As the new year rolled in, a sweeping sensation shook Mars and left it reeling. For the first time in over 3 years, Alliance membership numbers soared to unbelievable heights, from a mere 500 to well over 8,000 just overnight! And since then those numbers have continued climbing to where it is now, slightly above an incredible 19,000 members.
Board of Directors spokesperson, Jeweler, has confirmed in an official statement, that this massive influx of residents is largely due to the opening of a new transport system from Earth to Mars named the "mail.ru" site which caters for residents from the country of Russia back on Earth.
He wanted to reassure the public, and said in a public address, 'Lately myself and the MODs (Migration Operation Department staff) have been besieged by the community screaming that we are being invaded by multies. And I want to address something.'
'The MODs and the Board Administration is watching the flow of traffic, observing the process in which the new countries are created and maintained. But to date there has been no evidence of cloning or cheating.'
He also pointed out, 'It seems that the "mail.ru" transportation complex created has been directing new residents into the Alliance server primarily. This might explain the increase in population of only the Alliance server while the other servers experience little to no increase.'
'Yes there has been a lot of immigrants reporting in at a frequency of nearly 1 every 20 seconds, and it has raised alarms to a lot of the current residents, we have been attending to this situation and keeping a close and watchful eye since the complex has been completed.'
And it seems that the legendary LandFatTyrant has been intrigued by the sudden spike in membership. He commented, 'Just a thought to ponder, if there are so many new residents, why are we still the only people to post in the Forum?' (The Forum, although not a compulsary institution residents must be a part of, is a gold mine of information and sometimes, spam. The Mars community has used the Forum to socialize and interact, one of the reasons being users have to be registered, which assists MODs in monitoring the flow of human traffic on Mars.)
'I mean,' he continues, 'Has there been even one new poster in the english or russian boards?' (The Forum is divided into several Boards according to language to better meet the distinctive needs of different modes of communication.) 'IF the answer to that is no, then it is obvious these arent real people.' he concluded before vanishing into the mist once again.
In response to this, Xninja, former Officer of LoT and now Council of the Lords of Chaos, staunchly defended the new residents, claiming that 'For the last few days I have been watching the news feeds from all activity in the alliance server which could be cloned residents like you say, but I get replys from them when I attempt to communicate. I think I can tell which ones are real people. '
'Some of the replys just say "ok", which means nothing to the message I sent so I think they could be non-legit or they just dont understand what I was trying to say. Most of them, though, have conversations with me so I am thinking that they are just newcomers like Jeweler is trying to tell everyone.'
This certainly sheds some new light on this controversy, which has indeed stirred up the Mars Community. Some were insistant that the newcomers consisted mostly of clones, including elves4life, who challenged, 'still trying to say they're all legit?', to which Devestation, Lord of wearing Eleven Caps at once, countered, 'I don't think they've figured it out yet, but I don't believe there is any Clone Factory that is powerful enough to single handedly manage 8000 cloned products.'
There was some serious concern about the welfare in general of the public, as obviously pointed out by HellsCrusader, Wendy's fanatic and also coincidently a war fanatic as well, when LoTCookie just managed to catch him for an interview (he was rushing off to go boar hunting again and was just back from a long absence) 'If the old russian players convince all the new ones that we were [censored] (though, in a lot of cases, they would probably be correct... but at least we barely cheat by cloning in comparison) we'll all be doomed. Still.. I guess there's 1000's of them. Going to reshape mars as we know it. Our small clans will be nothing compared to theirs.. except we know how to manage countries haha...' As an afterthought, he added, 'Well sort of... generations get lazier as they go and we let them be so as to not have them leave... this is why some of our members claim to be netters and can never get in the top 10..'
'I think of it like the big fight at the end of the Lord of the Rings - the Return of the King. A very small and gifted army workin it's way through a huge army of less talented enemies. Hell... we may be overwhelmed by random attacks so badly that it becomes hard to progress.'
Others, such as Pheebs, wondered whether the recent influx really meant fresh blood for Mars, who desperately needs a breath of new life after going through a recessionary phase in terms of membership and activity. Even VulcanLander, MarsForum ELITE, expressed that 'Let's not mess up with this influx of players. Yes it is possible that a huge influx will make it easier for multies to hide, but lets bring in the new players and not assume they will cheat. We have a chance here to really help the market with a huge increase in demand. If a new country sends you a pact or declares war on your country I suggest you write to them saying you are willing to teach them to play. Mars needs this!'
And although Jeweler's statements definitely had a reassuring effect on the public in general, there was an overall feeling of what the semi-retired Jajaja-loving Roman General put perfectly into words - 'well its still safe to say that this is the biggest this server has ever gotten....I have never seen so many darn countries running around...'
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