Region hawking is a problem because it locks up possible region names from use by players who would put the region to use. A region is in use if it is home to a single player, if it houses a community, or if it is being used as puppet storage. A region is not in use if it does not serve one of these functions. Thus the offending players are those who control many regions (rather than few), and use none of them to build a community or to store groups of puppet nations. I know there are at least two players in existence who use this practice to maintain control of 100+ regions: (1)Macadon, which has maintained control of its share of regions for many years, (2) the Guardien Network, which is a few years younger than Macadon, and hawks many regions in the name of creating a secure environment - despite the fact that no one wants to be members of their regions.
This thread is intended as a place to produce and discuss solutions to this problem. Any and all ideas with the goal of limiting the affect of region hawks are in order here. But keep in mind that solutions should err on the side of not affecting regions that are part of a hawk's collection. Just because a region has 1 nation and has been that way for awhile is not an indication of egregious hawking, and a player who has founded three regions is not necessarily doing so for the sole purpose of collecting and letting them collect dust. The problem is players who found an extreme number of regions and hold on to them for multiple years.
So far, we have three possible ways to address the problem:
- Limit the number of regions one person can found
- Change rules for region CTE
- Conditionally allow regions of the same name to exist
*Region hawking refers to refounding and simultaniously holding many regions while doing nothing with them.