Well, here's the real dirt on WN:
WN was started jointly by Stifle and The Duke, with Stifle taking the #1 position.
The Duke recruited me to WN and we were a happy, tiny group of people in a small valley of Kal Tirikan. Stifle and Duke often joked about conquering all of Kal Tirikan. After I had joined and was comfortably moved in to the area, I began scouting out the land of Kal Tirikan around our little valley. At that time much of Kal Tirikan was uninhabited (as was much of the other farther out regions of Illy). I asked to become an alliance leader and to help recruit new members and move them into our area. It was granted to me and I began my work.
It seems I was an exceptionally good recruiter, or maybe there was a huge boom of new players to the game all looking for an alliance and trying to get out of the newbie ring... Either way, WN grew in leaps and bounds and I was hard pressed to find locations for all the new players. As we pushed outward, I began scouting further valleys that had plenty of 7 food squares. To our north, I noticed a nice Trade Hub, a pretty lake and lots of fertile land. So we began settling towns there.
That was when I noticed there were a few towns all from the same alliance: GRUJ (Grudge Bearers). I brought this up to the alliance and we all researched them. Their alliance profile at the time was....quite aggressive. They were in Confed with VALAR, who at the time was viewed as an "evil" alliance. We came to the conclusion that these were aggressive players and were afraid of them attacking our under-defended alliance (we were all quite small, but growing quickly).
I began shifting the new players to our southern area, in order to avoid problems with GRUJ, however there were still several good spots to our north that players already in the alliance were moving into. Eventually we got the attention of the larger alliance GRUJ and they contacted us with a little concern.
We felt it was necessary to draft up a "border agreement" with them. Something to keep us from becoming inter-mingled, which would create tension and possibly conflict. This was something we wished to avoid. However, we had a problem, there was no clear line that could be drawn between GRUJ and WN (at least no straight line). So I came up with a simple solution and it was presented to GRUJ leadership. We got a response that was not very easy to interpret, we came to the conclusion that GRUJ didn't speak English as it's native language. We tried to explain what our situation was and show that we were trying to work with them, but they had already come to the conclusion that we were invading their area. It didn't help that Stifle went on to claim he was going to attack GRUJ (I still don't know when, where or why he said that, it wasn't anything WN had discussed doing).
Unfortunately for me, I went on vacation. While I was gone a message was sent from GRUJ to WN, to Stifle, and he didn't know how to respond so he forwarded it to me, telling me to make a response. At this point, I had taken over most leadership responsibilities of WN, drafting up our organization and assigning roles to players. Since I was not around for a few days, GRUJ didn't get a response and thought that WN was planning on attacking. I came back too late for any words to matter, GRUJ declared war. Luckily, they only targeted myself (though Stifle did get some diplo action). We didn't have the forces to fight a war and went to our allies for help. A post was made in the forums (somewhere it still exists) where I shared all of the mail correspondence that had occurred between WN and GRUJ, from my point of view.
All of GRUJ (and a couple VALAR) attacks were successfully defended with little damage incurred. Peace was reached, but the damage had been done.
The Duke (our military leader) left WN, taking a few of our 'military' members. He had his reasons for leaving and those that went with him did so for their own reasons. However, this fracture in WN could not be repaired. After the conflict with GRUJ was resolved, Kasethras and Arwen also left WN, to found a trade alliance, and with them several other WN members went.
This left 4 alliances all inter-mingled in the same valley. I knew that it would be extremely difficult to manage this with no conflict and decided that I should leave the area. I wanted to found my own alliance, one that I could lead from the front seat (not behind the scenes like I had been). I allowed GRUJ to siege and destroy my town that was nearest them and planned on having my other 2 (yeah, I only had 3 towns!) sieged by Duke and Arwen. However, luckily Exodus was released and I was able to exodus my 2 larger towns.
Prior to leaving WN, I convinced Stifle to also leave, and that WN would be best left in SS's hands. I mainly did this because WN was doomed, especially if left in Stifle's hands alone. I knew that the members I had brought into the alliance would be best served by SS. (Stifle is a great guy, but I don't feel he's the best leader).
Well, that's the inside story of WN, the alliance that almost made it big-time!