DeletedUser12662
Guest
This post will sound more than a little biased, so I repeatedly put off penning it, but with so little activity in these threads we can't really afford to be choosy with our posts can we?
I won't even pretend to be qualified to guess the best and worst, as I don't know much about the vast majority of leaders who have come and gone. So instead I'll just list a couple good and a couple bad from my experience, choosing not necessarily the best/worst people I came across, but those who deserve mention for being better/worse than their reputations indicated.
For bad, I'll mention Zole and the other leaders of wolfpack, (but not the original VP) along with llohll, zolen, and the rest of the StoneCutter inner circle. This isn't new. You've heard their failings before, probably from me. What I believe many fail to take into consideration is just how good they were as individual fighters, and how good the individuals blindly following them were. They weren't the best, but they were good enough. "Good enough" players aren't usually defeated as long as there are ghosts to replenish themselves with, no matter how many alliances band against them. A mediocre leader, leading mediocre players, can see his alliance fall apart when the pressure is applied. When the players have enough skill among them to cope however, it takes truly horrendous mistakes to drive them apart. This evidently happened in both these cases. The leaders I mention didn't just ruin two alliances. They destroyed two alliances that should have been major powers in the endgame.
Good. Sapphire Sorrows and Roxt. The former seems to be subject to an effect well known among those with psychology backgrounds, the tendency for opinions to become more extreme over time. Her followers love her. Her enemies hate her. This happens for everyone, but she in particular seems to drive people to extremes when they look at the same action and decide whether to defend or attack her. We tend to think her followers are brainwashed when they stick up for her. We forget we've been subjected to opposite conditioning forces when we criticize her. The truth is that Phalanx was the alliance people loved to hate, the MRA that didn't want to be. We had all sorts of problems (I was there). We had a hundred players that needed protection, an enemy agent as our chief diplomat, a lunatic that kicked all but a handful of us out of the alliance at one point, a war against a far stronger alliance every day of our existence, and even an attempted coup (Hail nemanja! Hail sceeth!). Despite that, the alliance lasted. The leader must have been better than we tend to think she was, or that shouldn't have been possible.
Roxt probably isn't even considered a leader, but I don't think Ascension would have existed if not for him. DJ had slowly fallen to around the 10th ranked position or so, and its members were stagnating. It looked like a less elite version of Molon Labe, succumbing to the same ailments. (I kept close tabs on DJ back then, since they were my first enemy) Then Roxt took over as their recruiter. I don't know how he did it, but they turned around. If they hadn't, they still would have been smaller and weaker than Phalanx, and the merger never would have gone down in that manner. Since Roxt was active in the merger that created Ascension, I consider it probable that there was a causal relation between his efforts and the DJ turnaround, rather than assuming the timing was coincidence. So while Roxt might not be a true leader unto himself, he certainly had traits that any great leader needs to have. For that reason, he at least needs a mention here.
When you read my first sentence, you thought I was going to suggest myself didn't you?
I won't even pretend to be qualified to guess the best and worst, as I don't know much about the vast majority of leaders who have come and gone. So instead I'll just list a couple good and a couple bad from my experience, choosing not necessarily the best/worst people I came across, but those who deserve mention for being better/worse than their reputations indicated.
For bad, I'll mention Zole and the other leaders of wolfpack, (but not the original VP) along with llohll, zolen, and the rest of the StoneCutter inner circle. This isn't new. You've heard their failings before, probably from me. What I believe many fail to take into consideration is just how good they were as individual fighters, and how good the individuals blindly following them were. They weren't the best, but they were good enough. "Good enough" players aren't usually defeated as long as there are ghosts to replenish themselves with, no matter how many alliances band against them. A mediocre leader, leading mediocre players, can see his alliance fall apart when the pressure is applied. When the players have enough skill among them to cope however, it takes truly horrendous mistakes to drive them apart. This evidently happened in both these cases. The leaders I mention didn't just ruin two alliances. They destroyed two alliances that should have been major powers in the endgame.
Good. Sapphire Sorrows and Roxt. The former seems to be subject to an effect well known among those with psychology backgrounds, the tendency for opinions to become more extreme over time. Her followers love her. Her enemies hate her. This happens for everyone, but she in particular seems to drive people to extremes when they look at the same action and decide whether to defend or attack her. We tend to think her followers are brainwashed when they stick up for her. We forget we've been subjected to opposite conditioning forces when we criticize her. The truth is that Phalanx was the alliance people loved to hate, the MRA that didn't want to be. We had all sorts of problems (I was there). We had a hundred players that needed protection, an enemy agent as our chief diplomat, a lunatic that kicked all but a handful of us out of the alliance at one point, a war against a far stronger alliance every day of our existence, and even an attempted coup (Hail nemanja! Hail sceeth!). Despite that, the alliance lasted. The leader must have been better than we tend to think she was, or that shouldn't have been possible.
Roxt probably isn't even considered a leader, but I don't think Ascension would have existed if not for him. DJ had slowly fallen to around the 10th ranked position or so, and its members were stagnating. It looked like a less elite version of Molon Labe, succumbing to the same ailments. (I kept close tabs on DJ back then, since they were my first enemy) Then Roxt took over as their recruiter. I don't know how he did it, but they turned around. If they hadn't, they still would have been smaller and weaker than Phalanx, and the merger never would have gone down in that manner. Since Roxt was active in the merger that created Ascension, I consider it probable that there was a causal relation between his efforts and the DJ turnaround, rather than assuming the timing was coincidence. So while Roxt might not be a true leader unto himself, he certainly had traits that any great leader needs to have. For that reason, he at least needs a mention here.
When you read my first sentence, you thought I was going to suggest myself didn't you?
