I told myself I wouldn't say anything on the forums, but... I have too big of a mouth. XD And so, following is a retelling of some of the history from my perspective. Story time!
Hey everyone, I'm a former Borg player. I just wanted to publicly thank The Rebels for all of the hard work they put into putting my old alliance through the refining fires. I don't see any shame in admitting that I personally was way out of my weight class when the fighting first broke out, and I was one of the bigger players that we had. For most of the Borg-Rebel war, I had just assumed that after a while people would get bored, the actives in Borg would join the Rebels, and then we'd go fight Evo. Truly. And I was looking forward to that. (Naive? Most likely.) I never wanted to join Evo, because it sounded boring. What's the point of playing a game like this if you shield yourself from all risk with a super alliance? At that point, you aren't a fighter anymore, you're just a janitor. (That's probably all been said before, but I don't follow these forums all that closely.)
Anyways, right about when I was getting bored and figured the other side must be getting close to that point too, Evo broke up and our old TBE neighbors made this new alliance called Phenomenon. Ever since my first conquer, I had enjoyed scrolling over O64, just to see who had which cities that day. Even so, I still didn't want to join them. I was afraid of boredom, even with how small Phenomenon was. The other Borg fighters, however, didn't have such fears, and since I care more about fighting with them than I do anything else in this game, I went with them.
I am so happy that I did. I have not been bored at all! Not only do we still have plenty of live targets, now we have the active head count to make the players that I knew I couldn't touch before start to sweat. On top of that, my new alliance members have been very friendly and helpful, even when I make the occasional noob mistake... (WHAT??? SUMMON THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!) I even found a few people who weren't afraid to speak in math, if needed. I am home. ^_^
I discovered something else too. I have much more fun fighting against my friends in The Rebels than I think I ever would fighting alongside. Maybe that's not true, but hey. It takes a long time to build up really good, competitive relationships, and I think that's what we have.
Also, I really want to do for The Rebels what they did for us: draw a solid, unforgiving line between the people in your alliance (and outside of your alliance) that you can depend on, and the people you can't. All that's left after that is to cut off the dead weight. I understand that this may be a painful process for you guys. Don't worry. I'm here to help.