In this Opinion post, Opinion-Editorial writer Prisma addresses some issues regarding the formation of the new judging organisation and the sudden, full move of the community away from Club Penguin Army Judges.
Designed by MasterDS
Small Foreword: Worth noting is that this is primarily an analysis of the proposal of the new organization, the Army Judging Board, from their open letter. It does not necessarily include an analysis of their new judging standards and organization (from their website or Discord), but instead is about the fundamental question of replacing CPAJ. It does appear that the new Army Judging Board is very proactive in regards to several criticisms that are laid out here, and I do have hope that most if not all criticisms will be addressed either in the interim of writing and posting, or soon after posting, such as Pjayo’s stepping down from the Water Vikings, with a similar announcement to seemingly come from Cobra. The post will remain intact as it was from when I wrote it, so that it may still potentially contribute to the discourse surrounding the new organization.
Anomie
There is a sociological concept known as anomie. In a very short and simple description, the term describes a situation wherein a community of people, having been so alienated and detached from the mechanisms of their community, ultimately succumbs to a complete and total breakdown of social norms, ideological unity, and moral standards. This often paves the way for feelings and actions of revolution at best, or the weight of complete and total annihilation. The term was originally coined by Émile Durkheim in an effort to define the social causes of suicide during the industrial revolution, but has since gone on to refer to a broader phenomenon as opposed to remaining purely in the matter of labor and industrialization. It should be no surprise, then, to say that we as a community are rapidly approaching a state of anomie.
Club Penguin Armies Judges has fallen, or is at least on the cusp of it. An open letter that establishes a new organization has disseminated in the community, highlighting the institutional failures of the aforementioned organization and the hope to produce a new one. It has proven unbelievably successful, with both the Club Penguin Armies organization of 2022 and the Small Medium Army League cutting ties with the judging organization. Another smaller, less impactful force has also fallen incidentally in recent memory, but with the interest of focusing on the current situation, the open letter and its contents, goals, and aspirations should be examined with further scrutiny as we glide into a new state of anomie, so that we may guide our community to a state of revolution and away from annihilation.
My Experience
I want to highlight something that recently occurred from my perspective, much to the point of this open letter. On September 2nd, 2026, my army, the United Republic of Penguins, engaged in an invasion of the Rebel Penguin Federation. I will be discussing the experience from the perspective of a relatively green army leader to the current judging system in comparison to the open letter’s claims. This is not an effort to have the battle looked at again (we lost on size; there’s genuinely no way around it), but rather to highlight an agreement with the sentiment of the document.
That being said, I want it to be unbelievably clear what I believe this open letter does in effect, especially with the swiftness of action that has occurred as a result of it. Despite good intentions and good points, the letter simply exists to create the precedent that an organization will undergo a cycle of destruction and rebirth under new hands. This is an unavoidable pathway that can and will occur without the active effort of the community to course correct before actions are taken faster and more destructively.
Look no further than what has already happened for proof of this; what is clearly a matter of staffing issues, a lack of proper bias training, and long-term institutional degradation at the failure of effective replacements, has resulted in its exclusion from the community in the blink of an eye. If a letter is all it took for this community to decide that enough is enough, then has it done enough? I would argue it hasn’t.
Discussing the Open Letter
The Summit & Sweater’s Removal
Let’s discuss the first point the letter makes: CPAJ is, fundamentally, opposed to change. Some of its strongest points in this matter are described as follows:
Several head judges notably helped shut down many innovative proposals, especially during the initial “CPA Summit,” which, while deeply flawed, ultimately rendered any potential benefits moot.
The broader issue is that CPAJ appears increasingly unwilling to accept criticism, reform itself, or cooperate effectively with the institutions around it. One recent concern with this in mind was the failure to act on Sweater’s conduct, in which he harassed a member of this community, to the point of doxing, for days, before being disciplined. Whether the issue is judging standards, tournament administration, Army Board meetings, relations with the CPA Org, or leadership conduct, the same pattern keeps emerging: problems are raised, but meaningful change is slow, inconsistent, or actively resisted.
These two particular points themselves are damning and important to discuss. The organization simply moves too slowly and operates within the status quo; however, I want to highlight a deeper analysis of what these points are actually caused by. The CPA summits themselves are CPAorg’s domain; they can, truthfully, unilaterally make decisions regarding the conduct of these matters. The Head Judges of CPAJ are an inherent soft power bloc during these discussions, but would it not be the failure of the CPA organization to effectively moderate these discussions as well, perhaps in the proactive effort to try to stop specific groups from over-dominating the conversations regarding certain proposals? This matter does not just implicate CPAJ, but CPAorg’s own responsibility regarding the summit.
How about the banning of Sweater for harassment and doxxing? He was a deputy head judge, after all, doing these actions, and such a reputation would be extremely damning. It is actively indefensible for the organization to apparently drag its feet so aggressively on this matter; however, from the (admittedly limited) perspective of someone who ran an army during this process, his firing was done in time with the compilation of the evidence regarding his behavior. However, the fact that someone of his caliber got to the position he did is something to consider as it relates to the matter of the failure of Head Judges in CPAJ, contrasting the wide institutional failure discussion the open letter proposes.
The Beginning of Anomie
CPAJ, as an institution, is Spotty, for better or for worse, and whether or not Spotty herself wants that responsibility. There has been an ongoing search for a replacement for her own safe retirement. I would argue that the failure of a community-wide effort and initiative to create this replacement is the root of so many of these issues present in the organization. Those who have stepped up have simply failed in their role, lavished in bias-laden normalization that simply created the ideological difference between the community and CPAJ; with the vacuum of a founder wishing to retire, the conduct deemed appropriate by head judges and judges is simply at odds with the conduct the community considers appropriate. Anomie is planted and created here.
Bias Concerns
Stefan was the judge to take on the URP-RPF invasion. Stefan himself, a member of the Water Vikings, and incidentally an ally to the RPF as a result, already raised some level of suspicion in me. However, I had withheld those suspicions as I figured raising a big stink over a WV judge would simply make no sense. Leading up to the battle, he posted this in CPAorg’s community chat:
Stefan, who had accepted the judging role, immediately biased himself publicly as a judge by making light of my army with an RPF staff member, up to and including feigning ignorance to the army itself for the battle he himself had just signed up to judge. I come from a different time, 2017, a world where there were no judges, and the army community was largely run by defacers, doxxers, and harassers. In my mind and experience, there simply was no point in trying to contest this, as I did indeed want the invasion to happen at all. However, it showed a clear and obvious example to me that the judges in this community do not take their roles seriously enough in public-facing discussion on the battles they undertake. As it turns out, this sort of thing is something the open letter itself discusses:
On the topic of favoritism, CPA Judges do not pay close enough attention to affiliations and ongoing beef. While this is always difficult, in the 2025 VT–TCP War, the judges behind many of the battles were usually Water Vikings staff. Water Vikings staff did not like TCP at all, as is known. Yet CPA Judges did nothing to prevent this, which negatively impacted TCP’s war efforts: some battles seemed like TCP victories, yet VT were awarded marginal victories in many of them. This lack of attention to detail extends beyond the judging itself to the people they allow to judge battles. A mediator should always be present when bias may be apparent.
In more recent cases, Head Judges were found openly talking during the finals of Legends Cup this year, raising concerns about incompetence and conduct. While people want to voice their opinions in this community, judges interested in a Head Judge position need to understand they are judging some of the community’s most important battles. They need to serve as a voice of reason among their less senior judges and prevent bias from seeping through.
Where the letter strays, in my opinion, is the belief that this is itself a foundational issue of the judging institution itself. The issue is what I go back to: Spotty hasn’t found a suitable replacement. The effort has been largely propagated through the promotion of those who are simply committed to taking on the workload, which is itself a failure of Spotty’s own oversight of the entire promotional structure.
The Replacement Issue
The effort has been largely a process by which Spotty needs to take considerable time and effort to make happen: an effort she probably considers unavailable to her, time-wise. The issue is the fact that we have not promoted the proper head judges if all of the problems arise from the fact that the head judges themselves are not fit for the role by way of either malice or inactivity. The wrong people are simply at the head of the organization; the creation of a new organization is just as susceptible to this problem. The problem trickles down, where you end up with judging summaries like this:
I did not raise this issue with anyone, because I once again worried it would ultimately sour my reputation with the organization. My advisor and (jokingly) shadow leader Rowan Alden did in fact bring up this matter with Spotty. He later told me she was rather dismissive about the blatant issues with the summary. In short, I believe this summary to be a failure to accurately represent the battle itself. Keeping in mind that Stefan already biased himself to the RPF, there were claims in this summary that ranged from biased to outright ahistorical. Reader, how does a horizontal line get covered by a pyramid such that we were “basically invisible?” Here’s what “basically invisible” looks like, for reference, according to CPAJ:
Small, yes! I agree, but invisible? Moreover, room 2 was described as a failure due to “[RPF] continuously covering [URP]”, which looks like this, apparently:
Biased Judging & a Possible Solution
I could sit here and belabor the point. However, the matter is that even though this is a situation wherein an unbiased judge could easily dominantly rule in the RPF’s favor – they won by a landslide – the URP was somehow completely and disingenuously misrepresented by CPAJ. Clearly, there are issues with training and staffing that do trickle down into the community at large. I say this not to individually fault Stefan for his summary, nor his bias, though he did ostensibly contribute. I say this to indicate that this is the anatomy of biased judging, and one that I regret not making a bigger fuss about sooner.
Change needs to happen! However, it would be unfair to act like a completely new judging structure and organization is itself the answer. The workload of creating a new judging infrastructure from scratch to replace the long-standing one that exists now is a massive undertaking; my question is, are the people who propose this new organization ready for it?
In the discussion of the creation of a new system, this also means a full re-analysis of guidelines, bias training, staffing, appropriate workload for multiple individuals, firings because of inactivity if need be, recreating the diplomatic ties with multiple organizations, and, in short, rebuilding the entire faith and community around a central system. While my understanding of this is that a lot of this groundwork has started, this is a continual process of organization building.
The New Judging Organisation
As it stands, this new org will be spearheaded by two presently affiliated Water Vikings High Command members, a former CPAJ Head Judge (GreenVege, the one identified in the CPAorg post on the matter as the HJ shouldering most of the responsibility), a temporary HJ, and a very small panel of advisors presumably to get the organization started. Is this the appropriate start to a new, long-standing beginning? Or, as you may have your doubts about, will this face an equally turbulent and potentially more damaging start if the community fails to find suitable, long-term, neutral parties to run this organization?
A Dangerous Precedence
The death of Club Penguin Army Central due to Club Penguin’s shutdown led to the creation of Club Penguin Rewritten Army Central, an organization run by individuals who should not have had that power and influence to begin with. This was done out of necessity more than anything, and is arguably the regrettable start to a chain of failures in developing a league and a consistent body of community. The last thing I want is for that to happen to one of the most positive developments for the community, an independent judging body.
I’m sure the individuals who are running this organization know this fact, as SavageCobra, Silverburg, and Twitchy were all around during these turbulent times. They know the cost of setting this precedent; however, I would argue that the course of action being taken and in the way that it is being taken is itself setting this precedent.
There is generally advocacy for internal change rather than creating a whole new organization. The fact that we have had consistent organizations in the form of CPA Judges and the CPA Org is a major achievement. However, when an organization refuses to make adequate change and instead chooses to continue down a path of mediocrity at everyone’s expense, drastic change is required. There has been hesitation to take a stance on things like this, including opposition to Spotty’s proposed coup in 2025. However, since late 2025, hesitation is no longer possible. Therefore, we are proposing the establishment of a new judging organization that is willing to be consistent, transparent, and innovative.
There is something I want to highlight to readers who may find this document and then this subsequent op-ed on the document itself. The language being used in the document is extreme. CPAJ suffers “fundamental issues,” not issues with the bias training for judges. The organization is in “direct conflict with the very nature of CPA,” not in decline after the failure of adequate replacements in the Head Judges. The idea of reform is an inherently foregone conclusion to this document, and this is the precedent it sets. As we have seen with nearly every league in the CPPS era, all you need is for the convincing statement that reform is simply a foregone conclusion and it will be so.
This is the fundamental precedent that is being set here, and it is one that exists in the very lineage of the community. It is in using this language to define your new organization that you choose to embrace anomie, to take it into your arms with the express interest of revolution, but may find yourself just as capable of entering into annihilation. We are a community of teenagers and emotionally-stunted 20-somethings; using bold, aggressive language gets you bold, aggressive action.
CPA’s Stance
Reform was not a foregone conclusion to the CPAorg, as Jojo Teri has made clear in his post outlining the official stance of CPAorg’s own decision to break with CPAJ. He even clearly identified the issue being with the Head Judge structure, arguing that a complete and total staff restructuring would likely be the best point of pressure to put on CPAJ in order to fix its issues outside of abandoning the organization itself. In deciding to go with the latter, the administration states in such kind-to-themselves language:
Ultimately, two possibilities were considered by the Administration: restructuring the existing Head Judge team or establishing an entirely new judging organization.
In this context, the CPA Administration was approached by individuals interested in creating a new judging organization. While there was initially some hesitation, the Administration eventually decided to support the initiative after thorough consideration, particularly following CPAJ’s announcement of its most recent Deputy HJ appointments.
Reader, I appeal to your common sense once again, asking you whether or not this sounds like reform and the former approach was actually meaningfully considered! To me, this reads as though to explain why CPAorg took its first viable opportunity to step towards this proposed new organization while also padding the description of these events with language of deliberation and careful consideration as to not make the seemingly rash decision to drop a four year old institution for a four day old one sound so rash.
There simply has not been enough consideration regarding the former option, to take what already exists and gut it of its failures, to put in a full competent prepared panel of head judges, each tasked equally with handling some aspect of its misgivings, and to restructure the organization top-to-bottom. Neither option is going to be exactly easy, but at least in keeping CPAJ alive yet completely different you avoid the precedent of the destruction-rebirth cycle the community has only very recently begun to escape.
Moving Forward
I ask those involved with the new judging project to take your roles seriously, as far as removing yourselves from your army affiliations if you plan to stay within this role as the leaders of the independent judging body. You do not want to be Water Vikings when your organization is tasked to handle the upcoming Water Viking-Templars war.
I ask the community to consider taking up judging roles! If this matters to you at all, as it does to me, I do not care ultimately what organization it has to be under, albeit with my concerns over destruction and rebirth. The fact that you care is already a wonderful sign of your capability to judge. Please, consider your potential and your value as a civic participant in the community. It’s genuinely some of the most rewarding work you can do, and it doesn’t even have to be at the top of the organization. I enjoy reading, writing, and researching, and that’s why I do the work I do in the Wiki. I enjoy the concept of being a source of steady and careful deliberation, and that’s why I strive to do the work I plan to do in the judging scene once the time comes. You’ve read this far, and to me, that means you can do the work that a civic member of this community can do.
I want to ultimately end this with an appeal to everyone’s desire to see this community flourish. Without independent judging our community would be severely hurt. Without people who are committed to making this community what it is in a positive way, without those who lead their armies with respect and dignity, without those who do silent work for the community in our civic roles, we would be lost and disparate with nothing left. I have seen personally what the Forgotten Age of 2017 has left us, and I alongside all of us want nothing more than to see that to never happen again. Whether or not CPAJ’s downfall is the catalyst of another Forgotten Age or a carefully navigated effort to steer clear is a matter of our community’s resolve to make sure it does not happen.
Do you agree with Prisma’s ideas in this post? How will the new organisation end up performing? Will the judging organisation switch cause a chain reaction to the general community?
Prisma
Opinion-Editorial Writer