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The original was posted on /r/paradoxplaza by /u/IchUndReddit on 2025-07-23 13:34:01+00:00.
Hello again. Well, “again” might be a stretch as I kinda never post here, but I did once a while ago. I spoke about my MP Mega-Campaign and asked for advice. As the new perspectives really helped me back in the day, I wanted to make another post about it and see what you guys think, as my second try to host and “manage” an MP Mega-Campaign failed miserably, but I would like to try it again someday.
To conclude my last post quickly: It was about a “problematic player” that kinda destroyed the campaign. Shortly after my post, he literally lost all support from everyone that was part of the campaign and thus he just left. Thanks for your encouragements to be stricter with rules and players, that helped me a lot.
For this story, I kinda need to summarize nearly everything that happened since then, as it was a downward spiral of what was—in my opinion—really childish behaviour that ruined the campaign in the end, at least for a part of the players, including me. I hope you have popcorn because this story is worth to be put in one of those “horror relationship” Reddits. Or you just stop reading. Last time, people seemed kinda upset that I posted something like this here, so let this be some kind of warning for those.
We switched to EU4 a few months back. A lot of new and old people joined for EU4—“old” in the sense that a lot of people who were part of the first time we had an MP Mega-Campaign rejoined with EU4 as they hated CK3. All in all, our player count nearly tripled. I demanded that we have a session 0 in which we look at the converter, speak about rules, etc. This was important for me because I wanted to make sure that everyone agreed on the ruleset, the start of the world and whatever, so I couldn’t get complaints about it later. But here the problems already started.
You need to know that we had one player who was really fucking good at EU4. Like in comparison to us who only really played EU4 for the Mega-Campaign or started playing it for our first one, he was a god. He played in competitive MP matches and stuff like that every weekend. Let’s call him Persia, as he played Persia in the first campaign.
Maybe you already guessed it if you know EU4—I was at least told that this is common knowledge for people who know the game—but Persia is fucking strong. He dominated the whole world since the second or third session for the remaining time of EU4 back when we tried the MP Mega-Campaign the first time.
To be totally honest, “dominating” mainly means that nobody could touch him, but he didn’t touch anybody else either. He was literally just chilling and playing tall as soon as all AI was dead, even helping everyone else in and outside of the game. It was obviously still a problem that he could do whatever he wanted, and even a coalition of all other players (we had 6 players back in the day) would have had a hard time beating him, as 4 out of the 5 other players were noobs who lost to AI in the first of our eu4 sessions. But in my opinion, you can’t really blame him for building his nation up and being better than everyone else.
Back to session 0: Persia recommended using a rule of quests, where every player would get a certain quest and reward if fullfilled before each session from the host and maybe one player that joined him in deciding the quests.
For example: If the host was worried that one nation was expanding too fast in one special direction while ignoring another one and it seemed like it was done on purpose to cuck another player out of his expansion opportunities, the host could intervene and give a quest like “the nations in the other directions seem to rally against you, go and kill them first to get 100 diplo power” or whatever.
Nobody except me and persia liked it because it would “stop RP like the player intended” or whatever. This rule will be mentioned later again, so I wanted to mention it already.
What is important now is that players who joined new were allowed to create their custom nations. This was mainly meant for those who played outside of the CK3 map as they literally didn’t have the chance to make “their nation” in China, America or wherever. This resulted in the first big discussion as we had really loose rules on what was allowed to be created. All in all, the only rule was that (nearly) all of the players who were also part of CK3 needed to agree with these nations, as I wanted to give those who already invested dozens of hours the right to judge those who didn’t but wanted to reap at least similar benefits as in having a custom nation.
One of the main points of discussion was Persia’s new custom nation (he wanted to play a remnant of the Mongol Horde that wanted to form a Chinese-Mongol Empire).
Even if the argument got heated, as some players accused Persia of just picking the strongest stuff again and not focusing on RP which was required (this time), we could resolve the issue and created a few new nations. The important ones out of these were a half-unified Japan (who I will call Japan from now on) and Persia’s Korean-Chinese Mongol Horde thingy.
Afterwards, the complaints started to fly in. We agreed on a resting phase of two weeks as we wanted to test out the converted mod first, some people needed to learn the game and whatever. But basically everyone that previously agreed on the custom nations now was pissed that they even existed and wanted me to remove 90% of them, the only exception being a unified Florida of a player who never played the game and as such everyone agreed that he needed the help a custom nation provided.
Obviously, I was kinda angry myself that they wanted me to remove the custom nations all of a sudden after agreeing with them, but I buckled because we are speaking about 80% of the players being annoyed and I didn’t want the campaign to crash and burn before EU4 even started.
So I started negotiating between these “factions”—I am going to call them that because they literally became opposing factions later—to find a solution. Sadly, this didn’t happen as one faction was constantly offering new ideas and the other one just denying because they were apparently too strong.
Here I really don’t want to argue if these custom nations were too strong, as I don’t have a clue about EU4, I didn’t really care, and when I spoke to people who do know the game, they had opposing opinions.
As an example: Persia asked at one point if he could have a watered-down version of Yuan. One side argued that Yuan is an endgame tag and thus too strong in the beginning, and the other side argued that Yuan has shit ideas, shit missions and whatnot and thus is not only a really weak endgame nation, but as it’s watered down it could even get dangerous for Persia because of certain mechanics.
Like I said, I didn’t really care, because in my opinion this was an RP campaign and no matter how strong Persia would get, as long as he RPs it well and as long as we have players allying against him it would be fine. This time we even had really good players that were not Persia, so I thought they could balance each other out. Japan had the same problems.
Like I mentioned, these two factions (a huge part of the player base on one side and Japan with Persia on the other) established themselves more and more.
At one point, I stood between a faction who was accusing Persia and Japan of metagaming, not properly RPing etc. I still didn’t really see their arguments, as they argued that shit like releasing puppets to get cheaper wargoals for their cores was metagaming, not in the spirit of an RP project and thus not allowed.
While I understood their argument that the puppet situation wasn’t RPed at all and thus technically a rule break, this should have been an easy fix. Japan and Persia just start to RP their stuff more and that’s it, right?
Sadly wrong.
The factions hardened to an extent where they started to call each other names, threw really disgusting accusations at each other (like people trying to deliberately destroy each other’s games, people being called “EU4 Schmitler” and shit like that), etc.
At first, solutions like “ok so Persia and Japan just RP more” were accepted, but it really quickly became “Ok Persia and Japan get special rules or quests” (here is the fucking quest system that could have fixed everything but nobody except me and Persia wanted it) and finally “if they don’t go, we will.”
And it was horrible.
To be honest, at this point I was really glad that I did the last post here, because I finally decided to put my foot down and tell them that they need to stop or there will be consequences.
In the end, I suspended a session and demanded the factions to dissolve and fix their issues.
I mainly hoped that they would finally fix their mindset, as I didn’t have any problems any of these factions had. I talked to everyone nicely, I did really good RP with everyone in both factions and if there was a problem not between those two sides but in the factions, they were easy to fix. But as soon as these two sides clashed, everything got ruined.
Sadly, it didn’t work out and shortly before the time limit was set, both Persia and Japan left. As threatened, I nuked the campaign afterwards.
The remaining players continued on their own server and tried to get me to rejoin (like this was their only topic if I joined their talks for a while), but while I honestly really bonded with my ...
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