Or maybe it's just all of us not doing our share to draw people into the game and keep them interested.
Well, you and I came of age at the same time during this game, which was a glorious time indeed. There was a point where five of us (Napoleon, Wolfentoad, Tmth, you and I) were all actively pushing the pedal to the metal coming off of a presidential surge of traffic to the forum when it came to recruitment and candidate fielding, which pushed the game to damn near 200 people. Yet, this era still didn't produce more than 3 healthy regions.
As the MW & Pac altered their governments and became more active, the others began to suffer. Without the stars aligning so to speak when it comes to megalomaniac behavior, you can't sustain such a system, which still doesn't appear to produce 5 healthy regions. I consider late-2012/early-2013 to be a benchmark for the activity levels in this game, and I highly doubt we'll see such a climate unless Atlasia either starts recruiting from other sites (which, hey, wolfentoad was doing during that time anyway) or until the next presidential election rolls around. In the meantime, resolving the lull should be a top priority, rather than appealing to a standard none of us can live up to anymore.
The game wasn't built around five regional governments at the beginning, and the five-region system wasn't created around five regional governments as we know them today (at least I think?), so I see no reason to defend the status quo as being perfect or even what we needed from the start.
Well, I've been candid and admitted that I used these recruits mostly as numbers and not really as players. Some figured it out on their own or took the initiative to ask about opportunities in the game, but "integration" was never really a focus of mine. It should've been. I won't speak for you, but I think we were certainly satisfied as long as people turned out to vote.
