Walking around Mt. Augusta today is a depressing affair. The city itself looks great, with tall buildings and amazing new developments in the economy and aesthetics of the city. You walk around and touch the edges of the buildings and wonder how it was that at some point you were so immersed in this world which you now realize feels completely cold and empty. The only time people walk these streets are to spam unfunny memes and quickly disconnect. Where is the wonder of diplomacy? Where is the political intrigue? Just whispers of an old era that one can barely hear when running their hands across the Augustan flag?

People like to make many different excuses for the fact that the modern civclassics world feels devoid of life and barren, even if the server itself is populated. "It's always been this way", "We just grew up", or "civcraft's meta didn't evolve and people lost interest". In fact, there are TWO major decisions made by the admins and the community over the past few years that have been the MOST decisive in killing off the special feeling of communities existing and thriving within a larger world, which is what gave Civcraft its whole purpose and capability to be enthralling anyways. Without these two aspects, we are a sputtering, dying motor firing for the last time on the vapors of the old magic that has evaporated a long time ago

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1. Snuffing out local chat

Let me bring you back to a time when tight-knit communities on Civcraft were the norm. Travelling through the vast countryside, you could stumble upon small, cozy hamlets of two to three players, working away, ignoring the larger politickings of the server. Wandering the cold, lifeless forests and valleys for hours, your chat would be empty, and you'd truly feel completely isolated. At times, you'd forget you were even on a multiplayer server. When a wayward message would suddenly pop up, you knew you were close to someone! You'd walk into town, be welcomed by the locals that would come and congregate around you, and give you food and some basic supplies as well as eagerly show off their humble builds. You'd talk to them, and gain a peculiar insight into the local area. The elder mayor of a town you'd never heard of before would warn you about local raiders, talk about their political situation, and ask you for news of the outside world. Bidding farewell to the small hamlet as you pushed onwards, continuing your journey, you'd truly feel like a lonesome traveler in a completely dynamic world. You felt like you really accomplished something by discovering these tiny towns. You truly felt the absolute scale of the map, when all of the drama and PvP of the central states would disappear for a moment as the wind howled outside of the town hall where you would all exchange messages, messages that would travel out the window and into the wilderness, petering off and dissolving into the vast nothingness.

The big cities were always bustling back then. We didn't have one large city, we had many, and all of them felt alive. Local chat would constantly be lit up with curious newfriends, government officials, police chasing down criminals, people peddling wares... the atmosphere would change from city to city; Mt. Augusta in early 2.0 was favored by certain people as their local chat was more "laid-back", compared to the stiff eastern metropolis of Orion. The constant local chat stimulation would encourage others to speak up, those who would usually be silent. It would encourage people who logged on to stay on, as they immediately had an incentive to talk to people and answer questions. Those who just got home from work or school and who wanted social time with their online friends wouldn't jump into some closed-off discord server, but they'd actually log on to the game and enjoy it there. This gave real weight to in-game actions. Instead of the server becoming a meme-fest, people would pour time into the game to maintain their social environment... their society. Just like in real life.

Geography was important back then. The big struggles would be referred to with their location, as the PvPers from different nations would set out on the arduous journey to go fight in some far-off locale, leaving their homes behind. The only way to communicate would be through direct message, and they wouldn't get to enjoy the atmosphere of their home town, the local chat, and the friendly hellos and how-are-yous that would reverberate across their neighborhoods. Distance really meant something.

When group chats for citadel groups were introduced, however, all of this changed. Local chat gradually became obsolete as cities made local city chats and only let in a select amount of citizens. Newfriends would call out less and less, observing the emptiness of the local chat, and would simply move on, or disconnect forever. Worse even, the group chat [!] was created, effectively killing the whole purpose of restricted local chat that was one of the key selling points of early civcraft. Suddenly, anyone could talk to anyone at any time. The feeling of being alone and disconnected from the server, the feeling of distance, of meaningfulness, suddenly ruined by the [!] spam of everyone in the server, the different chat colours ugly and jarring, as if one was playing an online kit server with spammy, multicoloured chat.

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Whoever took the decision to code and implement this feature, knowingly or unknowingly killed the essence of what made civcraft addicting and special.

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2. The advent of Discord over Mumble

This is probably a smaller culprit in the demise of Civcraft. A centralized VoiP server basically forced all voice activity on civcraft to come together into one, densely populated server. This doubled the effective "online range" of Civcraft, as people who joined their mumble channel to talk to their friends would pretty quickly hop online as well, and transfer seamlessly between logging on and logging off. Eventually, players started moving towards their own group servers, and when their urge to have their social time with their online friends came, they wouldn't log onto the Civcraft mumble, but rather their own. This evolved into the current situation we have now, with a million different decentralized discord server. Where is the CIVCRAFT discord server, with a hundred different chat rooms for different cities and towns, all populated with their own clusters of citizens, representing a living, breathing game?

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In Summary:

We can now clearly see that the single and biggest decision to impact the server's quality was the one to implement group chats for citadel groups. At that point, the gun was primed, and it was only a matter of time before the players themselves switched to citadel group chats, pulling the trigger and ending the magic of Civ. Without a centralized mumble server to keep the atmosphere of community on life support, civcraft fragmented, and those who once played religiously now realize that in-game actions become meaningless without a greater context. They meme and spam and reduce their in-game actions to the mundane. The subreddit, that once would have in-depth political posts and breaking news, now stands reduced to the lowest-effort memes and rehashed comments, typed in all-lowercase. Shitposts after shitposts after shitposts. The minimum effort. People are tired, tired of going through the motions no longer feeling the magic. This will have, and has already had, dire consequences for the rest of the server.

Is the civcraft/civclassics dead? No, but those who were responsible for the above have cut the IV line and disconnected the life support. They've shelved us into a maintenance closet and closed the door. The dust is already starting to accumulate on the streets of the cities, streets that were once fully of life and well-traveled. What was once a circle of life, feeding the server and allowing it to grow, has become a vicious circle: No community and meaningful society means no real interest to keep playing which means no newfriends and a dwindling population, which feeds back into itself, endlessly.