Thoughts on the end of my streak as delegate

[Aurum Rider]

I raid because it's a fun activity to do with friends, and writing silly WFE entries is fun. No other reason beyond that.
/thread

Honestly, I can agree to the sentiment that being raided can ruin a region, however a community is meant to be a lot stronger than that. A good example was one Souls already brought up. The Community of TBR (Now DEN) was hit with a triple whammy of losing it's founder, two of it's key members, and then wast taken over. Their community has strong enough ties to soldier through it and become DEN instead.

A region is not the community, a region is a jumble of numbers, nations, and a few fancy doodads to enable communications. A community is a group of friends who will do whatever it takes to stay together, and if someone messing with your communication doodad is enough to make you leave the game, it's clear that you just don't value the friendships you made in your community.

[The Agnostic Collective]

My only issue with raiding is that it has no purpose other than to promote raiding. While raiding does stir up activity, so does posting on the RMB or the forum. Raiding use to be about conquering your enemies and actually achieving something, but now it's all about who's banner get's noticed more. Defending still has a purpose, while raiding will continue to affect tiny, unsuspecting regions arbitrarily.

[CoraSpia]

While I don't agree that raiding should stop a player like the OP, who's been playing the game since 2006 from continuing, I do believe that raiding can be a serious factor in a lot of newer players leaving.

I'm a co-founder of The Silver Isles, a region that was destroyed by TBR. This isn't about the region itself, but about observations I made about it. After most of the active members left, that strange sight which we sometimes see in the game, where members who have done absolutely nothing for ages decide to start doing things when it's waaaaaaaay too late started occurring. These were people who had developed a love for the community that had emerged after the other one before it split itself. This was completely stopped when TBR raided the region and completely destroyed (with a refound) it. After that, I saw over a hundred players from TSI (some may have been puppets, I do not know, those tools are not at my disposal) stop playing. If you can give me something that's not 'the raid' that could have stopped so many people wanting to play, I'll be very surprised.

[Funkadelia]

I can't speak for all raider, but I don't do this to piss people off. Sorry. I do it in part for the people I do it with, I do it in part for the thrill of the chase (or in this case, infiltration), sometimes I do it to make a mark, sometimes I do it because someone said I couldn't raid region x, it's security was too good. There's a feeling you get - the best example I can give in recent times was the night Pont resigned in TBR. In that moment, we had a choice- Risk weeks of work on making a run for delegate, against the former delegate (UGR), and Cormac and Ivo teaming up as well, with hours to update and no starting endorsements. Those frantic hours of talking to no less than four people at a time in three different windows, making deals, shaking hands left and right, counting endos, and so on. The hunt becomes so frantic, you don't even care about the weeks ahead - just the next hour. Then....to see update hit, refresh the page.... I actually jumped out of my seat, and I think a few others that night did as well. Then sat right back down and went back to the essay due the next day But the point was - Categorizing all raiders after a few radicals is like categorizing all those with defender moralities after Unibot.

I never said that you do it just to piss people off, but most of you do. I said you do it for self gratification and nothing more than that, which you just admitted to. You don't care about the fact that you're ruining the game for other people, because you just put your blinders on and stick your fingers in your ears and babble on about how it's all about camaraderie, or "the fun of it all." But at the root you simply don't care, or have any respect for the other people who play this game.

[Ransium]

A couple quick replies to folks. Sorry I'm on mobile so I'm not going to bother quoting.

1) I was referencing a raid that happened 8.5 years ago. Sorry I mixed up the raider organizations. I did know TBH raided us this time for what it's worth.

2) It seems a bit hypocritical that there was a thread by TBH trumpeting how big of deal breaking my streak was and then for you to tell me "Hey, you're feeling a bit over the game right now? Maybe you need to stop playing if your streak mattered that much. The power of being delegate should always come from within"

3) I should have seen the direction this thread would go. Just to be clear my stance is not that raiding should never happen, or I hate raiders so much because they ended my streak. Like I said I think I pretty much understand the incentives that caused them to raid, and I don't think you have to be an angry teenager. I just think that maybe this type of region crashing in particular is not the best for the game and made the thread because very few people have the perspective of being delegate for as long as I have. I didn't and don't expect anything to change gameplay wise or I guess otherwise.

Finally to the raider who said congrats on you tenure of being delegate, thank you I actually really appreciate a raider that can say that to me.

[Aurum Rider]

I think there isn't a raider who doesn't find your 8 year delegacy impressive. Not being able to hold a delegacy for more than 5 days, I know I find it impressive.

And it seems hypocritical, but honestly the threads are advertisements. They're deliberately written to be over the top, and rarely actually reflect the true feeling of anyone in the organization.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

Eleven years ago (oh boy...) I was the Delegate of a small, founderless, region. After coming to understand what invasions were, and after receiving a telegram telling me my region was being targeted for invasion, I made the perhaps precipitous decision to password it. The region died. Before I get into detail (oh so much detail), I must congratulate Ransium on achieving what I then failed to, and both preserving and invigorating his region for over eight years now.

According to O'Brien of Orwell's 1984, "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power." "Always, Winston, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face — forever."

I would argue that raiding is about power, about victory, about trampling an opponent. It is not, of course, restricted to angry teenagers, but when people say calling raiding out as bullying is necessarily trolling or somehow bad... I just don't understand it.

As regards the frustration some have with admin, the picture is somewhat complex. To an extent, I think administrators pay attention to requests, complaints, and suggestions that they actually hear, and most people not involved in raiding or defending will not make them. When uninvolved parties do speak up, they are often clearly uninformed about the details of how what they speak of works, and cannot make suggestions about game mechanics that would actually advance their needs. The game changes that have actually happened in recent times have not been entirely one-sided, either. The Summit was an attempt to improve on it, unfortunately, admins have not had the time to implement its recommendations very quickly. I should remind everyone however that the telegram system replacement also took a very long time.

The ever-improving access to data can make invading technically easier, particularly the determining of update timings. Improved access to game information helps everyone who can use it, however. Certainly such information is also heavily used by regions for internal, not external, purposes. (Including The North Pacific).

The changes to Feeder and Sinker influence, while potentially detrimental to GCR native communities, and advantageous to those who would invade them, have not had a clearly destructive result thus far. Furthermore, they do not at all affect user-created regions such as Forest.

The change to disallow multiple login sessions to a nation at the same time is clearly detrimental to invaders' ability to hold onto a region, though a fairly minor restriction. (Raiders used to sometimes have multiple people logged into the raid lead nation at once, so they could work together to banject would-be-liberators as quickly as possible.)

The introduction of artificial variance to the update speed was clearly intended to make it more possible for defenders to defend regions from invaders. It's difficult to say how things would be without it, but it is at least sometimes possible to defend against a raid, so I suppose that's something. (It is common for raids to happen with several seconds left before the target region updates. This is quite difficult to respond to, particularly if it is necessary to endorse the native Delegate. Sometimes raids happen the second the region updates, which is effectively impossible to respond to. It's difficult to say how common that would be without artificial variance.)

The removal of an undocumented ability to (pre-)endorse a nation in a different region from yours was certainly beneficial to invaders in holding regions against defenders seeking to liberate them, but can fairly easily be justified as fixing an unintended bug.

The political changes, in terms of how much more acceptable raiding has become in Gameplay since 2006, are not admin's fault. I've heard it argued that the introduction of Influence and removal of the Griefing rules removed the motivation for the old NS-wide political nigh-consensus against invading. I wasn't very familiar with the interregional political stage before the introduction of influence, so perhaps my thoughts can be questioned, but I think that the great politics mess-up (within an NS context) was caused more by the collapse in cohesion of defender groups, namely the ADN, ALL, and RLA, and the growth of "Neutral" (invader-tolerant and by inertia usually invader-friendly) regions. That collapse had many causes, including possibly the period of update order randomization: I've not been convinced by any of the arguments I've seen that Influence was a primary cause.

I think that ultimately the root cause of the relative popularity and effectiveness of raiding today is the relative ease with which it can be done today, mostly caused by the gradual accumulation of experience and technology among invaders subscribing to "Raider Unity" but assisted by the improving usability of the game in general. I should explain: I categorize players by levels of motivation / ability. The most motivated / able can not only consistently serve as updaters [to spot against invasions, one needs to be active at update regularly without being specially called for a mission], but can also develop techniques and perform intelligence and other work to assist the mission above and beyond participation in an operation. The more motivated / able can serve as updaters, but are unwilling or unable to go much beyond that. The less motivated / able can deploy as "pilers" and otherwise contribute on their own time, but will not generally show up at update. (I mostly ascribe the different tiers to differences in motivation, but there are probably also differences in technical and general ability involved sometimes.) Historically, the advantage defenders used to hold among the more experienced has declined, and the most motivated among invaders are now able to leverage the resources they do have. At this point, invaders regularly pitch all three of their tiers in against defenders of the upper two tiers when holding onto invaded regions, and their first two against the first tier of Defenders when invading.

The relative convenience of invading is also, I think, the root cause for the decline in popularity of defending and defenders. Independents often argue that joining defender alliances, or defending in general, is harmful to a region's self-interest, and I think that they are partly right. I should be very clear: I do think that a region can very definitely benefit, far more than it loses out, from having an effective defender military, or even from having an effective military that sometimes defends. However, the systematically asymmetrical difficulty of invading versus defending, increased need for constant cooperation, and the somewhat limited diplomatic options do impose a cost. For regions which cannot take advantage of the moral high ground of defending (either because they are authoritarian, or because they are focused on a culture of personal political careerism, or otherwise) the costs may exceed the benefits. This was not the case before the "great politics mess-up" I mentioned earlier, as the consensus of "civilized" regions was that what we now call raiding was simply unacceptable, but I think a self-sustaining feedback loop of that consensus eroding, regions least benefited by the consensus stance finding they could benefit by shifting it, the consensus eroding further, et cetera destroyed it.

The disengagement of regions not interested in invading from Gameplay, the realignment of Gameplay-focused regions which don't hold core values opposing raiding, the accumulation of experience and technology with raiders holding to "Raider Unity," and perhaps even some self-destructive political efforts by some Defenders to push back on all this, have had far more of an effect than any putative administrator disinterest in the interests of natives of regions.

[United RussoAsia]

The above is a good read.

[Trick Shot]

A couple quick replies to folks. Sorry I'm on mobile so I'm not going to bother quoting.

1) I was referencing a raid that happened 8.5 years ago. Sorry I mixed up the raider organizations. I did know TBH raided us this time for what it's worth.

2) It seems a bit hypocritical that there was a thread by TBH trumpeting how big of deal breaking my streak was and then for you to tell me "Hey, you're feeling a bit over the game right now? Maybe you need to stop playing if your streak mattered that much. The power of being delegate should always come from within"

3) I should have seen the direction this thread would go. Just to be clear my stance is not that raiding should never happen, or I hate raiders so much because they ended my streak. Like I said I think I pretty much understand the incentives that caused them to raid, and I don't think you have to be an angry teenager. I just think that maybe this type of region crashing in particular is not the best for the game and made the thread because very few people have the perspective of being delegate for as long as I have. I didn't and don't expect anything to change gameplay wise or I guess otherwise.

Finally to the raider who said congrats on you tenure of being delegate, thank you I actually really appreciate a raider that can say that to me.

Congratulations on your tenure, but I enjoyed dethroning you. To be honest, we raiders like to raid. Your streak was fun to break. You can still go on. Make a comment in your WFE about your tenure.

[North East Somerset]

I would argue that raiding is about power, about victory, about trampling an opponent. It is not, of course, restricted to angry teenagers, but when people say calling raiding out as bullying is necessarily trolling or somehow bad... I just don't understand it.

Are you saying you agree with those who allege that raiding is a form of bullying?

[Kazmr]

I'm not Elu, but that is a statement I agree with.

[RiderSyl]

Some of these statements about raiders are over-the-top. I left raiding because of a few bad apples, but most of them are just players that find the activity fun, not the disruption it causes.

[Kazmr]

Understandable Syl, obviously people wouldn't do it if it weren't fun. Some people enjoy tagging for instance and unlike other rads, whilr being extremely annoying, it isn't that bad. The difference is that there is literally no other community on this site whose fun is had at the expense of other communities. NSG? Certainly not. Roleplaying? No way. The GA? Not at all. Various social regions and regional governments? Nope. Yet each and every one can be disrupted, or even trashed, by raiders. As a sidenote, just about all of these communities, and often their subcommunities as well (sports RPing for instance which pulls at least 150 individuals just for the world cup every few months), are substantially larger than raiding, or even R/D as a whole.

[Valrifell]

To be rather frank, I don't think people have a leg to stand on when complaining about the Game, Raiders are dominating because they clearly show more dedication and passion than their defender counters. I think people go with the mindset "This is the way it's always been, so this is the way it always will be" instead of trying to change the Game. Defenders should rip a page out of the Raider handbook and learn a thing or two about recruitment, playing nice, and swanky tools.

If Defenders are not content with the way the Game goes, they should be the ones striving to change the way it is played, a part of this could be accomplished by not politically antagonizing Independents at every opportunity, that does nothing but remove feet from the field and is hard to ignore. Actually, I think it'd be best for the Game entirely to just have Defenders revert back to pure focus on Defending, instead of GCRs, politics, and elections.

Natives are another who refuse to change the Game, they don't want to get involved, which is fine, but if they don't want in, than they have even less of a leg than Defenders when it comes to the Game. And not only because nine times out of ten they don't have a clue about the inner workings of the Game or its facets. They should really pool into GP if they're so sick of raiders, otherwise they're waiting for their region to be raided or their friend's. Quitting NationStates entirely does nothing but further hurt everyone around you.

[Drop Your Pants]

Defenders should rip a page out of the Raider handbook and learn a thing or two about recruitment, playing nice, and swanky tools.

And the Game as you call it is NS or the subgame that is R/D?

[Valrifell]

Defenders should rip a page out of the Raider handbook and learn a thing or two about recruitment, playing nice, and swanky tools.

And the Game as you call it is NS or the subgame that is R/D?

The subgame, I would go all the way and say Gameplay, but nah.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

The above is a good read.

Thank you.

I would argue that raiding is about power, about victory, about trampling an opponent. It is not, of course, restricted to angry teenagers, but when people say calling raiding out as bullying is necessarily trolling or somehow bad... I just don't understand it.

Are you saying you agree with those who allege that raiding is a form of bullying?

Inasmuch as I contest that raiding is fundamentally about expressing powers over others, negatively, yes. That is not to say that everyone who raids is a bully. Some do it to do something with their friends, some do it for the adrenaline rush, and so on. But if the acts involved in changing the delegate of a region themselves alone were enough, then the warzones would have been more effective at their purpose, griefing would not be a thing, and the Cat Burglars would have been more successful. The core motivation behind raiding as a whole is defeating others in a multiplayer game, and because of the game's fundamental power asymmetries it is invariably against the more-or-less helpless.

Some of these statements about raiders are over-the-top. I left raiding because of a few bad apples, but most of them are just players that find the activity fun, not the disruption it causes.

If you mean some of the others, I'll certainly agree. If you mean mine, I'd like to ask where, in your opinion, I went over the top.

To be rather frank, I don't think people have a leg to stand on when complaining about the Game, Raiders are dominating because they clearly show more dedication and passion than their defender counters. I think people go with the mindset "This is the way it's always been, so this is the way it always will be" instead of trying to change the Game. Defenders should rip a page out of the Raider handbook and learn a thing or two about recruitment, playing nice, and swanky tools.

If Defenders are not content with the way the Game goes, they should be the ones striving to change the way it is played, a part of this could be accomplished by not politically antagonizing Independents at every opportunity, that does nothing but remove feet from the field and is hard to ignore. Actually, I think it'd be best for the Game entirely to just have Defenders revert back to pure focus on Defending, instead of GCRs, politics, and elections.

Natives are another who refuse to change the Game, they don't want to get involved, which is fine, but if they don't want in, than they have even less of a leg than Defenders when it comes to the Game. And not only because nine times out of ten they don't have a clue about the inner workings of the Game or its facets. They should really pool into GP if they're so sick of raiders, otherwise they're waiting for their region to be raided or their friend's. Quitting NationStates entirely does nothing but further hurt everyone around you.

Defenders are not new to recruitment, diplomacy, or technology. The asymmetrical nature of the game however give invaders a structural advantage.

As the elected leader of The North Pacific I am bound to serve my constituents' will. I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the North Pacific Army raiding as it finds necessary nor by our Allies who do so. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. That said, when not engaged in such obligations with my WA nation I have indeed defended. It's my observation that defenders have mostly withdrawn from politics in GCRs as defenders, unless you mean the Rejected Realms and Lazarus which are defender regions. I disagree however that defenders should not have politics. Successful regions have politics.

It is in no way surprising that those who don't want to play the invasion game don't do so, and I don't think it makes any sense to castigate them for it. Historically the mainstream NationStates player is part of the "third tier" of defenders, who are prepared to act but not at any particular time. The asymmetries I've mentioned make this group, in modern times, effectively useless as a force in very nearly all cases. The effort these players would need to invest in defending to really contribute to fighting invaders is far greater than the effort most invaders invest into raiding.

[The Agnostic Collective]

I don't think it's fair to assume Defenders generally show less dedication and passion than Raiders. Defenders can't act on a mission without Raiders having already followed through with theirs or having prior knowledge of an impending raid. If anything, Defenders show the kind of dedication and passion that's borderline zealotous (which isn't always a good thing.)

[Valrifell]

successful regions in general have politics, successful militaries normally do not. Raiders are a good example of being a military with a region, and I think Defenders tend to be regions that just so happen to have militaries. Which is bad for a crucial portion of R/D. If every Political Defender actually became WA mobile next Update, the Game would become much more entertaining, far better than the bore it is now.

I don't think anyone can claim the Game is biased in favor of Raiderdom when literally every Administration alteration to the Game directly or indirectly benefits Nativedom and Defenderdom. Defenders should have an easier time convincing people non-affiliated to switch, simply due to the roles that have developed. Passwords, Founders, and influence too. Y'all should have really less of a hard time to rally the troops and liberate/recruit. Perhaps more advertising would help, but Defenderdom doesn't advertise, for whatever reason.

Having a GCR means nothing to improve Defenderdom as a whole, being mobile leading militarily, might. That's why I don't understand Moral Defenderism in politics, if you don't like the direction if the Game, do something about it. Then again, if you did, what would your next campaign platform be? (Kidding, generalizing, I don't know what YOUR campaign platform was.)

Granted, Raider tools have come up with precise tools that give Defenders mere seconds to react, but the only solution to that which I could think of is to get those banned, or have more effective spies. I dunno, I'm not gonna do your jobs for you .

I don't think it's fair to assume Defenders generally show less dedication and passion than Raiders. Defenders can't act on a mission without Raiders having already followed through with theirs or having prior knowledge of an impending raid. If anything, Defenders show the kind of dedication and passion that's borderline zealotous (which isn't always a good thing.)

I just think that passion could be put to better use instead of focusing on Indies and the like, focusing on actual pure Raiders.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

successful regions in general have politics, successful militaries normally do not. Raiders are a good example of being a military with a region, and I think Defenders tend to be regions that just so happen to have militaries. Which is bad for a crucial portion of R/D. If every Political Defender actually became WA mobile next Update, the Game would become much more entertaining, far better than the bore it is now.

A defender army without a region exists, it's called the UDL. I don't think it works as well, long-term, as regional defender militaries, but maybe we'll prove me wrong yet. I won't comment on how the military side of things work with defenders, but I'd be surprised if you were particularly well informed.

I don't think anyone can claim the Game is biased in favor of Raiderdom when literally every Administration alteration to the Game directly or indirectly benefits Nativedom and Defenderdom.

That is very false. As noted, the increased availability of game information has greatly benefited invaders. I also referred to the removal of pre-endorsement, which was at the time exclusively useful to defenders and the changes to Feeder and Sinker influence explicitly intended to make it less difficult to overthrow our regions' governments by force. Furthermore, the game code changes which introduced the more commonly encountered "Security Check" errors were made to counter one defender's illegal script and have introduced inconvenience in liberations, but were applied to movement and not ejection and so do not inconvenience invaders holding a region in the slightest. (Indeed, I have been pointed to some ejection rates which are in fact astonishingly high such as 9 nations in under 7 seconds).

Defenders should have an easier time convincing people non-affiliated to switch, simply due to the roles that have developed. Passwords, Founders, and influence too. Y'all should have really less of a hard time to rally the troops and liberate/recruit.

As I've said, the moral high ground does have its advantages. However, passwords are generally destructive to active regions, Founders problematic, and influence legalized griefing. As we saw in Lazarus, hundreds of nations may be willing to move to help a region, but not at a particular time.

Perhaps more advertising would help, but Defenderdom doesn't advertise, for whatever reason.

Of course not.

Having a GCR means nothing to improve Defenderdom as a whole, being mobile leading militarily, might. That's why I don't understand Moral Defenderism in politics, if you don't like the direction if the Game, do something about it. Then again, if you did, what would your next campaign platform be? (Kidding, generalizing, I don't know what YOUR campaign platform was.)

As a TNPer, I pursue the interests of my region. For the record, this was my platform.

Granted, Raider tools have come up with precise tools that give Defenders mere seconds to react, but the only solution to that which I could think of is to get those banned, or have more effective spies. I dunno, I'm not gonna do your jobs for you .

Increasing artificial variance would also help. Invaders do not typically give the target to their troops very long in advance, and any defender moving in advance could burn a spy making that a very high effort for low return tactic. As with an un-spied raid, moving after the raid is hard not because it's hard to spot, but because there is very little time left to act in.

[Kazmr]

Are you seriously arguing that raiders have a harder time than defenders do?

Let me ask you this: to do your job, do you have to be here every single update? Perhaps if you're the one or two people who are leading an operation, but the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of people, no. You could tag if you feel like it that night, but thats still optionals. You only need to be on when an op comes up that can be planned well in advance and have calenders marked for.

Defenders simply don't have that luxury. We literally have to have people every single update to do our job, and even then we're essentially always facing worse odds. Elu breaking down tiers of activity put it very well; when raiders conduct a larger raid they get not only their daily folks but whoever can mark their calender or be on with advance notice, meaning that the defenders who are the most dedicated are facing both the most dedicated raiders but also a much wider group. Once a raid is successful, every raider there is can poor in, but defenders only rarely have the opportunity to use people able to pile (a sidenote to this is that I think the game would be shaken up tremendously if the delegate elect feature proposed at the summit were introduced as it would go a long way toward correcting this fundamental imbalance).

And as Elu also pointed out, the idea that Admin has only introduced changes that make life harder for raiders is so wrong that I'm not even going to bother saying more than he.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

The difference is that there is literally no other community on this site whose fun is had at the expense of other communities. NSG? Certainly not. Roleplaying? No way. The GA? Not at all. Various social regions and regional governments? Nope.

I'd disagree with this, on some levels. Yes, on a level as a whole, those communities are not at the expense of another. But there are certainly example of them drawing amusement, perhaps even more directly, from the misery of others. While NSG can have polite, informative discussions...there's also plenty of heated topics that devolve into "my opinion is better than yours" and are more about tearing everyone else down than building your own up. The GA has certainly sent out plenty of campaign telegrams that resort to bad-mouthing the other author, and the SC specifically has functions to condemn other nations/regions. There are plenty of regions who fuel activity of hating another - see, TEK, Laughing Coffin (most recently), many others whose names I can't recall off the top of my head (as I was not directly involved) that hate another (we sometimes get telegrams asking us to help some dozen-person region destroy their (foundered) "enemies." You might even be able to argue that the whole Osi-Laz war, seemingly a publicity/activity stunt more than something like LWU or LKE's wars (which have held solid for years), was a GCR example of regions/governments using the act of casting another down to drive their own activity.

Increasing artificial variance would also help. Invaders do not typically give the target to their troops very long in advance, and any defender moving in advance could burn a spy making that a very high effort for low return tactic. As with an un-spied raid, moving after the raid is hard not because it's hard to spot, but because there is very little time left to act in.

As I'm sure most of you know by now, we call silence, refresh newer updaters, and go over orders minutes before update. That's plenty of time to plan your own response, assuming that, like most times we're out in large numbers, you've already spotted that we're up to *something* and gathered more folks. New folks make it onto raids fast, and though we try not to take the newest folks on large hits, sometimes it's necessary for numbers. You could also get one sunk a little further in before leaking stuff, pushing the suspicion on newer members, or even work your way high enough that you have prior knowledge enough to have folks plant sleepers to activate. Either we're missing something right under our noses, or you all really need to step up your spying game Hell, even if they burn out fast, if each one gets one or two big raid attempts first....

I also understand that some of your side finds setting sleepers to be improper...but that said, there's a fairly limited pool of large, founderless regions that we might invade. If more of your people planted sleepers, or even placed obvious nations and informed regional leadership, you could potentially have a small army waiting inside the region with some influence built up, allowing even those who can't necessarily make those critical first few updates for liberation attempts to pre-endorse as late as they can and not all be ejected.

Finally, you have, of course, an advantage in gaining people. Of course, that's a bittersweet fruit - pilers are often of little use to you, and it's a pain to try and get random folks online and contributing in minimal time. But that said - if the delegates of all the defender-sympathetic GCR's sent out a region-wide telegram asking for people who could be online between 11:30 and 1 edt on this date, you'd almost assuredly get enough folks that even if half missed the jump, you'd overwhelm us even with an early jump. We'd see you coming, but there's not much we can do besides prepare to eject as many as possible.

[Omusubi Kororin]

A defender army without a region exists, it's called the UDL. I don't think it works as well, long-term, as regional defender militaries, but maybe we'll prove me wrong yet.

The UDL is dead. The organization has been decaying for some time now, and its members remain nonexistent or irrelevant to military gameplay as a whole save Ravania, a GCR-elite, and one very interesting automotive enthusiast. All that lives on is its name and Ravania's sleepers.

As noted, the increased availability of game information has greatly benefited invaders.

Defenders are free to utilize the exact same data we use to create update tools for triggering. I, for one, have used the same process to make my sheets since March.
As someone already mentioned in this thread, there's only so many targets that can be hit within a given time period. Days before the TBR hit on Atheist Empire, Land pointed it out as an extremely likely target for invaders due to suspicious endo-swapping. The dossier is your friend. A pity that nobody else was online at update to stop the raid though.

Furthermore, the game code changes which introduced the more commonly encountered "Security Check" errors were made to counter one defender's illegal script and have introduced inconvenience in liberations, but were applied to movement and not ejection and so do not inconvenience invaders holding a region in the slightest. (Indeed, I have been pointed to some ejection rates which are in fact astonishingly high such as 9 nations in under 7 seconds).

Raiding involves movement; I'm sure that you realize such "Security Check" errors plague raiders as much as they do to defenders. Both sides should never forget to tell your updaters to refresh the target's page.
Just as few defenders are capable of reacting to a "GO" in 15 seconds, not all invader points can manage such a high ejection rate.

Increasing artificial variance would also help.

Increasing artificial variance does nothing but mess up liberation attempts, since defenders are widely-known to be extremely chatty, impatient, and bored in their operations channels. As long as update order isn't reshuffled every day, a manual trigger is more than enough for raids to occur successfully.

Invaders do not typically give the target to their troops very long in advance, and any defender moving in advance could burn a spy making that a very high effort for low return tactic. As with an un-spied raid, moving after the raid is hard not because it's hard to spot, but because there is very little time left to act in.

It's plenty enough time for you to ping all the idlers in the channel, get an approximate update time on FriarTuck for the target region, and brief the updaters. Souls responded perfectly in making your point about burning a spy moot.

Ill probably get half a dozen raiders come along after I say this calling me a 'moralist' or whatever other bs they come up with to sleep at night and justify why what they do as 'just fun' and not harmful to the game

I do wonder how many of your comrades consider themselves on the moralist high ground, as the knights in shining white armor riding in to save every single region. Even old-timers like Karputsk once said that most defenders do it for fun.

Some people enjoy tagging for instance and unlike other rads, whilr being extremely annoying, it isn't that bad.

Terrible, Kazmr. Weren't you one of those old-guard defenders who kept on complaining about how tag-raiding has broken R/D and that real occupations were preferable?

Are you seriously arguing that raiders have a harder time than defenders do?

Although the invader group effort may have an easier time than their defender counterpart, I can argue that as individuals responsible for the success or failure of liberations, raiders do in fact encounter more difficulty.

For example, take Japan:
The individual defender shows up at update, and does a move-and-endo in order to put the native back into the delegacy to liberation an occupation. The individual invader point has the responsibility of kicking as many of these updaters as possible within a 15 second time frame. Had the invader point only ejected four (a reasonable average) per update, defenders would've won out with attrition before embassies were set to close, even with the amount of present allied support. With over 20 updaters crossing and another dozen or so sleepers for the non-updaters, it was extremely difficult to hold the region (any region in fact).

[Kazmr]

Actually if you ask around you'll find that I've always been the sort of defender who would be more than happy to see R/D end, however I think that as long as raiding isnt banned it shouldnt be allowed unckecked. Not that I dont get some personal enjoyment from defending (hence why tag raids are damn annoying), but Id rather have a nationstates with no R/D, where people are free to choose what facet of the game they want to participate in rather than having one single part which imposes itself on everyone else regardless of their opinions.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

A defender army without a region exists, it's called the UDL. I don't think it works as well, long-term, as regional defender militaries, but maybe we'll prove me wrong yet.

The UDL is dead. The organization has been decaying for some time now, and its members remain nonexistent or irrelevant to military gameplay as a whole save Ravania, a GCR-elite, and one very interesting automotive enthusiast. All that lives on is its name and Ravania's sleepers.

My point wasn't "this is a thing we're already succeeding with" but "it's been tried, I don't think it can be as successful as you say."

As noted, the increased availability of game information has greatly benefited invaders.

Defenders are free to utilize the exact same data we use to create update tools for triggering. I, for one, have used the same process to make my sheets since March.

Defenders do use the information. The game is not, however, symmetric. The wider availability of information benefits invaders more than it does defenders, as I explain in the paragraph about tiers and the like.

As someone already mentioned in this thread, there's only so many targets that can be hit within a given time period. Days before the TBR hit on Atheist Empire, Land pointed it out as an extremely likely target for invaders due to suspicious endo-swapping. The dossier is your friend. A pity that nobody else was online at update to stop the raid though.

"Soon" is not the same thing as "Wednesday night." My point about tiers stands. To an extent, more intelligence gathering and sharing could reduce some of the asymmetry, but again, it's a form of asymmetrical effort required, and defenders simply don't have that kind of motivated manpower advantage anymore. Plenty have given up on the idea that they ever will have enough again.

Furthermore, the game code changes which introduced the more commonly encountered "Security Check" errors were made to counter one defender's illegal script and have introduced inconvenience in liberations, but were applied to movement and not ejection and so do not inconvenience invaders holding a region in the slightest. (Indeed, I have been pointed to some ejection rates which are in fact astonishingly high such as 9 nations in under 7 seconds).

Raiding involves movement; I'm sure that you realize such "Security Check" errors plague raiders as much as they do to defenders. Both sides should never forget to tell your updaters to refresh the target's page.

I suppose I was thinking more of tag raiding than singular raids there. When you're switching often, leaving a region tab open too long is not so much of a concern.

Just as few defenders are capable of reacting to a "GO" in 15 seconds, not all invader points can manage such a high ejection rate.

Nevertheless, you point to yet another asymmetry. The invader lead can be a "tier 1" player, willing to train and prepare and come on update every single day. Defenders cannot (and could never) win battles with "tier 1" players alone, there simply aren't enough.

Increasing artificial variance would also help.

Increasing artificial variance does nothing but mess up liberation attempts, since defenders are widely-known to be extremely chatty, impatient, and bored in their operations channels. As long as update order isn't reshuffled every day, a manual trigger is more than enough for raids to occur successfully.

Raiders of course are always models of decorum and discipline. Sufficient artificial variance to really mess with raiding would also mess with liberations, that is true. My suspicion however currently is that the severe asymmetry with swift invasions is more serious than the severe asymmetry with liberation attempts.

Invaders do not typically give the target to their troops very long in advance, and any defender moving in advance could burn a spy making that a very high effort for low return tactic. As with an un-spied raid, moving after the raid is hard not because it's hard to spot, but because there is very little time left to act in.

It's plenty enough time for you to ping all the idlers in the channel, get an approximate update time on FriarTuck for the target region, and brief the updaters. Souls responded perfectly in making your point about burning a spy moot.

It's not moot. I don't think there's that great a difference in urgency getting people ready to defend when invaders are seen visibly preparing to invade and when commanders secretly know the particular minute the invasion is coming.

Ill probably get half a dozen raiders come along after I say this calling me a 'moralist' or whatever other bs they come up with to sleep at night and justify why what they do as 'just fun' and not harmful to the game

I do wonder how many of your comrades consider themselves on the moralist high ground, as the knights in shining white armor riding in to save every single region. Even old-timers like Karputsk once said that most defenders do it for fun.

I do enjoy defending. Much in the adrenaline-fueled social way that I described many raiders enjoy raiding. I just prefer to get my jollies cleanly.

Some people enjoy tagging for instance and unlike other rads, whilr being extremely annoying, it isn't that bad.

Terrible, Kazmr. Weren't you one of those old-guard defenders who kept on complaining about how tag-raiding has broken R/D and that real occupations were preferable?

[citation needed]
Frankly though, it's possible to disapprove of tagging while considering it itself harmless. Prevalent tag-raiding can make defending to prevent occupations much more of an unending slog. As my reference to the Cat Burglars should make clear, I have a very specific picture of a minimally harmful raid. If all raiders were like Andacantra's posse, there would not be much of a case that raiding is about the boot in the face.

Are you seriously arguing that raiders have a harder time than defenders do?

Although the invader group effort may have an easier time than their defender counterpart, I can argue that as individuals responsible for the success or failure of liberations, raiders do in fact encounter more difficulty.

For example, take Japan:
The individual defender shows up at update, and does a move-and-endo in order to put the native back into the delegacy to liberation an occupation. The individual invader point has the responsibility of kicking as many of these updaters as possible within a 15 second time frame. Had the invader point only ejected four (a reasonable average) per update, defenders would've won out with attrition before embassies were set to close, even with the amount of present allied support. With over 20 updaters crossing and another dozen or so sleepers for the non-updaters, it was extremely difficult to hold the region (any region in fact).

But the getting of WA status onto long-resident nations and the organization and coordination of so many updaters is, in total, a greater effort, is it not?

Keep in mind also that to defend against invasions defenders regularly need to be able to react to invader movement within seconds coherently over and over and over again.

Edit: forgot some bits, added them in.