TEM8

== Final Team Map ==
==Final Nation Map==
Not applicable.
==List of Teams==
* AuthLeft (AL) - A relatively weak team, led by Kthurses. Quickly became inactive, but was revived slightly by old players, including Ezekiel/Zerzan and Anubis, after D Day.
*AuthCenter (AC) - A relatively strong team, led by the politically active Poopman. With a large number of active players, they were able to claim nearly all of Europe.
*AuthRight (AR) - One of the most active teams in the game, led by Astolfo. They were able to quickly claim a large chunk of Southeastern Europe, as part of their Byzantine larp, and the USA.
*RightCenter (RC) - A nearly inactive team that failed to recruit any significant claiming power. Its first leader was Slick. RightCenter made only one claim in the first 5 days, and its absent leader, JackRabbit, was couped within a week. Tal and Grant made many failed attempts to build up the team through partnering with right wing political servers. Comissar attempted to use RightCenter as her base of operations, before conflict with FetusLettuce during D-Day led to the both of them being banned.
*LibRight (LR) - A team that was active in the beginning of the game, led by Aether. But they quickly lost momentum, unable to maintain a large claiming base. After D Day, its dream of claiming eastern China was kept alive by Omfi.
*LibCenter (LibC) - One of the game's strongest teams, led by Ybrik and Chib. Despite losing interest in the game shortly after D Day, few members stayed to claim daily, and were able to claim nearly all of South America.
*LibLeft (LL) - Led by Darkzz. Initially the strongest team in the game, its growth greatly exceeding all other teams, being able to draw a large amount of LibLeft PCM members since the beginning of the game. They lost most of their players after D Day.
*LeftCenter (LeftC) - A team that struggled in the beginning. Trying to larp as French revolutionaries, they were quickly outnumbered by AuthCenter. They were able to successfully claim India.
==List of Major Players==
* Poopman
* Astolfo
* Darkzz
* Comissar
* Ybrik
* Aether
==Background==
TEM8 was developed by Tal in May 2022, who hypothesized that the "magic" of TEM died because of its predictability, being played repeatedly by a small group of experienced "power players". Tal, who joined TEM during TEM2, sought to bring a TEM game to a completely new community. In order to do so, he temporarily left TEM, and went undercover as "Nico" in a PCM community, integrating himself for over a month before pitching his idea to the mod team. With the help of Grant, he developed TEM8 for 8 teams, implementing a one-claim-per-day-per-player system, and a team superclaim once every 5 updates. Tal and Grant originally planned to keep the game a secret from the TEM community, until the new players were fully settled in. Choosing to temporarily name the game "The Eight Map", Tal and Grant released the game to the PCM community on May 29th 2022, moderating the server alongside Abdann, a high level PCM mod.
Tal themed the server with traditional circus terms, giving himself the title of “Map Master” (as in a circus ringmaster), naming moderators “producers”, and naming the main channel category “center stage”. Each team had one leader, who could appoint as many highranks and midranks as they chose fit, as means of vetting new members, and protecting themselves from coups. A team superclaim could be made by the team leader once every 5 updates, and it entails claiming every province directly adjacent to a continuous piece of land owned by said team.
==Major Events==
=== Start ===
The Eight Map was released to PCM as a community partner, being able to quickly draw the majority of active PCM members within hours. AuthCenter, AuthRight, LibLeft, and LibCenter saw plenty of political activity, quickly forming power structures within their teams. The other teams had their first members assigned as team leader by default. 
By Update 3, Aether discovered “claim assigning”. 
=== Europe Conflict ===
Poopman’s AuthCenter wanted to claim the entirety of the Roman Empire, at its peak in 117AD. LibLeft, that initially wanted to claim all of Africa, agreed to let AuthCenter take the northern border of the continent. After Update 4, conflict in Eastern Europe began between AuthRight, AuthCenter, and LibLeft. Several members of LibLeft, wishing to expand on their ownership of Eastern Europe, made claims in Ukraine, to the dismay of AuthRight. Within a few hours, Poopman proposed the LibLeft-AuthRight-AuthCenter Treaty, that declared that LibLeft must trade its land in Ukraine to AuthRight, and that the three teams will respect and defend each others’ territories in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and the Ancient Roman Empire, respectively. Darkzz agreed to the treaty within the hour. 
=== Comissar ===
On June 5th, Comissar joined the server, expressing the strong desire to build the “Novgorod settlement” with her gang of loyalists. Tal suggested she apply for LeftCenter, hoping it would boost their numbers. However, her determination towards her own plan and unwillingness to cooperate with LeftCenter leadership led to her leaving the team 6 hours after joining, and she and her gang defected to LibLeft. Tal and Grant, curious to see what Comissar is capable of, but unwilling to see her disrupt LibLeft’s existing political ecosystem, decided to let her gang set up shop in the then-inactive RightCenter.
=== D Day ===
On June 6th, Tal and Grant decided to release the game to the original TEM community, believing that the PCMers were sufficiently settled in. This however, was not the case. Tal silently changed the server name to “The Eighth Map”. Once the gates opened, dozens of TEM members flooded in at once. Several “edgier” TEM members, such as Romm and Goat, wreaked havoc upon the social equilibrium, leading to scores of PCMers no longer feeling comfortable in general chat. Other TEM members hoped to sway Grant to change rules in their favor. AuthLeft was quickly overrun by Anubis and Ezekiel, and FetusLettuce and his loyalists joined RightCenter, hoping to coup for leadership. Comissar, now facing a sudden influx of “new players”, leading to a disruption in her rise to power, began to portray the TEM members as “illegal” and “conspirators”. This sentiment was shared by a large portion of the PCMers, and Comissar formed an “Anti-TEM Coalition” server, including 6 out of 8 of the team leaders (sans Astolfo and Poopman). They released a “Collective Statement”, demanding that the invading TEM members and Grant be all expelled from the game.
=== Unity Coalition ===
Approximately 12 hours after the D Day release, Tal created the Unity Coalition group chat, including Abdann, Polop, Poopman, Mad Hatter, Astolfo, and Garfield. They worked to create a friendlier atmosphere in the game server, and brainstorm how to deal with “problematic” members such as Goat and Comissar.
Tal and Grant rushed to rewrite the coup rules, and even considered putting a stop to all coups until the controversy is settled. At the same time, the large influx of members caused bugs in role permissions, and Abdann worked for 4 hours straight to fix the settings. Abdann then quit the server in frustration after being insulted by Comissar. Tal, without further consulting Grant, decided to ban anyone he deemed to be “playing in bad faith”, including FetusLettuce, Comissar, Val, Goat, among others, less than 20 hours after the D Day release. Despite this, large portions of the player base could not accept the new equilibrium, leading to a mass “ragequit”, causing LibLeft to lose the vast majority of its players. Ybrik, leader of LibCenter, even incited a mass quitting in his team, offering to build a new version of The Eight Map.
=== Decline ===
After the events of June 6th and 7th,
==Results==
==Aftermath==
At the time, the game was considered a major failure after D-Day, due to the rushed integration of the two communities and the underequipped admin team due to Tal and Grant both being on vacation at the time. This vindicated the bad omen of vacationing hosts. The pre D-Day part of the game became an example of how to do a secret TEM mainline game, while also exposing mistakes to avoid when hosting secret mainlines. It became common philosophy for a while after TEM8 that a secret game should not unite its separate community with the wider TEM community due to differences in edginess and knowledge of the meta. The next secret mainline, TEM11 overcorrected from the experiences of TEM8, resulting in a very successful game that failed to integrate more than one person into the community permanently, while TEM13 eventually struck a happy medium that worked for both the game and the community.
However, many of the PCMers, even the ones that were a part of teams that collapsed from the pressure of D-Day, eventually integrated into the TEM community and became power players and project leaders in their own right for years to come. They include Darkzz, Poopman, Gazpacho, Aether, Wulfaz, and Astolfo. In hindsight, the game did accomplish its initial objective of diversifying and expanding the TEM community. Poopman, Wulfaz, and Aether immediately established themselves in the TEM community by the next game, TEM8.5, and would eventually host their own games. Darkzz was on and off until finally becoming a full fledged member in 2023, while Gazpacho took a more gradual approach to establishment, with his massive potential as both a top-tier player and a top-tier developer only becoming fully realized in 2024.
Category:Mainline Game