Bears Armed wrote:Disposablepuppetland wrote:Raiding is a necessary part of the game,
The rest of us
(which one actual raider estimated, in a thread earlier this year about changes in the game, to be about 90% of the players) could and would get along with our other aspects of the game perfectly well if there was no raiding at all...
Are you referring to
this? Personally, I found that the result saying that about a third of the active playerbase was
interested in raiding/defending a lot more telling than the one that said that only 10% thought it was the most important aspect.
There's a lot more interest in raiding/defending than those well outside of it realize. That said, there's a lot more outside of it than those inside of it realize, and
nobody, it seems, makes up a majority of the game. That doesn't mean it ought to be considered the domain of a tiny minority, because it isn't.
Darkesia wrote:...defend the helpless, the innocent, the ignorant? Come on, Nai. No one, not even Biyah or Tres could believe that.
You see, what I find incredible, is that you
really seem to believe this.
We all know that the defender community has lots of people who don't believe it. There are plenty of defenders and organizations that are in it for purely cynical reasons, and both the invader and defender communities have a rather hefty population of people who hopped over to give the other side a try. Despite this, there are indeed plenty of people who
really believe in defender ideology. For everyone who says defender things with tongue lodged firmly in cheek, there's at least someone who genuinely believes that they're doing a good turn. And y'know, a lot of the time they are.
Indeed, the defender community wouldn't exist without them. All defenders - even the ones with 'defender' scrawled over their passkeys to the Old Raiding Club's rum cellar - need the fact that there are true believers to give their cause purpose. Without that ideology and those that stand by it, defenders could not recruit, could not organize, and could not run. Invaders are not much different in the respect of need for ideology; invaders are by no means a rigidly structured group and a lot of different sorts are doing it for a lot of different reasons. Most invaders really aren't fiery old-school raiders who preach about "fenda hegemony", raider unity and the sanctity of a geomorphic gamemap, but the raider community would be a lot less significant if those people didn't exist.
(Note to TORC members: Change the lock on the rum cellar already.)