Luziyca
Registered
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this afternoon's lecture. I am Luziyca.
This lecture is going to be somewhat different than all the others, since while almost everyone else will be giving lectures on how to improve your skills and what not, this is about how regions die, and in effect, what we can learn from Esquarium. And as someone who has been in two regions that died out, Illuscinora in 2011, and Esquarium just a few months ago, I feel I am more than qualified to talk about how regions die.
As I remember far more of Esquarium's death, I will be using this as a case study. With all this in mind, let's begin.
If you want the very short version of how it died, then to paraphrase Mr. Hemingway, it died in two ways. "Gradually, then suddenly."
That obviously doesn't help much. So... let's dig deeper into how it died.
The seeds were very much planted when Sjalhaven left the region, and Esquarium became a diarchy. The problem was that the two people running the region at the time were not all that interested in running the region. Thus, we can see increasing levels of what people call edginess and memeiness, which of course greatly hampered actually roleplaying and worldbuilding.
At this point, what one should have done would have been to replace the delegates with people who had the time to actually care about the roleplaying and worldbuilding communities in Esquarium, instead of caring only about memes. But we did not, which allowed things to go further downhill.
Members who have been in Esquarium for many years left, which included major nations. This greatly affected Esquarium's canon, because with so many nations leaving the region in such a short space of time, it left a significant vacuum that needed to be filled. To make things worse, we did not really do much in the way of recruiting new members, which in hindsight made things worse.
Thus, what one should have done would be to intensify recruitment of new nations: encourage the best and brightest newbies to come to Esquarium, to take the place of longtime nations who have abandoned Esquarium, so we could at least have a chance to fill up that void before it becomes to large to manage.
We did not do that, however. Instead, ten of us decided to try and start their own thing: to build a better Esquarium, based on our canon, but with a "new map, new leadership, and better oversight." This would be a great idea, especially as their plans, as outlined by Qian here, made a lot of sense and would be actually great ways to fix the region's problems as it stood.
The problem, however, was that everyone in Esquarium jumped on board with that, which while it may be a good idea if they were actually serious in working to improve Esquarium, was not the case, as according to Qian, "it turns out when a substantial portion of your membership is there solely to shitpost, to be edgy, or to lurk, changing the map and the approval panel doesn’t really help, and in fact makes it worse because of the old canon that gets ditched, so several months or even years of steady decline accelerated and Esquarians just went elsewhere." Plus, we did not really recruit, and the one person that got recruited here was pushed to another region.
However, I don't think this is quite it: for about a month, it actually was working. We were developing lore, and we were worldbuilding, and we were even discussing whether Esquarium should be worldbuilding, roleplaying, or both. But when one of the key members of our approval board, and our lore, left the region, that was when Esquarium began to die again.
What we could take away from the departure of a key member is that it might be a bad idea to have so much of a region's canon depend on X nation. And it wasn't like we didn't experience it before Esquarium started to die, honestly: Mich leaving the region should have been a warning bell that placing all your eggs in one basket is a terrible idea.
However, with the departure of that member, other members started to go, and Esquarium became much more insular. While there were still those who wanted to try and develop lore and what not, others were not as interested in keeping Esquarium around, which helped reduce activity to literally infrastructure between Ainin, Mespalia, and Montecara. Around that time, some members were discussing establishing another worldbuilding group where they would plan everything from the beginning of humanity, and our attentions shifted to that. And with many of the approval panel no longer interested in the region, we were essentially back to where we started, minus a lot of people, and all of our old canon.
At this point, what can you really do?
You could have replaced those in charge before you let it get this bad, you could have recruited the best and brightest and not send them off to other regions as soon as they get here, you could have taken the opportunity to prune all those who weren't here to worldbuild and roleplay, and you could have not put all your eggs in one basket.
If they had done all of them early enough, maybe Esquarium would still be thriving, and I would not be giving this talk in front of you guys today. But they didn't do that in time, and when they did it, it was generally a case of "too little, too late."
And as I look back at Illuscinora, while it did not die in the same way as Esquarium did, I can see parallels: just like how Ainin and Tuthina were too busy to care about Esquarium's roleplaying and worldbuilding, which led to its death, Arumdaum were too busy to care about Illuscinora's roleplaying and worldbuilding. We could have increased our recruiting, and we could have not put all eggs in one basket. And to think, they are not the only RP regions to have died on NationStates: I would not be surprised if they followed a similar process to that of my old region.
If there is one thing we can learn from Esquarium's demise, it is that you cannot rest on your laurels forever. You have to maintain your region, you have to bring new blood to replace the old, you have to remove the dead weight, and you have to make sure that everything isn't being placed on one nation, for that nation will one day leave.
Thank you.
This lecture is going to be somewhat different than all the others, since while almost everyone else will be giving lectures on how to improve your skills and what not, this is about how regions die, and in effect, what we can learn from Esquarium. And as someone who has been in two regions that died out, Illuscinora in 2011, and Esquarium just a few months ago, I feel I am more than qualified to talk about how regions die.
As I remember far more of Esquarium's death, I will be using this as a case study. With all this in mind, let's begin.
If you want the very short version of how it died, then to paraphrase Mr. Hemingway, it died in two ways. "Gradually, then suddenly."
That obviously doesn't help much. So... let's dig deeper into how it died.
The seeds were very much planted when Sjalhaven left the region, and Esquarium became a diarchy. The problem was that the two people running the region at the time were not all that interested in running the region. Thus, we can see increasing levels of what people call edginess and memeiness, which of course greatly hampered actually roleplaying and worldbuilding.
At this point, what one should have done would have been to replace the delegates with people who had the time to actually care about the roleplaying and worldbuilding communities in Esquarium, instead of caring only about memes. But we did not, which allowed things to go further downhill.
Members who have been in Esquarium for many years left, which included major nations. This greatly affected Esquarium's canon, because with so many nations leaving the region in such a short space of time, it left a significant vacuum that needed to be filled. To make things worse, we did not really do much in the way of recruiting new members, which in hindsight made things worse.
Thus, what one should have done would be to intensify recruitment of new nations: encourage the best and brightest newbies to come to Esquarium, to take the place of longtime nations who have abandoned Esquarium, so we could at least have a chance to fill up that void before it becomes to large to manage.
We did not do that, however. Instead, ten of us decided to try and start their own thing: to build a better Esquarium, based on our canon, but with a "new map, new leadership, and better oversight." This would be a great idea, especially as their plans, as outlined by Qian here, made a lot of sense and would be actually great ways to fix the region's problems as it stood.
The problem, however, was that everyone in Esquarium jumped on board with that, which while it may be a good idea if they were actually serious in working to improve Esquarium, was not the case, as according to Qian, "it turns out when a substantial portion of your membership is there solely to shitpost, to be edgy, or to lurk, changing the map and the approval panel doesn’t really help, and in fact makes it worse because of the old canon that gets ditched, so several months or even years of steady decline accelerated and Esquarians just went elsewhere." Plus, we did not really recruit, and the one person that got recruited here was pushed to another region.
However, I don't think this is quite it: for about a month, it actually was working. We were developing lore, and we were worldbuilding, and we were even discussing whether Esquarium should be worldbuilding, roleplaying, or both. But when one of the key members of our approval board, and our lore, left the region, that was when Esquarium began to die again.
What we could take away from the departure of a key member is that it might be a bad idea to have so much of a region's canon depend on X nation. And it wasn't like we didn't experience it before Esquarium started to die, honestly: Mich leaving the region should have been a warning bell that placing all your eggs in one basket is a terrible idea.
However, with the departure of that member, other members started to go, and Esquarium became much more insular. While there were still those who wanted to try and develop lore and what not, others were not as interested in keeping Esquarium around, which helped reduce activity to literally infrastructure between Ainin, Mespalia, and Montecara. Around that time, some members were discussing establishing another worldbuilding group where they would plan everything from the beginning of humanity, and our attentions shifted to that. And with many of the approval panel no longer interested in the region, we were essentially back to where we started, minus a lot of people, and all of our old canon.
At this point, what can you really do?
You could have replaced those in charge before you let it get this bad, you could have recruited the best and brightest and not send them off to other regions as soon as they get here, you could have taken the opportunity to prune all those who weren't here to worldbuild and roleplay, and you could have not put all your eggs in one basket.
If they had done all of them early enough, maybe Esquarium would still be thriving, and I would not be giving this talk in front of you guys today. But they didn't do that in time, and when they did it, it was generally a case of "too little, too late."
And as I look back at Illuscinora, while it did not die in the same way as Esquarium did, I can see parallels: just like how Ainin and Tuthina were too busy to care about Esquarium's roleplaying and worldbuilding, which led to its death, Arumdaum were too busy to care about Illuscinora's roleplaying and worldbuilding. We could have increased our recruiting, and we could have not put all eggs in one basket. And to think, they are not the only RP regions to have died on NationStates: I would not be surprised if they followed a similar process to that of my old region.
If there is one thing we can learn from Esquarium's demise, it is that you cannot rest on your laurels forever. You have to maintain your region, you have to bring new blood to replace the old, you have to remove the dead weight, and you have to make sure that everything isn't being placed on one nation, for that nation will one day leave.
Thank you.