- Location
- ?????????
The discord is so much shitposting too. It's frankly wild we get anything done lol
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
The discord is so much shitposting too. It's frankly wild we get anything done lol
Voz is my favorite, no contest. I really got him and enjoyed translating his bullshit into English. Klimenko though, I have no idea. I just assume him to be generically corrupt and delusional, whatever it is he believes.
And yes, it's always extremely frustrating when the thread is (for lack of a better word) distorted by the discord. That applies to pretty much every quest with a significant discord presence, I've had people get on my case before for not knowing what Word of God has been handed down in a private chat.
And yes, it's always extremely frustrating when the thread is (for lack of a better word) distorted by the discord. That applies to pretty much every quest with a significant discord presence, I've had people get on my case before for not knowing what Word of God has been handed down in a private chat.
- Pronouns
- It/Its
Voz was so fun yeah, adorable little spiteful man
I wonder who would get put in if Ashimov was able to take power eventually
I wonder who would get put in if Ashimov was able to take power eventually
- Location
- Under your couch
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This isn't in the quest anywhere and would definitely affect how i vote.
- Location
- UTC+0
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They
[]Labor Cost Adjustments: Labor cost increases are only expected to increase as the Union continues its drive towards modernization leaving several sectors of the economy growing more expensive. Measures to control costs will have to be taken to provide for low-cost construction labor if development is to continue at the same pace. A full currency revaluation is beyond the scope of ability either politically or economically but several softer measures can be implemented. Reducing same-job cost increase maximums can allow current growth in labor costs to be slowed and improve the dynamism of labor by encouraging varied employment. (1 Dice)
[]Enterprise Benefits: Allowing enterprises to offer expanded benefits can be a means of reducing direct labor price raises while continuing to expand services. An enterprise partnering with state services at a larger scale can allow some savings to be provided along with ensuring that job offers are not a direct competition of funding. The largest factor of these is likely to be canteen costs being deferred along with partnerships with local businesses to provide services to workers for free. Little reductions are expected from a full passage but even a tiny reduction in labor costs is an improvement to economic efficiency. (1 Dice)
I wouldn't say he is extremely anti-worker, that would be hyperbole, but he definitely thinks that wage growth is becoming an issue and wants to arrest it. Also, it took a favor for Semyonov to get him onboard with empowering Unions.
Ok it might be a but facitious to call him extremly anti worker but he definitely has spend the last 5 years finding different schemes he can use to underpay workers or replace them with cheaper imported or unskilled labour positions which i will say is fair calling anti worker practices
Non-Cannon Omake: Twitter Post On the Algerian Crisis
Blast from the future featuring 115 year old zoomer Belik.
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Thing like this is a reason why I stopped participating in this quest, but I am curious:
@Blackstar
What do our diplomats and spooks believe to be most likely consequences of this debacle, medium- and long-term; And, how likely are any meaningful improvements to them if USSR managed to wrangle better terms from America?
@Blackstar
What do our diplomats and spooks believe to be most likely consequences of this debacle, medium- and long-term; And, how likely are any meaningful improvements to them if USSR managed to wrangle better terms from America?
- Location
- The great frozen north
This quest is fun when we are looking through the eyes of someone who has limited information available and a moderately biased view of the world to decypher but is fundamentally rational and, not terminally delusional. It however becomes outright frustrating when the bias reaches the point of them being so far up their own ass that it severely obfuscates what information IS available and the updates sound like attempts at manipulating the supreme soviet (or threadviet) than reasonable internal monologues. Voznesensky's arcane bureaucratic actions (most famously the one to avoid the anti corruption investigation, which we didn't pick because it sounded like unproductive political ratfucking) and now Klimenko totally ignoring the MFA (despite how remarkable a known hawk opposing escalation was!) feel like that.
Anyways, as for whether we can achieve socialism/communism... screw that. It's all words, as long as we are able to keep the government looking out for the well-being of the people, I care not for the deets. Important thing is we keep the enterprises reigned in to avoid going full Dengist.
As for Klimenko being anti-worker and such... With most ministers any REALLY GOOD IDEAs they had are confined to narrow sections of the update intros or the Bureacracy section, so they look more like isolated brain worms than serious ideological faults. That we are generally not pushed into taking those bad options like Klim's wage freezes further prevents the connection getting engrained. The Voz's general Voz-ness permeating entire updates is the notable exception to this.
Anyways, as for whether we can achieve socialism/communism... screw that. It's all words, as long as we are able to keep the government looking out for the well-being of the people, I care not for the deets. Important thing is we keep the enterprises reigned in to avoid going full Dengist.
I think us not even considering deliberately crashing The Voz early on was a combination of 3 or 4 things:
- It took a while to realize his corruption, and early we were happy for his very large dice bonus so we felt his shenanigans were worth it
- After the mess of Malenkov's exit, we figured the chaos of having a minster replaced and plan re-started was not worth it, in-universe (disruption of planning) or out (long period of political wrangling). And of course, nobody would dare suggest removing a minister by having them fail a plan.
- Throughout the Stalin era getting a minister removed was a fail-state that meant the successor would likely be an incompetent hardliner, and the "do not get the minister removed by politicians ever" mentality was hard to shake.
I don't think asking people to join other sites is super-serious, in the olden days it was common for one's interests to be spread across many forums. But I agree that, given Discord had known data breeches and that the discussion of interest is fully login blocked (is there even any other non-NSFW free site that does that nowadays?), it seems shady is fuck if you're not already a discord user. And speaking of forums, some of us are on sites like SV specifically because we are trying to avoid the dopamine-chasing plague that modern social media is.
As for Klimenko being anti-worker and such... With most ministers any REALLY GOOD IDEAs they had are confined to narrow sections of the update intros or the Bureacracy section, so they look more like isolated brain worms than serious ideological faults. That we are generally not pushed into taking those bad options like Klim's wage freezes further prevents the connection getting engrained. The Voz's general Voz-ness permeating entire updates is the notable exception to this.
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- Location
- A haze of forgetfulness
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It also has some toxic people that just make it not worth interacting with so its best to just avoid it in general. The thread is much more civil in every regard.
Yeah I did get the feeling like the writing on the whole mfa thing crossed over from "giving characters biases that need to be kept in mind" to "actively hiding basic contextual information from the player in a completely different way than previously established so there's basically no way to predict it"
Character biases can be fun if they're consistent the player actually has a chance to engage with them but but writing a section in such a way that seemingly the whole playerbase legitimately thought the literal ministry of foreign affairs had no opinion on this matter proves that something went very wrong with the writing of this chapter in a way beyond just "character bias lol"
Character biases can be fun if they're consistent the player actually has a chance to engage with them but but writing a section in such a way that seemingly the whole playerbase legitimately thought the literal ministry of foreign affairs had no opinion on this matter proves that something went very wrong with the writing of this chapter in a way beyond just "character bias lol"
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
A lot heavily depends on the future US admins and can't exactly be predicted from where you are. In theory, if you get better terms you could get more immediate concessions from the US and that would likely lead to a further dieback of their more dovish wings, or well, more of one than is already set to happen. Further trade with the US is likely to start getting hammered no matter how this crisis resolves or if you get more out of it, some of this was inevitable with Ashbrook banking on sanctions to turn unions/workers into a republican voting group but it'll likely increase no matter what. NATO defensive positions across Europe are likely to increase in density but that has little practical effect outside countering the re-armament of Germany in the mid-term.
Going into more long-term general policy impacts, they expect the French to be more committed to the Algerian war and possibly see the current agreement of the Americans selling them out depending on who goes into power. It's unlikely to cause a split in NATO but is likely to cause further US concessions to France while they work more agressivly on influence games. In effect either the current terms of better terms for the Union would be more an extrapolation of current trends with increasing pressure against socialism and socialist states in response to the current more agressive posture pushed by Romanov and the conservative oposition. In the good news though, in future crises the escalation lines and red lines will be clarified far better and there will be a greater respect for them then the current ones.
To an extent, the practices you also saw here are also far more systemic, the whole Presidium/Politburo being a council of equals goes both ways and that means that the MFA is just another person rather then a respected participant who should be leading talks. This is something that can be seen OTL in the Hungarian Intervention. I didn't actually mean to model that/should have been far more clear where every member of the presidium stood and will be in the future for the situations but it to an extent does simulate the relative weight given to the political posts if unintentionally. Shepilov historically basically got ignored as even existing in the room and confined to the UN for the entire Hungarian crisis to provide top cover with no connections to decisionmaking. In the future I'll be a bit more clear on the exact opinions of charaters, but the MFA in this instance was well, the junior chair due to relative political connections.
- Pronouns
- He/They
Some updates just generate a lot of hype around a certain option - this is a minor issue in all popular quests, some updates just get a ton more engagement and those votes don't tend to be the most considered. But similar things happen in real politics too.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Gaddafi has, justifiably in historical hindsight, something of a reputation as a loose cannon. It discouraged us from trusting him as a proxy.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I don't know. I think it's kind of nice to play a game where we aren't constantly showered with near-optimal reward piles for just having whatever minimal attention span it takes to not push the brightly colored and clearly labeled self-destruct button.
In fairness, this is true.
@Blackstar , it is definitely true that there does at least need to be text signposting that the player character is biased. We learned pretty quickly that Voz is terminally STEM-brained, that Galchobar was a lunatic, and so on, because the character's biases were communicated strongly via the text. I think a lot of people missed that with Klimenko being hawkish enough that it was interfering with his perceptions of reality in a major way.
Wasn't that done in the first post / turn 0 post of the thread?
Yep.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think there's a very tight limit on how much better the terms can get before our risk of losing a LOT more and worse starts to far outstrip the gains.
Arguably, the USSR should react by wanting things to go on as they have been. The last two decades have seen the Soviets nearly close the technological gap with the West, vastly improve standards of living, and integrate an enormous economic zone across most of Eurasia. Gambling with a risk of nuclear war in exchange for the opportunity to set up a few more avowedly communist proxy states in Africa (we're never going to turn the whole continent red from our starting position in the foreseeable future) seems... questionable.
Marx was a big believer in sweeping world revolutions, and so were some other thinkers. Most of them had never heard of the atomic bomb, which makes the game rather nervous.
Blackstar, not gonna lie, part of the problem here is that you tend to use bureaucrat-speak words like "several" to mean everything from "about three people think this" to "the overwhelming majority of experts think this but the player character doesn't want to admit they're wrong."
I think you need to be a little clearer in your descriptive language sometimes, because you wind up taking fairly basic pieces of information that the character would at least be aware of and fuzzing them out behind two or three levels of euphemisms until the voters can't tell the difference between "this" and "more or less the opposite of this."
Yeah, that's important. I agree with Red. Having to treat everything as "we need to constantly deconstruct a puzzle because every piece of pertinent basic information is padded with two or three layers of obfuscation and euphemism" is too fucking exhausting for a game.
That doesn't address this specific situation, though. Here, the big problem is that the main character isn't distinguishing between "this one guy and several diplomats" and "this one guy and the Foreign Minister." That's kind of important.
Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but at least we'd have had more of a clue that we were specifically ignoring the advice of the Foreign Ministry because our guy thinks they're wrong.
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- Location
- Northish
It's page 1102 of the thread, expecting people to remember that little tidbit at page 1 is not realistic
It's the core premise of the quest though, and it's come up several, several times. For example, all of Voz's term. Or every time we shift character and the narration changing significantly as the new guy comes in with new opinions.
I don't think it's an unfair complaint, but I just wanted to point out that the PC being biased is both the premise of the quest and also explicitly told in the very first post of the quest.
- Location
- Elsewhere
As someone that mainly lurks, I rather enjoy the style of the updates with the deep biases and unreliable narrators. It's a unique aspect of the quest that makes it more fun.
- Pronouns
- he/him
i think that the deciphering of biases and the lack of perfect information is a core component of the quest, and us falling into the thought traps that our characters themselves are in is the main consequence. us eating crow because we were operating with the information given to us by the character, and the character was wrong, is not a failure of the quest. we weren't set up to fail, we ignored the warning signs and weren't critical enough of our options. we weren't playing with the rules of the game in mind. i can understand people's frustration at the main conceit of this quest, but this is the game, and it isn't for everyone.
our main advantage as players is in information processing. not everyone may be able to solve the puzzle, but as long as we all know what the puzzle is we can work on it together. we've been sort of ignoring this aspect of the game for the last while since it seemed like klim was normal (he is compared to voz, but that should mean we should be more critical of his perspective, not less). this was a relatively minor failure that'll give us a kick in the pants to be more careful in the future, and consider the perspectives involved, especially with the end of the world. i think we need to play the game better, not get upset at it for us failing
our main advantage as players is in information processing. not everyone may be able to solve the puzzle, but as long as we all know what the puzzle is we can work on it together. we've been sort of ignoring this aspect of the game for the last while since it seemed like klim was normal (he is compared to voz, but that should mean we should be more critical of his perspective, not less). this was a relatively minor failure that'll give us a kick in the pants to be more careful in the future, and consider the perspectives involved, especially with the end of the world. i think we need to play the game better, not get upset at it for us failing
- Location
- Lost in the internet
There is also the fact that our first strike missiles can only stay on the pads for a few days before we have to bring them down for maintenance and refueling.
And the longer we stay mobilized, the more damage to our economy we suffer.
At some point, the more the negotiation drag, the less advantageous our position is.
(as I interpret it, obviously I might be wrong...)
So going off topic a bit just how bad are our environmental problems considering the catfish issues and the lake that occasionally combusts.