The Experiment

Suppose for one minute that you hadn't ever seen civcraft, but it was described to you as follows:

"It's an anarchy server with mods that let player exert limited control over property (citadel) and over each other (prison pearl). It's being run as an experiment to see what types of power structures emerge. Maybe civilizations will emerge. Cool, huh?"

"Oh, but I should mention, game mechanics give tenfold or greater power advantages to certain types of players. Bot-scripters get ten times as much "god armor" (an equipment set that makes one fighter equal to five non-god-armored players). Also, coolpvpers have a tenfold power advantage over everyone else. Hmm, let's do math: 10x, 5x, then 10x again. I guess if a player happens to be skilled in bot-scripting and coolpvp, the rules of the game give them a 500x power advantage the day they join the server!"

Isn't it obvious, from this information alone, exactly what types of power structures are bound to emerge within a game with these rules? And isn't it equally clear how little this emergent order will resemble that of our world, the world in which civilizations emerged!

How "civilization" actually emerges

In the real world, forming and maintaining communities is the ultimate source of power advantages. Once people are connected in communities, specialization and trade can begin to create economic multipliers for community members. Prosperity lets people quit worrying about starvation and start creating culture and technology, and technology in turn provides power advantages. Notice the order of things:

stable societies => trade => technology => power multipliers

Larger communities allow more specialization, amplifying each piece of this process in turn. But it's hard to get large groups of people to live together in peace. Robust social structures need to be put in place, and a common culture needs to be fostered, or else communities will fracture and lose their advantages. Civcraft's slogan, "build with more than just blocks" is a reference to the activity of creating stable communities out of people (i.e. people are the blocks). This activity is the stuff that civilization is actually made of, and if that slogan is an indicator, that activity is what we want civcraft to be about!

Garbage in, Garbage out: Power and conflict on Civcraft

In a world where community-building is the path to power advantages, civilizations are the source of power, and they are what survives natural selection. But in a world with perverse rules, where massive power multipliers are awarded for activities that have nothing to do with community-building, it's not reasonable to expect civilization to emerge at all.

When practicing coolpvp and experimenting with bot scripts leads to a 500x power advantage, coolpvpers and bot-scripters will be the only ones to survive natural selection. The only "community" needed by these power structures is a botter meeting a coolpvper and giving him prot4. All meaningful power in a game with such rules will be held, not by communities, but by self-made supersoldiers.

Chaos out of Order

Has Civcraft ever had a war over territory? Or over strategic resources? Or over control of population? No, because on Civcraft, bizarrely, none of these things have anything to do with gaining or maintaining power. If you occupy Orion, it won't improve the strength of your prot4, the efficiency of your botting scripts, or your coolpvp skills. In fact there is nothing at all needed for you to maintain power, other than making sure you don't anger a rival power-clique and get permapearled. There is no nation or empire to hold together, and there are no masses to appease with bread and circuses, because people aren't your power base, you are your own power base.

This means there is no endgame for power players. They win the power game almost as soon as they start on the server, and then face a choice between suffering boredom or creating artificial conflict. Inevitably a bored clique of power-players will resort to griefing or trolling to relieve their boredom, and the also-bored rival power-player cliques will start an anti-griefer war. The "good guys" usually win, but when they win too thoroughly, they run into boredom themselves. Some of them descend to griefing, and the cycle starts all over again.

Often this cycle is broken up by interpersonal rivalries and feuds, some cliques splitting up and new ones forming in their place. But none of this conflict has anything to do with grand strategy or "clash of civilizations", it's just bickering and drama between unpleasant individuals on whom the game has bestowed massive power advantages. The Civcraft world with all its power structures often hangs in the balance based on the junior high-school drama of a few coolpvpers.

The false duality

When a clique of 10 friends who bot and coolpvp decide to exert power together, they make an instant server hegemon. The other hundreds of players on the server don't matter, that clique has already won the entire power game simply by joining the civcraft server with skills they probably gained on servers such as HCF. The only thing that can challenge their hegemony is if another clique of 10 coolpvpers and botters drop their personal differences for long enough to oppose them.

So the server perpetually bounces back and forth between "World Police" types and "HCF" types. The "HCF/Recharge" want to win fights for the sake of winning fights, and burn the world for the sake of burning the world. The "World Police" oppose them, fighting to make the world safe for us to play our puny little civilization roleplay games in (unless a few of them get bored or dislike your ideology and decide to troll and harass you into oblivion instead). Each time the HCF/WP conflict erupts, it's a "battle of the titans" in which the vast majority of players are completely irrelevant. We are encouraged to root for the LADS to come back and save us from Recharge, as if we are nothing more than screaming civilians in downtown Manhattan during the climax of a crappy superhero movie.

I reject this duality. I'm not going to root for the LADS to come back, so we can resume "civilization roleplay theatre" at the pleasure of the world-protectors. The Civcraft world has a dozen cities that outnumber Recharge and LADS in terms of population; any single one of these cities should rightfully be capable of crushing Recharge all by itself.

What we badly need is dramatic and sweeping changes to the rules of our game, so that cities and civilizations are granted the power superiority they ought to have. Power should come from unifying large populations, and directing their efforts toward common goals, not from being "born" into the civcraft world with a 500x power advantage.

Conclusion: how you can help fix Civcraft's flaws

Please consider joining the Bergecraft test server on "Bergecraft Thursdays". This server uses the standard civcraft plugins, but botting is banned, and prot4 is massively nerfed. These changes help equalize power between coolpvpers and ordinary players, making Recharge-like groups less of a threat to organized communities.

By participating, you will be helping Civcraft eliminate the Recharges of the future. Your playtesting and feedback will help in the development of the type of mechanics changes Civcraft so badly needs.

TLDR: Civilization emerges because Nature rewards society-building. Civcraft rewards coolpvping and bot-scripting instead. Therefore, civilizations will only become meaningful on Civcraft if the rules of the game are completely changed. Dominance of WP and HCF groups shows how terribad the problem is. Try out Bergecraft and help playtest changes that Civcraft needs.

Edited: The Recharge war is over, so End innocents no longer have a special opportunity to test Bergecraft.