Lord of Darkness in Cyber Nations

Lord of Darkness
New Pacific Order
Emperor
August 1, 2016 – July 23, 2020
Preceded by	Frawley
Regent
March 9, 2016 – August 1, 2016
Preceded by	Frawley
Succeeded by	Jesse End
Imperial Officer of Military Affairs
May 4, 2013 – August 1, 2016
Preceded by	Gandroff
Succeeded by	Gumpper

For more information on the player, see Lord of Darkness.

Lord of Darkness is the tenth Emperor of the New Pacific Order. He was appointed to the throne on August 1, 2016. He previously served as Imperial Regent and Imperial Officer of Military Affairs.

Early Career

Lord of Darkness joined the New Pacific Order in December 2008. He quickly took jobs in Recruiting, the Praetorian Guard, the Imperial Academy, Military Intelligence, and Media throughout 2009. Much of his career was jump-started by being invited to join the Praetorian Guard in early May 2009 where he would go on to excel. Then a highly competitive and exclusive invite-only department, the Guard brought him into close contact with several prominent members of the Imperial Academy, Military Intelligence, and Military Command departments. Later that very month Lord of Darkness was invited to join the Imperial Academy and three months afterwards, in August, he was invited to join Military Intelligence. Having taken an interest in creating forum signatures, he joined the Pacifican Media Corps in November 2009.

2010 shaped up to be a major year in Lord of Darkness' career. He was invited to join Military Command in March and went on to be promoted to Gamma Battalion Lieutenant less than three months later. At the end of May, Lord of Darkness was promoted to Faculty Dean of the Imperial Academy. As Faculty Dean he assisted the Schoolmaster, Gandroff, with managing the department. In October he was appointed High Command Prefect of the Praetorian Guard and stepped down from Military Command to focus on his new position. Lord of Darkness would go on to manage the operations of the Praetorian Guard for just shy of three years, up until his appointment as Imperial Officer of Military Affairs. During this time he rewrote almost all of the Guard's guides, modernized its policies and procedures, added an additional rank to the department's hierarchy, and introduced an awards system inspired by that used by Military Intelligence, as a means of rewarding the department's staff.

In August 2011 Lord of Darkness was appointed Chief of Media Affairs (later renamed to Media Director) after having managed/co-managed the Media Corps graphics division for eight months. During his time running the Media Corps he culled the department of its extremely bloated hierarchical structure from when the alliance and game had been much larger. The following year he stepped down to focus on merging the Imperial Academy department into the Praetorian Guard.

Recruiter Corps

Lord of Darkness joined the Recruiter Corps on March 23rd, 2009. Six months later, on September 30th, 2009, he was promoted to being the Talent Agent of the recruitment lists division. This marked his first leadership role in the Order, albeit a very minor one as the Recruiter Corps was so large that it had three tiers of leadership positions. As Talent Agent he worked with the rest of recruitment leadership but was primarily focused around two responsibilities: posting daily recruitment lists of non new nations to be sent out by recruiters and auditing the performance of recruiters sending lists to ensure they met a monthly quota of lists sent. Following a series of promotions in other departments, Lord of Darkness retired from the Recruiter Corps on August 1st, 2010.

Praetorian Guard

On May 8th, 2009 Lord of Darkness was invited to join his second department, the Praetorian Guard, and began a storied career which would define him for many years. As a Praetorian he was responsible for assessing prospective applicants seeking to join the Order, encouraging nations who set their alliance affiliation but neglected to apply for membership to join or remove the NPO name from their nations, sending out messages encouraging nations on the red team to vote for NPO's in-game team senate candidates, and various other tasks aimed to uphold the Order's security and integrity.

Nine months later, on February 24th, 2010, he was promoted to the rank of Praetorian Centurion. In this role he worked with the rest of Praetorian leadership to manage the department, audit its staff, evaluate prospective staff candidates, and maintain extensive records of every case processed by the department. He also spearheaded a massive overhaul of every one of the department's guides, rewriting almost all of them himself.

Lord of Darkness was appointed as Praetorian Prefect on October 21st, 2010 following the appointment of his predecessor, Gandroff, as Imperial Officer of Military Affairs. Throughout his tenure as Prefect he continued to maintain extensive and highly detailed guides detailing the department's operations. Many policies and procedures were reworked under his direction, particularly those pertaining to the processing of non-member nations using the alliance name in an effort to make the work less tedious. He increased the frequency of auditing staff activity to occur on a monthly basis instead of haphazardly, awarded staff members based off their monthly contributions, and established regular audits of NPO's member level IRC channel access lists to remove non members in a timely manner.

The most noteworthy changes to the Guard during Lord of Darkness' tenure as Prefect occurred at the end of 2012 when he merged all the membership application related duties of the Imperial Academy into the department. Prior to this point, both departments had carried out their own, separate but related tasks to review membership applications. Ever since the 2007 restructuring of the Academy into its modern state, both departments had heavily relied upon overlaps in staff and leadership to function efficiently. With this consolidation the potential for communication and coordination errors between the two was eliminated and NPO's sprawling bureaucracy was reduced to better suit a smaller game. The increase in responsibilities necessitated the addition of an another rank, Immune, to the Guard's hierarchy to sufficiently divide the different tiers of work between staff.

On November 2nd, 2012, while working on the Praetorian Guard and Imperial Academy reforms, he was awarded the prestigious Order of Pacifica Medal by then-Emperor Brehon for his contributions to the Praetorian Guard, as well as within Military Affairs as a whole.

Alongside his appointment to Imperial Officer of Military Affairs on May 4th, 2013 Lord of Darkness became an Imperial Prefect, a position he retained until when, as Emperor, he implemented a sweeping restructure of all NPO institutions on November 17th, 2016 which included the discontinuation of the rank.

Imperial Academy

Lord of Darkness was invited to become an Instructor in the Imperial Academy on May 28th, 2009. As an Instructor he worked to diligently interview prospective Pacificans, graded their entrance examinations, and provided assistance to confused cadets before they were handed off to the Mentoring Corps. Three months later, on August 16th, 2009 he was promoted to Academy Professor and was responsible for approving and denying membership applications. He was commended with the Academy Award of Excellence for his work in December 2009.

On May 30th, 2010 Lord of Darkness was promoted to Faculty Dean. As Dean he oversaw most of the day-to-day operations of the Imperial Academy and coordinated updates of the academy lesson material used for the entrance examination. Together he and the Schoolmaster Gandroff established monthly Academy staff auditing procedures to monitor the performance of the Instructors and Professors. When Gandroff was appointed Imperial Officer of Military Affairs and remained Schoolmaster, Lord of Darkness became the de-facto manager of the Imperial Academy's day-to-day operations.

He would remain Faculty Dean until December 27th, 2012 when he merged the Imperial Academy's application processing responsibilities into the Praetorian Guard.

Military Intelligence

On August 26th, 2009 Lord of Darkness was invited to join Military Intelligence as a Field Agent where he worked tirelessly to gather information to help keep Military Command and Economic Affairs running smoothly. He rapidly received several Outstanding Intelligence Officer awards and was promoted to Tactical Analyst on October 5th, 2009. Two months later he was promoted to Cryptographer on December 7th, 2009. As Cryptographer he oversaw the global wars monitoring division. He would go on to be one of the only people to receive every award in Military Intelligence.

Later in Lord of Darkness' Intel career he moved from overseeing the war monitoring division to the personnel division and became the Cryptographer primarily tasked with assisting the Intelligence Director with monitoring the performance of the department's approximately twenty personnel. He remained in this post until his appointment as Imperial Officer of Military Affairs on May 4th, 2013.

Media Corps

At the urging of newly appointed Media Coordinator Brennan, Lord of Darkness joined the Media Corps as a graphics artist on November 27th, 2009. Both during and after his career in the Media Corps he would go on to produce a multitude of noteworthy graphics for the Order including the second set of forum icons used by the Technology Corps, the greater than five years as a Pacifican service badges, the imagery used on most of NPO's forum themes, forum signatures for several Emperors, eleven of the Order's war ribbons, the Orion logo, and the Oculus bloc's imagery.

He was promoted to a senior graphics artist position, Illustrator, on August 30th, 2010. He later was promoted to Graphics Officer on December 18th, 2010 and Graphics Editor on July 25th, 2011, two management roles tasked with coordinating projects undertaken by graphics artists. Lord of Darkness was promoted to Chief of Media Affairs, then the department head position for the Media Corps department, on August 19th, 2011. While overseeing the writing, graphics, wiki, and library divisions of the Media Corps he would manage many projects in each division including several newsletter publications, collating a timeline of major events in CN NPO's history, and cataloging of every announcement made by NPO leadership.

His biggest contribution to the department, however, would come in the form of a restructure to prune the abundant layers of bureaucracy rampant in the department. He eliminated positions such as Graphics Officer and its equivalents in the writing and wiki divisions, closed the library division, and consolidated the abundance of division manager positions into a single one who could be assigned to different divisions. Numerous positions causing hierarchical bloat were culled from the department's hierarchy as a result.

On September 16th, 2012 the Chief of Media Affairs position was renamed to Media Director. A month later Lord of Darkness retired as Media Director on October 23rd, 2012 to focus on merging the Imperial Academy department into the Praetorian Guard. He remained in the advisory Media position of Lorekeeper until his appointment to Imperial Officer of Military Affairs on May 4th, 2013.

Military Command

Lord of Darkness joined Military Command on March 10th, 2010 as Epsilon Battalion Non-Commissioned Officer under Lieutenant Brennan. On June 6th, 2010 he was appointed as Gamma Battalion Lieutenant by navblue and oversaw the approximately sixty nations in the aforementioned battalion. At the time Military Command was primarily focused on ramping up operations for the conclusion of the Armageddon War surrender terms. Lord of Darkness contributed to several projects aimed to acquire more military wonders and increase the Order's nuclear weapons stockpile. Four months later, on October 21st, 2010, he stepped down from Military Command in order to lead the Praetorian Guard.

While High Command Prefect, Lord of Darkness worked closely with the rest of High Command. He provided input on a wide variety of subjects, from prospective Military Command staff candidates to military and nation development policy. He also put together statistics used to help inform High Command's decisions.

Upon being appointed Imperial Officer of Military Affairs, on May 4th, 2013, Lord of Darkness returned to Military Command as Grand Marshal of the Army of the Pacific.

Imperial Leadership

Lord of Darkness was the longest-serving Imperial Officer of Military Affairs in the Order's history, having been appointed on May 4th, 2013 and serving until his appointment as Emperor on August 1st, 2016. He led the Order's military efforts in the War of the Orders and the Doom War, the last two major conflicts in Cyber Nations.

After his appointment he wasted no time implementing changes to modernize Military Affairs. On May 12, 2013 he announced the closure of the Explosive Ordinance Disposal department. Previously this department, run by Military Command, had been responsible for conducting spy operations to strip enemy nations of their nuclear arsenals, but due to the prevalence of spy-oriented national wonders, having a special task force became obsolete. Lord of Darkness also oversaw the implementation of other major changes which were announced by General Malabyte at the end of May. The number of battalions was trimmed from seven to four and the strength range quantifier for each was updated accordingly. The biggest change was to warchest requirements, which had previously been based on nation income times a number of days varying per battalion, and now were changed to be based on flat amounts associated with various infrastructure levels. In many cases this led to requirements being double, triple, or more compared to the prior ones, but this would prove important when five months later the War of the Orders began and NPO had spent the better part of the previous half year stockpiling well beyond its prior cash reserves. He also relaxed the controversial mandatory squads system introduced by Emperor Brehon, returning squad participation to being optional while allowing squads' members to continue maintaining trade circles with each other if they so desired.

Determined to avoid a repeat of the Order's poor performance during the Equilibrium War, Lord of Darkness published several statements clarifying the need for members to fight during wars and to reiterate the alliance's wartime policies and procedures. He frequently used statistics as a means of motivating people to contribute to wars, a practice he would continue for the reset of his career. Multiple training operations for Military Command staff were conducted under his direction.

These preparations and reforms proved to be invaluable to Pacifica during the War of the Orders, the most intense conflict since the Armageddon and Doomhouse Wars. Although the war was ultimately a political defeat, Lord of Darkness' military leadership prior to and during the conflict resulted in NPO dishing out substantially more damage than it received. It was also during this war when he began to experiment with the potential for more optimally utilizing the game's spy operations mechanics to inflict additional damage.

Following the conclusion of the war he helped coordinate the Order's rebuild. Afterwards he spent a large portion of 2014 overseeing a long needed complete rewrite of every nation development guide and policy. In April he abolished the alliance's no nuclear first-strikes policy, an antiquated remnant from when nukes were seldom used in warfare. The following month he modernized the alliance's readiness level system.

In June 2014 he and Jesse End released one of their most significant contributions to NPO, Orion, a replacement for the aging war and economic management system Unimatrix Zero, which had been used by the alliance since 2008. Orion placed vastly more advanced mass-scale military and economic coordination capabilities at the Order's disposal. During the years which followed they would continue to add updates and additional features to Orion.

On October 14th, 2014 he announced several substantial changes to the Praetorian Guard. The processing of non-members using NPO's name was changed to require them to be on the alliance affiliation for at least five days to give the Recruiter Corps more time to interact with potential recruits and avoid wasting effort on anyone briefly passing by. The mechanics for joining the department were altered to be more in line with how the other past and present Military Affairs departments had gone about hiring new staff: by discussing, then approaching candidates and offering them a job. But the most substantial change was folding the Military Intelligence department into the Praetorian Guard.

The following month the Doom War broke out and Lord of Darkness again led the Pacifican military through the conflict with impressive results. A year and a half of guide and policy reforms and the advent of Orion had transformed the Order into an exceedingly effective military and economic juggernaut. This was soon demonstrated when the Order nearly singlehandedly wrecked the entire Aftermath bloc, which had twice as many nations. When the war ended, the Order's rebuild was swift and explosive, quickly surpassing its previous all-time records in the alliance leaderboards.

During 2015 and 2016 many of Lord of Darkness' previous projects continued to be refined and expanded. He developed a multitude of new Orion features. He and Jesse End spend most of 2015 developing a companion tool to complement Orion. This tool, Aurora, was released in January 2016 after being in alpha testing since early 2015 and proved to be almost as big of an advancement in the Order's capabilities as Orion was.

On March 9th, 2016 Lord of Darkness was appointed Imperial Regent by the newly crowned Emperor Frawley. He retained his prior post as Imperial Officer of Military Affairs, becoming the only person to concurrently hold two Imperial positions. As Regent under Frawley, he helped effect a transition from the renaissance of Letum's reign to the broad retrenchment that would later characterize his own reign. In July he would be named as one of the five Heroes of the Order in recognition for his extensive contributions.

While Regent, Lord of Darkness was responsible for pushing the Order to abandon Internet Relay Chat as a real time communications platform in favor of Discord, becoming the first alliance to fully commit itself to using the platform. As Cyber Nations continued to shrink in size, this early migration proved vital to ensuring that NPO's community would continue to flourish for many years to come. He would spend much of the remainder of his time as Regent contemplating how to adapt the alliance's extensive hierarchical structure to a smaller, less active game.

Reign as Emperor

Main article: Age of the Prophet

On August 1st, 2016 Lord of Darkness was appointed as the tenth Emperor of the New Pacific Order. His reign has been primarily focused on offsetting the decline of Cyber Nations via internal reforms and community integration with other NPO branches.

External Links

Lord of Darkness on the Cyber Nations Wiki