Sugarjohn, Merf, Kenshiro - great FA can be helped to win the round or used to stall the dynamics and help realmies who come from behind

Rush, AgFx, Cronel, Grapes - devoted bloper but can also provide huge ops support

Sharkey, Zar - player I do get along with able to attack but also always in the top ops ranking

Ofc if ppl from higher ranked pick are still available I may go for them

'''Post-draft'''

'''AI Summary'''

I stuck with my usual first pick, Rio—no surprise there, since he runs the Rio Ranks. Chunk was a must-have for his top op calculator, and Zedijar, the first OD-winning explorer, adds some history to the team. Neruht might not be a well-known name yet, but his tracking skills last round made him an easy pick. OMGnoob brings top-tier attacking experience, while Slice, Mesaxx, and Squarewave round out the squad with versatility and activity. Uruk Hai adds some brute force, and as for Saimon? Well, Saimon says we win.

'''Actual Text'''

1st pick Rio - what is a draft round without us pairing? Active or not he is the one who makes the Rio Ranks so no wo der I will end up on top there 2nd pick Chunk - the guy who runs the top op calculator most of the ppl are using this days is the guy you must have and that is for sure pick number 2 for our team 3rd pick Zedijar - not many explorers ever won but he was the first in OD, ladies and gents please welcome to our team Zedijar 4th pick Neruht - a name that most of you don't know just yet but you are about to remember Neruht The guys was able to explore and single handly track the top op last round so another name that is a must 5th pick OMGnoob - highly ranked experienced attacker who will bring that extra versatile attacking experience that we just need 6th pick Slice - if you want a piece of cake you must Slice it first 7th pick Mesaxx - being with us last time and the only time when draf realm won the round tells it all 8th pick Squarewave - an extra active player who will provide lots of ops and blops whenever they are needed 9th pick Uruk Hai - all the hordes of goblins and orc will need an Uruk Hai to lead them 10th pick Saimon - Saimon says we win

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T15:11:58Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting, on-theme AND it rhymes? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem is this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was after all now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this round was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. I have little confidence that it's capable of doing so, and even less so now that I'm not around to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gameplay-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:44:46Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting, on-theme AND it rhymes? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem is this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was after all now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this round was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. I have little confidence that it's capable of doing so, and even less so that I'm not around to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gameplay-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:42:00Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting, on-theme AND it rhymes? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem is this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was after all now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this round was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:41:22Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting, on-theme AND it rhymes? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem is this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was after all now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:40:08Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting, on-theme AND it rhymes? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem is this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:33:57Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting, on-theme AND it rhymes? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:25:17Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:19:23Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust - and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T12:18:55Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, Emperor fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:46:50Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also massively fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:45:51Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

...aaand this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:42:53Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt like nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:30:37Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned and we ended up being the first realm to break the seal on declaring war. The decision essentially became a foregone conclusion when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:28:23Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned. The decision not to war at blops live was taken out of our hands, when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:23:51Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was kicked off the GPC this round after being investigated by the rules committee. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned. The decision not to war at blops live was taken out of our hands, when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:19:21Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking a warped version of what we had told him.

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was investigated by the rules committee this round and the reason for those announcements about naughty rulebreaking. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned. The decision not to war at blops live was taken out of our hands, when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:17:43Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin this stupid yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking an inaccurate version of what we had told him (one of the blackoppers we'd invited to the draft, Volv, was in his realm discord and watched him leaking like a sieve).

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was investigated by the rules committee this round and the reason for those announcements about naughty rulebreaking. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned. The decision not to war at blops live was taken out of our hands, when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:15:38Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust -and rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin that yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking an inaccurate version of what we had told him (one of the blackoppers we'd invited to the draft, Volv, was in his realm discord and watched him leaking like a sieve).

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was investigated by the rules committee this round and the reason for those announcements about naughty rulebreaking. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned. The decision not to war at blops live was taken out of our hands, when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:14:48Z

Rush:

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust. And rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin that yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking an inaccurate version of what we had told him (one of the blackoppers we'd invited to the draft, Volv, was in his realm discord and watched him leaking like a sieve).

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was investigated by the rules committee this round and the reason for those announcements about naughty rulebreaking. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned. The decision not to war at blops live was taken out of our hands, when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings and cap spywiz ratios, and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's wild-eyed gp-feedback suggestions are bad.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 41 The Conrad von H tzendorf of OD Strategery

2024-10-21T10:12:18Z

Rush: Created page with "Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your v..."

Hi, this is Rush here. Zar was kind enough to let me hijack his entry in the top 100 so I could post this Roundfail. Turns out when you abandon, fett personally deletes your very existence from the history books in disgust. And rightly so! But it meant I had nowhere else to go. So thank you to Zar, last refuge of the fett-scorned and official sponsor of my last ever (gasp) Roundfail.

'''FOREWORD'''

This foreword has been a bit of a bitch to write. Actually this whole Roundfail has been a bitch to write, what with all the drama, bullshit, lies, cheating and general cunty-ness on full display from our wonderful community this past round. I have pretty much washed my hands of OD at this point, but I had over 6,000 words of this Roundfail written before I quit - so I figured I might as well tidy it up a little and then hit publish. One last yarn.

Before I get into it though, I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent and talk a little bit about the editing process first. It has some context for the tone of this Roundfail so it's worth covering.

When I write these stories I do tend to spend a fair bit of time on them, and a big part of that is the editing. I re-read what I've written and revise it repeatedly through the round and post-round. I probably revise the entire volume five or six times before you ever even see it on the wiki. I have one golden rule with these Roundfails: they are light entertainment. They are a bit of fun for people who are still capable of some oldschool reading in an age of short attention spans and tiktok videos. In this community, that's probably like five of you. Then there's a larger group that just Ctrl + F for their own name, and when they don't find it, they go back to watching youtube shorts of guys being accidentally hit in the balls by various projectiles. But no matter how you consume this content, it has always had those 'light entertainment' guard rails on. These Roundfails are supposed to be at least mildly interesting and funny, and not meant make people feel bad about themselves. That means no genuinely hostile or personal attacks on other players. When I do trip up and cross that line, it always gets caught in one of the edit sweeps before publication, and if something does sound genuinely hostile, I'll re-work it until it's at least funny instead of just mean-spirited. This is why we end up with memes about Mithrandir going to Disneyland instead of a toxic rant about selfish players not giving a shit about teamplay weeks before they ever got on a plane to the magic kingdom. It is an exercise in self-moderation and it '''always''' improves the overall quality and entertainment value of the Roundfail.

It has been very hard to follow that golden rule this round. Not least because so many people in this community clearly have absolutely no interest in moderating their own toxicity, or just don't have the social aptitude or self-awareness to realise when they're being cunts and reel themselves in. I'm not talking down from a pedestal here, I'm right up there on the list of repeat offenders in cheeky comments - but some players really go beyond the pale with genuine anger and are so relentless in their heedless cuntery that they have now effectively poisoned and polarised the community.

So in the end, not wanting to further poison the well, I settled on somewhere between keeping it vague enough that any of you reading this who did contribute to this shitshow won't feel personally attacked, while still having a good rant at your expense. The best of both worlds. Unless your name is Mithrandir, in which case you still get a well-deserved roasting throughout this story - starting three paragraphs ago.

I'm aware this is a quality control failure, but I've decided it's warranted in this case.

Also, this is by no means a 'finished' story; I abandoned on like day 33(ish), but I'd been on autopilot for a week before that, so it ends quite abruptly. I only found out through the grapevine that playt0i won the round, but I was happy to hear that for two reasons: one, he's a cool dude, and two, he's one of those incredibly insular one-pack-for-life players, which likely excludes him from a lot of gossip. Speaking to him post-round, he had absolutely zero forewarning about all of the blops alliance rumours, and did not benefit from the perceived pre-round (un)intelligence that some other players tried to use to their advantage. So congratulations to playt0i and his pack / realm for the win. It was well deserved and fairly earned.

Anyway, with all of the above in mind, you are now equipped with the drama warnings you need before deciding if you want to waste your time reading this Roundfail. Without further ado, let's spin that yarn.

'''PRE-ROUND - SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACONDIR'''

Hi, Rush here with another Roundfail. And it's another draft round baby!

Oh, it wasn't a draft round, you say? Well, maybe not for you. But if you're a blackopper or spicy fast attacker, it most certainly was a draft round. If you weren't invited, that's a you thing.

But in all seriousness, after soloing the previous round I was keen not to re-live that experience anytime soon, and we'd been trying to organise a pack but had somehow ended up with six players wanting in it, which obviously wasn't going to work. We were also all a bit frustrated with the lack of meaningful war in the previous round, which led to a realm running away essentially uncontested. These two problems had a solution, and so we set about having our own private draft.

We approached a mix of mostly blackoppers and fast attackers, as well as a handful of players that had a mixed skillset, meaning any pack that was built could have some versatility depending on the preferences of its captain. Identikit hydras, but with enough genetic variation to be wildly different beasts in the field.

The people we approached were all informed that there would be no collusion; this wasn't an alliance, or a non-aggression pact, or an effort to work together towards a common goal (besides trying to have our respective realms win, of course - like every other realm out there). Once the round began we all knew we would all be enemies. One of the people we invited as a potential fast attacker was Mithrandir. We thought he could be a great wildcard player, though it later became clear that he was already committed to Erix's pack. But instead of declining our invitation and explaining he was busy or already committed to a pack (which is what every other player we approached who couldn't make it did), he expressed interest and fished for more information. As I look back at our discord conversation, I realise now he never actually declined to join - his line was always essentially "I'm interested and will probably join, just give me more time", stringing us along until we found out he was just leaking an inaccurate version of what we had told him (one of the blackoppers we'd invited to the draft, Volv, was in his realm discord and watched him leaking like a sieve).

Mith repackaged the expressly conveyed "no collusion" rule in his invite as a "blackops coalition" and told his then-realm that this blackops coalition was forming for the next round. I don't know who all initially heard this 'Mithiniformation', but I do know that virtually half the playerbase knew about it by the first week of the round and that this was the catalyst for the meltdown we'd all see on day 4 after blackops went live, when BigBell brought the rumours into the main discord. This untrue rumour of a blackops alliance (which would have been a very obvious breach of the rules) had gestated inside Mithrandir's realm about three weeks before the round started, going unreported despite the rumours reaching multiple packs. And because it was never reported to fett or the rules committee until after day 4, it meant a sizeable subset of the OD community was now operating under the Mithguided belief that there was a blackops alliance this round - and presumably altering their playstyle to anticipate it, whether in foreplanning pre-round or by strategic changes after learning about it.

Whether by active backdoor gossip or passive exposure, it's quite easy to encounter info you shouldn't have in OD. You can learn things you shouldn't just by existing in a realm discord where someone else shares it. Using BigBell as an example here is illustrative of how rife it is, as he's someone with no previous round connection to Mith in-realm, and he discovered information (albeit bullshit) shared by people in that realm. I suspect if we played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in OD it wouldn't take anywhere that number of connections to trace it all back to Mith, but there's at least two degrees of separation in this one given that BigBell's realm this round shares no common realmie with Mith's realm last round or BigBell's realm this round.

There is a lot of info-sharing that goes on in this game, often between players that have strong pack connections but occasionally decide to ride with another group. They have close friendships and talk in their own channels, and usually it's not considered actively harmful because the bulk of the info they trade is locations. If you're a top player in a realm with someone outside of their normal pack, there is a non-zero probability your location will leak - and not always just to the rest of that person's pack, but to their entire realm. And once it's in the realm's collective information, it gets shared even wider. In case you ever wondered but couldn't figure it out, this is why most people know where most of the big names are by the end of the round. The community likes to gossip.

Normally this info-sharing doesn't apply to hard strategic information; these people are typically only sharing locs and not ops. They may get some psychological insight benefit from it, and usually that's about it. There are also people who do share ops or try to push strategic moves onto other realms, but they are an extreme minority of elite players - such as Wurstmeyer, who was investigated by the rules committee this round and the reason for those announcements about naughty rulebreaking. But it is highly unusual to see anyone share strategic information ahead of or during a round that they should not have access to, and even rarer to see a complete lie proliferate throughout the community uncontested, especially where it concerns the characters of players we all know and have played with before.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I realised either Mithrandir or his cohort, or both, were spreading this rumour about a blackops alliance. Multiple realms caught wind of it through a series of Chinese whispers. This is strategic information sharing, even though it was bollocks - and that is expressly against the rules, and not in the "oh what's the harm tee hee" kind of way that loc-sharing is treated despite also being expressly against the rules. The players responsible for this info sharing took NO HEAT for actually breaking the rules - and instead directed real anger at innocent, rules-abiding blackoppers.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

It seemed to me at the time that it was an obviously silly conspiracy theory - 15 players with no history of cheating, deciding collectively to all cheat together and throw away their reputations, was just so ridiculous that I was legitimately (and in hindsight, foolishly) confident nobody would believe it. Of course we'd always been wary the pack draft could leak before I could announce it on the Rush Hour podcast, it was just disappointing to see how it had been presented to other players behind closed doors. So when I heard about what Mithrandir had done I just messaged him directly and asked him to knock it off, and hoped that would be the end of it. How naive I was. In retrospect of course I should have known that once that gossip train had left the station there'd be no stopping it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While the Fake News Express was hurtling towards Drama Station, we were still in the process of drafting.

For blackoppers and versatile players, we pulled in all the big names and a few moonlighters. We had Cronel, AgFx, Grapes of Math, ForPony, Damdred, Swamp Fox, jmerc, former roundwinner mcgeeal, volv, Loki, Zar and myself. We also had to consider which fast attackers might be game for such a volatile arrangement. They had to be adaptable and comfortable with a lot of chaos, so it was a very short shortlist of about five names: Downrightdave and Sugarjon were obvious choices, with Dave being part of the original 'hydra' and Sugarjon eager to see what all that fuss was about. Damdred had floated Soup as being interested, and we also checked in with Rio and Mithrandir to see if they'd be interested. Rio couldn't make it, having other commitments, and Mithrandir as we already know expressed disingenuous interest in joining.

While we waited days for Mith to give us a concrete response that would never arrive, Soup confirmed his interest. Fortunately Soup was the real deal, so we snapped him up. We had our three team captains.

The rest of the process went about how you might imagine if you've ever been part of the official draft rounds. I landed on Team Soup, alongside Zar, Volv and Loki. Dave picked up mcgeeal, Swamp Fox, Grapes and jmerc, while Sugarjon leaned fully into the hydra spirit and selected Cronel, ForPony, AgFx and Damdred. Sugarjon had built the most authentic hydra of yore, and would be reliant on the algorithm lottery in landing with other decent attackers to make the most of it, while Dave and Soup's teams had a bit more flexibility and wouldn't be so reliant on realm composition.

'''WEEK 1 - THE MITHINFORMATION TRAINWRECK'''

At realm assignment, we had an interesting mix: Ivetza and Rompar had two-packed, and we also landed with some decent random active bloppers, namely Hexum (Beautiful Disaster) and Bazzaroony, whose names I both recognised as being nuisance competitors in previous rounds for blops ranks. Well, at least this round they'd be a thorn in my enemies' sides instead of mine! Ivetza was potentially a blessing and a curse. A blessing for his capability as a fast attacker, and a curse because it's Ivetza. If his round went off the rails there was a high chance he would too. But Rompar made up for it with his banter in discord. We also landed with a relatively new and active player, shanulf, who was cool and keen to learn the game.

I was The Betty Boop of Massive Bloops, and I decided to go Undead after hearing Cronel talk them up the previous round. Big thanks as always to Lud for the excellent sim, it performed exactly as he predicted it would and came out really strong on high land at oop, though it was a bit spooky relying on so many draftees for squishy dp for the first 12 hours, even knowing they couldn't be assassinated. As Lud foretold, I had a lot more ops in my news than I was accustomed to without actually getting hit.

I didn't take much notice of the first three days of the round as usual; we all know the real round starts after the excel simulator disengages on day 4, when blops go live and attackers collectively wet themselves at the thought of being lightly pelted by soggy noodleballs.

We mostly seemed like we were in a good position. Soup and Ivetza were in the mix of competitive FAs, and while our realm had taken some hits, it was mostly our inactives that fed. Bazzaroony also had a string of bad luck where he got munched a few times and almost abandoned, but some words of encouragement from Ivetza gave him the motivation to play on. Of our pack, Loki had been the most indecisive about what he wanted to play, stuck between the idea of wanting to try out something unusual and off-the-wall while also not wanting to be a burden to the pack in case it failed. He'd oscillate between those two positions like a coked-up human pendulum until he eventually came down on playing a converting Dark Elf, following a suggestion from Volv who'd seen Sarmis play it quite impressively. I had personally hoped Loki would be blops support so a converter - and following what was presumably an incredibly hard-to-follow act in Sarmis' shadow at that, which Sarmis himself also failed to pull off - was not the best news, but at least he was a DE converter, which solved the issue of him getting roasted if we went to war. And he said he'd still support with blops as a "combat blopper", a concept I'd never heard of before. I didn't really see it happening but it's the thought that counts, right? At oop Loki struggled to keep pace with the dp requirements and got hit, which immediately hurt his chances of a decent convert.

''2024-08-20 02:59:13 Hawk Tuah (#12) invaded fellow dominion The Kurt Cobain of Sui Trains (#4) and captured 56 land.''

The best laid plans and all that.

Meanwhile Volv had created a monsterblop build and came out of protection on something ridiculous like 17% towers. He was like AgFx on steroids. Zar was always pretty useful for blops generally, but I knew from playing with him previously that ops is where he shines. I'd suggested to soup after he drafted me that we snap him up before someone else did, as when he's on the ball with ops he just makes everyone else's lives so much easier.

I followed my usual path of coming oop quite light on spywiz, and on around 10% towers early so I had a sufficient mana pool to launch one full volley of fireballs if it was needed. We took a pragmatic approach: we'd see what the landscape looked like, with an opportunistic view to war, but not a cavalier one. In fact I had expected us to be the least war-mongery of the three hydras and the last to war, but that didn't exactly play out as planned. The decision not to war at blops live was taken out of our hands, when soup sent out on a hit without updating one of his closest competitors in #8, the lycanthrope I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco).

''2024-08-20 17:59:42 Victorious on the battlefield, The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) conquered 47 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).
''
With mounting horror soup realised the lyc could break him, which would spell disaster for our entire realm, as we had pinned our best hopes of doing well on our twin FAs. And now it looked like one of the two was about to get demolished.

We only really had one recourse: sink his ass. We took a look at his docks situation and as soon as we realised he was sinkable, our mistake became Disco's misfortune.

''2024-08-20 18:35:26 The Roger the Dodger of Sticky Situations (#4) has declared WAR on (ODA) (#8).''

I think Disco may have actually had decent spies for a fast attacker; I remember failing a bunch of ops on the guy. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But we still took him down to 77 boats from approx 150 and suddenly he couldn't full send anymore, and had to sit on his hands until he fixed his docks problem and his boats regenerated. We also set him on fire, because why not?

Once he had the boats to send, he got some due gratification with a war hit on our realmie 34 hours later.

''2024-08-22 04:47:16 I'm not gay but ops are ops (#8) invaded fellow dominion The mr bean of comical relief (Bazzaroony) (#4) and captured 53 land.''

It wasn't ideal but we had averted disaster for soup, and with our realm composition it all hinged on him and Ivetza keeping the pace. Our realm was still in the race.

Meanwhile, the other hydras had found themselves in a war for one reason or another. Dave's realm had been savaged by Wurstmeyer and co in realm #12:

''2024-08-19 14:55:16 Hawk Tuah (Bobbo) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (DownrightDave) (#5) and captured 55 land.''

''2024-08-19 16:59:56 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Tipyourcanoe and Sink Them Too (#5) and captured 49 land.''

So it was with little surprise that a war their way came:

''2024-08-20 18:43:00 Creating a game in which no dominion needs to go to bed hungry! (#5) has declared WAR on snap, crackle and pop (#12).''

At blops live, #12 were among the first to start spluttering that the war was unfair and that bloppers can't be trusted to make sensible decisions. But revenge is best served hot and fiery in OD. There are genuinely players in this game that seem to be operating under the misapprehension that hits, particularly multiple hits, aren't MASSIVE acts of aggression and don't deserve to be punished later. It makes no sense to me but it really does appear to some players as though nothing should ever upset the sanctity of the careful balance at the top - even including some well-earned revenge. Realm #5's war with #12 was effectively us all witnessing an egotist realm being slapped out of its reverie by the cold hand of reality. A lesson in diplomacy perhaps.

Cronel's realm took the bold decision to war #6, and the even bolder decision to start fireballing their two fully protected top attackers. This was the second round in a row Cronel's realm had warred and bombed fully protected targets (having not spotted the Wizard Academy protecting a realm last round) and then been flabberghasted at being ineffective. Of all of the realms, realm #6 had more protection than anyone else; #11's fireballs would have been shrugged off. I thought #6 was actually a viable candidate for war, and is a realm I would also have considered at some point early on were it not for soup's shenanigans, but only in the sense that you'd have to kneecap their late-round threat players instead and avoid feeding their top guys. And even then it would have been incredibly high risk / low reward with how dysfunctional mutual war is now. The halfling, Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i), and the undead, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz), were both virtually immune from wiz blackops, and their races highly resilient against spy blops. And they could mutual if declared upon, granting an obscene op bonus that still feels incredibly strong given that the concern of pile-ons from other realms no longer applies now that wiz damage is capped and time-limited. Mutual used to be risky business back when a blops pile-on from other realms was a potential threat, but nowadays with rejuvenation it's just risk free and purely beneficial for the top realm to mutual if they are defended. They all do it without a second thought now. No strategic thinking required, just go mutual - it's free real estate.

''2024-08-20 19:56:49 Flame on! (#11) has declared WAR on Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-20 20:54:16 Generic realm name (#6) has declared WAR on Flame on! (#11). ''

That 10% op bonus would have been absolutely crushing and #11 didn't manage to keep up, and ended up feeding the top ops instead of hobbling them.

''2024-08-21 02:59:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) conquered 48 land from step through the fog and creep through the smog (Beta52) (#11).''

''2024-08-21 20:57:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (#6) conquered 62 land from The Mailman (alison) (#11).''

Realm #11 noped out of that war as soon as they could.

''2024-08-22 19:39:18 Flame on! (#11) has CANCELED war against Generic realm name (#6).''

''2024-08-22 20:01:17 Generic realm name (#6) has CANCELED war against Flame on! (#11).''

It was #11's first mistake of the round, but it wouldn't be their last, because their next move would be to mess with the best: realm #4.

My realm.

Meanwhile, realm #1, supposedly a pinoy realm that had been constructed by fett (at their request) to help prevent info-sharing in ironically what has turned out to be the most profific example of info-sharing we've ever seen in a round from a chunk of the playerbase, declared war on #13:

''2024-08-21 00:47:51 We Got A PhD In Break Dancing (#1) has declared WAR on "We come from the land of ice cream & dough" Bread Zeppelin (#13).''

Nobody knows why. I'm not even sure they could tell you why.

But this marked the fourth war shortly after blops went live.

At the time, to the subset of the info-sharing community that was hopped up on Mithrandir's falsehoods and absolutely fizzing about it, all of these wars looked like a coordinated effort. The Mithinformation started leaking like a burst dam. The blops coalition rumour finally got formally reported - by a realm that wasn't Mith's. And in another realm that wasn't Mith's, or the origin of the report, BigBell had "various concerned citizens" approach him with this Mithinformation. Who knew BigBell was the OD police? He was the first person to bring those rumours into the discourse in the game's main discord. What followed was a series of serious accusations of cheating - though to give BigBell some due credit, he did caveat them with "**if** you've done this, then this is what I think". But just putting the Mithinformation out there was enough to set imaginations alight and turn the discord into a swamp of toxicity. And to BigBell's discredit, he would then repeatedly water down what started off as "if you have a blackops alliance then you are the worst of people" to, after three or four watered-down revisions to his accusation were countered by truthful denials on my part, what ultimately became "if you have a discord the rest of us aren't in, you are still the worst of people". And at that point I had to disengage; it seemed to me he'd become too entrenched in his position to be reasonable, and had to come away with his pound of flesh to justify his anger. We did of course operate a private discord to organise the draft. After the draft was conducted it was shut down so nobody could communicate. But you try explaining that one to the guy in the middle of a conspiracy theory meltdown. No thanks.

The discord did its thing. We talked it out, hundreds of messages were exchanged, and then fett ruled in and said a private draft wasn't against any rules, which everyone involved already knew but it was nice to have it officially stated. The worst I heard was that it was a "moral grey area", which I don't agree with, but even if it were true, hey, we're blackoppers. The moral grey area is where we live.

Once everything settled down, inevitably some dozy git would meander in having read none of the exchange, and offer their uninformed two cents on the original Mithinformation, then saunter off and the whole thing would explode again for another several hours. Rinse and repeat until everyone hates each other.

I'm not one to hold grudges usually, but the community has a lot to answer for on this one. Despite initially sharing information and rule-breaking, none of the heat came down on Mithrandir, and instead was laser focused on an entirely innocent side draft a small number of players were having. I am still annoyed about it weeks later as I revise this section of my notes. I don't think Mithrandir ever intended or could have foreseen that this shitstorm would happen, and I think control of the rumour would have immediately left his hands as soon as he told his realm, but in my opinion he is still fully responsible for everything that followed - and hasn't once apologised, which indicates to me he doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

But Mith's stupid behaviour aside, my real gripe is the hypocrisy of the community targeting a draft that wasn't against the rules while sweeping the absolutely rife info-sharing that goes on under the carpet - because so many people are at it and many of the accusors will have been complicit in it.

Cuntmongering of the highest order.

Pinoys, as one example, get a pretty bad rap for having their own sub-community that shares information freely between its members, but if they were sharing that information with their friends regardless of nationality, do you know what we'd call them? It wouldn't be cheaters. We'd call them your average elite pack.

So that was week one. The community had collectively shit itself, and a bunch of people including myself left the main discord in disgust. Even Pillar of the Community AgFx was pissed off, which was the first huge alarm bell to a lot of people that things had taken a serious turn.

We were off to a great start.

'''WEEK 2 - THE IVETZA PROBLEM'''

Ivetza had surprised me; not only did he help talk Bazzaroony down from the ledge after he got hit multiple times, but he was also taking time out to coach new player shanulf, who had been efficient-exploring but wanted to try and convert. I was starting to warm up to the guy after his weird winking homophobic tantrum in the previous round. But we eventually encountered a problem, and it was pretty early on. Soup had thought he and Ivetza were in a symbiotic fast attacker bromance relationship, one protecting the other, the two of them rising as one to take on the world together. It's the ideal situation for fast attacking in OD and they were working in synchronicity. Ivetza apparently did not see it this way however, because it seems when Ivetza spies an opportunity, he does not consider the ramifications for others, he only sees the opportunity as it pertains to Ivetza. This is ultimately what led to us falling off as a threat to #6's rapidly developing stranglehold on the round.

''2024-08-26 21:13:52 Zip Splat (DanTheMan) (#12) invaded Someone suicide Yami! 🎯🔫 (Jcinnz) (#6) and captured 128 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:02 Obesity Boys (BigBell) (#13) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 104 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:05 Vǎrkolak - 0/0, completely harmless (SlyPimp) (#9) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 102 land.''

''2024-08-26 21:16:33 I'm not gay but ops are ops (Disco) (#8) invaded Zip Splat (#12) and captured 87 land.''

Zip Splat's suicide on Someone suicide Yami had sparked off the usual chain of vultures feeding, and soup was preparing to be the fourth in the chain. He'd taken the ops, he was discussing it in discord, it was a safe hit for him, and the land would help him stay in the race and keep the pressure on #6.

Ivetza had other plans. He logged in, saw the suicide, didn't bother to check top op (which he wasn't safe against), didn't consult anyone and immediately full sent at Zip Splat, essentially suiciding on a suicide.

''2024-08-26 21:25:27 Victorious on the battlefield, The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (Ivetza) (#4) conquered 77 land from Zip Splat (#12).''

Ivetza had stolen soup's safe hit, knocked the target out of soup's range, and then because he wasn't safe, directly fed the realm that #12's suicide was intended to hurt, ruining the suicide and soup's chances to keep the pressure on #6. He had double-fucked our realm and undone any benefit from Zip Splat's suicide.

''2024-08-27 03:22:41 Hawk Tua on Yami (playt0i) (#6) invaded fellow dominion The Topper Harley of Gummy bears boxing (#4) and captured 112 land.''

Some of the realm accused him of stealing targets, and Ivetza's response was "I log in, I see a suicide, I send". Soup was considering abandoning at this point, to which Ivetza simply said "if you want to abandon go ahead, I will follow".

That abandon didn't happen, and soup limped on for a bit before later deconverting. Ivetza would also follow with a deconvert shortly afterwards.

Towards of the tail end of the first week, Sugarjon's realm of wonder-sniping wee bastards had sniped the Wonder we'd been diligently cycloning. Cronel would later claim personal responsibility for the snipe.

''2024-08-23 22:10:14 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Warpool (#11).''

This then led to the first war between blopper realms and was the first obvious signal that there was no love lost between the draft hydras. But if that wasn't evidence enough, #11 made it mutual. "I think that was a mistake," said soup, and then made the hit of the day with the full mutual war bonus active.

''2024-08-25 23:18:49 The Ricky Bobby of Going Fast (#4) invaded fellow dominion Hydra Bob (ForPony!) (#11) and captured 121 land.''

Realm #11 dragged out the war for a while, but after eventually calculating that they wouldn't be able to take the Wonder back from us in the 3-hour window they'd allowed themselves by mutualing when they did, and suffering under the intense pressure of soup's boosted op, they threw in the towel. They got a decent borrow of our Wonder, but it had now been returned to its rightful owners.

''2024-08-28 19:58:02 War Were Declared on #4 (#11) has CANCELED war against The Stephen Fry of Low QI (#4).''

I'm just going to pause the flow for a bit to let you appreciate our realm name. Witty, insulting AND on-theme? It's gold.

And we're appreciating.

And appreciating some more.

Okay, let's continue.

We didn't have our Wonder for long before the other blops hydra in realm #5 made the decision to come after us for it.

''2024-08-29 08:59:53 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has declared WAR on The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

This annoyed us, because we had been gearing up to war #6 and attempt to kneecap their late-game threats.

As part of their war they fireballed soup, who was at the time the only one still left pressuring #6, which led to further hysteria about bloppers from the community. They didn't hammer soup particularly hard though, so I'm not sure if it was a rogue blopper or if they changed their approach after taking some backlash. Either way, soup never had burning or rejuvenation trigger in the war.

We waited a few days before making it mutual, ensuring we took what was rightfully ours back from the scamps in #5.

''2024-08-31 02:59:12 The Walter White of Educating Noobs with Smite (#4) has declared WAR on We’re sorry, that doms lack of defense was clearly our fault (#5).''

We scouted a potential war hit for soup in #5, but he was unfortunately not safe against #6 to make the hit. And ultimately #5 decided they didn't want to be caught in a Wonder war.

''2024-08-31 08:00:06 Lack of war is weakness entering one’s body (#5) has CANCELED war against The Marv Murchins of Stealing Realmies' Targets (#4).''

Realm #5 would then later complain they had been gearing up to go after #6, when they in turn were warred by #3.

''2024-09-01 17:15:05 The roof is on fire 🔥 (#3) has declared WAR on Revenge is best served with war (#5).''

Quite annoying when cheeky blops realms disrupt your plans for blopping the big baddies, innit #5?

'''WEEK 3 - DUMPSTER FIRE'''

For two weeks the OD discord had been a toxic swamp of aggro and snide remarks about blackoppers. It happens every round but it was now in overdrive after Mith's rumour mill shenanigans; I wasn't in the discord anymore but I was still getting updates that the usual suspects just couldn't leave it alone. I think for the nature of a game like OD it is expected that it attracts more of the neurodiverse than you'd see in other online communities, but this had gone beyond the weaponised autism you see pitted against blackops each round.

I had expected it might actually die down after I left the discord, since I'm usually a major antagonist, defending the importance and utility of blackops, and therefore the guy also partly responsible for helping perpetuate the conversation. But instead of leaving a void where players could freely shit on bloppers with no pushback, other bloppers by this point felt so aggrieved at all of the outlandish and absurd criticism that they were clapping back.

The blops playstyle is in never-ending flux thanks to this never-ending blops screeching. People blopping don't know up from down half the time, and it is exhausting listening to this asinine nonsense about a playstyle its most ardent critics don't play and wouldn't even touch with a barge pole when most of us here are pushing or in their 40s, and just trying to have a good time playing a game with our friends. And we can't be having that now can we?

I'll interrupt my own rant with a small but necessary concession here. The majority of players pushing these lines aren't toxic players generally, they just wade into the middle of a heated discussion, drop a big turd into the mix, offer no solutions, and go back to doing whatever they were doing. It's what they've always done round after round and its been fine, so I can see why doing this probably felt inoffensive. Unfortunately by this stage, a near-unanimity of the blops players were sick of it and were pushing back against these constant and casual waves of abuse. And they were met with mostly mixed reactions of surprise and irritation. Grapes of Math, one of the friendliest guys in the community, became Grapes of Wrath and unleashed the fury on some poor saps in the discord that were still whinging about bloppers. Swamp Fox, always the smart one, made the wise decision and just straight up noped out of the discord and even out of the notion of playing OD full stop. Pillar of the Community and the Man with the Voice, AgFx, who has probably done more for this community than anyone outside of fett and the GPC, snapped and abandoned, quitting the game. Damdred left, dave left, plenty others like jmerc muted the place and the list just goes on. In droves, bloppers were sick of the community's toxic behaviour. It was an exodus.

So much for those halcyon days where we thought we were different and more mature than all those other gamer communities eh?

For my part, I was totally fine not playing the role of the argumentative blopper in the discord. Leaving had evoked the same sort of feeling I have when I'm lying in bed and I can hear it's pouring down with rain outside, but I'm all warm and cosy. I knew there was storm raging on outside, but it was now someone else's problem.

Of course, there were immediate downsides. No AgFx meant no Rush Hour podcasts for the 60-70 people that listen in every other week, and Riol Talk would probably have to find another editor if AgFx and Merf were both out of the picture. Fett worked out we could still pull in the blops ranks data since AgFx's work was all open source, but without the silly end of round awards show we do to go alongside it, it had lost a lot of the shine for me. And why would you want to contribute to a community that just throws abuse at you anyway?

I'm coming to the end of this rant shortly, I promise. Let me end with this:

Blops screechers - those of you who cannot help youselves - you need to recognise that blackops have a valuable role to play in this game, and that blackoppers by and large do play that role in good faith, working together as a team, co-operating with their realm to the benefit of the realm. The sneering attitude towards these collective players is repugnant and completely lacking in self-awareness. What bloppers do is functionally no different to what attackers do: we disadvantage other players to advantage our team. Attackers do it by taking their land, bloppers do it by burning their peasants or sinking their ships, or debuffing them in other ways. Attackers in particular need to drop this superficial 'aggrieved victim' mentality when they get blackopped: you are the enemy and you are not innocent or harmless. I know it's a different story when it comes to the balance at the top, because this is a top-down game and those actions can affect everyone, but for the overwhelming majority of players, you are in the trenches of a war game. Stop crying about it, it's just weird.

We all have at our disposal relatively cheap and accessible blops protection, it is so much easier to weather blops than it has ever been, and yet the blops screeching just keeps getting more and more shrill with every round. It is totally paradoxical. The more these players get what they want, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. Or perhaps they're just more encouraged, now they can see what works to achieve their goals? It's a genuine question because their behaviour makes no sense to me.

My unsolicited advice to the GPC, and the solution to this confected illusion of a problem it's this: stop listening to these degenerates. They are never going to stop pushing for blackops to be obsoleted in the game and they will never be satisfied until they can play in their excel simulator for 47 straight days. We don't have to be in constant panic about blackops every single round. We only need to tone down the reactivity to these public freakouts by the same people every round.

Anyway. That felt cathartic.

So where are we? We're almost at the end of this Roundfail because, after all the above was said and done, I realised I didn't really feel like playing OD anymore, so I kinda stopped paying attention. At this point in the story it's the end of Week 3, we've had a few wars for the Halls of Knowledge and managed to hold onto it, and our realm's FAs were dead. Soup had deconverted with the new scion hero and had moved over to the dark side. Ivetza had followed but, not realising there was a new scion hero, had deconverted without using it. Whoops. Our realm's focus shifted from looking after their interests to trying to give new player and converter Shanulf a decent shot at having a good time, as well as Loki who had finished his convert as well. Converters, ever the bane of a blopper's existence, don't always get this level of care and consideration from a meanie blopper like me. I've said before it's a bit like being handed someone else's baby and being forced to look after it, but this round I found a better analogy: converters are more like pears.

I'll let Eddie Izzard explain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PGPMGUGNsQ

Ripe for half an hour, most converters. But shanulf had been forgiving of the realm's warmongering in the early game and had eaten his fair share of blops already, and was still having a good time, so we were all happy to rally behind him and give as much support as we could. He was now our lead attacker.

'''WEEK 4 - OUT OF STEAM'''

Shanulf was stuck for a while under Choo Choo 🚂 (#12)'s op, and we were considering options for war.

And this is as far as I got with the Roundfail. I had some other random notes, but nothing really worth extrapolating further on. Well, except for this:

''2024-09-11 00:46:17 Hawk Tua on Yami (#6) invaded A$$, Grass or Plat - No one explores for free (Mithrandir) (#8) and captured 173 land.''

Mith not only fucked the community but also fed the runaway this round. Slow clap for Mith everybody.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Usually most rounds that suck have a bittersweet quality to them, and despite all of the noise surrounding this one, this one was no different. I still managed to have a good time within the bubble of our realm until the real fatigue with the trajectory of the game and the community set in.

There has always been two main ways to enjoy OpenDominion, at least in my view: there's the game itself, obviously, and there's the social side of it - the community of your realm, and also the wider community, which has something like four podcasts (and probably has two new ones by the time you finished reading this sentence), people who contribute Roundfail stories, and groups that play other games together. From a blackopper playstyle perspective, the game has been in a pretty terrible state for about five rounds now, and I've heard through the grapevine that there are yet further plans to remove blops rankings, cap spywiz ratios and make exploring more difficult (sorry, "more rewarding"), and it just continues to get worse every round. Blackops are like a scab and players can't stop picking at it. All of the blackoppers I know are social players, they can (and have) put up with a lot of these unpleasant changes because ultimately it's still fun to play games with friends. Some still even hold that view in spite of this round. But for me, when the community turns out to be a toxic wasteland, there's no incentive to play the game, and there's no reason to stick around. That's where I'm at.

Maybe I'll check back in 5-10 rounds and see if the community managed to find a sensible solution to blops. If I was still around I'd say I have absolutely no confidence that it's capable of doing so, and I have even less than no confidence now that I'm not there to explain why all of vinn's gp-feedback ideas are stupid.

To my pack and my realmies, I'm sorry I didn't manage to play the full round, but you guys all know the reasons. My first ever abandon, and it does feel like letting the team down. I did think about messaging Wurst and asking him where to find the abandon button for the memes, but I found it easily enough after all. It's on the Government page, for anyone wondering.

To my blops bros forever in the trenches, in particular Damdred, Swamp Fox, Cronel, AgFX and Saccora, I'll miss playing with you guys.

And finally, last and most definitely least, I'll end on this note:

Mithrandir sucks.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell - https://imgur.com/a/m9Uj9jR

'''RUSH'S ROUNDFAIL REPOSITORY'''

You can read the full back-catalogue of my Roundfail series here: https://roundfail.blogspot.com/

Round 40 Ghetto Superstar

2024-08-01T14:04:58Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. I took notes for the first two weeks this round and then hit the 'roundfail abandon button' when I realised that, for me at least, this was going to be the least interesting round in OD history, so this one's another mini roundfail. You want to know what it's like to spend 47 days in a ghetto realm? Well you've come to the right place. Set your expectations to 'snooze' and lets get this over with.

I was Ghetto Superstar in (#5), Sylvan, and I finished 45th on 5,614 land.

I sailed solo this round, figuring I'd let the algorithmic winds of fate decide upon which shore I beached. And it just so happened to be realm #5, with the worst realm composition at assignment I've ever been included in. No beef to any of the players, we all got screwed on this one. I landed with Pos5 Only, Lou Dort is Benny Cheng (yes that's his lifetime name), TRoiT, spoonman, jahmes, Jocke, Martinuum, Guydoonster, Naweeb, and... Elf Woods. Elf Woods again! As a late signup before round start we'd pick up SlyD, who would never even make it out of protection, and xiang1121. Then as the round went on, we acquired Cosmo's Kingdom and Lacricel. I didn't know who most of these people were.

It turned out 50% of my realm were completely new players, and 10% was Elf Woods. I sent fett a message demanding an apology from the algorithm, but it turned out a lot of realms were experiencing the 'new player' phenomenon. Or maybe they were all farms. Either way, it was shaping up to be an unusual round.

I'd been planning to have the Elf Woods experience this round, so assignment didn't matter as much to me initially anyway. Before realm assignment I'd switched off my advisors and hidden my lifetime name, arriving completely incognito, so as far as these guys were all concerned I was a mute random. I planned to play the first few weeks in true Elf Woods fashion: avoid the realm discord and hopefully snipe a Wonder on my own. I set sniping a Wonder as my win/lose goal (either by my hand or Elf Woods' efforts), but I also wanted to see how well I fared without any group intel to support me, so I'd be trying to figure out who all the big nasties were myself and tracking the threats all on my own. A lot of my Roundfails are built with the intel and insights collected from realmies on the whole - who I usually try to credit - but inescapably my awareness of round dynamics is largely coloured by group analysis. Not so this time! Such was the Elf Woods Challenge. And I had some decisions to make. Namely, which Wonder was I going to try and solo snipe.

The mania-inducing Gnomish Mining Machine, the Ancient Library and the High Cleric's Tower were the options on the table right away. The GMM, though completely useless to me as a Sylvan, was probably the most likely to bring us war as a weaker-looking realm, so of course it was my natural preference. Plus the only Gnome in our realm was Elf Woods, and when you're cosplaying Elf Woods, you've gotta do a bro a solid. The HCT in a round of new undead races was probably going to be somewhat popular too, so it was a secondary option. The Library is a very popular Wonder which I'd often mistakenly assumed would bring lots of war, but in my experience, it doesn't turn out this way - probably because it's a popular Wonder primarily with explorers and sometimes converters. It's not a Wonder that sits on most attackers' radars, and they are usually the point of gravity in most realms that have cooperative and active realmies.

The Wayfarer's Outpost popped up after OOP, but while it would have been a lovely Wonder to have, it was probably going to be too popular for me to snipe.

'''WEEK 1 - THE ELF WOODS CHALLENGE'''

When the starter gun fired at oop, my realm had eight attackers straight into the frey, with only TRoiT bouncing on his first attack. Even Elf Woods was getting stuck into some attacking, making three attacks over 13 hours, before getting invaded by Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff (Ivetza) (#9) and then bouncing his fourth hit on a bot. This prompted Naweeb to post the "can we help ya buddy" thread in council that Elf Woods probably sees at some point in every round he plays, and which he duly ignored. But we were on good terms at least; I'd voted him for Monarch and by return, he'd voted for me. We had a bond. A mutual respect between mute and uncooperative realmies.

I'd been tracking the early top ops myself, mainly just by sorting by highest networth and keeping an eye on the Town Crier. In my estimation, right out of the gate the biggest threats were Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3), I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) and I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2). As a Sylvan, I had a sluggish start baked into my build, so despite being on smaller land than some juicier targets I defended against the first two anyway. Not that they even looked. I couldn't benchmark my DP against players in my realm of a similar size, as they'd unshared advisors with me in retalliation for unsharing my own. I knew Braille could hit me, but took an educated guess that he wouldn't - expecting he'd hit someone bigger and with better landtypes.

The wheels came off the sims pretty early for a couple of these guys, with Mortality bouncing on a 'confusingly named' (but not really) target, having sent on the wrong guy, who was nonetheless found in breach of the rules and promptly renamed.

2024-06-15 16:02:16 Sadly, the forces of Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3) were beaten back by Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12).

Mortality was awarded full land and prestige for his blunder and was back in the game, but ultimately squandered it on his next hit by getting eaten alive.

2024-06-16 14:59:38 Victorious on the battlefield, Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) conquered 56 land from Emu Export (TheThing) (#9).

2024-06-16 15:07:07 Alex & Sammy's Endless Summer (DavetheGoliath) (#13) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 50 land.

2024-06-16 15:48:31 Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 45 land.

2024-06-16 16:59:46 Rule 2z: Thou Shalt Bar All Retiles in Code (Ares Titan) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 40 land.

Meanwhile, Braille had the scariest op that I'd seen, but I wasn't sure he could full send it, so I was sitting in range underdefended to him.

He not only full sent, but also sent a handful of chams on a Gnome who was slightly smaller than me. And also bounced. I am guessing an out of date land spy was the culprit. I'm not sure how I flew under the radar on that one, but I wasn't complaining.

2024-06-16 12:22:22 Sadly, the forces of I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2) were beaten back by Gn¤me man is an ‡šland. (Espiritus) (#1).

And then he got hit.

2024-06-16 23:59:50 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion I can read braille without being blind (#2) and captured 54 land.

That guy hadn't even been on my radar at all, so I quietly added I'm not lovin' it to my list of ops to track.

When blops went live this round I was fast asleep - unusual for me, but I had zero expectations my realm which were mainly attackers would be hankering for war against a rapidly developing runaway situation in realm #2. Pre-blops-live ops showed that some of the fast attackers were bringing in wizard guilds, anticipating war, but after hearing complaints about landing in similarly jank realm compositions from other prominent bloppers, I wasn't going to hold my breath. When I woke up the next day I was not surprised to see the the fast attackers waltzing through a blops-free paradise.

I did however do a quick scan for potential swarm targets. Although I could have just gone through the a dropdown list of the biggest players and swarmed everyone, I prefer to be more targeted, particularly early round when mana is a limited resource. I'd cast clear sight, and if their food was low, I'd compare it to an older clear sight in the archives to see if they were on and upwards or downwards trend. Then I'd cast revelation to see if they had Gaia's up. Depending on their circumstances, I'd then cast swarm. If someone is low on food, and losing food despite having Gaia's up then they are the ideal target, and I caught three players that fit this bill. I also discovered the second-place top explorer, Too kewl for skewl (Craghack) (#9), was on 0 food and already starving, with 4 hours left on his Fools Gold, so would be potentially starving for another few hours. He had no hostile spells on him so it seemed no one had noticed yet. There is no immediate benefit to throwing a swarm on someone already in that situation (can't starve him harder than 0 food after all), but I could make his recovery more irritating, so I swarmed him anyway. I wondered if anyone else would notice his predicament and if he'd become a massive hit for someone later.

I didn't have to wait too long. Six or seven ticks later:

2024-06-18 14:59:18 Engage! (jboy) (#3) invaded Too kewl for skewl (#9) and captured 107 land.

The hit knocked him straight out of second place and when I checked on him two days later, he'd sunk to 16th.

I had saved some wiz and spy strength for ops since I had to take all these myself now. I knew I was definitely in danger territory dp-wise, hittable by I can stop peeing mid-stream, but Engage had just made himself a much better target.

2024-06-18 15:59:03 I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) invaded Engage! (#3) and captured 65 land.

There was also now a Nox in my realm that hadn't unshared his advisors and sitting a little larger than I was on about 3k less dp than me (although this was due to not casting Ares), and that was before taking into account his 2k draftees. Even with Ares up he was still the better target. I had a second meat shield.

Since this was shaping up to be a very quiet round, at this point I also applied to join the Shadow League. Last round the SL was a breeze, and I found that now more than ever I needed the cheaper ops if I was going to survive being a blopper and a solo opper.

Just like last round, Elf Woods had started cycloning a Wonder and had already dealt 23k to something. If I could guess which one he was targeting I had a better chance of sniping. At that damage already it had to be a tier 1 wonder, and since he was a Gnome, I had to assume he'd caught the Gnomish Mining Machine mania. I razed and rezoned some alchemies to bring in some more towers and started cycloning it.

By the end of the first week, the kobold and the lyc in #2 were slightly out of range, but still in the zone where I could easily explore into it - but would risk getting hit. Despite feeling underdefended on several occasions in the first week I never caught a single op. My meat shield, who was still relying on 3k of squishy dp had somehow evaded interest too, with better targets reliably presenting themselves gift wrapped to the fast attackers whenever they needed a hit.

At least my realm was doing its bit to keep some of the other fast attackers in the race:

2024-06-19 23:48:35 Victorious on the battlefield, Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (Pos5 Only) (#5) conquered 48 land from Etchi no Kamigami (#0).

2024-06-20 07:59:31 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (#5) and captured 65 land.

At the start of the round I was barely in the top 100 doms, but by the end of the first week I'd managed to crawl into the top 40, which is usually where I live for most of the round when playing slow races. Steady as she goes.

2024-06-21 02:59:27 OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (hepizoj) (#11) fended off an attack from I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2).

This hit doesn't have anything to do with my narrative here, I only noted it down because it was funny.

2024-06-21 04:56:29 I can cook using an Air Fryer! (Rury) (#2) invaded OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (#11) and captured 70 land.

Shortly after, Rury showed Erix how it's done!

'''WEEK 2 - SINKING FEELING'''

Unfortunately for my meat shield at the start of the second week, the runaway lyc had already started to bottomfeed.

2024-06-24 02:07:34 I can stop peeing mid-stream (#2) invaded fellow dominion Cant Afford Daniel Gafford (Lou Dort is Benny Cheng) (#5) and captured 89 land.

He was able to hit him despite about 4k draftees, which he didn't even bother to assassinate, which didn't bode well for other explorers being able to stay ahead of the curve, given that he looked pretty well defended to me. But I didn't have eyes on the lyc. The kobold was in an even stronger position, on 2,900 land (compared to his lyc support on 2,383 acres), and the memes about the round being over were already well underway.

By day 10, between myself and Elf Woods we'd done around 100k in cyclone damage, but since I didn't know what he was cycloning, I had no idea if we were close to taking the Gnomish Mining Machine or if we'd been targeting different wonders. I could have just asked him, of course, but it went against spirit of the Elf Woods Challenge to communicate.

Then, the worst case scenario happened: my realm was actually able to coordinate a Wonder take-down.

2024-06-24 11:30:45 Budots (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:31 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:59 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:05 FishTea Nya Wah (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:33 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:04 Big Guy in the Backyard (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:05 The Imperial Armada has been destroyed and rebuilt by returnees (#5).

Okay it involved one guy hitting it three times and a bit of a gap for the last guy to get stuck in, but the chain hits were a success and the Wonder fell.

It seemed an odd choice of Wonder for our realm: the Armada is typically a top realm Wonder, where you're concerned you might be targeted in war for sinking. Unless my realm was preparing for war, I couldn't see the likelihood in anyone warring us to sink any of them - until, of course, they took the Wonder, which a top realm might actually want. In which case they'd only bring war on themselves, lose the Wonder, and get blopped anyway.

In any case, regardless of their reasoning, their Wonder take-down had ended my Elf Woods Challenge in failure. Neither I nor Elf Woods had managed to snipe a Wonder. I was top ranked in cyclones at this point, and it was all for naught. Still, it had been a fun little challenge and kept me occupied in the early game. And with the Elf Woods Challenge over, I had no reason to continue playing the role of a mute realmie, so I shared my advisors with everyone. Everyone except Elf Woods, naturally. Then I joined the realm discord to try and figure the realm's rationale behind taking the Armada. I scrolled up for the recent chat logs:

jahmes: "what wonder should we get do you think?"

xiang1121: "maybe try our luck on armada?"

jahmes: "ok"

And there you have it folks. I lost my Elf Woods Challenge to an apparently random spur-of-the-moment decision to take a random Wonder. At the end of the round, some of the pinoys were pleased that we'd managed to keep it all round. But it was such a pointless Wonder that offered zero benefit to us except for a puny -1% royal guard tax, I was just confused by their glee. I was also surprised nobody just knocked it down for the prestige. A 200k wonder was just begging to be one-shot.

At least with cyclones off the menu I could turn my attention to some proper blopping. And so that's what I did.

'''WEEK 3 AND BEYOND - THAT GUY'''

My realm was under pinoy control this round, with a 5-pack of "returnees" (which remained our realm name the entire round) coming back to the game having never played since Classic. Jahmes, the King, was I think the only regular player, and the rest of his pack seemed alright with just doing their thing. Only one of the pinoys (who never joined the discord) got locked for cheating. He'd been running three accounts, which his packmate said was so he could learn the game faster. The innocent cherub, I can't believe the Rules Committee would punish such an earnest display of wanting to get better at the game.

I didn't agitate for war at all this round, until right at the very end - I could see plain as day that our realm wasn't equipped to deal with it. There was some attempt to track top op in the first few weeks, but after that, nobody seemed to keep track - or if they did, they weren't sharing the info and were just doing it personally. That was fine; I did exactly the same thing until the last week or two, where I played pretty fast and loose with my dp and narrowly avoided getting chomped by Syl's Rainbow Sorbet (lamb) #7 in his ascendancy to near-greatness. But the lack of war, combined with the low social element in the realm discord, really hurt my enjoyment of the round. I think this round was probably the most disengaged I've been in any round I've played and it was pretty much entirely down to landing in a very quiet and basically rudderless realm, under the control of a pack that mostly seemed content to just dawdle along.

The one time I did start banging the war drums was when #2 declared on #13 towards the end of the round. It removed the possibility of a mutual war, it meant that #2's bloppers would have had targets lined up and already blown their loads, we didn't have any noobs in range to feed them, and all of the non-packed and even some of the packed players were up for it. We were all dead in the water with nothing to lose. But our King just ignored it all. I briefly considered pulling a Cronel and staging a mutiny, but jahmes' position as Monarch was pretty entrenched. Some of the late, mute and mostly inactive players had also voted for him, and I didnt fancy my chances competing with his 7 votes to my 1 (shout out to Elf Woods for his unwavering support all round). I figured I could definitely bleed one of his votes, as it was from an active non-packed player, and I could always vote for myself, taking it to 6-3, but it was too much of a long shot to be worth the effort.

With 'inconsequential' being the defining characteristic of our realm, I had only one recourse left to keep me engaged in the round: the Shadow League. And I never thought I'd find myself typing that sentence!

I usually hate That Guy in the Shadow League that just trains stupid ratios at the expense of their finish, but this round, with nothing better to do, I was That Guy. Unfortunately it just so happened that I'd picked the worst round to be That Guy, because SL is not working at all as intended. I've moaned about SL plenty in the past being a "noob trap" that just bogs players down in a never-ending ratio race to the bottom, hurts their growth and diverts their blops away from attacker threats and onto each other. It doesn't really work like that at the moment though: it is now a mostly-peaceful safe haven for ops bitches to enjoy half price ops. With the recent changes, particularly to wiz blops and defences, wizard races are paradoxically at a massive disadvantage in the SL if they're trying to deal damage. The first fireball I threw at a non-wizard race in SL killed 60 peasants, and so after that I didn't throw any fireballs. From the perspective of a wizard race just looking to coast as an ops bitch in the SL, however, you're in a great position: only your spies are vulnerable if you don't turn them into assassins. And while assassins are a lot bettter than they were, they're still very expensive and no one wants to train them. I capitalised on this.

Spy races, on the other hand, are playing on god mode in SL right now. Spy blops are still effective (except for sabotage, since it's an attacker-only countermeasure and everyone in SL is exploring), snare works great and does decent damage, and assassination is pretty strong. As long as you maintain an okay wizard ratio - which naturally you'll convert to AMs because they're worth it - nobody can touch you. You're effectively immune to wiz blops from your AMs and nobody can assassinate them. Meanwhile, you have a naturally strong spy ratio and can farm almost any non-spy race SLer you want.

I had two main problems with SL. Problem number one was that most of the players in SL were virtually immune to damage, and in particular most war blops damage sucked ass. Problem number two was that as a Sylvan, I'd lose dp every time I failed a blop - which in SL is a pretty common occurrence. Anyone over a 0.5 ratio massively spikes your fail rate, almost regardless of your own ratio. For example, targeting one SLer that maintained a 0.5 wiz ratio all round, I'd fail around the same number of blops on him on a 2.0 ratio as I did on my end-round crazy ratio of 4.0. And the higher the target's ratio goes, the higher your casualties. I could easily lose 30-80 dryads on a fail. You get 75% of them requeued, but it's a sharp drop in immediate dp when you have a bunch of fails that could mean the difference between getting hit and skating by.

Despite this, I was determined to be That Guy, and after probing for weaknesses I found a few goldmines. The first was Theme? We Don't Need no Stinkin Theme! (Grapes of Math) (#9), who had experimented with throwing fireballs at me once too often, and so when after a long flight to Japan he was finally able to check his phone, he had a few thousand dead wizard corpses waiting to greet him. He quickly converted his remaining wizards to AMs.

It was difficult to stay ahead of some of the SLers that were able to go to war, and so I was constantly competing with other war-blessed SLers for coveted ranks, particularly around the disband/assassination ranks. My competitors were able to find soft targets in war and farm thousands of kills at a time in very short windows. Fortunately, one SLer brought himself to my attention (DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (Skubasteve) (#13)) when he tried to feed me to his realmie (Summertime Thadness (Chunk) (#13)) and was constantly opping me and revving me for a 24 hour period. I let him be until I knew I was in the clear, not wanting to further incentivise a hit, but after I was safe I went after Jazzy Jeff with a vengeance. He was a Nox: no racial spy immunity. I disbanded thousands of his spies. He queued thousands more, but at the same time he'd also put in his 12-hour surrender notice to the Shadow League emperor. I was waiting for those spies to come in to disband them, but he left SL the same tick they arrived. I was annoyed that I'd waited, but the bait of thousands of spies incoming to be disbanded again was too strong.

Without Stinkin Theme or Jazzy Jeff as viable targets, I was forced to resort to picking on Ross' offspring: Soybins the Handsome Troll (Soybins the son of Ross) (#1). This guy spent all round in SL as a troll with a 0.5 wizard ratio and an estimated 0.3 spy ratio. He would train wizards and spies, and I would assassinate them in pretty small numbers, and he'd train more wizards and spies, and I'd assassinate those too. Round and round we went. He never seemed to convert them to AMs or Asses, and he never left SL. The kills were peanuts compared to what I'd been farming from Jazzy, but it shored up my numbers enough to keep a lead. But I had a problem: another SLer in #2 was soaring up the disband ranks to contend with - How Does This Work Again? (MumbleNGrumble). #2 had a bunch of wars in the endgame and this guy had an all you can eat buffet of targets to choose from. He nearly eclipsed my kills overnight from one war, but thankfully his target must have dried up and converted spies to assassins, because his kills dropped off pretty quickly. Still, I needed another juicy target.

Fortunately for me, Jazzy Jeff couldn't resist the allure of SL, and after some time spent recovering outside of the SL, he decided to sneak back in. He kept a low profile though, and I might not have noticed if it weren't for the #2 spy disbander forcing me to redouble my efforts to find a target. I nuked thousands of his spies. In total I dished out over 3.3million plat in spy disband damage this round, and Jazzy Jeff bore the overwhelming brunt of it. Jazzy hadn't learned from his mistake last time, but I had learned from mine. I saw that Jazzy queued thousands more spies... and so this time I waited until the tick before they arrived, then disbanded another thousand spies. The next tick he was no longer in the SL, and would remain out for the rest of the round.

'''EPILOGUE'''

My laser focus on assassination ranks for both spies and wizards meant I secured first place in the Rush Ranks for assassination (worth a not-too-shabby 15 points). It's more effort than the fireball rank, which is by far the most bang for your buck than any other category at 10 points, but it still meant I had a fighting chance of being top blopper. In the dead zones where I had no targets, I switched up my blopping to bring my score up in the theft and duration ranks. I had number #1 in plague and #2 and #3 ranks in a bunch of others. The lumber rank as a Sylvan was a cinch. The more war-dependant a rank was, the harder it was to score highly in it, so fireball, lightning and sabotage were all beyond my reach to compete for in any capacity.

Top fireball naturally went to mutineer and warmonger Cronel, but I beat him in enough of the other categories that I was able to at least take the title of top blopper in the Rush Ranks this round. It felt like I was playing for top blopper on hard mode with such a small pool of targets, but some luck and the generosity of Jazzy Jeff helped me get by.

Congratulations to realm #2 and to Rury for the win.

Next round I'll be throwing at least two fireballs to make sure I beat my Rush Ranks fireball score of 0.003 this round. 120 dead and crispy peasants here I come!

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/kkFmJQJ

Round 40 Ghetto Superstar

2024-08-01T14:01:33Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. I took notes for the first two weeks this round and then hit the 'roundfail abandon button' when I realised that, for me at least, this was going to be the least interesting round in OD history, so this one's another mini roundfail. You want to know what it's like to spend 47 days in a ghetto realm? Well you've come to the right place. Set your expectations to 'snooze' and lets get this over with.

I was Ghetto Superstar in (#5), Sylvan, and I finished 45th on 5,614 land.

I sailed solo this round, figuring I'd let the algorithmic winds of fate decide upon which shore I beached. And it just so happened to be realm #5, with the worst realm composition at assignment I've ever been included in. No beef to any of the players, we all got screwed on this one. I landed with Pos5 Only, Lou Dort is Benny Cheng (yes that's his lifetime name), TRoiT, spoonman, jahmes, Jocke, Martinuum, Guydoonster, Naweeb, and... Elf Woods. Elf Woods again! As a late signup before round start we'd pick up SlyD, who would never even make it out of protection, and xiang1121. Then as the round went on, we acquired Cosmo's Kingdom and Lacricel. I didn't know who most of these people were.

It turned out 50% of my realm were completely new players, and 10% was Elf Woods. I sent fett a message demanding an apology from the algorithm, but it turned out a lot of realms were experiencing the 'new player' phenomenon. Or maybe they were all farms. Either way, it was shaping up to be an unusual round.

I'd been planning to have the Elf Woods experience this round, so assignment didn't matter as much to me initially anyway. Before realm assignment I'd switched off my advisors and hidden my lifetime name, arriving completely incognito, so as far as these guys were all concerned I was a mute random. I planned to play the first few weeks in true Elf Woods fashion: avoid the realm discord and hopefully snipe a Wonder on my own. I set sniping a Wonder as my win/lose goal (either by my hand or Elf Woods' efforts), but I also wanted to see how well I fared without any group intel to support me, so I'd be trying to figure out who all the big nasties were myself and tracking the threats all on my own. A lot of my Roundfails are built with the intel and insights collected from realmies on the whole - who I usually try to credit - but inescapably my awareness of round dynamics is largely coloured by group analysis. Not so this time! Such was the Elf Woods Challenge. And I had some decisions to make. Namely, which Wonder was I going to try and solo snipe.

The mania-inducing Gnomish Mining Machine, the Ancient Library and the High Cleric's Tower were the options on the table right away. The GMM, though completely useless to me as a Sylvan, was probably the most likely to bring us war as a weaker-looking realm, so of course it was my natural preference. Plus the only Gnome in our realm was Elf Woods, and when you're cosplaying Elf Woods, you've gotta do a bro a solid. The HCT in a round of new undead races was probably going to be somewhat popular too, so it was a secondary option. The Library is a very popular Wonder which I'd often mistakenly assumed would bring lots of war, but in my experience, it doesn't turn out this way - probably because it's a popular Wonder primarily with explorers and sometimes converters. It's not a Wonder that sits on most attackers' radars, and they are usually the point of gravity in most realms that have cooperative and active realmies.

The Wayfarer's Outpost popped up after OOP, but while it would have been a lovely Wonder to have, it was probably going to be too popular for me to snipe.

'''WEEK 1 - THE ELF WOODS CHALLENGE'''

When the starter gun fired at oop, my realm had eight attackers straight into the frey, with only TRoiT bouncing on his first attack. Even Elf Woods was getting stuck into some attacking, making three attacks over 13 hours, before getting invaded by Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff (Ivetza) (#9) and then bouncing his fourth hit on a bot. This prompted Naweeb to post the "can we help ya buddy" thread in council that Elf Woods probably sees at some point in every round he plays, and which he duly ignored. But we were on good terms at least; I'd voted him for Monarch and by return, he'd voted for me. We had a bond. A mutual respect between mute and uncooperative realmies.

I'd been tracking the early top ops myself, mainly just by sorting by highest networth and keeping an eye on the Town Crier. In my estimation, right out of the gate the biggest threats were Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3), I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) and I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2). As a Sylvan, I had a sluggish start baked into my build, so despite being on smaller land than some juicier targets I defended against the first two anyway. Not that they even looked. I couldn't benchmark my DP against players in my realm of a similar size, as they'd unshared advisors with me in retalliation for unsharing my own. I knew Braille could hit me, but took an educated guess that he wouldn't - expecting he'd hit someone bigger and with better landtypes.

The wheels came off the sims pretty early for a couple of these guys, with Mortality bouncing on a 'confusingly named' (but not really) target, having sent on the wrong guy, who was nonetheless found in breach of the rules and promptly renamed.

2024-06-15 16:02:16 Sadly, the forces of Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3) were beaten back by Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12).

Mortality was awarded full land and prestige for his blunder and was back in the game, but ultimately squandered it on his next hit by getting eaten alive.

2024-06-16 14:59:38 Victorious on the battlefield, Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) conquered 56 land from Emu Export (TheThing) (#9).

2024-06-16 15:07:07 Alex & Sammy's Endless Summer (DavetheGoliath) (#13) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 50 land.

2024-06-16 15:48:31 Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 45 land.

2024-06-16 16:59:46 Rule 2z: Thou Shalt Bar All Retiles in Code (Ares Titan) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 40 land.

Meanwhile, Braille had the scariest op that I'd seen, but I wasn't sure he could full send it, so I was sitting in range underdefended to him.

He not only full sent, but also sent a handful of chams on a Gnome who was slightly smaller than me. And also bounced. I am guessing an out of date land spy was the culprit. I'm not sure how I flew under the radar on that one, but I wasn't complaining.

2024-06-16 12:22:22 Sadly, the forces of I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2) were beaten back by Gn¤me man is an ‡šland. (Espiritus) (#1).

And then he got hit.

2024-06-16 23:59:50 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion I can read braille without being blind (#2) and captured 54 land.

That guy hadn't even been on my radar at all, so I quietly added I'm not lovin' it to my list of ops to track.

When blops went live this round I was fast asleep - unusual for me, but I had zero expectations my realm which were mainly attackers would be hankering for war against a rapidly developing runaway situation in realm #2. Pre-blops-live ops showed that some of the fast attackers were bringing in wizard guilds, anticipating war, but after hearing complaints about landing in similarly jank realm compositions from other prominent bloppers, I wasn't going to hold my breath. When I woke up the next day I was not surprised to see the the fast attackers waltzing through a blops-free paradise.

I did however do a quick scan for potential swarm targets. Although I could have just gone through the a dropdown list of the biggest players and swarmed everyone, I prefer to be more targeted, particularly early round when mana is a limited resource. I'd cast clear sight, and if their food was low, I'd compare it to an older clear sight in the archives to see if they were on and upwards or downwards trend. Then I'd cast revelation to see if they had Gaia's up. Depending on their circumstances, I'd then cast swarm. If someone is low on food, and losing food despite having Gaia's up then they are the ideal target, and I caught three players that fit this bill. I also discovered the second-place top explorer, Too kewl for skewl (Craghack) (#9), was on 0 food and already starving, with 4 hours left on his Fools Gold, so would be potentially starving for another few hours. He had no hostile spells on him so it seemed no one had noticed yet. There is no immediate benefit to throwing a swarm on someone already in that situation (can't starve him harder than 0 food after all), but I could make his recovery more irritating, so I swarmed him anyway. I wondered if anyone else would notice his predicament and if he'd become a massive hit for someone later.

I didn't have to wait too long. Six or seven ticks later:

2024-06-18 14:59:18 Engage! (jboy) (#3) invaded Too kewl for skewl (#9) and captured 107 land.

The hit knocked him straight out of second place and when I checked on him two days later, he'd sunk to 16th.

I had saved some wiz and spy strength for ops since I had to take all these myself now. I knew I was definitely in danger territory dp-wise, hittable by I can stop peeing mid-stream, but Engage had just made himself a much better target.

2024-06-18 15:59:03 I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) invaded Engage! (#3) and captured 65 land.

There was also now a Nox in my realm that hadn't unshared his advisors and sitting a little larger than I was on about 3k less dp than me (although this was due to not casting Ares), and that was before taking into account his 2k draftees. Even with Ares up he was still the better target. I had a second meat shield.

Since this was shaping up to be a very quiet round, at this point I also applied to join the Shadow League. Last round the SL was a breeze, and I found that now more than ever I needed the cheaper ops if I was going to survive being a blopper and a solo opper.

Just like last round, Elf Woods had started cycloning a Wonder and had already dealt 23k to something. If I could guess which one he was targeting I had a better chance of sniping. At that damage already it had to be a tier 1 wonder, and since he was a Gnome, I had to assume he'd caught the Gnomish Mining Machine mania. I razed and rezoned some alchemies to bring in some more towers and started cycloning it.

By the end of the first week, the kobold and the lyc in #2 were slightly out of range, but still in the zone where I could easily explore into it - but would risk getting hit. Despite feeling underdefended on several occasions in the first week I never caught a single op. My meat shield, who was still relying on 3k of squishy dp had somehow evaded interest too, with better targets reliably presenting themselves gift wrapped to the fast attackers whenever they needed a hit.

At least my realm was doing its bit to keep some of the other fast attackers in the race:

2024-06-19 23:48:35 Victorious on the battlefield, Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (Pos5 Only) (#5) conquered 48 land from Etchi no Kamigami (#0).

2024-06-20 07:59:31 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (#5) and captured 65 land.

At the start of the round I was barely in the top 100 doms, but by the end of the first week I'd managed to crawl into the top 40, which is usually where I live for most of the round when playing slow races. Steady as she goes.

2024-06-21 02:59:27 OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (hepizoj) (#11) fended off an attack from I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2).

This hit doesn't have anything to do with my narrative here, I only noted it down because it was funny.

2024-06-21 04:56:29 I can cook using an Air Fryer! (Rury) (#2) invaded OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (#11) and captured 70 land.

Shortly after, Rury showed Erix how it's done!

'''WEEK 2 - SINKING FEELING'''

Unfortunately for my meat shield at the start of the second week, the runaway lyc had already started to bottomfeed.

2024-06-24 02:07:34 I can stop peeing mid-stream (#2) invaded fellow dominion Cant Afford Daniel Gafford (Lou Dort is Benny Cheng) (#5) and captured 89 land.

He was able to hit him despite about 4k draftees, which he didn't even bother to assassinate, which didn't bode well for other explorers being able to stay ahead of the curve, given that he looked pretty well defended to me. But I didn't have eyes on the lyc. The kobold was in an even stronger position, on 2,900 land (compared to his lyc support on 2,383 acres), and the memes about the round being over were already well underway.

By day 10, between myself and Elf Woods we'd done around 100k in cyclone damage, but since I didn't know what he was cycloning, I had no idea if we were close to taking the Gnomish Mining Machine or if we'd been targeting different wonders. I could have just asked him, of course, but it went against spirit of the Elf Woods Challenge to communicate.

Then, the worst case scenario happened: my realm was actually able to coordinate a Wonder take-down.

2024-06-24 11:30:45 Budots (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:31 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:59 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:05 FishTea Nya Wah (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:33 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:04 Big Guy in the Backyard (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:05 The Imperial Armada has been destroyed and rebuilt by returnees (#5).

Okay it involved one guy hitting it three times and a bit of a gap for the last guy to get stuck in, but the chain hits were a success and the Wonder fell.

It seemed an odd choice of Wonder for our realm: the Armada is typically a top realm Wonder, where you're concerned you might be targeted in war for sinking. Unless my realm was preparing for war, I couldn't see the likelihood in anyone warring us to sink any of them - until, of course, they took the Wonder, which a top realm might actually want. In which case they'd only bring war on themselves, lose the Wonder, and get blopped anyway.

In any case, regardless of their reasoning, their Wonder take-down had ended my Elf Woods Challenge in failure. Neither I nor Elf Woods had managed to snipe a Wonder. I was top ranked in cyclones at this point, and it was all for naught. Still, it had been a fun little challenge and kept me occupied in the early game. And with the Elf Woods Challenge over, I had no reason to continue playing the role of a mute realmie, so I shared my advisors with everyone. Everyone except Elf Woods, naturally. Then I joined the realm discord to try and figure the realm's rationale behind taking the Armada. I scrolled up for the recent chat logs:

jahmes: "what wonder should we get do you think?"

xiang1121: "maybe try our luck on armada?"

jahmes: "ok"

And there you have it folks. I lost my Elf Woods Challenge to an apparently random spur-of-the-moment decision to take a random Wonder. At the end of the round, some of the pinoys were pleased that we'd managed to keep it all round. But it was such a pointless Wonder that offered zero benefit to us except for a puny -1% royal guard tax, I was just confused by their glee. I was also surprised nobody just knocked it down for the prestige. A 200k wonder was just begging to be one-shot.

At least with cyclones off the menu I could turn my attention to some proper blopping. And so that's what I did.

'''WEEK 3 AND BEYOND - THAT GUY'''

My realm was under pinoy control this round, with a 5-pack of "returnees" (which remained our realm name the entire round) coming back to the game having never played since Classic. Jahmes, the King, was I think the only regular player, and the rest of his pack seemed alright with just doing their thing. Only one of the pinoys (who never joined the discord) got locked for cheating. He'd been running three accounts, which his packmate said was so he could learn the game faster. The innocent cherub, I can't believe the Rules Committee would punish such an earnest display of wanting to get better at the game.

I didn't agitate for war at all this round, until right at the very end - I could see plain as day that our realm wasn't equipped to deal with it. There was some attempt to track top op in the first few weeks, but after that, nobody seemed to keep track - or if they did, they weren't sharing the info and were just doing it personally. That was fine; I did exactly the same thing until the last week or two, where I played pretty fast and loose with my dp and narrowly avoided getting chomped by Syl's Rainbow Sorbet (lamb) #7 in his ascendancy to near-greatness. But the lack of war, combined with the low social element in the realm discord, really hurt my enjoyment of the round. I think this round was probably the most disengaged I've been in any round I've played and it was pretty much entirely down to landing in a very quiet and basically rudderless realm, under the control of a pack that mostly seemed content to just dawdle along.

The one time I did start banging the war drums was when #2 declared on #13 towards the end of the round. It removed the possibility of a mutual war, it meant that #2's bloppers would have had targets lined up and already blown their loads, we didn't have any noobs in range to feed them, and all of the non-packed and even some of the packed players were up for it. We were all dead in the water with nothing to lose. But our King just ignored it all. I briefly considered pulling a Cronel and staging a mutiny, but jahmes' position as Monarch was pretty entrenched. Some of the late, mute and mostly inactive players had also voted for him, and I didnt fancy my chances competing with his 7 votes to my 1 (shout out to Elf Woods for his unwavering support all round). I figured I could definitely bleed one of his votes, as it was from an active non-packed player, and I could always vote for myself, taking it to 6-3, but it was too much of a long shot to be worth the effort.

With 'inconsequential' being the defining characteristic of our realm, I had only one recourse left to keep me engaged in the round: the Shadow League. And I never thought I'd find myself typing that sentence!

I usually hate That Guy in the Shadow League that just trains stupid ratios at the expense of their finish, but this round, with nothing better to do, I was That Guy. Unfortunately it just so happened that I'd picked the worst round to be That Guy, because SL is not working at all as intended. I've moaned about SL plenty in the past being a "noob trap" that just bogs players down in a never-ending ratio race to the bottom, hurts their growth and diverts their blops away from attacker threats and onto each other. It doesn't really work like that at the moment though: it is now a mostly-peaceful safe haven for ops bitches to enjoy half price ops. With the recent changes, particularly to wiz blops and defences, wizard races are paradoxically at a massive disadvantage in the SL if they're trying to deal damage. The first fireball I threw at a non-wizard race in SL killed 60 peasants, and so after that I didn't throw any fireballs. From the perspective of a wizard race just looking to coast as an ops bitch in the SL, however, you're in a great position: only your spies are vulnerable if you don't turn them into assassins. And while assassins are a lot bettter than they were, they're still very expensive and no one wants to train them. I capitalised on this.

Spy races, on the other hand, are playing on god mode in SL right now. Spy blops are still effective (except for sabotage, since it's an attacker-only countermeasure and everyone in SL is exploring), snare works great and does decent damage, and assassination is pretty strong. As long as you maintain an okay wizard ratio - which naturally you'll convert to AMs because they're worth it - nobody can touch you. You're effectively immune to wiz blops from your AMs and nobody can assassinate them. Meanwhile, you have a naturally strong spy ratio and can farm almost any non-spy race SLer you want.

I had two main problems with SL. Problem number one was that most of the players in SL were virtually immune to damage, and in particular most war blops damage sucked ass. Problem number two was that as a Sylvan, I'd lose dp every time I failed a blop - which in SL is a pretty common occurrence. Anyone over a 0.5 ratio massively spikes your fail rate, almost regardless of your own ratio. For example, targeting one SLer that maintained a 0.5 wiz ratio all round, I'd fail around the same number of blops on him on a 2.0 ratio as I did on my end-round crazy ratio of 4.0. And the higher the target's ratio goes, the higher your casualties. I could easily lose 30-80 dryads on a fail. You get 75% of them requeued, but it's a sharp drop in immediate dp when you have a bunch of fails that could mean the difference between getting hit and skating by.

Despite this, I was determined to be That Guy, and after probing for weaknesses I found a few goldmines. The first was Theme? We Don't Need no Stinkin Theme! (Grapes of Math) (#9), who had experimented with throwing fireballs at me once too often, and so when after a long flight to Japan he was finally able to check his phone, he had a few thousand dead wizard corpses waiting to greet him. He quickly converted his remaining wizards to AMs.

It was difficult to stay ahead of some of the SLers that were able to go to war, and so I was constantly competing with other war-blessed SLers for coveted ranks, particularly around the disband/assassination ranks. My competitors were able to find soft targets in war and farm thousands of kills at a time in very short windows. Fortunately, one SLer brought himself to my attention (DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (Skubasteve) (#13)) when he tried to feed me to his realmie (Summertime Thadness (Chunk) (#13)) and was constantly opping me and revving me for a 24 hour period. I let him be until I knew I was in the clear, not wanting to further incentivise a hit, but after I was safe I went after Jazzy Jeff with a vengeance. He was a Nox: no racial spy immunity. I disbanded thousands of his spies. He queued thousands more, but at the same time he'd also put in his 12-hour surrender notice to the Shadow League emperor. I was waiting for those spies to come in to disband them, but he left SL the same tick they arrived. I was annoyed that I'd waited, but the bait of thousands of spies incoming to be disbanded again was too strong.

Without Stinkin Theme or Jazzy Jeff as viable targets, I was forced to resort to picking on Ross' offspring: Soybins the Handsome Troll (Soybins the son of Ross) (#1). This guy spent all round in SL as a troll with a 0.5 wizard ratio and an estimated 0.3 spy ratio. He would train wizards and spies, and I would assassinate them in pretty small numbers, and he'd train more wizards and spies, and I'd assassinate those too. Round and round we went. He never seemed to convert them to AMs or Asses, and he never left SL. The kills were peanuts compared to what I'd been farming from Jazzy, but it shored up my numbers enough to keep a lead. But I had a problem: another SLer in #2 was soaring up the disband ranks to contend with - How Does This Work Again? (MumbleNGrumble). #2 had a bunch of wars in the endgame and this guy had an all you can eat buffet of targets to choose from. He nearly eclipsed my kills overnight from one war, but thankfully his target must have dried up and converted spies to assassins, because his kills dropped off pretty quickly. Still, I needed another juicy target.

Fortunately for me, Jazzy Jeff couldn't resist the allure of SL, and after some time spent recovering outside of the SL, he decided to sneak back in. He kept a low profile though, and I might not have noticed if it weren't for the #2 spy disbander forcing me to redouble my efforts to find a target. I nuked thousands of his spies. In total I dished out over 3.3million plat in spy disband damage this round, and Jazzy Jeff bore the overwhelming brunt of it. Jazzy hadn't learned from his mistake last time, but I had learned from mine. I saw that Jazzy queued thousands more spies... and so this time I waited until the tick before they arrived, then disbanded another thousand spies. The next tick he was no longer in the SL, and would remain out for the rest of the round.

'''EPILOGUE'''

My laser focus on assassination ranks for both spies and wizards meant I secured first place in the Rush Ranks for assassination (worth a not-too-shabby 15 points). It's more effort than the fireball rank, which is by far the most bang for your buck than any other category at 10 points, but it still meant I had a fighting chance of being top blopper. In the dead zones where I had no targets, I switched up my blopping to bring my score up in the theft and duration ranks. I had number #1 in plague and #2 and #3 ranks in a bunch of others. The lumber rank as a Sylvan was a cinch. The more war-dependant a rank was, the harder it was to score highly in it, so fireball, lightning and sabotage were all beyond my reach to compete for in any capacity.

Top fireball naturally went to mutineer and warmonger Cronel, but I beat him in enough of the other categories that I was able to at least take the title of top blopper in the Rush Ranks this round. It felt like I was playing for top blopper on hard mode with such a small pool of targets, but some luck and the generosity of Jazzy Jeff helped me get by.

Congratulations to realm #2 and to Rury for the win.

Next round I'll be throwing at least two fireballs to make sure I beat my Rush Ranks fireball score of 0.003 this round. 120 dead peasants here I come!

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/kkFmJQJ

Round 40 Ghetto Superstar

2024-08-01T13:59:07Z

Rush: Created page with "Hi, Rush here. I took notes for the first two weeks this round and then hit the 'roundfail abandon button' when I realised that, for me at least, this was going to be the leas..."

Hi, Rush here. I took notes for the first two weeks this round and then hit the 'roundfail abandon button' when I realised that, for me at least, this was going to be the least interesting round in OD history, so this one's another mini roundfail. You want to know what it's like to spend 47 days in a ghetto realm? Well you've come to the right place. Set your expectations to 'snooze' and lets get this over with.

I was Ghetto Superstar in (#5), Sylvan, and I finished 45th on 5,614 land.

I sailed solo this round, figuring I'd let the algorithmic winds of fate decide upon which shore I beached. And it just so happened to be realm #5, with the worst realm composition at assignment I've ever been included in. No beef to any of the players, we all got screwed on this one. I landed with Pos5 Only, Lou Dort is Benny Cheng (yes that's his lifetime name), TRoiT, spoonman, jahmes, Jocke, Martinuum, Guydoonster, Naweeb, and... Elf Woods. Elf Woods again! As a late signup before round start we'd pick up SlyD, who would never even make it out of protection, and xiang1121. Then as the round went on, we acquired Cosmo's Kingdom and Lacricel. I didn't know who most of these people were.

It turned out 50% of my realm were completely new players, and 10% was Elf Woods. I sent fett a message demanding an apology from the algorithm, but it turned out a lot of realms were experiencing the 'new player' phenomenon. Or maybe they were all farms. Either way, it was shaping up to be an unusual round.

I'd been planning to have the Elf Woods experience this round, so assignment didn't matter as much to me initially anyway. Before realm assignment I'd switched off my advisors and hidden my lifetime name, arriving completely incognito, so as far as these guys were all concerned I was a mute random. I planned to play the first few weeks in true Elf Woods fashion: avoid the realm discord and hopefully snipe a Wonder on my own. I set sniping a Wonder as my win/lose goal (either by my hand or Elf Woods' efforts), but I also wanted to see how well I fared without any group intel to support me, so I'd be trying to figure out who all the big nasties were myself and tracking the threats all on my own. A lot of my Roundfails are built with the intel and insights collected from realmies on the whole - who I usually try to credit - but inescapably my awareness of round dynamics is largely coloured by group analysis. Not so this time! Such was the Elf Woods Challenge. And I had some decisions to make. Namely, which Wonder was I going to try and solo snipe.

The mania-inducing Gnomish Mining Machine, the Ancient Library and the High Cleric's Tower were the options on the table right away. The GMM, though completely useless to me as a Sylvan, was probably the most likely to bring us war as a weaker-looking realm, so of course it was my natural preference. Plus the only Gnome in our realm was Elf Woods, and when you're cosplaying Elf Woods, you've gotta do a bro a solid. The HCT in a round of new undead races was probably going to be somewhat popular too, so it was a secondary option. The Library is a very popular Wonder which I'd often mistakenly assumed would bring lots of war, but in my experience, it doesn't turn out this way - probably because it's a popular Wonder primarily with explorers and sometimes converters. It's not a Wonder that sits on most attackers' radars, and they are usually the point of gravity in most realms that have cooperative and active realmies.

The Wayfarer's Outpost popped up after OOP, but while it would have been a lovely Wonder to have, it was probably going to be too popular for me to snipe.

'''WEEK 1 - THE ELF WOODS CHALLENGE'''

When the starter gun fired at oop, my realm had eight attackers straight into the frey, with only TRoiT bouncing on his first attack. Even Elf Woods was getting stuck into some attacking, making three attacks over 13 hours, before getting invaded by Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff (Ivetza) (#9) and then bouncing his fourth hit on a bot. This prompted Naweeb to post the "can we help ya buddy" thread in council that Elf Woods probably sees at some point in every round he plays, and which he duly ignored. But we were on good terms at least; I'd voted him for Monarch and by return, he'd voted for me. We had a bond. A mutual respect between mute and uncooperative realmies.

I'd been tracking the early top ops myself, mainly just by sorting by highest networth and keeping an eye on the Town Crier. In my estimation, right out of the gate the biggest threats were Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3), I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) and I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2). As a Sylvan, I had a sluggish start baked into my build, so despite being on smaller land than some juicier targets I defended against the first two anyway. Not that they even looked. I couldn't benchmark my DP against players in my realm of a similar size, as they'd unshared advisors with me in retalliation for unsharing my own. I knew Braille could hit me, but took an educated guess that he wouldn't - expecting he'd hit someone bigger and with better landtypes.

The wheels came off the sims pretty early for a couple of these guys, with Mortality bouncing on a 'confusingly named' (but not really) target, having sent on the wrong guy, who was nonetheless found in breach of the rules and promptly renamed.

2024-06-15 16:02:16 Sadly, the forces of Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3) were beaten back by Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12).

Mortality was awarded full land and prestige for his blunder and was back in the game, but ultimately squandered it on his next hit by getting eaten alive.

2024-06-16 14:59:38 Victorious on the battlefield, Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) conquered 56 land from Emu Export (TheThing) (#9).

2024-06-16 15:07:07 Alex & Sammy's Endless Summer (DavetheGoliath) (#13) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 50 land.

2024-06-16 15:48:31 Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 45 land.

2024-06-16 16:59:46 Rule 2z: Thou Shalt Bar All Retiles in Code (Ares Titan) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 40 land.

Meanwhile, Braille had the scariest op that I'd seen, but I wasn't sure he could full send it, so I was sitting in range underdefended to him.

He not only full sent, but also sent a handful of chams on a Gnome who was slightly smaller than me. And also bounced. I am guessing an out of date land spy was the culprit. I'm not sure how I flew under the radar on that one, but I wasn't complaining.

2024-06-16 12:22:22 Sadly, the forces of I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2) were beaten back by Gn¤me man is an ‡šland. (Espiritus) (#1).

And then he got hit.

2024-06-16 23:59:50 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion I can read braille without being blind (#2) and captured 54 land.

That guy hadn't even been on my radar at all, so I quietly added I'm not lovin' it to my list of ops to track.

When blops went live this round I was fast asleep - unusual for me, but I had zero expectations my realm which were mainly attackers would be hankering for war against a rapidly developing runaway situation in realm #2. Pre-blops-live ops showed that some of the fast attackers were bringing in wizard guilds, anticipating war, but after hearing complaints about landing in similarly jank realm compositions from other prominent bloppers, I wasn't going to hold my breath. When I woke up the next day I was not surprised to see the the fast attackers waltzing through a blops-free paradise.

I did however do a quick scan for potential swarm targets. Although I could have just gone through the a dropdown list of the biggest players and swarmed everyone, I prefer to be more targeted, particularly early round when mana is a limited resource. I'd cast clear sight, and if their food was low, I'd compare it to an older clear sight in the archives to see if they were on and upwards or downwards trend. Then I'd cast revelation to see if they had Gaia's up. Depending on their circumstances, I'd then cast swarm. If someone is low on food, and losing food despite having Gaia's up then they are the ideal target, and I caught three players that fit this bill. I also discovered the second-place top explorer, Too kewl for skewl (Craghack) (#9), was on 0 food and already starving, with 4 hours left on his Fools Gold, so would be potentially starving for another few hours. He had no hostile spells on him so it seemed no one had noticed yet. There is no immediate benefit to throwing a swarm on someone already in that situation (can't starve him harder than 0 food after all), but I could make his recovery more irritating, so I swarmed him anyway. I wondered if anyone else would notice his predicament and if he'd become a massive hit for someone later.

I didn't have to wait too long. Six or seven ticks later:

2024-06-18 14:59:18 Engage! (jboy) (#3) invaded Too kewl for skewl (#9) and captured 107 land.

The hit knocked him straight out of second place and when I checked on him two days later, he'd sunk to 16th.

I had saved some wiz and spy strength for ops since I had to take all these myself now. I knew I was definitely in danger territory dp-wise, hittable by I can stop peeing mid-stream, but Engage had just made himself a much better target.

2024-06-18 15:59:03 I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) invaded Engage! (#3) and captured 65 land.

There was also now a Nox in my realm that hadn't unshared his advisors and sitting a little larger than I was on about 3k less dp than me (although this was due to not casting Ares), and that was before taking into account his 2k draftees. Even with Ares up he was still the better target. I had a second meat shield.

Since this was shaping up to be a very quiet round, at this point I also applied to join the Shadow League. Last round the SL was a breeze, and I found that now more than ever I needed the cheaper ops if I was going to survive being a blopper and a solo opper.

Just like last round, Elf Woods had started cycloning a Wonder and had already dealt 23k to something. If I could guess which one he was targeting I had a better chance of sniping. At that damage already it had to be a tier 1 wonder, and since he was a Gnome, I had to assume he'd caught the Gnomish Mining Machine mania. I razed and rezoned some alchemies to bring in some more towers and started cycloning it.

By the end of the first week, the kobold and the lyc in #2 were slightly out of range, but still in the zone where I could easily explore into it - but would risk getting hit. Despite feeling underdefended on several occasions in the first week I never caught a single op. My meat shield, who was still relying on 3k of squishy dp had somehow evaded interest too, with better targets reliably presenting themselves gift wrapped to the fast attackers whenever they needed a hit.

At least my realm was doing its bit to keep some of the other fast attackers in the race:

2024-06-19 23:48:35 Victorious on the battlefield, Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (Pos5 Only) (#5) conquered 48 land from Etchi no Kamigami (#0).

2024-06-20 07:59:31 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (#5) and captured 65 land.

At the start of the round I was barely in the top 100 doms, but by the end of the first week I'd managed to crawl into the top 40, which is usually where I live for most of the round when playing slow races. Steady as she goes.

2024-06-21 02:59:27 OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (hepizoj) (#11) fended off an attack from I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2).

This hit doesn't have anything to do with my narrative here, I only noted it down because it was funny.

2024-06-21 04:56:29 I can cook using an Air Fryer! (Rury) (#2) invaded OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (#11) and captured 70 land.

Shortly after, Rury showed Erix how it's done!

'''WEEK 2 - SINKING FEELING'''

Unfortunately for my meat shield at the start of the second week, the runaway lyc had already started to bottomfeed.

2024-06-24 02:07:34 I can stop peeing mid-stream (#2) invaded fellow dominion Cant Afford Daniel Gafford (Lou Dort is Benny Cheng) (#5) and captured 89 land.

He was able to hit him despite about 4k draftees, which he didn't even bother to assassinate, which didn't bode well for other explorers being able to stay ahead of the curve, given that he looked pretty well defended to me. But I didn't have eyes on the lyc. The kobold was in an even stronger position, on 2,900 land (compared to his lyc support on 2,383 acres), and the memes about the round being over were already well underway.

By day 10, between myself and Elf Woods we'd done around 100k in cyclone damage, but since I didn't know what he was cycloning, I had no idea if we were close to taking the Gnomish Mining Machine or if we'd been targeting different wonders. I could have just asked him, of course, but it went against spirit of the Elf Woods Challenge to communicate.

Then, the worst case scenario happened: my realm was actually able to coordinate a Wonder take-down.

2024-06-24 11:30:45 Budots (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:31 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:59 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:05 FishTea Nya Wah (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:33 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:04 Big Guy in the Backyard (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:05 The Imperial Armada has been destroyed and rebuilt by returnees (#5).

Okay it involved one guy hitting it three times and a bit of a gap for the last guy to get stuck in, but the chain hits were a success and the Wonder fell.

It seemed an odd choice of Wonder for our realm: the Armada is typically a top realm Wonder, where you're concerned you might be targeted in war for sinking. Unless my realm was preparing for war, I couldn't see the likelihood in anyone warring us to sink any of them - until, of course, they took the Wonder, which a top realm might actually want. In which case they'd only bring war on themselves, lose the Wonder, and get blopped anyway.

In any case, regardless of their reasoning, their Wonder take-down had ended my Elf Woods Challenge in failure. Neither I nor Elf Woods had managed to snipe a Wonder. I was top ranked in cyclones at this point, and it was all for naught. Still, it had been a fun little challenge and kept me occupied in the early game. And with the Elf Woods Challenge over, I had no reason to continue playing the role of a mute realmie, so I shared my advisors with everyone. Everyone except Elf Woods, naturally. Then I joined the realm discord to try and figure the realm's rationale behind taking the Armada. I scrolled up for the recent chat logs:

jahmes: "what wonder should we get do you think?"

xiang1121: "maybe try our luck on armada?"

jahmes: "ok"

And there you have it folks. I lost my Elf Woods Challenge to an apparently random spur-of-the-moment decision to take a random Wonder. At the end of the round, some of the pinoys were pleased that we'd managed to keep it all round. But it was such a pointless Wonder that offered zero benefit to us except for a puny -1% royal guard tax, I was just confused by their glee. I was also surprised nobody just knocked it down for the prestige. A 200k wonder was just begging to be one-shot.

At least with cyclones off the menu I could turn my attention to some proper blopping. And so that's what I did.

'''WEEK 3 AND BEYOND - THAT GUY'''

My realm was under pinoy control this round, with a 5-pack of "returnees" (which remained our realm name the entire round) coming back to the game having never played since Classic. Jahmes, the King, was I think the only regular player, and the rest of his pack seemed alright with just doing their thing. Only one of the pinoys (who never joined the discord) got locked for cheating. He'd been running three accounts, which his packmate said was so he could learn the game faster. The innocent cherub, I can't believe the Rules Committee would punish such an earnest display of wanting to get better at the game.

I didn't agitate for war at all this round, until right at the very end - I could see plain as day that our realm wasn't equipped to deal with it. There was some attempt to track top op in the first few weeks, but after that, nobody seemed to keep track - or if they did, they weren't sharing the info and were just doing it personally. That was fine; I did exactly the same thing until the last week or two, where I played pretty fast and loose with my dp and narrowly avoided getting chomped by Syl's Rainbow Sorbet (lamb) #7 in his ascendancy to near-greatness. But the lack of war, combined with the low social element in the realm discord, really hurt my enjoyment of the round. I think this round was probably the most disengaged I've been in any round I've played and it was pretty much entirely down to landing in a very quiet and basically rudderless realm, under the control of a pack that mostly seemed content to just dawdle along.

The one time I did start banging the war drums was when #2 declared on #13 towards the end of the round. It removed the possibility of a mutual war, it meant that #2's bloppers would have had targets lined up and already blown their loads, we didn't have any noobs in range to feed them, and all of the non-packed and even some of the packed players were up for it. We were all dead in the water with nothing to lose. But our King just ignored it all. I briefly considered pulling a Cronel and staging a mutiny, but jahmes' position as Monarch was pretty entrenched. Some of the late, mute and mostly inactive players had also voted for him, and I didnt fancy my chances competing with his 7 votes to my 1 (shout out to Elf Woods for his unwavering support all round). I figured I could definitely bleed one of his votes, as it was from an active non-packed player, and I could always vote for myself, taking it to 6-3, but it was too much of a long shot to be worth the effort.

With 'inconsequential' being the defining characteristic of our realm, I had only one recourse left to keep me engaged in the round: the Shadow League. And I never thought I'd find myself typing that sentence!

I usually hate That Guy in the Shadow League that just trains stupid ratios at the expense of their finish, but this round, with nothing better to do, I was That Guy. Unfortunately it just so happened that I'd picked the worst round to be That Guy, because SL is not working at all as intended. I've moaned about SL plenty in the past being a "noob trap" that just bogs players down in a never-ending ratio race to the bottom, hurts their growth and diverts their blops away from attacker threats and onto each other. It doesn't really work like that at the moment though: it is now a mostly-peaceful safe haven for ops bitches to enjoy half price ops. With the recent changes, particularly to wiz blops and defences, wizard races are paradoxically at a massive disadvantage in the SL if they're trying to deal damage. The first fireball I threw at a non-wizard race in SL killed 60 peasants, and so after that I didn't throw any fireballs. From the perspective of a wizard race just looking to coast as an ops bitch in the SL, however, you're in a great position: only your spies are vulnerable if you don't turn them into assassins. And while assassins are a lot bettter than they were, they're still very expensive and no one wants to train them. I capitalised on this.

Spy races, on the other hand, are playing on god mode in SL right now. Spy blops are still effective (except for sabotage, since it's an attacker-only countermeasure and everyone in SL is exploring), snare works great and does decent damage, and assassination is pretty strong. As long as you maintain an okay wizard ratio - which naturally you'll convert to AMs because they're worth it - nobody can touch you. You're effectively immune to wiz blops from your AMs and nobody can assassinate them. Meanwhile, you have a naturally strong spy ratio and can farm almost any non-spy race SLer you want.

I had two main problems with SL. Problem number one was that most of the players in SL were virtually immune to damage, and in particular most war blops damage sucked ass. Problem number two was that as a Sylvan, I'd lose dp every time I failed a blop - which in SL is a pretty common occurrence. Anyone over a 0.5 ratio massively spikes your fail rate, almost regardless of your own ratio. For example, targeting one SLer that maintained a 0.5 wiz ratio all round, I'd fail around the same number of blops on him on a 2.0 ratio as I did on my end-round crazy ratio of 4.0. And the higher the target's ratio goes, the higher your casualties. I could easily lose 30-80 dryads on a fail. You get 75% of them requeued, but it's a sharp drop in immediate dp when you have a bunch of fails that could mean the difference between getting hit and skating by.

Despite this, I was determined to be That Guy, and after probing for weaknesses I found a few goldmines. The first was Theme? We Don't Need no Stinkin Theme! (Grapes of Math) (#9), who had experimented with throwing fireballs at me once too often, and so when after a long flight to Japan he was finally able to check his phone, he had a few thousand dead wizard corpses waiting to greet him. He quickly converted his remaining wizards to AMs.

It was difficult to stay ahead of some of the SLers that were able to go to war, and so I was constantly competing with other war-blessed SLers for coveted ranks, particularly around the disband/assassination ranks. My competitors were able to find soft targets in war and farm thousands of kills at a time in very short windows. Fortunately, one SLer brought himself to my attention (DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (Skubasteve) (#13)) when he tried to feed me to his realmie (Summertime Thadness (Chunk) (#13)) and was constantly opping me and revving me for a 24 hour period. I let him be until I knew I was in the clear, not wanting to further incentivise a hit, but after I was safe I went after Jazzy Jeff with a vengeance. He was a Nox: no racial spy immunity. I disbanded thousands of his spies. He queued thousands more, but at the same time he'd also put in his 12-hour surrender notice to the Shadow League emperor. I was waiting for those spies to come in to disband them, but he left SL the same tick they arrived. I was annoyed that I'd waited, but the bait of thousands of spies incoming to be disbanded again was too strong.

Without Stinkin Theme or Jazzy Jeff as viable targets, I was forced to resort to picking on Ross' offspring: Soybins the Handsome Troll (Soybins the son of Ross) (#1). This guy spent all round in SL as a troll with a 0.5 wizard ratio and an estimated 0.3 spy ratio. He would train wizards and spies, and I would assassinate them in pretty small numbers, and he'd train more wizards and spies, and I'd assassinate those too. Round and round we went. He never seemed to convert them to AMs or Asses, and he never left SL. The kills were peanuts compared to what I'd been farming from Jazzy, but it shored up my numbers enough to keep a lead. But I had a problem: another SLer in #2 was soaring up the disband ranks to contend with - How Does This Work Again? (MumbleNGrumble). #2 had a bunch of wars in the endgame and this guy had an all you can eat buffet of targets to choose from. He nearly eclipsed my kills overnight from one war, but thankfully his target must have dried up and converted spies to assassins, because his kills dropped off pretty quickly. Still, I needed another juicy target.

Fortunately for me, Jazzy Jeff couldn't resist the allure of SL, and after some time spent recovering outside of the SL, he decided to sneak back in. He kept a low profile though, and I might not have noticed if it weren't for the #2 spy disbander forcing me to redouble my efforts to find a target. I nuked thousands of his spies. In total I dished out over 3.3million plat in spy disband damage this round, and Jazzy Jeff bore the overwhelming brunt of it. Jazzy hadn't learned from his mistake last time, but I had learned from mine. I saw that Jazzy queued thousands more spies... and so this time I waited until the tick before they arrived, then disbanded another thousand spies. The next tick he was no longer in the SL, and would remain out for the rest of the round.

My laser focus on assassination ranks for both spies and wizards meant I secured first place in the Rush Ranks for assassination (worth a not-too-shabby 15 points). It's more effort than the fireball rank, which is by far the most bang for your buck than any other category at 10 points, but it still meant I had a fighting chance of being top blopper. In the dead zones where I had no targets, I switched up my blopping to bring my score up in the theft and duration ranks. I had number #1 in plague and #2 and #3 ranks in a bunch of others. The lumber rank as a Sylvan was a cinch. The more war-dependant a rank was, the harder it was to score highly in it, so fireball, lightning and sabotage were all beyond my reach to compete for in any capacity.

Top fireball naturally went to mutineer and warmonger Cronel, but I beat him in enough of the other categories that I was able to at least take the title of top blopper in the Rush Ranks this round. It felt like I was playing for top blopper on hard mode with such a small pool of targets, but some luck and the generosity of Jazzy Jeff helped me get by.

Congratulations to realm #2 and to Rury for the win.

Next round I'll be throwing at least two fireballs to make sure I beat my Rush Ranks fireball score of 0.003 this round. 120 dead peasants here I come!

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T14:11:18Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combined with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Manno spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 (Crazy Elf's draft realm) decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #12 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (''Rush from the future edit:'' this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T12:12:09Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combined with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Manno spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 (Crazy Elf's draft realm) decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #12 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

'''TL;DR'''

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T11:45:51Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combined with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Manno spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 (Crazy Elf's draft realm) decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #12 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T11:45:26Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combined with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Virchue spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 (Crazy Elf's draft realm) decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #12 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T11:16:16Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combined with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Virchue spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 (Crazy Elf's draft realm) decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #10 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T11:14:54Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combimed with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Virchue spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 (Crazy Elf's draft realm) decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #10 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T09:56:06Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combimed with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Virchue spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 (Crazy Elf's draft realm) decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were noob realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #10 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T09:49:07Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combimed with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Virchue spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓 (Karpatheo), who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were noob realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #10 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T09:43:28Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combimed with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft round sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Virchue spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓, who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were noob realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #10 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7

Round 39 Dan was abandoned as a child

2024-05-03T09:42:33Z

Rush:

Hi, Rush here. And it's time for another Roundfail: draft edition!

I was drafted onto Team Dan, alongside Gothia, Erix, Asanka, Scratch, Zar, ForPony and Sizzler. Dan had also drafted Bombtek, but after asking us to make him a sim (which Lud, who said he was taking the round off - and then played anyway and almost friggin won the game - generously created for him), he then never turned up to register in time. We DMed him and pinged him a bunch but I don't think he used discord much and he definitely had turned his notifications off, and so he missed the deadline and would have been seeded randomly into one of the other realms - if he even signed up for the round at all. Honestly, it felt a bit like we dodged a bullet, but then we ended up with Elf Woods as a rando in-realm anyway which felt a bit like what happened to me the time I went to return a toaster I'd bought at Tesco because it wouldn't heat up, only to be given a replacement toaster that was missing the lever to lower the bread into the grill and switch it on. Neither of them could make any fucking toast.

I already knew I was on Team Dan before it got announced publicly. Merf had strongly alluded to me being on Dan's team in the Rush Hour podcast where we revealed the co-captains, despite me saying on the pod I wanted it to be a surprise (though if you ask Merf, he says I directly asked him what team I was on). Then after the pod wrapped and we were having the post-pod chat he straight up told me who my team was. I don't know how Merf got all of the info he did - someone from the captains discord must have been leaking it to him - but he was 100% accurate.

Dan was the one team captain that, if you'd asked me before that chat with Merf, I'd have put money on not drafting me - especially with Gothia as his co-captain. The previous round my pack had been responsible for obliterating a member of their pack (Wurst) as soon as wars became viable, leading to their entire pack abandoning, and the dissolution of their entire realm as the remaining players became refugees and were shipped off to other realms. This legendary blopmageddon was what ushered in the Dark Ages of blops we now find ourselves in. It had gotten a little heated in the discord in the days that followed; I'd called Dan a serial abandoner, he'd called me a narcissist. Standard internet beef.

That said, this is all just a game; it's difficult for me to take a lot of what gets said in the heat of the moment too seriously while we're all out here running fantasy dominions filled with orcs and pixies or whatever. If Dan was drafting me I could only conclude he didn't really give a damn either.

Just to make the scenario as awkward as possible however, I'd also spent some time on the Rush Hour pod saying Dan and Gothia didn't strike me as leadership captain-y types, as they typically filled "General" roles in packs (as in, the second-in-command position); and my experience in previous draft rounds with that type of player was that they often don't perform as well outside their usual team environments. So it was also great to be joining the very captain and co-captain I'd just been saying didn't seem to have that synergistic victory spark. It could have been worse; Merf, knowing I had been drafted by Dan, had been keying me up repeatedly to say negative things about them on the podcast to try and sew seeds of discord among our draft pack. That fucker Merf's always on the psyops, even between rounds. Unfortunately for Merf, neither Dan or Gothia seemed at all concerned with our opinions.

From Dan's draft reasoning on the RiolTalk pod, I think he made the logical decision with the players on the board available to him at the time. I got drafted pretty much exactly where I expected to be, in round three (aka the support round) - although I still can't believe Unfather went before me! An outrageous selection by Grapes.

Looking around at the other teams, I thought Crazy Elf and Swamp Fox had put together the best teams, but I was still optimistic about our team compared to some of the other compositions. We were certainly in the top half in terms of player capability, at least in my estimation, so it really just came down to whether or not our line-up was going to be able to cope on the ops side: due to timezones, I could support Gothia well enough, but Dan and Erix didn't have any natural supporters. I wasn't over the moon about being drafted specifically as ops support (as a blopper, it's really only a role I perform when none of the pure explorers are willing to do it); but given the perceived weak nature of blackops for the second round running, and a crazily disproportionate mutual war op bonus still in full swing, I figured maybe settling for ops might not be the worst possible fate if that's what it came down to.

We spent actual days trying to decide on a theme. Erix had a bunch of lame-o America-centric theme suggestions like "Trump theme", "wrasslers theme" and "fuck the commies" theme that nobody wanted to do, but would then poo-pooed my really good theme suggestions, like naming ourselves after rocks. ForPony wanted to do a beach boys theme where you'd kind of type-hum the beat of the song, and use the word "blops" a lot. Scratch wanted to do a potato theme. We were all over the place. Eventually we all agreed that theme-by-democracy was a dumpster fire, so we asked Dan just to pick whatever he wanted. He went with "insulting team captains" as a theme. So naturally I called myself "Dan was abandoned as a child". I can't help myself, I've always got to stoke the fires. It's a blopper's nature.

Lud had made a Sylvan sim and a Nox sim for us, and the original plan was to have ForPony and I running Sylvan blopsplorers and Bombtek running a Nox blopsplorer, but since Bombtek never showed up, I went Sylvan and ForPony ran Nox. As for randos, we picked up Vinn, Espiritus and Elf Woods. Vinn was a steal, Espiritus was an unknown (or I thought he was, turns out this was my third round playing with the guy!), and Elf Woods... well, Elf Woods is bad. There's no getting around it, he just sucks. He is also bit of an enigma, made even more so by the fact that he unshared advisors with everyone a few days into realm assignment. His lifetime shows that he generally finishes on 2k acres despite having played 15 rounds now. It is almost impressive that after 15 rounds he hasn't quite cracked a reliable 3k explorer finish. Although, having Elf Woods in our realm did give us something to work towards: a collective goal to not get hit before he did.

We failed horribly in that goal.

'''WEEK 1 - FA MELEE'''

Pretty much everyone (including me) expected our realm to play fast - but after much discussion Dan, Gothia, Erix and our various other attackers decided not to put a horse in that race, correctly predicting that there would be a lot of fast competition this round and instead opting for quick convert / slow attack strategies. And when the horses left the gates at oop, I think they were all pleasantly surprised at being even more right than they'd dared to imagine. There were fast attackers everywhere. Every man and his dog was fast attacking. In the first week we were having to track a ridiculous number of players all competing for top op to the point where it sometimes felt overwhelming. I don't know how anyone did it in classic when there were thousands of players - probably with a lot of off-site tools and the kind of free time a teenager at school has. There were some situations where I just couldn't be bothered working out if I had the wiggle room to explore a few more acres or not so I'd just chain dp instead. It probably hurt my early growth a bit, but I tend to play on the conservative side anyway.

This being the third draft round, I think it's fair to make the claim now that these draft rounds are always chaos at oop, and this round was certainly no letdown. The GPC's factory changes, which they cooked up to invalidate people's cache of sims, also had the knock-on effect of invalidating the dp reference chart a lot of people use as a guideline for the first 72 hour of dp needed. This combimed with the "teenagers in ferraris" draft sim phenomenon lead to a few spectacular wrecks in the first week and a lot more player hits than usual. Our realm by contrast was an absolute fortress - we were the final realm to hold out against being invaded until day five, when Espiritus ate a hit after a risky send. The only realm that even came close to our level of invasion evasion was realm 10, but they'd suffered their first hit six hours earlier.

''2024-03-20 00:51:31 The Jungle B (Disco) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) and captured 73 land.''

''2024-03-21 06:59:17 Open Domination (bigchris27) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) and captured 51 land.''

There was also a lot of playing "guess who?" with packs. Everyone in the draft round wants to know where someone is, because once you have one person identified you have virtually the entire realm triangulated, which makes it easier to predict their moves. Loose lips started sinking ships straight away as we were able to nail down a number of realms early on. I don't know who blabbed to who from these realms, because all the people I spoke to gave nothing away, and most people I spoke to seemed to think we were in #5. Except Rio, who accurately guessed our realm in a conversation with Gothia, and MattyVanHalen, who knew without a shadow of a doubt where we were, indicating that someone in our realm had straight up told him. B's realm was the easiest to identify, because they'd been "mcgeealed" - Cosula hadn't changed his rulername from his lifetime; something mcgeeal did to my draft pack five rounds ago. Whoops!

I don't know what the general consensus on who the most dangerous realm was with so many FAs flying around. Vinn assessed towards the end of the week that it was between #3 and #5, with #11 still hanging in there. But there was something about #10 that made me uneasy: a very strong fast attacker plus an absolutely rock-solid looking goblin heading for a convert. So I put the goblin on permaquake.

After about 48 hours of quakes, it seemed to trigger some real annoyance from his realm, who lit up my news with notifications from three different ops bitches falling over themselves to get my info within the space of a minute, including a land spy. I knew I wasn't a good target (the gift of undesirable land types) but I was on the lower end of dp and may have been hittable without Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) needing to send any chams.

''2024-03-22 14:21:21 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (exrio) (#10) were discovered within our castle!''

''2024-03-22 14:21:11 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (Nauj) (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:21:07 Spies from Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10) were discovered amongst our buildings! We executed 1 spy.''

''2024-03-22 14:20:49 Spies from Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10) were discovered amongst our lands!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:48 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:46 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:44 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:43 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:40 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:38 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:36 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yeah. And we'll be up to our asses in nerd shit. (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:30 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

''2024-03-22 14:20:22 Our wizards have repelled a Clear Sight spell attempt by Yes I Am A Nerd, Bookworm I'm Studious! (#10)!''

Not taking any chances, I rezoned some alchs over to lumberyards for some instant dp and made sure my dominion was more of a "no nerds allowed" kinda deal than a "revenge of the nerds" situation.

At the beginning of day six we started seriously looking at taking down the Halls of Knowledge. ForPony had done about 13k in cyclone damage to it, which meant it was probably around 60k, but we figured if any other realm had identified it as a Wonder they wanted they'd already be on the case too having seen the air ranks. Broken toaster Elf Woods was also cycloning something, and had done about 15k damage, but we didn't know to what - and we didn't want him sniping a Wonder that didn't fit in with our realm strategy, so we knew we had to act quickly before we potentially ended up with something totally unsuitable like the Wizard Acadamy. Gothia put together a spreadsheet of the damage we'd done and the damage we needed to do, and then began the game of herding the geese to try and coordinate a take-down. We needed Espiritus, but he wouldn't respond to pings or council. We eventually got him in direct messages on discord, but his army was out and he was about to go to bed. He then set an alarm for the middle of the night for him (he was in the Phillipines) for when his army got back in 5h to get up to help take down the Wonder, but didn't tell us he was doing this, so there was a mad scramble to assemble the team while he was temporarily awake. We couldn't get half the team to reply, particularly those we needed to send op (which would comprise the majority of the damage). Dan was off building another wing for his house, Erix was stuck in another disciplinary meeting with HR, Scratch was in a potato-induced coma, and Vinn was too busy scoring out words in the dictionary.

I don't know why, but organised Wonder take-downs are always stressful in my realms. It's never just smooth sailing. Something always has to make it seem like an edge-case possibility. I suppose we were taking the Wonder down a lot earlier than other realms seemed poised to do, which was always going to put it more on the fringes of possible. Fortunately Erix was finally released with a warning from HR and was able to back us up with the remaining op we might need. Zar, ForPony and I sent out our silly little cylcone swirls, then Gothia pulled the trigger and sent his troops. Then there was a painful 30 second delay where we wondered if Espiritus was actually going to follow, but he did. And the Wonder fell. We didn't even need Erix in the end, so he left to go and work on his alibi for his next HR meeting.

''2024-03-21 19:29:41 Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 Jack of all tirades! (Espiritus) (#9) has attacked a neutral wonder!''

''2024-03-21 19:30:08 The Halls of Knowledge has been destroyed and rebuilt by Erix doesn't wash his hands afterwards (#9).''

Several of us in the realm had made the decision to join the Shadow League this round - including me, which marked the first time I'd even considered it since it was ultranerfed many, many rounds ago and rendered basically useless to anyone outside of the hydra, who would just use it for cheaper ops and bully anyone that joined it until they had to leave. My opinion of the Shadow League has always been that it's essentially a noob trap, and just forces you to get bogged down with insane ratios that eventually ruin your economy; it's designed to set blackoppers on a path to irrelevance so they don't bother the "real" players. I have always viewed the SL insignia as little more than a purple moron badge. But Erix made a fairly persuasive argument early on, saying that Virchue spent most of his rounds in the SL and always finished big, benefitted a lot from the cheaper ops, and wasn't really hassled much by bloppers. I also knew from talking to ForPony on the podcast there were some ways to game SL so that generally the other purple moron badge holders didn't bother with you. And I knew the hydra was split up, so the bullies were out of the picture. It was a good environment to give it a shot. I put in my application to join the SL and, alongside ForPony and Zar, we soon had three purple moron badges on display in the realm. Initially only ForPony had the mana to boast any sort of threat level, but a lot of people don't bother to check - even after Dave cautioned that we could well be fakers on RiolTalk - but after the first week I'd finished bringing in schools and was able to finally focus on building war% towers. Faked it 'til I made it.

There were a few other people in SL in other realms, but I just ignored them and they, for the most part, ignored me. The only SLer that was any sort of nuisance was another sylvan in #1, They called me Mr.👓, who would regularly try to assassinate my draftees even though he was miles behind the top assassin. I assume he was infamy farming, but I'd deliberately made myself a terrible target for that, so after a while I just figured he could never remember which person in SL gave him the infamy yield he was after.

Speaking of SL, one of the more interesting hits in the first week came from a fast attacker in #10 who made the curious choice of joining the Shadow League, and then made a massive hit:

''2024-03-20 21:59:48 Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10) invaded Monopolize Scooby 🍖 and gain control over all 🐕 (Rury) (#11) and captured 93 land.''

When asked about it, #10 didn't exactly clarify the decision making process behind this choice when they appeared on the Riol Talk podcast the following weekend (for reasons that would later become clear). It seems to me it was likely a schoolboy error or a misclick when joining guards. In any case, we gave him a hard time with fireballs until he sensibly turned in his purple moron badge the next day. But if anything, he'd earned that badge more than any of us had.

'''WEEK 2 - MERF'S MEDIA EMPIRE'''

We didn't get off to the greatest start in our second week.

''2024-03-23 22:01:58 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 121 land.''

''2024-03-23 22:21:39 Ozzy Osboarn (Chunk) (#2) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 107 land.''

''2024-03-24 02:59:57 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (#9) and captured 97 land.''

Dan then tried to use this as cover and made a risky send, which didn't pay off:

''2024-03-24 11:59:54 More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) invaded the angriest angle (#0) and captured 53 land.''

''2024-03-24 16:57:43 Every Corporate HR Department, Ever. (Nate) (#5) invaded More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 69 land.''

Dan was a bit miffed that #5 had hit him when he felt there were better targets on the map, and I think he may have concluded that it was a targeted take-down. He apparently later kicked off in the captains discord about people leaking locs.

Apart from a comatose Asanka dropping Ares and then farming out over 300 acres (or 600+ with land gen) to #2, #10 and #11 and Dan's minor setback, our realm had mostly avoided taking hits. For his part, Asanka's dominion was a classic example of why people complain that fast exploring is too easy - relatively low activity, high performance, a big lead on acres early, then snoozing on dp / spell drops. Fast exploring carries this far greater risk of getting hit if you aren't careful because the top attackers really want that lazy explorer booty, so they're constantly looking out for it, but the hits don't really translate into a terrible finish, so it's an easy deal for the fast explorers.

As we progressed through the second week the FA circus had begun to consolidate a bit with some frontrunners taking their leads. #10 had emerged as a potential runner, with "Damdred" flexing his muscles as a top fast attacker threat, and were invited onto the podcast to talk about the round so far. Unfortunately Damdred wasn't able to make it, so Soup came on in his stead to represent the realm. Soup wasn't able to provide a lot of insight but was able to repeatedly assure everyone that Damdred was enjoying himself.

Cutting to the chase here, the whole discussion on RiolTalk between Merf and Soup was a ruse. #10 was actually Swamp Fox's draft pack (which Merf was part of) and they had deliberately picked out Damdred as a rulername to subtly mislead the gossipers, but kicked this into overdrive when the real Damdred and his real realm (who were actually realm #8) leaned into the lie, and invited them onto the podcast to engage in maximum tomfoolery by amplifying the propaganda. I haven't listened back to the podcast to see if Soup was barefaced lying or simply being cute with the truth; I'd just taken it at face value at the time. I'd been impressed with Damdred's first shot at fast attacking last round. He'd even clapped Rio's cheeks at one point, although he had paid the price for it and got wrecked soon after. And I knew he was a hot-shot player from the Nebula Kingdoms community we'd poached him from. So it made sense to me that he could be punching high this round. But it was all a con; collusion between realms.

Unfortunately for #8 and #10, the collusion didn't last very long. The podcast went out late on a Sunday, but by Tuesday everyone seemed to know who #10 really was and were openly hinting at it in the OD discord. Merf's media empire had suffered from a chronic case of loose lips sinking ships. I can't help but wonder if Merf would have still tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - or if he'd have had as much success as he did - if Rio had been on the podcast to interrogate the situation a little more.

Later on the Rush Hour podcast, I'd liken the antics on RiolTalk to Russian propaganda. It's no coincidence that RiolTalk (RT) chose to align its initials with Russia's propagandist news station, Russia Today. Of course, I saw all of this coming all the way back in round 27 https://imgur.com/a/h5dQo3O

Even more bad news followed for realm #10 in the form of realm #11, who had seized a circumstancial opportunity to its fullest and catapulted their fast attacker into the frontrunner position.

''2024-03-27 22:59:48 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 129 land.''

While other FAs were hitting in the 80a range, Rig had smashed sleepy Jeff for 129a, taking advantage of the others being out and unable to retalliate against him. Some people speculated that the fast attackers finally had a runaway, but internally some in our realm had seen the writing on the wall. The fast attackers hadn't gotten the clean break they needed to lock down the round early and were now consigned to a gradual trudge towards familiar irrelevancy.

Gothia summarised the state of affairs: "I think all of the fast attackers have been hit at least once, and with no runner it seems to me that quick converters will take over in the next week or so. Dan and Scratch are both looking to be the top quick converters for their races or at least on par with competitors; we just need to make sure we find the fattest targets and be prepared if something like a suicide happens. Beyond that, Erix and Vinn are also well positioned to be the top dogs of their races, looking set to take over around day 30-35 if they can make smart choices on good targets."

He was however less enthusiastic about his own chances at this stage, projecting that he was a week or two away before he could even think about getting in range with his all-in dp. He was going to need a big dollop of luck to make it work.

Gothia also kept closer tabs on Dan after his yolo earlier in the week. Conversations in discord (paraphrased below) had shifted a bit from:

Dan: "I'm gonna do it"

Dan: "I'm doing it guys"

Dan: "Yolo!"

to:

Dan: "Can I hit this bot?"

Gothia: "No."

Dan: "Ok"

Another Ares drop from Asanka earned him the nickname ACanka in-realm:

''2024-03-29 01:02:12 Look at my grade point average! Look at it! (Merf) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Yami's the cheap stripper at JC's stag party 🕺 (Asanka) (#9) and captured 114 land.''

Asanka had generously gifted more than 800 acres to our enemies at this point. Just whose team was he on?!

'''WEEK 3 - OMENT'S PROPHECY'''

The third week was the week everything stalled, and fast attackers started complaining about - well, anything that could be hurting their playstyle. Explorers bothering to defend themselves; bots having too much dp; it being too expensive to mass raze, rezone and build insane mods instantaneously to get the drop on, well, literally anyone you wanted at that point; or even players just not making enough mistakes. Why can't you guys just make more mistakes and give these poor honest fast attackers your land? More fast attackers had been touted as the solution to stalls but this round had a lot more than we've seen in a long time, and it didn't solve the problem. Rio speculated that the reason for this was they were all making dumb decisions. It's difficult to design around that issue though.

Realm #10 had still been in a decent position at the beginning of the week and when #6 warred them to take back the Fountain they'd pinched, my eyes lit up. Realm #10 at this point was pretty much confirmed to be Swamp Fox's draft team, which included Merf, which likely meant an internal push for mutual. We agreed in-realm that if that happened we'd war #10, but as the day progressed, it became increasingly clear that Merf didn't have his hand on the big red button and was probably tied up and gagged in a corner somewhere. I suggested that we should war #10 anyway, targeting the merf in the first wave and the goblin on the second wave, and most were in favour. Unfortunately #8 then stepped into the mix and overcomplicated the situation for us; it increased the possibility of a Wonder snipe and would leave #10 with options on what Wonder to take - the Fountain, or our cherished Halls of Knowledge, which was on a meagre 200k hp and would be easy prestige. Merf had apparently broken free from his restraints and #10 mutualed #8. It was already a mess.

We stood down for war. I ran a few scans in the first day of the wars to see if any blops were happening, and no one in #10 had burning. It was purely a Wonder squabble. Hilariously, #6 (a non-draft realm, with a few notables like Virchue, empoy and Robert) still managed to take the Fountain back for themselves, and when #10 was able to disentangle themselves from their impulsive mutual, they went after #6 again. Gnomish Mining Machine fever had officially spread from round 38 into round 39, and realm #10 were hopelessly in its thrall. Still, if no one was blopping any of them in these wars, I guess it was a no-risk scenario.

Meanwhile, amazingly, the Shadow League was the only thing keeping my interest in the round. I had mostly been sticking to an honour system that most of the other Shadow Leaguers had adopted: if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we can all enjoy our cheaper ops together. With the exception of the nerd fast attacker that accidentally joined I hadn't really flexed my ratios on anyone. Then #3 decided they could join SL and start harrassing my realm. At first the top spy disbander, Big Chuncks of Wurst after Scruff in Gothiaborg (Jaerock), focused on Asanka, miasma'ing and disbanding about a hundred spies, while JcinYami (jmerc13) started snaring me and gunning for my Earthquake title. I counter-snared him and upped the quakes to give him a moving target. Up until this stage I'd been solely quaking That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10), and by day 18 I'd put 276 hours on him - which was 11.5 solid days since blops went live out of a possible 13 days. But I dropped the laser focus on him and widened the net, quaking all dwarves in range, no doubt leaving them all scratching their heads.

The next day Chuncks of Wurst had the temerity to assassinate 40 of my draftees, so in response I swarmed him on 18k food, then disbanded 450 of his spies, then snared him down - then passed his details over to ForPony, who begrudgingly liberated another 350 spies from their posts. He wasn't happy about getting 15 infamy per cast, but I assured him that sometimes in the pursuit of chaos, damaging your opponent is more important than what you personally gain. Those 40 draftees were precious to me, and had to be avenged.

Chuncks had been slammed with up to 400k platinum in damages in seconds, confirming Oment's warnings that in some scenarios it was now the most powerful blop in the game. Chuncks requeued a ton of spywiz and scuttled out of the SL the same tick they arrived. Fortunately for Chuncks, since I had an alarm set to kill all of them on arrival, SL has a 12h leave time (it used to be 24h) and he managed to escape without further harm.

Towards the end of the week we took the decision to war #12 and give new fireball its first real test of the round. Most of the wars up to this point had been for Wonders, and fireballs seemed incidental to those wars at best. The frontrunners in fireball were noob realm #6, who were falling over themselves to donate as much land as humanly possible in their war with #10. It was a fight they picked but both realms were caught in the thrall of Wonder fever - but #10 were very much the benefactors here. Over the course of the war (at the time of taking note on day 24) realm #10 had collected over 1,500 acres in conquered and generated land. With the mutual war land gains bonus, it was closer to 1,700 acres.

Realm #6 had started off as the plucky hero realm willing to sabotage one of the leading realms but had ended up becoming meals on wheels instead. The exchange rate on land vs blops they were offering may just be the greatest deal ever seen in OD history.

In our war, we targeted Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) for fireballs. His dom was looking a bit cheeky so we figured we'd throw a speedbump at him. We declared, we fireballed, we burned, we plagued, we did that whole shebang. Asanka and Zar did the volleys, and I drew the short straw and got tedious maintenance duty. Very quickly while fireballing on maintenance I realised something was wrong - not only had Asanka's and Zar's fireballs not taken Lud down to cap, but he was recovering his peasants so quickly that I couldn't keep him at cap either. I exhausted my wiz strength and he was still recovering.

It turned out there was a bug. We don't know when it was introduced - fett said he rewrote everything at some point, and there was a zero somewhere a zero had no business being. Honestly fett could tell me anything and I'd have no idea if it was true or not, but a rogue zero definitely sounds like something I'd say if I was a developer telling someone who understood nothing about my profession and I didn't want to have to explain it. But the long and short of it was burning wasn't working as it should. The fireballs still hurt Lud, according to Lud, but it was still pretty frustrating. #3 joined in the war and contributed some fireballs of their own, but it still didn't seem to be enough to keep Lud at cap.

I messaged fett and he fixed the bug pretty quickly, and refunded some mana and wiz strength to our realm in order to try and reset the balance, but Lud had already cast Lucky Bastard and most of my refunded fireballs on a 2.1 ratio bounced, instead killing a load of my dryads, and when I did finally succeed with a fireball it was reflected back at me.

These sorts of experiences do not foster goodwill and patience towards new fireball.

My realm was exasperated. We were almost 12 hours into the war at this point and felt like we'd done pretty lacklustre damage. We'd gone into the war intending to limit Mad Merf's training, but I think Zar's meme best summed up the situation: https://imgur.com/a/MDqkN5K

I messaged fett again and explained the issue in more detail, and he agreed to remove some of Lud's peasants to bring him down to the level he should have been at had fireball / burning been working. I'm not sure he ever actually did that though (certainly Lud wasn't aware of it if he did, which means it probably never happened), and I mostly lost interest in the war after that. #10 knocked down our Wonder, which we expected, and we took it back. We had discussed if we should just let them have it, but ultimately agreed the Halls still had some utility left to us. We posted in council for the less active discord players (Espiritus, Elf Woods, and a new guy that had joined called Gwyn) to ask them not to take the Wonder down early. Espiritus was the only one who responded to the thread and we clarified to him why we were timing it carefully. Then he hit the Wonder anyway, knocked it down, then apologised in the council thread saying he forgot.

In the interim before Dan was able to cancel the war, Zoojed (Zedijar) (#12) threw some troops at the Wonder and did a trivial but crucially uneven amount of damage, which upset Vinn, who I'd learned has some sort of affection for pristine and round numbers. Espiritus may never know the mental anguish he caused with his yolo. I think we should all practice having a little more empathy in this game for all the Vinns out there.

To cap off the week we assassinated some draftees so Erix could swipe some land from one of the two remaining SLers, JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3). His ratios made assassinating annoying and I failed about half the time. But together with some key sizzler support, Erix was able to make the hit.

''2024-04-08 16:54:45 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (Erix) (#9) conquered 113 land from JcinYami (jmerc13) (#3).''

Even as a dirty SLer myself it was satisfying to help engineer a hit on another SLer - and I got decent infamy for it. Should've trained more dp instead of all those ratios pal!

Our realm overall wasn't feeling like it was in a good spot despite making the smart choice to play slow and picking up a fantastic Wonder for the playstyle. Gothia's early prediction that he wasn't getting the momentum he needed was worsened by people continually sniping the bots he'd lined up for a hit, and he was now being out-trained by his competitors. Scratch was talking about training suicidal op just to help someone out, which is always a good indicator that someone is dead in the water. Dan had made a few mistakes and had now been overtaken by Erix as the top dog of the realm. Asanka had been hit too much to be in with any hope of a respectable fast explorer finish and was only 200a ahead of me and my slow-ass Sylvan SL blopsplorer build. Despite insane imps with a 32% keep and 16 techs unlocked I figured it was only a matter of time before I overtook him, and I felt like I was doing quite poorly as well. Infamy being stripped out of the game without any other economic crutch being added had definitely hurt my growth.

'''WEEK 4 - BOREDOM IN KAMIKAZIA'''

Nothing happened in the fourth week. Well, maybe for you stuff happened, maybe in the game stuff happened, but for me, I was largely checked out and so I hereby confidently assert that nothing happened. If something had happened I'd have heard about it and I didn't hear anything. The main discord was mostly Crazy Elf complaining about beloved OD superstar Zooj. My realm chat for an entire week straight was people just stating where there were in the attack queue, which is every bit as interesting as constantly announcing to everyone around you where you are in a telephone queue to speak to a customer service rep. Either that or they would speculate when Zooj might send. Or mention that they were bored, and that attacking was boring. It was a boring week for everyone in #9. Have I mentioned that we were bored?

Well, people being bored and consequently being boring doesn't leave you with much to work with for an entertaining roundfail story, so instead I've outsourced this week to ChatGPT and asked it to spin us up a short tale instead - with a few key plot points I specifically requested.

(I may also have added some enhancements to the text.)

Behold! My* magnum opus.

(*copyright to every writer who ever lived, probably - who knows how many writers this bot ripped off in the making of this epic)

---

In the kingdom of Kamikazia, a curse of boredom had settled like a thick fog, suffocating its once lively population. Heroes and Legends alike found themselves in a state of listlessness, their once noble quests for land and renown now rendered dull and uninspiring.

Gothia, once a revered warrior known for his courage and strength, found himself struggling to keep up with the other Legends. He sighed heavily as he surveyed the empty training grounds, his sword feeling heavier in his hand than usual. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself, his voice tinged with frustration.

Erix, the cheeky imp, flitted about the courtyard, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a weary expression. He paused by Gothia's side, his tiny wings drooping. "Cheer up, Gothia! It's not all doom and gloom," he chirped, though even his upbeat tone couldn't mask the despondency in his voice.

Gothia glanced at Erix, his brow furrowing. "Easy for you to say, Erix. You're not the one struggling to keep up with the others," he grumbled.

Erix shrugged, his impish grin returning. "Maybe you just need a change of pace, Gothia. A new challenge to reignite that passion within you!" he suggested, fluttering his glitter-encrusted wings excitedly.

But before Gothia could respond, a booming voice echoed across the courtyard, drawing their attention. Rush, a fearsome sorceror of the blackest of black arts, strode into view, his eyes alight with mischief. "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

Gothia tensed at the sight of Rush, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. "What do you want, Rush?" he growled, his voice dripping with suspicion.

Rush chuckled, twirling his staff between his fingers. "Just thought I'd spice things up a bit, Gothia. Break the monotony, you know?" he replied, his eyes still gleaming with mischief.

Gothia narrowed his eyes, his grip tightening on his sword. "I don't trust you, Rush. Your idea of 'spicing things up' usually ends in disaster," he retorted, his tone sharp.

Rush shrugged, unfazed by Gothia's hostility. "Suit yourself, Gothia. But don't come crying to me when you're bored out of your mind," he quipped, before disappearing in an uninteresting puff of smoke.

Gothia sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "What are we going to do, Erix? The curse of boredom is only getting stronger. Even that encounter with Rush just now was really boring and he usually does stuff like set us on fire," he lamented. "I'm so bored. This is so boring!"

Erix glanced up at Gothia, a spark of determination flickering in his eyes. He brushed a permed lock of hair from his tiny imp eyes. "We'll figure it out, Gothia. Together, as pals!" he declared, his squeaky voice ringing with conviction.

But deep down, both Gothia and Erix knew that breaking the curse of boredom would be no easy task. And as they watched the sun sink below the horizon, casting long shadows across the empty courtyard, they couldn't shake the feeling that their efforts would ultimately end in failure. And the worst kind of failure too: a legacy that would bore the pants off anyone who heard about it.

Meanwhile, up in the hills of Kamikazia, Zooj, the golden god of a man, stood tall and proud, his charismatic aura shining brightly despite the darkness that surrounded him. But his confidence wavered as Crazy Elf, consumed by jealousy and bitterness, confronted him with a fierce glare.

"You think you're sooooo special, don't you, Zooj? With your stupid sexy golden locks and your charming winsome smile," Crazy Elf spat, his voice dripping with venom. "But mark my words, your reign will come to an end, and when it does, I'll be there to watch you fall!"

Zooj raised a perfect eyebrow, his expression unflinching. "Is that a threat, Crazy Elf?" he retorted, his voice calm but laced with a hint of amusement.

"You bet your perfectly sculpted sweet cheeks it is!" Crazy Elf shouted, his heart burning with an insane rage. With a feral snarl, he lunged at Zooj, their clash of wills echoing through the silent streets of Kamikazia.

As they fought, their insults became increasingly mundane, their bants devoid of any spark or wit. As they traded blows, a faint drizzle began to fall from the sky, the raindrops so light and unremarkable that they hardly made a sound as they hit the ground. It was the most boring kind of rain imaginable.

"Wait!" Crazy Elf gasped for breath, holding his arms up in surrender. "Wait, I have something I have to confess!"

"This better be interesting," Zooj sighed. He'd hardly even broken a sweat.

"I love you Zooj, I've always loved you," Crazy Elf sobbed. Zooj gasped.

Crazy Elf had done it. Someone in Kamikazia had finally said something interesting.

The rain stopped abruptly. A silence fell over the hills. The heavens themselves seemed to catch their breath.

Was this it?

Was this how the curse would be broken? A confession of love? Of hopeless infatuation, of lust, of Crazy Elf's shameless desperation for that carnal Zooj touch?

Erix flitted over the hills just in time to gasp in shock as he watched the two heroes suddenly embrace, their tongues-

[Sorry folks, I had to cut it there before I was responsible for OD's first erotica. Subscribe to my Patreon for the full version.]

'''WEEK 5 - THE INEVITABLE MITHSTAKE'''

After flatlining from sheer boredom for a week straight, someone finally stepped up to the plate to spice up the round. And while it wasn't Damdred, it was the realm that had been impersonating him. And oh boy did they bring the spice.

It started off innocently enough with an isolated event that didn't involve any of the actors that were about to take centre stage. With so many massive explorers flying into the stratosphere, #12 was able to bank on one of them letting their Ares slip. They had been tracking a bunch of them, but it was Captain Planet that dropped the ball, and #12 caught it.

''2024-04-14 23:42:10 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded Captain Planet (Saccora) (#8) and captured 368 land.''

This hit dropped Lud's op and evidently gave #10 the courage that they could take war to our realm, snare hit Gothia, and be safe from reprisals from #12.

''2024-04-16 04:25:45 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has declared WAR on Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

Gothia had suspected it was coming and had upped his spies from completely non-existent to homeopathic, and had me and ForPony casting illumination on him for an extra +10% spy defence. Unfortunately his ratios were still trash and sitting at something like 0.25 so an extra ~80 spies equivalent in defence was pretty useless. #10 were able to snare him down and keep him snared, with a lot of their attackers getting in on the action because Gothia's spy defences were made of wishful thinking.

Gothia considered his options as the freight train hurtled towards him and his Ares hours ticked away: he could release his op and try to force a bounce; he could release his dp and deliberately feed #10's competition; at the fever pitch of his desperation he even considered deconverting to blopping; or he could take the option he ultimately chose: to just eat the hit.

For my part, I set about disbanding spies in #10 to hurt the snare efforts. Based on fails in Gothia's news I was able to work out who had spies instead of assassins - but their ratios were so garbage and with their Wizard Academy reducing damage by 50% I only got like 10 a pop.

Once Gothia had time to assess the situation it became increasingly clear that #10 weren't just going to hit him, but they were also apparently totally oblivious to the fact they were going to feed the one guy they should have been keeping tabs on to make sure they didn't feed: Lud. And Lud, sensing opportunity at their war dec, had dropped specs to make sure he had the flex to hit Mith if he sent.

Surely they wouldn't pull the trigger? Surely they had ops on Lud?

''2024-04-16 09:04:47 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (Mithrandir) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) and captured 226 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:42:18 Mad Merf and Glory (Lud) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 352 land.''

''2024-04-16 09:45:29 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 364 land.''

Guess not.

The popular theory in our realm was that this was all a result of Merf's tactical awareness, but after some more digging, it turned out Merf didn't really have anything to do with it. And neither did draft captain Swamp Fox. And neither did Mith. In fact, the more digging I did, the less accountable #10 became for their decision. Somehow, they'd wound up in a war, with a coordinated snare campaign against us, and then made a hit, and they'd accomplished all of that without any of them making any decisions. Quite incredible really.

''2024-04-16 11:59:56 Victorious on the battlefield, More like DownSyndromeDave (DanTheMan) (#9) conquered 279 land from The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12).''

''2024-04-16 12:14:19 That’s 7,107.32 boobs (Swamp Fox) (#10) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 184 land.''

''2024-04-16 12:17:56 What the 💦 did they do to this 🐟? Batter it to 💀? (Psychosophy) (#1) invaded fellow dominion More like DownSyndromeDave (#9) and captured 182 land.''

''2024-04-16 17:29:28 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (Cobber aka Poige) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 360 land.''

I was poised and ready to trigger Burning on Mithrandir, but Gothia cautioned that it was better to leave him alone, with the expectation that he would now come to his senses and suicide on #12. I sulked: even in war I couldn't blop!

Of course, Mith did not do what was expected and instead just hit Gothia again.

''2024-04-17 14:59:16 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 234 land.''

Then Erix scored himself a lil war hit:

''2024-04-17 15:25:17 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 199 land from Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style (Sharkey) (#10).''

''2024-04-18 04:01:26 No-one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends. (#10) has CANCELED war against Erix don’t need no edumacation (#9).''

But that pesky lingering war bonus'll getcha every time:

''2024-04-18 09:02:27 Victorious on the battlefield, Volv is named after a gay wizard (Gothia) (#9) conquered 203 land from Those nerds are a threat to our way of life (Blafiora) (#10).''

Evidently fed up with Mith's shenanigans, Gothia had just decided to feed his competition instead.

''2024-04-19 00:59:46 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 244 land.''

''2024-04-19 01:26:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded fellow dominion Volv is named after a gay wizard (#9) and captured 232 land.''

The war was over and I went back to sleep. Metaphorically speaking, that is. I was already asleep when the war cancelled. I'm using a writing technique here to convey that I was basically comatose with boredom at this point in the round, you see. I stopped taking notes and fully intended not to bother recording the rest of the round.

But then Erix made it his mission to keep things entertaining.

'''WEEK 6 - ERIX GETS TACTICAL'''

I was roused from my coma by a ping from Zar to see if I had enough spy strength to contribute to a snare. A quick scan of the chat revealed that Erix was in a panic about a potential rezone hit on him from the Wood Elf in #8, Captain Falcon (Soup), after he'd sent out the previous day:

''2024-04-22 22:42:24 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 228 land from 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3).''

Captain Falcon had apparently been stacking plat overnight and had a cool 1.6 million ready to terraform some acres with the magical power of money, giving him more than enough op to clap Erix's cheeks at a 110% hit and be totally safe on dp.

The long and short of it was that we could maybe snare Captain Falcon at a push so he couldn't cast Ares, but we likely couldn't keep the spell off him long enough for it to matter, so in reality we had no option but to wait.

In the tick before he could make the hit, Erix revealed that he'd been chatting to Oceanu the previous night (who was also in #8), and had suggested the Wood Elf may want to stack plat for some morning fireworks, assuming certain players made certain moves and sent according to his expectations. Erix had apparently been trying to play 4d chess and engineer an outcome that it seemed hadn't actually transpired, and had instead given Captain Falcon a potential hit on himself instead. The realm chat was unforgiving with gifs chortling at the fact he had quite literally dug a grave for himself.

Fortunately for Erix, word on the street was that Captain Falcon was Faith (Rush from the future edit: this was wrong, but I didn't know that when writing the next two paragraphs, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it - Faith was actually Captain of the Obvious, lol). Knowing the player and the psychology is a huge part of anticipating moves in this game and with Faith, who others described as a calculating player only interested in his own finish, we figured a rezone hit for just 110% was probably not worth the cost. It's a move a Wood Elf can only realistically deploy once and so Faith was likely not going to pull the trigger until there was a substantially better target on the menu. Also Erix had sucky landtypes.

The hit never materialised. Faith had played according to expectation, and Erix was spared the rod he himself had created.

Later when I spoke to Erix to try and get more information about what 'fireworks' he'd been expecting for this story, he claimed he'd made the whole thing up, hadn't spoken to Oceanu and that it was all fake news.

Whether it was fake news, or his claim that it was fake news was the real fake news, I guess we'll never know.

Meanwhile, Mith was busy force-feeding his direct competition the roundwin. His realm had warred #7 to snare WhiteSnakes on a Plane (Candarius), had failed in the snare and allowed him to cast Ares, but were still able to make the hit a few ticks later.

''2024-04-22 21:57:54 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded WhiteSnakes on a Plane (#7) and captured 351 land.''

Realm #10 hadn't been taking ops on their direct competition again though. It was an unusual strategy and it wasn't paying off. Mith seemed to be flying blind on every send.

''2024-04-23 05:57:56 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 393 land.''

Or maybe it was just tactical awareness week and I'd missed the memo.

'''THE FINAL DAYS - CRONEL'S REVENGE'''

In the last week, Erix had been getting excited about the prospect of a 7k finish. For once, it was just within his reach. He was like a kid on Christmas Eve, eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of Santa. Only unlike all the good boys of the world, Erix couldn't actually rely on Santa showing up, since it was predicated on a number of factors, several of which were out of his control. He needed to make the right moves at the right time and hope that nobody (including him) did anything dumb.

Unfortunately for Erix, it wasn't going to be Santa coming down the chimney with the gift of mucho acreage. Instead he was to be visited by the OD Grinch, who would instead deliver a swift kick in the balls.

I'd warned our pack right at the start of the round that whoever picked a name insulting Cronel was probably in for a rough ride, and might want to consider going Spirit or Undead to mitigate the endless swarms that would be coming their way. Erix initially listened to this advice and was going to run Spirit, but later changed his race and went Nox, and I guess just #yolo'd on keeping the name (or he forgot). Fortunately for him though, Cronel didn't really bother him with harrassing ops and his realm instead just carefully chose their moment to fuck with him. And it just so happened the moment they chose was the moment Erix was hoping the stars would align, and the seas would part, Santa Claus would come to town and he'd waltz on over to that rare attacker 7k finish.

As with most things in OD these days, it all started with a Mithstake.

''2024-04-25 04:03:49 GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) invaded Jeff "Ironwood" Hudson (margoose) (#4) and captured 206 land.''

This move set in motion the crazy daisy chain of the round:

''2024-04-25 05:59:53 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded GIMME’ HEAD TILL I’M DEAD (#10) and captured 465 land.

''2024-04-25 06:59:43 Mad Merf and Glory (#12) invaded Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) and captured 537 land.''

OD bots (B) pulled the trigger on a suicide, and this was likely the move that secured the roundwin for Poige.

''2024-04-25 07:59:53 Build an army of OD bots (B) (#11) invaded Mad Merf and Glory (#12) and captured 491 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:38:41 Captain O Captain! My Captain! (Warpig) (#8) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 367 land.''

''2024-04-25 10:59:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (Weaser) (#12) invaded Build an army of OD bots (#11) and captured 296 land.''

Erix trailed in for sloppy thirds, late to the party because he'd been snoozing all morning:

''2024-04-25 11:07:30 Victorious on the battlefield, Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) conquered 281 land from Build an army of OD bots (#11).''

Erix had calculated that he wasn't the best target if anyone chose to hit him. There were others out on similar dp, bigger land and and with more desirable landtypes. In particular Erix had noted an icer 400 acres bigger than him just 4k dp ahead that should have been a no-brainer for someone to target over him.

Then #8, Cronel's draft realm, dropped an asteroid of coal on Erix's early Christmas:

''2024-04-25 19:15:33 Captain Falcon (Soup) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 371 land.''

It hit like an atom bomb. The stars unaligned. The seas promptly squelched back together. And Erix's dreams of a white Christmas melted before his eyes.

Alright, alright, I'm done with the ''ham''fisted Christmas imagery! ...get it? Christmas ham? Anyone?

So anyway. Erix. Was. Furious.

He rapidly cycled through the five phases of grief. First up was shock and denial.

Erix: "Wtf? Are you serious?"

Which quickly gave way to anger:

Erix: "This is BULLCRAP"

He seemed to skip the bargaining phase - or maybe he did bargain, pleading to some American God via more traditional methods instead of over discord. Either way, blink and you'd miss it because soon enough he was straddling the depression and acceptance phases:

Erix: "It is what it is."

But he didn't stay there for long. Erix had decided he preferred the anger phase much more than the depression or acceptance phases, so he soon returned to the comforting arms of raw fury. Or if you ask Erix, he says he never left the anger phase. His default bad round ending of "sui merf if things go wrong" had transitioned to "sui anyone in #8 as revenge". He couldn't hit Cronel, so instead he redirected his fury at faith. As jester at the time, he updated the realm name to faith's lifetime account and added the message "better defend 5:4". The threat was issued. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

I spoke to Cronel about it a few days later, and he said nobody in his realm had even noticed the realm name, so the threats ultimately fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Erix wasn't suiciding anyone. He was instead making a calculated move to claw back some land and maybe still limp on to that dreamy 7k finish. As long as a certain cheeky roundwinner-to-be in #11 didn't send while he was out, he was covered.

''2024-04-29 03:22:11 Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) invaded 2 Thy 1 Cup (Crazy Elf) (#3) and captured 236 land.''

But with just a few hours left on the clock, Poige sent:

''2024-04-29 10:56:35 Engineer Robotic Candiru Army (#11) invaded I've had it with these 👩‍🍼🚚 🐍 on this 👩‍🍼 🚛 🛩 (Yeeeoow) (#1) and captured 349 land.''

And then #12 came knocking:

''2024-04-29 11:58:35 The Dan Who Knew Too Little (#12) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 336 land.''

Even OD bots was getting his ownback this round, clapping Erix's cheeks in retalliation for his participation in the gangbang earlier that week.

''2024-04-29 13:55:51 Build an army of OD bots (#11) invaded Cronel thinks chaos is a personality trait (#9) and captured 322 land.''

It was over. Erix didn't get his revenge. Instead, for all his revenge plots, Erix would finish the round as a victim of revenge twice over, and short of a 6k finish on 5,895 acres. Which is still a great attacker finish.

But it wasn't a 7k.

From this point onwards, Erix was a broken man. He vowed to enact revenge upon 'the guy' in #8 - some day, in some future round. His promises of revenge haven't worked out too well for him so far though. And last I heard HR had caught wind of him scrawling obscenities about wood elves onto the side of company air conditioners, so things may even be going from bad to worse.

We wish him luck. Maybe next round will be his John Wick moment.

'''EPILOGUE'''

Overall, this was a dull round for me. The Dark Ages of blops really sucked a lot of the life out of the game for bloppers, but there is a little light on the horizon with the recognition from fett and the GPC that blops need another major rework - and I've seen some good ideas coming from that direction already. Maybe next round bloppers can feel like part of the team again, and bring that spark of chaos back into the round dynamics.

It was my first time playing with Dan and Gothia, and while I don't think my initial "General" player type was off the mark, I definitely have a better appreciation for what both personalities bring to the table. Dan is a strong player that can play at a very high level with basically zero team input, and he's an opportunist, but the flipside of that is when he doesn't have someone (presumably Wurstmeyer) to act as a check and balance to his inclination to yolo, it can be his undoing - which certainly seemed to be the case this round. Gothia seems quite similar to Rio in his ability to assess the battlefield and was often spot on with his predictions as to how actions across multiple realms would unfold; it's one of the rarest abilities in the game and looks a lot like reading tea leaves to the rest of us.

We went into the round initially wondering if we'd be alright on the ops front, but we needn't have concerned ourselves, because Zar was putting out literal tomes of data tracking all of the ops in the early game, and kept it up until pretty much the end of the round. He's also a 'scary explorer' - and hear me out, because in his case that isn't an oxymoron. Zar will sit with his Ares off in range of top attackers when he knows they want fed, and present himself as bait, waiting for them to take ops, watching as they gather their intel, smiling as they cast rev, waiting again as they make their calculations, sometimes even letting them rev a second time - and then he'll cast Ares and watch them bounce. Just for the lols. It's a level of "playing chicken" I've never seen before and it will catch even cautious top attackers out. It completely fucked SugarJon who had been doing great up until that point:

''2024-04-07 21:00:59 Rig the 2044 election (Sugarjon) (#11) invaded B is really more of a C- (Zar) (#9) but failed to conquer any land.''

Shoutout to Scratch, who played great for a new player, even if he was a bit frustrated at times with the lack of action or not being able to make moves when he wanted to. He's a fun player that brings a lot of bants and energy to the realm - if you haven't listened to his podcast with Nauj give it a whirl, it's a good listen. How does this niche game have three podcasts? Madness. You have to love this community.

Out-of-realm shoutout to Mith who singlehandedly kept the game interesting with his unique blend of yolos and trademark Mithstakes. He reminded me of something an old IT manager once said about me after I'd accidentally wiped an entire server: "He knows just enough to be dangerous."

I finished on 6,069 acres. I could have finished about 150 acres bigger, but something about the number 6,069 just appealed to me. It was... ''nice''. We capped off the round end with a mutiny against Dan who had been missing in action for so long that Scratch was starting to tape his picture to milk cartons. As King for a day, I only had one agenda: war! We picked #10 because why not, and we did almost no damage (I was getting 92 pez kills per fireball) because that's just how blops are at the moment.

Congrats to realm #11 on their win - to Poige and B's draft pack. It was entertaining to see that the a few of the top contenders for the win this round were non-drafters, and that a non-drafter won, though I doubt Poige could have done it without B's suicide on Lud.

And the ending of the story that everyone is really here for:

Elf Woods finished on 3090 land. He did it - he broke 3k acres! Not for the first time, mind you, but it's one of just a few occasions he's managed it. And he did it all under my benevolent telepathic guidance.

You're welcome, Elf Woods.

And that's it. Third draft round over. Back to your regular packs, everyone. See you next round.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/VICXRM7