Klaus Devestatorie wrote:So Rose became Queen of the Commonwealth. In hindsight, this would have been a bad time to unify the founders underneath the control of the monarch.
There were some shady sorts of people floating around the Commonwealth of the time. Lord Alphanesia, for example, had already showed up at least once (but I can't, for the life of me, remember what his agenda was). There were definitely some other personalities that I don't remember; but the group of people that are going to matter the most are indeed "The Aeazen Combine"- which LA was a member of. For reference, Aeazer was already a DOS player; he'd been made DOS all the way back in pre-influence days, along with a large chunk of their organization and their O.G. leaders.
Aeazer should probably not have been allowed back into NationStates; but he'd been able to quitely return because Rose had given him one of her nations ("Alistair Ghent"). This account had been reported a lot at the time, but game mods said there was no problem with his presence in the game. They did not seem to remember that he was in fact DOS until, bizarrely, the Gatesville coup of Osiris in 2013, and then, to my extreme irritation, they claimed they'd never had any idea who "Alistair Ghent" had belonged to. The truth is, it was probably only in 2013 that Aeazer actually confirmed on-site himself that he was the player behind "Alistair Ghent", but it still seems a bit silly that he'd not been detected for so long; there was a boatload of evidence that would have probably been taken into account today.
Rose quietly invited Lord Alphanesia, Aeazer, and all of their friends to the Commonwealth on a more permanent basis; she also added Audux to the Commonwealth, the old French themed home of the wider Alphanesian family. There were definitely people in regions like Hampshire who issued warnings about this to us, but those warnings were probably blown off.
The Aeazen Combine made themselves at home; they weren't invisible, of course, but most members didn't really recognize them as "The Aeazen Combine" or anything (most of us had no prior NS experience before the Commonwealth, including me)- just friends of Queen Rose. Eventually, they decided to run for government, as one, and they did. They took all 8 of 9 seats in the House of Commons (more on that in a bit), and they also took the Prime Minister spot. They did this with the blessing of Queen Rose; they also involved people such as Rix who had been on the outskirts of Commonwealth society for some time. But there was one other big Commonwealth figure who found out- Charles, who was not participating much, but still respected as the root admin of the forums and the guy who allowed us to be so successful in the first place. At the end of the election, he blew the whistle, and exposed the whole thing.
I was actually dead centre in the middle of this particular mess. While I wasn't exactly considered truly trustworthy or anything, I was working on being less of an utter shithead (episodes did occur), and I'd eventually grown the confidence to run for office at the time. When I'd won a position in the House of Commons, I was thrilled; but Charles showed me on the morning of the day he blew the whistle (night before, my time) that I'd only won because one of the Aeazen Combine agents had gone inactive (Kazaman). I was not a member of the Aeazen Combine myself (and they never would have let me in), but I was a member of the Alphanesian family- I got on well with LA, and Rose, and so on, and so they decided I was a safe bet for someone they could control, and they all switched their votes to me.
(...)
The Commonwealth was a raider region. Today, it'd be fairly accurately listed as an "Independent", although I don't think either The New Inquisition or Europeia were ever particularly fond of it. We did not raid to deliberately be evil, or based on any kind of ideology (which was the norm of the day among raider orgs); we did it because we felt like it. In fact, the main reason why we went for raiding over defending was because the main person from the defender side of affairs that was trying to woo us was Falconias, and we could tell that a; he was simultaneously being dishonest and trying to set up spies in the Commonwealth, and b; whenever we raided, he got mad about it, which was funny. So we leaned towards raiding. We sometimes worked with The Dominion and Unknown, sometimes with Europeia and The New Inquisition, but most of the time we were just doing our own thing. Sometimes, we'd even both raid and defend in the same update; we were messing around with what would now be called "switchers" well before anyone else ever bothered.
The large size of our community meant that we were able to do some cool, long forgotten stuff. For starters, Lazarus had repeatedly been subjected to coups over the previous few years and had been held by Killer Kitties for some time. But Lazarus did not have the ability to eject nations at the time- so 8 or 9 of us endoswapped up to challenge Killer Kitties, and eventually Charles pipped him with the puppet Razril Island. Killer Kitties agreed to make no contest out of the matter if we granted his raider org access to our recruitment lists, and we agreed; and that's how I met the guy behind Killer Kitties- Evil Wolf. Lone Wolves United became a member of the Commonwealth (for maybe 4-5 months), and Evil Wolf agreed to lead our military. Lazarus was restored to the Emerald Republic (eventually- I think at one point, Charles literally gave Razril Island to Rose for a birthday present), and we moved on. This was well before Charles quit as King. In addition, underneath the governance of Queen Rose and the assistance of The Dominion, Europeia (and to be fair, about a dozen members of the Aeazen Combine), we were able to launch a full emergency countercoup of The West Pacific and return into to ROLHEATH, who as I recall, was notable for exclusively communicating in haiku. The TWP operation involved about 40 Commonwealth endorsements. Doesn't sound like much, but remember again- the game was less than a quarter of the size it is now.
If we go back to the thing with Charles favouring one political party over the other, well, one of the reasons why Charles favoured that party is because he wanted to raid; and the party was full of people who did want to raid. The other party weren't quite as hard core about it. They raided, but they had problems with, for example, "griefing". After the end of King Charles, and the end of Queen Rose, the majority of established people in the realm were from the other party, and suddenly, they were in control of the foreign policy of the Commonwealth.
The biggest raider org in operation at the time was Unknown; but the relationship became adversarial between some of the new Commonwealth leadership and Unknown itself, due to exactly this attitude about "griefing". Kazaman in particular caused a big problem when he tried to push the original Archemperor, Gerzam, into launching a coup against Savaer, the new and current Archemperor. Kazaman also personally caused me problems, a rather new member of Unknown, by trying to have me banned from Unknown and The Dominion for being an Aeazen Combine spy. I wasn't; and frankly, unless he was the one who blew the whistle on the Aeazen Combine rigging the election under Rose, I'd be forced to conclude that he was one himself. Kazaman also actually shows up very occasionally, so maybe he could shed some light on that.
Further drama between the Commonwealth and both a former leader of TBOB (Station Man/St Mason, who had just founded Grand Central at the time), and OOC drama between a then rising star of Unknown's legions (rEVOLutionaire, known as Lyncaenia in Unknown and later LWU) and certain other members of the Commonwealth closed that working relationship for good.
I was appointed Director of the Commonwealth Intelligence Agency (CWIA) in early 2009 under the premiership of Almaric Richardson, just prior to the AC's power grab in The Commonwealth of that year. I had been aware of the AC only vaguely before this, from their involvement in great power conflicts in 2005-2006 that were distilled to me in my earliest months playing NS. Most of what I knew was that they were a griefer organisation that held no particular ideological loyalty to the invader-sphere, and that many of their members had been banned from the game in the past.
I can't remember who gave me the information (and it's sort of moot anyway since, as Dev said, so many people were noticing strange things about the new crowd of "Rose's friends"), but at some point I was tipped off about the AC's presence in the region. I immediately launched a CWIA investigation into the extent of the AC's infiltration, although those records were unfortunately lost (I didn't migrate the CWIA forums before Tapatalk's grace period ended). The primary objective of this investigation was to discover which forum members were involved with the AC, beyond the obvious core who ran for election under the same party. This investigation was in cooperation with Charles, the root admin of the forums. I was to find as many names as possible as quickly as possible, and ban them all at once in one go. The thinking at the time was that if we missed anyone important, the bans would spook them and make them act much more carefully.
It turns out that the infiltration went quite a bit farther then the regional government, though. Forgery, Aeazer's second in command and spymaster, had been granted admin powers. At one point, he revealed that someone had informed him about my investigation into the AC's infiltration (implying that he had moles in the CWIA, which I later discovered to be correct). He then banned me from The Commonwealth's forums for approximately two minutes as a show of force. Charles and I were quickly able to figure out who betrayed us. Trinity, whom Charles was e-dating at the time, had been coaxed by Forgery into begging for admin powers from Charles. After she was granted access, she simply waited for Forgery's instructions.
In retrospect, the AC had probably gotten all they wanted from the CW by that point. My infiltration of their group found that, besides trolling and griefing for their own amusement, they were primarily interested in the recruitment script that Charles had created. They wanted to establish a footing in NS in order to further political ambitions in Second Life, Cyber Nations, and RuneScape. They saw NS as a fertile recruitment ground for people who would be interested in their style of plotting, and at the time Charles' recruitment script was the talk of many circles in the game.
I'll also make a brief note about the accusation that I tried to destabilise Unknown by supporting a coup. I've been on good terms with both Savaer and Gerzam for as long as I've known them. Indeed I worked with both of them when Station Man was trying to cause problems in Unknown. I used the resources of the CWIA to infiltrate Grand Central and weaken its presence in the game. After the full collapse of the Commonwealth, I and a few others (Asiantic/Aurora, Earth-22, rEVOlutionaires) spent more time in Unknown itself. I served as an officer in their forces, and Savaer would later appoint me as Director of Unknown's intelligence agency.
At one point, the Commonwealth chose to invade Iran. The region had specifically pissed us off; I think it was because they'd been causing trouble in one of the newer Commonwealth regions (I suspect The Archipelago of Seychelles, but I'm not really sure). We went in cleanly, we took the place outright and held it for as long as we wanted; but my buddy Steph Hate who was the point man made one mistake. Seems like a non mistake these days; wasn't at the time. He put in the WFE that the Commonwealth was "liberating" Iran.
This is a problem, because back then, there were some interesting people in the establishment of the raiding world. Here's a screenshot of how one of them reacted.
It's worth noting that back in the day, the majority of raiders bought into this kind of stuff. When Sedge and CrazyGirl were first made moderators, for example, it was an enormous shock- these were two of the most important figures of the FRA suddenly potentially getting full access to our IP addresses on the game forum, and a lot of people up top freaked out. Standing orders in Unknown, for example, were to no longer touch these forums without a proxy.
So suddenly, most raiders are no longer working with us. Lone Wolves United was still a "member region" of the Commonwealth, but Evil Wolf wasn't recruiting for it or anything. I don't recall us ever working with The Black Hawks on anything, you've just seen the reaction of whatever passed for the existence of DEN, and I already covered Unknown in more detail.
I ran point in the operation in Iran, using the puppet Ants Exsist, which I've just revived today. Steph Hate, then the Commander-in-Chief of the CWAF (I was Deputy CiC), was the trigger.
Iran had been antagonising my region in the CW, the Holy Imperium of Nabban. From what I remember, they were sending recruitment telegrams to nations in Nabban, and moving puppets into Nabban to post aggressive messages on the RMB. There were some people who wanted to emphasise that to justify the raid, but I didn't feel the need to do so. It had turned out that the native delegate of Iran at the time, Ayatollah Khomeini, was seen as a despot by a significant number of the other natives. I'd discovered this while looking into where the RMB posts and telegrams were coming from. I decided that it was best to bill this raid as a liberation of Iran from its despotic native leader. All of this is documented both in saved MSN logs and telegrams with Iranian natives, some of which I will share below.
I have always primarily been involved in raiding regions, but I have never myself been an ideological raider. I was cutting my teeth with defender tactics and ideas in 2009, and although this did rankle some allies, few ever doubted that I was loyal to the raider organisations that I worked with. I was certainly no friend of most of the FRA member regions, although I had (and maintain to this day) a lot of respect for XKI, and I don't think anyone can rightly speak against Texas or Wysteria. Worth noting that this was before the days of the DEN revival, the TBR Predator scandal, and the foundation of the UDL (and all the faction-changing drama associated with several users at that time). They were ideological times, but a bit less so than what was to come in the near future.
Anyway, ideological they were, and many raiders reacted in a completely unhinged manner to my inclusion of "liberation" in the WFE of Iran. The game had just recently introduced liberation resolutions to the Security Council, and many raider organisations were still angry about the liberation of Feudal Japan, which I had also participated in due to my military roles in the CW and Europeia.
Dev himself took my WFE to be deliberate sabotage, and started to suspect that I was a defender plant. Several months later, after I had become Commander-in-Chief of the CWAF (and concurrently served as Grand Admiral in Europeia), Dev wrote a post on a defunct CWIA forum which I had been given admin access to and which Dev had kept an account from his prior service as an agent under the directorship of Caninope. The post alleged that I was Avenging Angels, a prominent defender player from The Exodus (see below for the screenshot of Dev's post).
Needless to say, this was a ridiculous accusation that convinced absolutely nobody. It also, a bit ironically, falls right in line with the sorts of conspiracies that partisan raiders were spreading about the CW at the time. My memory of the diplomatic scene with Unknown at that point is a bit hazy, but I believe the true reason for distancing ourselves was due to Savaer's resignation as Archemperor and a cooling of relations with his successor (who may have been Earth-22, but again my memory is a bit hazy).
All this having been said, I don't harbour any ill feelings about this post from Dev or from any of our interactions back in the day. I sincerely hope that he doesn't harbour any ill feelings toward me, either. I remember that despite our differences we did often get along. Replying to this post has been quite a lot of fun, and was a great excuse to take a deep dive into my NS gameplay archives. By the way, I still have the gigantic PM archive from the CW's forums!
