Embassy of the NPO

[Pasybfic]

Non-Aggression Pact between The League & Concord and the New Pacific Order

The New Pacific Order and The League & Concord are pleased to announce the passage of the Francograd-Merrimack Agreement.

Amidst increased tension and various challenges in gameplay throughout recent times, healthy communication across spheres is a critical part of maintaining the current relatively peaceful state of the game. Despite occasional tactical and philosophical disagreements, both governments recognize the benefit of healthy communication outside their immediate sphere and expanding our horizons within our interests. To the end of encouraging collaboration, and with the allegedly looming release of a massive shift in the way the game is played, we are proud to ratify the Francograd-Merrimack Agreement to prepare both regions to move into the future with strength and certainty.

The agreement sets the stage for what will undoubtedly be a fruitful relationship between our two regimes, and its specific text is featured below.

Francograd–Merrimack Agreement

Article I: Mutual Recognition

The League will recognize the government of the New Pacific Order as the government of the Pacific as determined by the Emperor, or, in the absence of the Emperor, the Regent.

The New Pacific Order will recognize the government of The League as determined by the Constitution of the Republic, led by the Consulate of the Republic as the community’s highest executive.

The New Pacific Order will recognize the region Concord as an integrated territory of the The League as determined by the Constitution of the Republic, under the executive leadership of the Consulate and its appointees.

The League will not recognize or endorse any in-game WA Delegacy of the Pacific not held or mandated by the Emperor of the New Pacific Order as legitimate.

The New Pacific Order will not recognize or endorse any in-game WA Delegacy of The League or Concord not held or mandated by the Consulate of the Republic as legitimate.

Article II: Non-Aggression

Neither signatory will engage in military hostility against the other signatory’s regions.

Neither signatory will conduct clandestine operations in relation to or against the other signatory’s regions or institutions.

Signatories being on opposing sides of an external military engagement shall not constitute a breach of non-aggression in law nor in principle.

If a signatory becomes aware of an ongoing or future threat of any nature to the regions or institutions of the other, they shall report it in good faith to the other. For the New Pacific Order, the proper body to inform of such developments shall be the Senate. For The League, reports of concern should be directed to the Domestic Security Bureau.

Article III: Additional Collaboration

Signatories will aspire to collaborate on cultural matters and are encouraged to, at their convenience, hold communal cultural activities between their communities.

Signatories will collaborate on World Assembly affairs when feasible and suitable to mutual interest, including but not necessarily limited to supporting the recognition of their respective members in the Security Council.

Signatories will not support any World Assembly resolution targeting the other’s regions without the express consent of the targeted government.

At their leisure, signatories are encouraged to conduct bilateral military training exercises.

Signatories are encouraged to assist the other in lawful transition of WA Delegates and aid the stability of each other’s WA Delegates upon request.

Article IV: Ratification and Alteration

The signatories of this agreement are the Republic of The League & Concord and the New Pacific Order.

This agreement will enter into immediate force upon ratification by the Consulate of the Republic of The League & Concord and the Senate of the New Pacific Order.

This agreement may be amended by the consent of both ratifying institutions.

Signatories may withdraw from this agreement according to their internal processes, though are encouraged to provide ample notice to the other signatory.

The League & Concord
Quebecshire, Consul of the Republic
New San Antonio, Director of Foreign Affairs

New Pacific Order
Lord of Darkness, Emperor
Syberis, Senator of Diplomatic Affairs

[Vylixan]

Awesome work from both parties !

[North East Somerset]

Congrats to the NPO & TL+C.

[Writinglegend]

Congratulations!

[East Durthang]

New Pacific Order Press Release

Domestic Affairs

This past year has seen several noteworthy changes in the Senate. The Senator of Cultural Affairs and Senator of Admissions & Personnel positions were consolidated into a singular Senator of Internal Affairs position. Ender, Syberis, and Grey were appointed as Senators for Military Affairs, Diplomatic Affairs, and Internal Affairs. Xoriet, Marina, and Elegarth retired to Senate Advisors.

On the Culture front, we organized and assisted in the organization of several noteworthy events as outlined below. The positions within our culture department were also overhauled.

• At the start of the year, we had a wonderful Easter month, with Easter themed events hosted by Ender and Grey.
• Our Foreign Affairs Department and Xoriet, coordinated a lovely collaboration for us to work with our allies in The East Pacific and The South Pacific for The Festival of Blossoms for two days at the end of April. There were a variety of events available to participate in, and The Pacific was proud to host an NS cards tournament and a photography contest! Many thanks to the wonderful Sitethief, who did a splendid job with the cards contest.
• The end of the year saw a substantial pick-up in events, with a Halloween Festival, organized by then newly appointed Culture Senator, Grey. We were honored to help plan and coordinate the NS 20th Anniversary Festival soon after, which had many festivities and interviews, and we are happy to report our then newly appointed Senator of Foreign Affairs, Syberis, made an appearance for a radio interview on behalf of The Pacific.
• December started with a bang, as one of our Military Senators, Dimitri, hosted a banjection contest to get us into the holiday spirit. Another lovely collaboration with the Foreign Affairs Department gave us an amazing opportunity to help organize and host the NS Christmas Charity Fundraiser, to help raise funds for the non-profit organization, The Trevor Project. Last, but perhaps most amusing, was the NS Secret Santa event. It was meant to have started right as the great NS shutdown commenced, so we unfortunately were forced to postpone it until the New Year due to many of the participants only being reachable via onsite. It ended on Friday, the 13th of January, so take that how you will.

We also launched a brand new department, Outreach, to help engage with residents and citizens and encourage them to become more involved in Pacifican affairs. The work done by our Outreach Mentors has already yielded some interesting results and we are very excited to watch the department grow under its recently appointed department head Honourbound.

During the coming months we have many more structural adjustments planned, along with bold and ambitious changes to how we approach running events. With our twentieth anniversary approaching, we must look to lay the ground work to make our next decade our biggest and best ever.


Foreign Affairs

Throughout 2022, the NPO’s Diplomatic Corps strove to assist in the growth of an environment conducive to independent ideologies of all stripes in order to preserve a political gameplay sphere unbeholden to R/D alignment. To this end, we signed both the Pax Polaris Occidens and the Modern Gameplay Compact. However, ultimately that was only the beginning of our long-term plans.

The GCRs as a whole should be paragons and examples of their chosen ideological bent. To continue to build said example, we have taken the first steps during 2022, and will continue throughout 2023, to build a table for healthy, productive discussion unconstrained by mere alignment. The Diplomatic Corps also looks forward to working with our friends in Culture to continue to create a happy, healthy series of events and engagements for our friends and allies.

Our individual treaties and relationship nets have grown substantially in the last six months as well, highlighted by the Treaty of Sericum with Europeia in August, January's Palatine Pact with Lone Wolves United, and the freshly-published Francograd-Merrimack Agreement with The League & Concord. These pacts underline our greater commitments to interregional peace and communication. We see all of these treaties as core to transitioning into a future gameplay with a blurred line between GCR and UCR politics, whenever this change does occur. When this change happens, we hope to maintain our solid avenues of communication in order to ensure game health thrives as much as possible in a situation we foresee as potentially one of the most contentious and violent periods in NS history.


Military Affairs

The Legio Pacifica participated in nearly 300 operations during 2022, and as of writing this news article, has completed nearly 50 operations so far this year.

During the past year, the following Legionarii have been promoted:

• Ender: Centurio to Praefectus to SoMA
• Chi: Centurio to Praefectus
• Greatkitteh: Miles Gregarius to Evocatus to Decanus
• Nijil: Miles Gregarius to Evocatus to Decanus
• Honourbound: Recruit to Miles Gregarius to Evocatus
• Kurnugia: Recruit to Miles Gregarius
• Comfed: Recruit to Miles Gregarius
• Sample: Recruit to Miles Gregarius

The Legio Pacifica has continued our firm stance against fascism through both internal and collaborative operations with Antifa and other military organizations. We also hosted and participated in numerous interregional war games in efforts to foster positive relations with our allies. Some operations worthy of note include:

• Confederation of Layem — Legionarii composed a third of the roughly 300 nations involved.
• Warzone Airspace Liberation
• Sanctum (Antifa)
• EmbassyRegionia Liberation
• PCM & its subsidiary (Antifa)
• Concord
• The East Pacific delegate transition support
• Stargate support
• Joint operations and war games with other military organizations including but not limited to TWPAF, NPA, EPSA, ERN, TBH, LWU, and Balder
• Cities of the World (Antifa)

[Drop Your Pants]

During the past year, the following Legionarii point blank refused to be promoted and ran away:
DYP

Or was that 2021

[New Pacific Order]

The New Pacific Order Turns Twenty

20th Anniversary Calendar

The NPO was founded in a very different time. The internet was barely past its infancy – there was no YouTube or Facebook, no smartphones, and hardly any major “platforms” to speak of. Instead, there were private forums and IRC channels. (If you're too young to have experienced IRC and the associated sport of abusing channel permissions, internet relay chat was what we all used before Discord.)

In this fragmented early internet, people had to make their own platforms. Some, like the chats made for guilds in early MMOs, were small; others, like Fark and Something Awful, became online subcultures in their own right. One of the more peculiar types of platform that proliferated was the browser game. Most were unremarkable: buggy, imbalanced, and short-lived. A few, however, were made remarkable by their players.

NationStates was already well on its way to being one of the genre's rare success stories in late 2003, almost a year after it had been created. It had its share of bugs, quirks, and balance problems, but it was small enough to fit into people's offline lives and big enough for people to build online lives around.

Anyone familiar with NationStates will know the New Pacific Order is one of the most famous organizations in the game, and that its founding is one the most – if not the most – pivotal event in the game's history. The August Revolution, which remains controversial even today, started a multiyear world war during which NPO laid the foundations of its fame, infamy, and culture.


Twenty years later, it's the latter that stands out most. The Order survived and thrived in NS because its founders believed it was something worth building and defending. They devoted their time, talents, and energies first to the project of self-governance for the Pacific in NationStates and then to a broader project that went on to span multiple games and decades.

In some ways, having a purpose was enough. NPO attracted plenty of talented, ambitious members, including many former rivals, because it offered them a challenge. That challenge quickly became a cause as NPO's first generation built something much bigger than any of themselves. When people began predicting the imminent death of NationStates, they responded by colonizing other games. In the ensuing decades, Pacificans established an organized presence in over two dozen games.

This served NPO's early membership, but it also left permanent marks on its culture. NPO's various branches, sometimes independently and sometimes in communication with one another, began acting to make their respective games more hospitable places both for the Order itself and for its membership, including its future members. NPO came to see that its founding purpose – to organize and lead a great swath of disenfranchised players – naturally extended to stewardship of the games they played. If NPO was an online home for its members and the games it played were its homes, then those games needed to be maintained.

This originally meant articulating NPO's aims via in-character ideologies; writing wiki pages; teaching new recruits how to play; and wielding power for both entertainment and safety within the online worlds it relied on for survival. Here NPO achieved more success than perhaps any other group in a browser game ever has, but future success was never guaranteed. Branches could poach each other's best talent or suffer catastrophic defeats at the hands of their rivals. Games could and did shut down.

There were attempts to reorganize NPO into a cohesive, multi-game community, but they proved unsuccessful. NPO's fragmentation, a source of success and testament to its massive talent pool, was a hindrance to the effort. In 2017, we started again with more preparation and organization. We applied the lessons we'd learned and relearned in various browser games to NPO itself with the aim of integrating it into a single community. Our next decade will be when we make that vision into reality.

In the next ten years, we intend to turn NPO into a community of at least five thousand members. None of the games we play are capable of sustaining a group that large, so we'll look beyond their limited confines.


"It would have been impossible to imagine that all those dramatic events could have led to the Pacific in its current form, having long persevered, and clearly stronger and more vibrant than ever, indeed existing on a level well beyond anything conceivable in the early days. Over ninety-five percent of the NPO's 20-year history is the post-Franco era -- you have all accomplished wonders I can't even begin to fathom, and I therefore salute all those who have built and sustained this impressive community through to the present day. Thank you, and long live the New Pacific Order!"

~ Francos Spain, founder of the New Pacific Order, on August 28th, 2023

[Angeloid Astraea]

[Unibot III]

[Gemeinschaftsland]

I'm sure I'm missing some kind of joke here, but nonetheless, happy 20th anniversary, NPO! I wish you all the best of luck in your pursuits.

[Aivintis]

Happy 20 years!! I look forward to seeing the NPO develop and change as it moves towards its lofty goals for the next ten years.

[Pichtonia]

Congratulations on your anniversary!

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Noticed this thread is still titled after the Treaty of Sericum. Convenient.

Does the NPO have any public comment or statement to make on their withdrawal from this treaty?

Or on Europeia's decision to characterize Syb specifically as the former delegate of Osiris (and then wink wink nudge nudge over that), in between citizens saying they forgot you existed, and the Assembly Chair calling you a "floundering government" and "fair weather friends" that are merely trying to "appear relevant" with your decision to withdraw?

How about on Europeia's claim that "Europeia and the NPO will continue to maintain diplomatic relations through their shared ties in the Modern Gameplay Compact?"

I'm curious if you have any public reply to all this hullabaloo, where Europeia's comments currently dominate the public narrative. Thanks.

[Lord Dominator]

I'm curious if you have any public reply to all this topic where Europeia's comments currently dominate the public narrative.

Not really sure there’s a public narrative if this is the first time I, and probably most people, have heard of this

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Not my fault if you don't read the EBC's reporting ;p

It exists. It's public. It's the only public discussion of this. I'm interested in the other side of the story.

And I dislike both parties, so, I'm not even biased!

[Pasybfic]

Or on Europeia's decision to characterize Syb specifically as the former delegate of Osiris (and then wink wink nudge nudge over that), in between citizens saying they forgot you existed, and the Assembly Chair calling you a "floundering government" and "fair weather friends" that are merely trying to "appear relevant" with your decision to withdraw?

If we were attempting to appear relevant, withdrawing from a treaty privately via an NPO news post and a post in our embassy thread in Europeia would have been a really awkward means of projecting relevance. A floundering government implies that we have lost some faith from our citizenry or are failing in our internal objectives, which is not the case. Characterizing myself as "the former delegate of Osiris" is confusing to me. While it is factually correct, I'm not sure if it intends to exalt my deeds or to insult myself alongside the region of Osiris in some manner. In regards to forgetting the NPO existed, I would say that's a statement that shows a lack of knowledge of current affairs, antifascist action, and the history of the game. As to fair-weather friends, I will not speak authoritatively on that matter. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.

I will say that there is a factual error in regards to Europeia's reporting on the Modern Gameplay Compact, which was incorrect at the time of publishing if my recollection is in order. It seems their draft was never updated to match existing realities. We are no longer a signatory of the Modern Gameplay Compact.

[Lord Dominator]

We are no longer a signatory of the Modern Gameplay Compact.

Pour another one out for the death of non-R/D forum reports, if this is how we all get to learn of this

[Ostrovskiy]

We are no longer a signatory of the Modern Gameplay Compact.

As someone who probably should know what this is about but doesn't, does this not merit some sort of official announcement at least?

[Varanius]

We are no longer a signatory of the Modern Gameplay Compact.

As someone who probably should know what this is about but doesn't, does this not merit some sort of official announcement at least?

Why? It's not your treaty.

[Pasybfic]

We are no longer a signatory of the Modern Gameplay Compact.

As someone who probably should know what this is about but doesn't, does this not merit some sort of official announcement at least?

The long and short of it is - yes, but not immediately. We immediately communicated it to the regions involved, as well as posted internally to our citizenry. I'm currently working on a public statement addressing a few things, which necessitated some substantial rewrite by the nature of Europeia's own take on the announcement. It was deemed important but not imminently time-sensitive to inform the greater world of this matter, and thus my intended (brief) statement was due for release tomorrow, partially to give the Modern Gameplay Compact time to get their own unified statement out. I felt it was prudent to allow them to do so for the sake of respect. However, I did feel the need to correct here since Europeia did unilaterally release a public statement that incorrectly asserted that we were still members.

I apologize to those who are concerned. You will still be seeing a public statement from us at some point very soon.

[Reventus Koth]

The NPO, unlike the Buffalo Bills, secure the W

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

As someone who probably should know what this is about but doesn't, does this not merit some sort of official announcement at least?

The long and short of it is - yes, but not immediately. We immediately communicated it to the regions involved, as well as posted internally to our citizenry. I'm currently working on a public statement addressing a few things, which necessitated some substantial rewrite by the nature of Europeia's own take on the announcement. It was deemed important but not imminently time-sensitive to inform the greater world of this matter, and thus my intended (brief) statement was due for release tomorrow, partially to give the Modern Gameplay Compact time to get their own unified statement out. I felt it was prudent to allow them to do so for the sake of respect. However, I did feel the need to correct here since Europeia did unilaterally release a public statement that incorrectly asserted that we were still members.

I apologize to those who are concerned. You will still be seeing a public statement from us at some point very soon.

Thanks Syb, for the above and this. I realize that two days can be a little quick to have something formal together unless you're really on the ball. I appreciate getting a response at all, as well as engaging in this forum at all, and look forward to your full statement.

[Aivintis]

Why does NSGP feel entitled to play by plays from every major region on everything they do? Feels like y'all just want drama to chew on. Props to Syb for professionalism here - anything more than "Nunya" is more than y'all really need right now. I'm curious, too, but waiting won't kill ya. Patience is a virtue.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Why does NSGP feel entitled to play by plays from every major region on everything they do? Feels like y'all just want drama to chew on. Props to Syb for professionalism here - anything more than "Nunya" is more than y'all really need right now. I'm curious, too, but waiting won't kill ya. Patience is a virtue.

Two thirds or more of ongoing never get posted about on site at all anymore. You'd be "waiting" until the heat death of the universe in most cases. I, for one, am playing NationStates, not DiscordBackrooms, and think that notable ongoings should get announcements, or at least *posts* - and equally, that parties should be *interested* in telling their narrative to the world.

Which is to say, you're not entirely wrong about wanting something to chew on, but that's kinda the whole point of the game that is gameplay, isn't it? Especially for Frontiers and Feeders (and other GCRs), whose insecure existence inherently requires engagement with Gameplay.

[Lord Dominator]

Why does NSGP feel entitled to play by plays from every major region on everything they do? Feels like y'all just want drama to chew on. Props to Syb for professionalism here - anything more than "Nunya" is more than y'all really need right now. I'm curious, too, but waiting won't kill ya. Patience is a virtue.

Things are rather more interesting when us plebians know what is going on