[PASSED] Historical Region Act

[Grea Kriopia]

This proposal no longer calls for offensive Liberations, only Liberations when and if the last remaining nation within the region is about to CTE. There's a vast difference between those two things.

There's really not. That is still a preemptive liberation, regardless of what term you want to use, which ignores native consent and would be as Luca literally said to decide historically founderless regions have less sovereignty than other regions. I don't understand why you refuse to drop this clause after failing to give a compelling argument for its continued inclusion.

Also, there's nothing at all saying that those Liberations can't be repealed as soon as the region is secured by non-threatening forces like defenders. There's a possibility I could even add a clause calling for a neutral defense force to secure the regions in question and to hold them under password, to be handed over to original native populations if they return.

This is somehow worse, lol? Defenders or "neutral forces" have no place subjugating a region under a password or otherwise for its own supposed good.

[Unibot III]

Grea, what happens in the case where a surviving native is inactive and cannot provide consent to an immediate WA Liberation submission?

Isn’t presumed consent better for the security of the region than presumed non-consent?

I mean.. a WA Liberation can be repealed, a region cannot be undestroyed.

I bring it up because realistically many of the regions we’re talking about are very inactive.

[Luna Amore]

From my post here: posting.php?mode=quote&f=12&p=39502727

Nearly half of the truly founderless regions that existed February 2012 have ceased to exist. Here's the state of those formerly founderless regions today:

Region	Nation Count	Border Status
Alliance of Socialist States	1	Founder|Open
Apolyton	1	Founder|Open
Asmer	1	Founder|Open
Blammus	n/a	n/a
CRFH	n/a	n/a
Discordia	9	Founder|Open
Free Dominion	n/a	n/a
GameFAQs	2	Founder|Open
GameFaqs WoT	n/a	n/a
Linux	n/a	n/a
Mare Unae	0	n/a
Pyoko	1	Founder|Locked
Relic	n/a	n/a
Sev Space	n/a	n/a
Snopesean Archipelago	n/a	n/a
Suomi	5	ex-Founder|Locked
The Gray Waste	n/a	n/a
The Heights of Azure	1	Founder|Open
The Region of United Nations	n/a	n/a
Three Valley	n/a	n/a
Uberwald	1	Founder|Locked
Vlaanderen	109	Founder|Open

Vlaanderen looks like an outlier at first, but the RMB shows the last message was nearly a year ago. Absent the founderless status, these regions still stagnate or just completely don't exist. Nobody is beating down the doors to create communities here.

The better question is why anyone thinks they have a duty to protect something that has done just fine by itself for two decades? If I wanted to let LUE cease-to-exist at this point, isn't that my prerogative?

[Refuge Isle]

I wasn’t suggesting defenders would necessarily play an active role in a historical society.

Time has passed, but not enough time has passed for me to forget the day to day work that goes into defending

Apparently it has, because you seem oblivious to the fact that when a founderless region is able to be entered by raiders, it will be. You seem oblivious to the fact that natives who are no longer able to be protected by their own passwords will have to be protected by something else, and that's us. If you want to break open a region for "history's sake", but don't think that defenders will have to take on the responsibility to make sure they don't get melted, you've got some poor arithmetic somewhere along the way.

If a native in a near dead passworded UCR gives their password out accidentally to an invader spy who is phishing for the password, defenders won’t be able to intervene until 1) the native awakes and gives you the password (could take days/weeks), 2) a WA Liberation is passed (could potentially take a while), or 3) the password is obtained through raider intelligence (only a possibility.)

They seem to have done okay for the last twenty years, so I can't say that the concern necessitates the nanny state you're trying to force defenders to adopt. If the founder does give out their password to someone, it remains their decision. It's their region, and not yours, and for some reason I cannot seem to get you lot to understand that.

Likewise, if a log-in script fails, someone needs to catch this in time to submit a WA Liberation to intervene, and these things aren’t necessarily always caught right away.

If a login script fails and the region dies, it dies. That's it. Dozens of regions CTE every freaking day, that's their natural end, the story stops. There's zero reason to peel off these regions' skin, put it on our face and make them dance around like everything's fine or act like they're going to come back. A dead region serves no purpose, and the fact that these regions don't have a founder is no reason to commandeer control.

I believe in the right of self-determination, but there has to be a point where we question the capacity for self-determination. Does a native community even exist anymore?

If you want to seize control of a region without the consent of its owner(s) because you want to take control of it, that is called "raiding".

It is no wonder that the LWU leader has been interested in this proposal coming to fruition. If I were a raider, I would be on these liberations like white on rice.

This proposal no longer calls for offensive Liberations, only Liberations when and if the last remaining nation within the region is about to CTE. There's a vast difference between those two things.

They are ALL offensive liberations unless they are at the request of the natives.

[Lenlyvit]

This proposal no longer calls for offensive Liberations, only Liberations when and if the last remaining nation within the region is about to CTE. There's a vast difference between those two things.

There's really not. That is still a preemptive liberation, regardless of what term you want to use, which ignores native consent and would be as Luca literally said to decide historically founderless regions have less sovereignty than other regions. I don't understand why you refuse to drop this clause after failing to give a compelling argument for its continued inclusion.

Also, there's nothing at all saying that those Liberations can't be repealed as soon as the region is secured by non-threatening forces like defenders. There's a possibility I could even add a clause calling for a neutral defense force to secure the regions in question and to hold them under password, to be handed over to original native populations if they return.

This is somehow worse, lol? Defenders or "neutral forces" have no place subjugating a region under a password or otherwise for its own supposed good.

I wasn’t suggesting defenders would necessarily play an active role in a historical society.

Time has passed, but not enough time has passed for me to forget the day to day work that goes into defending

Apparently it has, because you seem oblivious to the fact that when a founderless region is able to be entered by raiders, it will be. You seem oblivious to the fact that natives who are no longer able to be protected by their own passwords will have to be protected by something else, and that's us. If you want to break open a region for "history's sake", but don't think that defenders will have to take on the responsibility to make sure they don't get melted, you've got some poor arithmetic somewhere along the way.

If a native in a near dead passworded UCR gives their password out accidentally to an invader spy who is phishing for the password, defenders won’t be able to intervene until 1) the native awakes and gives you the password (could take days/weeks), 2) a WA Liberation is passed (could potentially take a while), or 3) the password is obtained through raider intelligence (only a possibility.)

They seem to have done okay for the last twenty years, so I can't say that the concern necessitates the nanny state you're trying to force defenders to adopt. If the founder does give out their password to someone, it remains their decision. It's their region, and not yours, and for some reason I cannot seem to get you lot to understand that.

Likewise, if a log-in script fails, someone needs to catch this in time to submit a WA Liberation to intervene, and these things aren’t necessarily always caught right away.

If a login script fails and the region dies, it dies. That's it. Dozens of regions CTE every freaking day, that's their natural end, the story stops. There's zero reason to peel off these regions' skin, put it on our face and make them dance around like everything's fine or act like they're going to come back. A dead region serves no purpose, and the fact that these regions don't have a founder is no reason to commandeer control.

I believe in the right of self-determination, but there has to be a point where we question the capacity for self-determination. Does a native community even exist anymore?

If you want to seize control of a region without the consent of its owner(s) because you want to take control of it, that is called "raiding".

It is no wonder that the LWU leader has been interested in this proposal coming to fruition. If I were a raider, I would be on these liberations like white on rice.

This proposal no longer calls for offensive Liberations, only Liberations when and if the last remaining nation within the region is about to CTE. There's a vast difference between those two things.

They are ALL offensive liberations unless they are at the request of the natives.

When the last native nation(s) is about to CTE, there is no more native consent left to give. I don't view these as preemptive Liberations, only as trying to preserve what the original inhabitants originally built before it's lost forever. That's something that I would think the natives would want, to preserve their legacies.

From my post here: posting.php?mode=quote&f=12&p=39502727

Nearly half of the truly founderless regions that existed February 2012 have ceased to exist. Here's the state of those formerly founderless regions today:

Region	Nation Count	Border Status
Alliance of Socialist States	1	Founder|Open
Apolyton	1	Founder|Open
Asmer	1	Founder|Open
Blammus	n/a	n/a
CRFH	n/a	n/a
Discordia	9	Founder|Open
Free Dominion	n/a	n/a
GameFAQs	2	Founder|Open
GameFaqs WoT	n/a	n/a
Linux	n/a	n/a
Mare Unae	0	n/a
Pyoko	1	Founder|Locked
Relic	n/a	n/a
Sev Space	n/a	n/a
Snopesean Archipelago	n/a	n/a
Suomi	5	ex-Founder|Locked
The Gray Waste	n/a	n/a
The Heights of Azure	1	Founder|Open
The Region of United Nations	n/a	n/a
Three Valley	n/a	n/a
Uberwald	1	Founder|Locked
Vlaanderen	109	Founder|Open

Vlaanderen looks like an outlier at first, but the RMB shows the last message was nearly a year ago. Absent the founderless status, these regions still stagnate or just completely don't exist. Nobody is beating down the doors to create communities here.

The better question is why anyone thinks they have a duty to protect something that has done just fine by itself for two decades? If I wanted to let LUE cease-to-exist at this point, isn't that my prerogative?

As the last and final native of LUE, that is definitely your prerogative and your choice. I don't think there's anything in this proposal that would be against that, but I might add something that explicitly states that if I need to.

[Refuge Isle]

When the last native nation(s) is about to CTE, there is no more native consent left to give. I don't view these as preemptive Liberations, only as trying to preserve what the original inhabitants originally built before it's lost forever. That's something that I would think the natives would want, to preserve their legacies.

If it's no long possible to acquire consent, guess what? You'll never get it.

Being unable to acquire consent is not suddenly a green light for you to raid their region and do with it what you want, it's the modus operandi of TBH, LWU, and BoM. If the region dies because it CTEs in a passworded state, that's their decision and their administration, not yours. It is their right to despawn without your obsession with its brand of being founderless. They are worth no more than any other region, and entitled to no less sovereignty. Why in the world do you think you're in a position to decide what regions can and cannot naturally CTE.

[Lenlyvit]

When the last native nation(s) is about to CTE, there is no more native consent left to give. I don't view these as preemptive Liberations, only as trying to preserve what the original inhabitants originally built before it's lost forever. That's something that I would think the natives would want, to preserve their legacies.

If it's no long possible to acquire consent, guess what? You'll never get it.

Being unable to acquire consent is not suddenly a green light for you to raid their region and do with it what you want, it's the modus operandi of TBH, LWU, and BoM. If the region dies because it CTEs in a passworded state, that's their decision and their administration, not yours. It is their right to despawn without your obsession with its brand of being founderless. They are worth no more than any other region, and entitled to no less sovereignty. Why in the world do you think you're in a position to decide what regions can and cannot naturally CTE.

Let me get one thing straight, I am not a raider. I have never been a raider, and never will be one. You have absolutely no right to call me such, especially after I spent the better part of 5 years dedicated to protecting innocent regions and communities from destruction by raiders. This resolution is about protecting these regions status as the few last historical Founderless regions, and preserving them in their natural form. The only thing that trump's that is the will of the native population which I've tried to convey within the resolution.

Also, let's not forget that Liberations are voted upon by the international community. If one were to pass, it would be because the international community deemed that it must. I have faith in their choices when it comes to such a vote, and faith that any Liberation against a natives wishes will be sunk like they normally are.

[Lenlyvit]

I've gone ahead and added another clause that calls for voting against any Liberation resolutions that are against the express will of the native community.

Edit: I've also removed the Liberation clause in favor of the one just added.

[Refuge Isle]

Let me get one thing straight, I am not a raider. I have never been a raider, and never will be one. You have absolutely no right to call me such

No, let me get one thing straight for you. If you are commandeering someone else's region without their permission because you want to do something with it, that is raiding. I couldn't care less if you were in defending for ten years or founded the faction. It's a hypocritical stance for you to say it's fine for you to do it, but not fine for BoM. I understand that you passed liberations 2020 and prior which did not have the consent of the native population, which you lied that you had at the time, but since that time, the faction has maintained a strict standard to get that permission before going ahead with it. And you've just said that if the region is about to CTE, consent doesn't really matter if you can't get it. You're in the wrong era.

I've gone ahead and added another clause that calls for voting against any Liberation resolutions that are against the express will of the native community.

Edit: I've also removed the Liberation clause in favor of the one just added.

The position that natives have to specifically say they DON'T want a liberation is zero percent better. You are literally now adopting a "silence is consent" approach. They're still not your property.

[Lenlyvit]

Let me get one thing straight, I am not a raider. I have never been a raider, and never will be one. You have absolutely no right to call me such

No, let me get one thing straight for you. If you are commandeering someone else's region without their permission because you want to do something with it, that is raiding. I couldn't care less if you were in defending for ten years or founded the faction. It's a hypocritical stance for you to say it's fine for you to do it, but not fine for BoM. I understand that you passed liberations 2020 and prior which did not have the consent of the native population, which you lied that you had at the time, but since that time, the faction has maintained a strict standard to get that permission before going ahead with it. And you've just said that if the region is about to CTE, consent doesn't really matter if you can't get it. You're in the wrong era.

I've gone ahead and added another clause that calls for voting against any Liberation resolutions that are against the express will of the native community.

Edit: I've also removed the Liberation clause in favor of the one just added.

The position that natives have to specifically say they DON'T want a liberation is zero percent better. You are literally now adopting a "silence is consent" approach. They're still not your property.

You're going to have to help me find this supposed liberation I've lied about having native support on, I've looked through all of the threads I could think of that I've created and can't find it. To the best of my recollection I've never lied about having native support, and if that recollection is correct I'd like an apology for calling me a liar when I am not one.

[Tinhampton]

Liberate Syria was passed without explicit native support (and we are now extremely unlikely to get rid of it).

[Lenlyvit]

Liberate Syria was passed without explicit native support (and we are now extremely unlikely to get rid of it).

And that was something I was pretty straightforward on, I think? I looked back through the thread and read the posts, and I didn't see anywhere where I claimed to have express native support. Just the possible support of a former native I think. Also, I attempted to sink that proposal at the end by asking Tubbius to vote against, and instead he voted for which made it a wider margin than it should have been.

[Unibot III]

If you want to seize control of a region without the consent of its owner(s) because you want to take control of it, that is called "raiding".

No one is suggesting seizing control of a region unilaterally, I am however suggesting seizing back control from invaders under reasonably presumed consent and returning control to whatever remains of the native community.

Defenders operate on a principle of presumed consent for much of their day to day activities. Yet, WA Liberations have developed into something where the threshold of consent is expected to be higher. Why? Because invaders in the 2010s wanted more legal obstacles to pursuing WA Liberations.

You can go echoing invader-talking points all you like, but it doesn’t change the basic facts that regional destruction is irreparable, native reactions are often delayed, and most rational people don’t want their own regions destroyed.

If you don’t want to be resuscitated, sign a Do-Not-Resuscitate Order. But don’t come crying to the Doctor if they bring you back to life otherwise.

[Christian Confederation]

Why not just preserve the oldest/ most populated/ last to exist once the others CTE? No reson to waste resources on a dozen plus reasons for the point of "Look here newby that region is as old as the website!"

It's a nice idea but in the long run not really worth the effort. This isn't like searching for lost media that was thought destroyed in a studio archive fire, it's just what people were talking about 20 years ago. It's probably what most RMBs look like now but the slag and references are from the 2000s.

[Refuge Isle]

If you want to seize control of a region without the consent of its owner(s) because you want to take control of it, that is called "raiding".

No one is suggesting seizing control of a region unilaterally, I am however suggesting seizing back control from invaders under reasonably presumed consent and returning control to whatever remains of the native community.

This proposal no longer calls for offensive Liberations, only Liberations when and if the last remaining nation within the region is about to CTE. There's a vast difference between those two things.

I guess you missed the point when the author said it was his goal to break into regions whose last native was CTEing to prevent the region from despawning. It's a pretty sad day when a proposal's loudest proponent is Unibot, but you're not even arguing on topic. It isn't a discussion about what to do during a raid, it's about liberating regions that are either fine on their own, or going to naturally CTE on their own. That is the part where you're breaking into someone's region and doing with it what you want.

If you don’t want to be resuscitated, sign a Do-Not-Resuscitate Order. But don’t come crying to the Doctor if they bring you back to life otherwise.

Presumed consent arguments are personally disgusting to me, but once again to correct you back to the subject, it's less of an issue of "we don't know whether or not to treat this 20 year old with a gunshot wound" and more of a "we should break into this 107 year old's house and forcing them up to life support because it's kinda cool they're 107, wonder how long we can draw it out"

[Unibot III]

It's a pretty sad day when a proposal's loudest proponent is Unibot, but you're not even arguing on topic

Well I think someone has to dispute your line of argument and since nobody else is, that leaves me.

I’ll add nothing you’re talking about is in the proposed resolution.

Presumed consent arguments are personally disgusting to me, but once again to correct you back to the subject, it's less of an issue of "we don't know whether or not to treat this 20 year old with a gunshot wound" and more of a "we should break into this 107 year old's house and forcing them up to life support because it's kinda cool they're 107, wonder how long we can draw it out"

I’m frankly baffled by this attitude: you’re acting as though it is some kind of chore or a negative for veteran players if the destruction of their region (that they’ve helped to keep alive for two decades), and which they had no say in, is aborted.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of faulty logic from an invader, but from a defender it’s puzzling since it calls into question your motivation for defending to begin with.

1) When you’re invaded, it interferes with your right to self-determination. The people impacted by the invasion aren’t getting to make a free choice about the direction of their region.
2) The right to self-determination isn’t conditional on how much attention you pay to Update or NS. Your right to run your region doesn’t diminish as you’ve played NS for longer and you develop other priorities and focuses in life.
3) Regions are often meaningful to players who have played an active/passive role in sustaining them for years or decades.
4) Most players are reasonably annoyed when their region is invaded.

These are basic understandings that go into defending.

Presumed consent for necessary action against region griefing underpins everything that defending does. You cannot stop an invasion without presumed consent — there’s not enough time to consult a native community, you have to move in and either endorse the native delegate or use your own team to block the invasion. You can tell yourself that’s not an issue needing prior consent because you’re ‘only’ endorsing the delegate or your only ‘preventing’ the invasion. But you’re still directly intervening to prevent the invasion. Applying the logic of presumed consent to defences but not liberations in the event of inactive natives implies there is some kind of difference to you in terms of their moral quality. Both but defences and liberations are just interventions to ensure control of the region lies with the natives, when natives cannot be reached in a necessary timeframe.

EDIT:

I want to add that back 12-13 years ago now (fuck me), defender-authors like me and Sedge and others were faced with a political dilemma when we first pursued WA Liberations: they were new, they were controversial, and the electorate felt icky about them as it was regarded as an intervention against regional sovereignty that needed to conform to strict expectations to be justified. Invaders and imperialists and some people, who today might be considered independents, took advantage of that spirit, and fueled the moral panic because they correctly understood that WA Liberations were an effective tool to use against regional destruction.

This forced us to make necessary political compromises, establishing conventional ‘limits’ and the need for explicit written consent for action by almost all parties involved, because we had to demonstrate moderation and the restrictiveness of this policy to get legislation passed and help who could be helped. I find it really sad to see defenders today sort of adopt that posturing from then as morally significant, when it was in fact just political maneuvering on my part and others: we were trying to deal with the hand we had. I felt that as WA Liberations became more common, the electorate would be open to its use to help native communities and the balance would swing to them, rather than their critics (i.e., invaders). The reality is many of the regions you’re dealing with as a defender are inactive, natives can’t always be reached in a timely manner, and it never sat right with me that the WA’s default position is to assume they want to be invaded or potentially destroyed by their occupiers unless they say otherwise, when the opposite of course is invariably true for most people.

It’s a hard lesson that sometimes when you’re rolling a sausage, you have to be prepared to eat it, because you can’t disassemble it once it’s made.

[Xanthal]

This proposal isn't about the tenets of defending in general, it's about applying a mandate of preservation to Founderless regions in particular. Nobody is saying that regions with an active native community that is at risk of being displaced by raiders don't deserve a spirited defense, but it's a fair point to make that dead and dying regions ceasing to exist is part of a healthy lifecycle and not normally considered cause for defender intervention. Refuge Isle is right to say that defending such regions simply because they happen to be Founderless is a poor use of limited resources, and to question the ethics of defenders taking the leadership role in such regions to effect conservation.

In principle I'm more inclined to let a region CTE than be kept on life support as a historical curiosity to be gawked at, but when in practice the choice is between preserving the corpse or letting raiders desecrate it- well, I've clearly chosen the former for my own region. That said, I do not consider it reasonable to make defenders responsible for the indefinite upkeep of SPACE or any other inactive region when no natives could otherwise be bothered.

[Lenlyvit]

To be honest, I’m starting to not understand the arguments here anymore. The liberation clause was removed in favor of one that calls for voting against a liberation unless it has native support, which is what I thought people wanted? Also, I tried making an emphasis on the regions rights to dictate their own future with a nod to regional sovereignty. I could add more emphasis on that, which I might, after getting feedback from the region South Pacific. Also, this doesn’t call on just defenders to do things despite what some may be saying here. It calls on all regions or organizations, which includes defenders, imperialists, indepents, etc etc.

[Xanthal]

My reservations at this point are mostly practical: maintaining a region requires work, and if the native community- assuming there even is one- is unwilling or unable to put in that work, someone else is going to have to. Otherwise these "preserved" regions will just be a revolving door of tag raiders.

Founderless regions that have any kind of active player base already have access to the resources they need to protect themselves by whatever means they see fit. The ones that don't are dead or nearly dead. In that case, it's worth asking what exactly we're hoping to save by keeping them around.

This proposal predicates that keeping them Founderless is reason enough. I personally find that dubious, but the popularity of the original version indicates public opinion is with you so I'm willing to entertain the premise. However, I know from bitter experience what a Founderless region looks like when it has no active caretaker. Who fills that role and how are important questions.

[Lenlyvit]

So, there's a very substantial change to the proposal that's basically a total rewrite and also has a name change. I would like feedback on the changes and whether they work, so I can't wait to see them!

[Comfed]

Further naming the regions within this category of ancient regions that had a founder nation selected to lead them, and subsequently were appointed by the gods themselves, to be Europe, 10000 Islands, Texas, The Heartland, Wysteria, Nasicournia, and Axis of Absurdity.

I am fairly positive that this is not accurate, and that the list of regions which have had founders appointed for them is very long.

[Lenlyvit]

Further naming the regions within this category of ancient regions that had a founder nation selected to lead them, and subsequently were appointed by the gods themselves, to be Europe, 10000 Islands, Texas, The Heartland, Wysteria, Nasicournia, and Axis of Absurdity.

I am fairly positive that this is not accurate, and that the list of regions which have had founders appointed for them is very long.

As of now, that's all I have to go on. I'm not sure how I'll be able to figure out what the other regions are without someone telling me, but if I do figure it out I'll make the necessary change.

[Lenlyvit]

I am fairly positive that this is not accurate, and that the list of regions which have had founders appointed for them is very long.

As of now, that's all I have to go on. I'm not sure how I'll be able to figure out what the other regions are without someone telling me, but if I do figure it out I'll make the necessary change.

As promised I've made that change to the proposal after finding out how many regions might still be in existence. I've also made some other slight adjustments.

[Lenlyvit]

I'm going to go ahead and move this to last call, to be submitted sometime during the vote on Valentine Z. I'm pretty comfortable with the current writing of the resolution.

[Lenlyvit]

This proposal has officially been submitted!