A Problem with Liberations

[Northrop-Grumman]

Tell me, what would happen if RP was outlawed and all the RPers left the game?

it would be a mess, WA would collapse, forums would be shut down, NS would lose a lot of money and might shut down because not enough people are playing...

Gameplay would suffer from lost recruits, big mess all around.

If raiding were banned the defenders would be out of a job, interregional politics would in essence cease to exist, players who think there is a way to have "war" in this game would leave as the out let of raiding would be closed to them. Regions would die, mass migration to cybernations, feeder fall into inactivity(worse than they already are), together resulting in new players seeing it as a dead game, not playing it and the doomsday scenario of NS shutting down would become a reality. Rpers wouls first only lose a small player base of those who participate in both sides of the game but as the WA became useless and the overall population decreased they would start taking a hit too, from lost players and eventual shut down.

Now, the problem with this arises in the words of one administrator for the game and yourself in stating that if the option for regions to opt out of the invasions existed, then the raiding/defending part of the game would simply die. This leads one to believe that a majority, if not all, of the game wishes to simply be left alone and not participate in that. So, in essence, everyone would still be around and your doomsday scenario never comes true.

Personally, I believe that not everyone would opt out of it, and the raiding/defending gameplay would continue, but in lessened amounts. So really, in either case, your argument falls flat.

[NERVUN]

So R/D is for trolling.

Got it.

I'm glad we're clear now.

Pretty much...

Alright, everyone cool down the jets.

This is the friendly warning that this thread is getting heated and while I am not going to take any action now (Nor would I having partisapated), if we keep seeing R/D'ers are trolls and poo-poo heads, OTHER Mods can and will shut this down.

[Euroslavia]

Just a reminder to everyone to keep it cool and keep the discussion as constructive as possible. The last few pages have gotten a bit heated and frankly, I don't want to have to hand out warnings because people are getting too worked up about it. Stick to the topic at hand and voice your concerns (or your confidence) in liberations, while avoiding any sort of personal attacks (because I've seen a few going around in here).

[Mondoth]

Why can't the proposed 'RP mode' to prevent invasion not also restrict some other aspect of invasion gameplay such that invaders attempting to misuse it would be unable to take part in future invasions? (honestly don't know enough about invasions to know what functions could be restricted to prevent abuse, I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could think of something)

Likewise, is there any reason the proposal to prevent anyone from activating 'RP mode' without spending some length of time as delegate wouldn't work? (this could also tie to influence, so invaders can't stick around for months before ejecting everyone and locking the region into RP mode)

Also, an idea I just had is that perhaps, since RP regions are typically mostly populated by non WA members, some functionality can be added so that non WA members can help defend against invasions, or that non WA members are needed to approve of the switch to RP mode, or can otherwise be utilized as a means of enforcing an RP/GP divide.

Keep in mind, basically all of my knowledge of invasions comes from this thread and the one in SC, I welcome anyone to criticize/modify/discuss/combine these ideas and others to find a workable, agreeable and lasting solution.

[Questers]

Is there actually a possibility of the mods assigning a nation "founder" status for Haven and offering to do the same for all non-founder regions?

[Euroslavia]

Is there actually a possibility of the mods assigning a nation "founder" status for Haven and offering to do the same for all non-founder regions?

I highly doubt something like that would ever happen. There are so many potential issues with the idea of us getting involved in gameplay like that.

[NERVUN]

Is there actually a possibility of the mods assigning a nation "founder" status for Haven and offering to do the same for all non-founder regions?

Their are a few problems with assigning founders (As I understand it). Who do we assign? And to what regions? What happens if/when old founders come back? And finally, if we do it now, why not to Region X after their founder disapears tomorrow?

[Bryn Shander]

Is there actually a possibility of the mods assigning a nation "founder" status for Haven and offering to do the same for all non-founder regions?

Their are a few problems with assigning founders (As I understand it). Who do we assign?

In the case of Haven, Scandavian States. He's the only person still in the region that was there when the region was founded.

[Derscon]

So R/D is for trolling.

Got it.

I'm glad we're clear now.

Pretty much...

Alright, everyone cool down the jets.

This is the friendly warning that this thread is getting heated and while I am not going to take any action now (Nor would I having partisapated), if we keep seeing R/D'ers are trolls and poo-poo heads, OTHER Mods can and will shut this down.

I didn't see any heatedness in those posts.

Also, I'd just like to reiterate what Nathi said. The key with all of the other aspects of the game is you can choose to opt out of it. Invading-defending, you cannot. When the response to this criticism boils down to "go fuck yourself I don't care if you enjoy the game less because of my actions," that's effectively an admission of guilt of trolling. If someone in a DnD campaign did that, he'd be kicked out of the party because he's being a jerk. If that response happened anywhere else in the aspects of NationStates, they'd be warned or banned. And yet, suddenly, when it comes to the invasion-defending aspect of the game, it's now a legitimate counterargument.

[The Merchant Guilds]

Somebody brought up the point that this resolution might not get through and that more or less settled the matter a few posts back. While this might be true of this particular one I think it is fairly obvious that this is a form of 'test case' by the I/Ders to see if they can get at RP regions (i.e. the mods won't do anything) which are founderless.

As I said before the big point here as I understand it is that Raiders may well begin to (ab)use the WA (and set up new passworded regions with their own raider delegates to get their 'Liberate' proposals past the first stage [as somebody else cleverly pointed out earlier]) in order to involve founderless RP regions who have used their password as protection in their game and in essence make life hell for the RPer segment of NS. I don't particularly care about the (ab)use of the WA by the I/D game (as I can understand it being part of the fun), but I do care about the obvious fact that this is potentially a precedent (even if technically unsuccessful due to all the negative publicity they have received) that can be used to open up and destroy founderless password-protected RP regions.

You might say it won't happen, but I can assure you it will on the grounds that the basis of the Raider game is organisation and getting people to act together in a very basic form of grand strategy. If you merely apply that a little wider then it is obvious that the Raiders if they are worth their salt will set up the enough regional delegates (say by every raider region creating new regions and sending say two-three puppets into a region in order to create a WA delegate) to allow a properly worded proposal (i.e. suggesting that there is actually oppression going on and that there is a need to 'Liberate' the targeted region) to go through to a general vote. Now let us note that in order for someone to defend against one of these Raider 'Liberate' proposals somebody from the targeted region has to keep an eye on the WA boards and be sufficiently good at spokesmanship (as well as have well-known friends) to have a fair chance of successfully campaigning that this is a faux 'Liberate' proposal from Raiders. Otherwise it is 'he said, she said' and quite frankly there is every chance that the general vote would allow for 'Liberation' since the facts are hard to establish especially if the Raiders use the clever strategem of actually pretending to be personally agrieved parties themselves (Otto von Bismarck style). Hell if I was a Raider with a dozen or so followers that is basically what I would do.

That's why this is such a big can of worms and also why Haven seems to have been picked. Precisely, because if you can do it for Haven then you can do it for anyone else, which is the classic high profile test case.

If the Mods don't want to do anything about this issue then all I can see left open to RPers is AMFs idea (the Treaty of St. Freeksburg), which is for all RPers (particularly the established RP regions) to be prepared to actually act like 'Defenders' if the I/Ders actually invade one of the RP only regions (i.e. pile on the Raiders until they retreat). As well as the undesirable possibility of creating a 'mega RP region', where everybody from the established RP-only regions goes as a form of self-defense by sheer numbers (and then everyone talks on their original Regional boards leaving each other alone).

[Euroslavia]

So R/D is for trolling.

Got it.

I'm glad we're clear now.

Pretty much...

Alright, everyone cool down the jets.

This is the friendly warning that this thread is getting heated and while I am not going to take any action now (Nor would I having partisapated), if we keep seeing R/D'ers are trolls and poo-poo heads, OTHER Mods can and will shut this down.

I didn't see any heatedness in those posts.

Also, I'd just like to reiterate what Nathi said. The key with all of the other aspects of the game is you can choose to opt out of it. Invading-defending, you cannot. When the response to this criticism boils down to "go fuck yourself I don't care if you enjoy the game less because of my actions," that's effectively an admission of guilt of trolling. If someone in a DnD campaign did that, he'd be kicked out of the party because he's being a jerk. If that response happened anywhere else in the aspects of NationStates, they'd be warned or banned. And yet, suddenly, when it comes to the invasion-defending aspect of the game, it's now a legitimate counterargument.

If you have an issue with both of us taking the approach that we have, by giving out an unofficial warning for everyone to calm down, you're welcome to take it to Moderation. Otherwise, your point has no place here. Let's keep it on topic please.

[The Most Glorious Hack]

Then there's raiding. If raiders target your region, you CAN'T ignore them. THAT is why people dislike raiding. It's the only thing that people don't CHOOSE to participate in.

I do not like the daily update forcing my population up. I choose to no longer participate in it. Sadly, I cannot seem to find the checkbox on the settings page that will allow me to ignore this particular game function.

[Vojvodina-Nihon]

The immaturity of those NS players who profess to be adults has long since failed to amaze me. Exposure to the real world took care of that. It saddens me, though.

However, there are a lot of people suggesting that regions that don't want to be invaded should be allowed to "opt out" of the raiding system. I humbly suggest that those people are missing the point entirely.

If raiding was limited only to regions that wanted to be raided (or at least didn't mind being raided), that would ruin the whole raiding aspect of the game. The whole point is to raid regions that don't want to be raided. If they don't want to be raided, they'll muster an effective defense from their fear or irritation, or enlist someone who can. That's what makes raiding fun: if people enjoyed being raided, they wouldn't bother trying to defend themselves, there would be no gameplay politics, that whole part of the game would become boring.

I'm a RPer, for instance, not a gameplayer. I mostly ignore the game, in fact. Would I be pissed off if someone invaded my region and tried to eject me or my regionmates? Absolutely. But being pissed off isn't necessarily bad. See, when I get pissed off, I try to do something about it. In this case I would join the WA, enlist help from whatever defender organisations I could get in touch with and resist as strongly as possible. Depending on the outcome, I might even consider it fun after the fact -- I've done lots of things that have been annoying or painful at the time I did them, but afterwards looked back on fondly.

People have said that I/D is the only aspect of the game you can't opt out of. This is not really true. There's a fair bit of stuff built into the game engine you can't opt out of. You can't opt out of being in a region, for instance. You can't opt out of the WA census reports. You can't opt out of population growth, or having the same rate of it as everyone else. Et cetera. But there is an important difference -- all of those other things just involve your nation. I/D involves you.

To a large degree this is why we're having the whole WA + RP vs. I/D conflict in the first place. The WA and RP forums, after all, are concerned with the lives and machinations of your characters, your nations, your militaries. They are entirely dissociated from you the player. I/D, as it were, breaks the fourth wall. Suddenly NS isn't just about The Most Glorious and Majestic Emperor His Holiness Tarien Redblade Through Whom All Things Are Possible and his wacky misadventures, but about you, the player behind that character. It's like when your SAN level drops below a certain threshold in Eternal Darkness and the game engine starts screwing with your controller, randomly deleting stuff from your inventory and so on: making you doubt not just the sanity of your character in the game, but your own mental health as well.

That's what raiding is like, from a RP perspective: the comfortable divide between reality and NS becomes blurred. That makes you upset. That's the entire goal of the raiders, since they play the game on a level that involves the manipulation of people rather than characters. I suspect that to them, the idea of a RP war where the nations ICly hate each other but OOCly are best of friends would be utterly alien -- as are the very notions of IC and OOC.

So yes, you can't ignore raiding. Nor should you. You also can't ignore being punched in the face. Deal with it, and move on.

Wow, that went on for far too long.

[Bears Armed]

Alright, we've reached an impasse at this point. Obviously the RP'ers want to be left alone, but up to now there's not been a proposal that would allow this short of banning raiding entirely, which I don't want, and I'm sure that many of the RPers would agree with me there. We don't want to ruin the raiders's NS for them, at least not here.

We're here to brainstorm ideas for a solution, not to debate that there is a problem. I think the fact that 100% of the RPers that have weighed in support some form of restrictions on the ability of raiders to harass RPers that have no interest in being harassed in such a way, which is why we have passwords.

I do see the value of liberations of course, freeing regions held by raiders, but the proposal at had is ridiculously obviously an abuse of the system. Haven has not been taken by raiders. Haven is not in need of freeing at the moment. Of course, even if the proposal fails, as is expected, then the problem of founderless regions that have passwords for a damn good reason being exposed by bullshit liberations and subsequent greifing.

The best solution is a founder of course, but Haven lacks one. For this reason, the re-founding option that has been brought up several times seems to be the best option for Haven at this time, but has been ignored.

How about changing the rules so that Liberation proposals are only ‘legal’ if applied to regions that have actually been “occupied” against the natives’ will, and have this enforced by the Mods.
(Yes, I know, the Mods, don’t want to have to judge who is a ‘native’ & who isn’t… )

You could always kill founder off all together, I'd would solve re-founds because the region would always be open for someone to take over unless passworded, but it could be liberated and even if region like Haven were taken it could be taken back, even if re-founded.

I wasn’t around at the time, but weren’t Founders added to the game specifically because raiding was getting out of hand and Max agreed that the people who weren’t interested in that side of things needed an opt-out mechanism?

because it would kill the R/D gameplay

Well, no loss there...

Frankly? Go find your own game to play with people who want to play it. Y'all just can't get it when we RPers say "we don't want to play with you. Sorry."

*(agrees)*
There are online ’Risk’ sites, for example…

[Ananke]

The problem with getting rid of invading is that it won't only hurt that part of the gameplay crowd. All kinds of gameplay (I/D is only a subset) is driven by the fact that a real threat against regional/interregional stability exist. If you remove that threat, no matter how remote it is in most cases there won't really be much point to gameplay (meaning high level politics, diplomacy, spying/intel gathering, propaganda wars etc) anymore.

[Dread Lady Nathicana]

I think Derscon missed my point, which has been repeated, and repeatedly ignored.

I'm not against having this I/D part of the game. I'm irritated by the concept, sure, but I've taken advantage of the protections that have been in place for years now to ensure I don't have to deal with it if I don't want to. And while I realize it may be annoying, and create more work for people, I'm encouraging them to do the same.

At the same time, I'm asking the Admins and Moderators to take steps to ensure that the avenues available to regions who don't have a founder and don't wish to participate in I/D can do so without the messes we've seen in the past.

Clear-cut outline for How To Protect Your Region, step by step, so no one else gets banned for 'griefing' while trying to re-found a region.

A proper venue for addressing the inevitable problem of region hijacking by those interfering in the process of re-founding, and an assurance that such interference will be properly addressed.

Simple as that. No one loses, everyone has the option to opt in or out, rules will be clear-cut, additional problems will be avoided, and while extra work will be an issue, I figure its worth the effort if it gets you what you want.

So much for a 'lack of maturity', or 'reasonable suggestions'.

[The Merchant Guilds]

Is there actually a possibility of the mods assigning a nation "founder" status for Haven and offering to do the same for all non-founder regions?

Their are a few problems with assigning founders (As I understand it). Who do we assign?

Whoever the natives of that region vote for. I don't know how simple it would be game mechanics wise, but if you have an elected delegate then you could also elect a founder if the original founder disappeared.

And to what regions?

All founderless regions. It would actually give a more interesting (strategic gamer hat on) qwerk to the I/D game in so far as they would have to collect and use intelligence more than they currently do. I suspect in some ways all this has come about because the I/D game is a little repetitive and uniform (at least from where I am standing as an RPer and as an avid fan of strategy games of all varieties). Attacking Haven in this way adds a different level of difficulty to their game, precisely because they need to manipulate the WA, but at the same time you don't want the RP community being pointlessly harrassed by people they want nothing to do with effectively.

What happens if/when old founders come back?

Well it is tough cookies really, especially considering that vacation mode exists. The election of a new founder is simply an expedient for the region and to also offer opportunities for I/D gamers to have their fun.

And finally, if we do it now, why not to Region X after their founder disapears tomorrow?

Appointing a founder is a suggested temporary solution for Haven (the more permanent solution is suggested above [DLN's solution is another, simpler, way to do it]), because of the nature of what has occurred (i.e. raiders using a test case for breaking into password protected roleplay only regions [i.e. it is a completely new event as I understand it]). As for why Haven specifically well it would be a question of keeping active parts of the community happy. That is why I haven't advocated banning anything in regard to I/D [keeping them happy can be done by giving them a different kind of challenge as I've stated above], but at the same time by allowing I/D [which is from what I understand of it a minority on NS] to do this you are disrupting a good portion of the repeat users of NS as everyone wants to have fun, but nobody wants somebody wrecking their experience (since when this happens a lot of energy that would normally go into RPing goes into these kinds of issues and arguments get heated [since the last thing we want to be doing is this]).

As somebody said a raider can ignore our RP challenges, but we can't ignore the raiders wrecking of a regional community and all the bad blood that causes (even if the community itself is largely on outside board as NS is the anchor and recruitment ground if you like).

[Somewhereistonia]

I'm just wondering whether there might be some statistics for this somewhere.

Approximately how many I/D players are there (players, not nations)?

Approximately how many players have left the game after being invaded?

The second is going to be much harder to establish than the first but my hunch is, given how nobody seems to like invaders, that the second number is going to be much, much higher than the first. Obviously this is a guess but I think an educated one based on the number required to successfully invade etc. If this is indeed true then those arguing that banning raiding would kill off the game are sorely mistaken. Banning raiding, or keeping it out of Non I/D regions would most likely make the other game areas thrive.

Nobody outside of the I/D game can realistically be said to rely on it. Regional politics and interregional politics exist in many regions where this game is not present, they will survive, unhindered by raiding which they do not desire. As said, is there a problem with having seperated I/D regions? Sure, exactly how you do it would have to be worked out, but this can be worked out without too much difficulty in another, more technically minded, thread. Is there a problem with creating this separation? The only argument I can see is the vague assumption, based on bugger-all, that the I/D game will die if it is unable to fuck up everyone elses time here. If that really is true, then well, it is trolling and it should die. I do not think it is true, I think raiding can survive in I/D regions if it is set up right. As I've said before, the regions could be set up upon founding to be either I/D or Non I/D, with differing rules in the two. In the Non I/D regions, the game is strictly forbidden with as much done automatically to restrict the possibility of invasion. In the I/D regions, the system is set up in such as way as to actively encourage the raider game, whatever the changes here may be. This seems very fair to me. What is surprising is the lack of support or even acceptance of the possibility of entertaining this idea by the moderator team. I really, really do think that this should at least be discussed on a moderator level. If this debate is ever going to go away, you either have to ban raiding or allow everyone uninterested in it to opt-out easily. If not, this argument will continue until the very end of nationstates' existence. We have a problem, let's face it straight on.

[Vault 10]

NS isn't exactly one game. It's more like three or four different games that happen to be located in the same place, and sometimes they rub up against one another. This is one such case.

The problem is here not just with the raiding/invading part of the game.

Security Council is the worst game addition ever, by a long shot. All it contributes to the game is circlejerk. A bunch of feeder region delegates taking rounds commending each other, said jerking circle condemning nations and regions 99% of the game doesn't care about, and occasionally messing with other regions in worse ways than the usual invaders can.

Yes, NS is essentially several games in one. But here comes the kicker. The original game is the perfect game for 16 year olds - high school kids, believing they know everything exactly about how the world or at least their country should work. Classic WA falls somewhere around 16-18 - the same, but with the occasional need to compromise added. General is actually more along the lines of 40+ olds, disgruntled in their midlife crisis and arguing to no end about what they can't change; even though the actual audience is a lot younger. Roleplaying is more like 18-22 - similar to how the other RP is most popular among the nerdier college students.
What about invading/defending? Well, it's about who can gather the biggest crowd - so it's around 8-12 year olds - by the end of junior high people tend to develop a sense of self-identity other than what crowd they are a part of. And SC is largely the same. That is being generous; just three neurons would be overkill already for the I/D/SC game, since even unicellulars like volvox are known to form colonies (crowds), which is the whole point.

The level of sophistication and mental challenge offered by the I/D/SC game is so outrageously below the rest of the game that most normal player preferred to just ignore it and pretend it never happened. But now it's being forced on us. This reminds me of that Top Gear episode where they investigated whether smart people can perform the dumbest activity known to man and ape, tire burnouts (WA SC didn't exist yet). Except that time it was voluntary, and this time it's not.
Forcing the players of other games that form NS to participate in the SC raids is like modifying chess to require the players to slam their figures onto the board as forcefully as possible - and enforcing all chess tournaments to be played by these rules only.

Invaders/defenders is bad enough, but at least it was possible not to participate, by using password protection. Now, reinforced by SC, not only it's in-your-face all the time (why should normal players read about SC condemning #random.nation.no.one.cares.about# and other crap that only concerns a few nations out of 100,000?), but it's also running the risk of actively spoiling other parts of the game. Not that it doesn't already, of course; this is just a more outstanding example.

[Bluth Corporation]

No one denies that no one "wants" to be raided.

But certainly, it seems reasonable that if you want to play the part of the raider, you make yourself a legitimate target for being raided.

So why not have regions declare whether or not they are part of the raider/defender game altogether, rather than just "you can't raid us" as most people seem to be suggesting? So that way, if you declare that you can't be raided, you also prohibit yourself from being allowed to engage in raiding yourself?

It only seems right that if you want to play the raiding game, you have to play the whole game--and not just the raider side of it. That way, those who are truly interested in playing the raiding/defending game (rather than just being jerks to people for no reason at all) will actually be able to do so; and if no one chooses this option, that makes it pretty clear that those engaged in raiding right now weren't actually trying to play any sort of game, but were just interested in being jerks to people.

Yes, there is the problem of creating a consistent, reliable definition of what is and is not raiding in this case. But if we can agree that this is an acceptable solution to all in principle (which I think it should be, if those raiders are truly interested in playing a game), then that's a problem we can surely work out.

[No endorse]

So that way, if you declare that you can't be raided, you also prohibit yourself from being allowed to engage in raiding yourself?

This sort of thing is dubious at best.



Raiding works by a bunch of nations in the WA moving from one (or multiple) regions to a target and all endorsing either each other or one/several leaders. In terms of gameplay mechanics, this is just the normal move from region A to region B, with slightly more complexity. How do you stop that through settings?

[Bryn Shander]

Raiding works by a bunch of nations in the WA moving from one (or multiple) regions to a target and all endorsing either each other or one/several leaders. In terms of gameplay mechanics, this is just the normal move from region A to region B, with slightly more complexity. How do you stop that through settings?

You put a password on the region.


Oh, wait...

[Bluth Corporation]

So that way, if you declare that you can't be raided, you also prohibit yourself from being allowed to engage in raiding yourself?

This sort of thing is dubious at best.



Raiding works by a bunch of nations in the WA moving from one (or multiple) regions to a target and all endorsing either each other or one/several leaders. In terms of gameplay mechanics, this is just the normal move from region A to region B, with slightly more complexity. How do you stop that through settings?

You know what region they started from, do you not?

And again, this is what I was talking about--deciding clearly and consistently what constitutes raiding, and whether or not the solution is best implemented through in-game settings or through mod action; regardless, if we can agree that it's a good solution in principle certainly we can work out a way to implement it in practice.

[Bears Armed]

Then there's raiding. If raiders target your region, you CAN'T ignore them. THAT is why people dislike raiding. It's the only thing that people don't CHOOSE to participate in.

I do not like the daily update forcing my population up. I choose to no longer participate in it. Sadly, I cannot seem to find the checkbox on the settings page that will allow me to ignore this particular game function.

I realise that that was probably only meant metaphoricaly (Right term?), but if you really think that being able to set an upper limit on (or much slower growth-rate for) one's national population might be a nice feature then why not suggest its addition to the Admins? In fact, come to think of it, I might do that anyway now that the point has been raised...
However, why would you actually need a checkbox to ignore this factor? As its only real use (apart from as a rough guide to the nation's age) is in RP, and you'd need to define a lot of other factors about your nation apart from its population for [good] RP anyway, why not just mention the lower population-level in your RP descriptions of the country -- and maybe in your sig, as I do for this nation -- anyway?
In fact, come to think of it, weren't you the Mod who has already described one of their nations (perhaps even 'TMG Hack' itself?) as having a population of only 4 -- even if one of those is a widepsread AI network -- for RP purposes?

So yes, you can't ignore raiding. Nor should you. You also can't ignore being punched in the face.

Right: And if you're punched in the face then you can either counterattack -- not a very viable option in this NS context, as the raiders' home regions will either be safely protected or be relatively unimportant to them -- or complain to the law... which in this case is the Mods & Admins... which is what people here are trying to do.
Can you really imagine a RL society in which the authorities would tell people that getting punched in the face by random strangers was just a fact of living there to which they'd have to become accustomed?!?

[Oh my Days]

This is exactly why I proposed the Liberation, to highlight the fact that they are completely abusive. Before, RPers and other players could avoid the I/D game altogether, as Haven did for many years by putting a password up, but now they can't because the WA has become far too powerful and is eroding the natives' right to run their own region. I am probably not going to be able to pass this, I don't have enough political clout or enough people to telegram for it, but TNI and co probably could, just look at the way they almost derailed Liberate Free Thought and if there was still a raider power the size of Gatesville at its peak, they certainly could.

Raiding is not the problem, raiding is necessary to encourage activity and raider groups often encourage activity but Liberations are creating disincentives to raid. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the feature to add regions to dossiers and the ejectban buttons have made invading harder, and the dual update time has made it harder to keep hold of a region once it is taken, that is now only possible for the larger organisations as they can summon the most numbers, anyone who tries to set up a raider group with a few friends will not have a chance. The disincentives not only ruin the game for raiders, but risk substantially decreasing activity as raiders are no longer around to encourage it. They are also causing raiders to look further afield for targets, and in this case Haven became a target. The problem is Liberations, they have put far too much power in the hands of WA bureaucrats and increasingly, regions like Haven are going to fall victim. Liberations must go.