HM,
I have no doubt that H?, in the past, has maintained high standards of honour and decency. Unfortunately, over the last months, while the sentiments expressed in your post are all fine and noble, you are unable to hold to these sentiments because you have lost control over your allies, and even your fellow directors and members.
Let's look at tourneys for an illustration. In the past, tourneys were a fun opportunity to spend some troops, engage in friendly competition, and have some "war" at no lasting cost to anyone on a server without real war (maybe, about once a year). If the devs were to announce a new tourney tomorrow, even without this server-wide war, among the top 20 alliances who would dare to commit anything but a token force to it considering what happened to Consone and BANE in the last 2 tourneys?
over the last few months, NC has been attacking other alliances larger, but less prepared than it, with the only apparent limiting factor being that they don't fight more than 1 war at a time. Kumomoto, a leading member of H? has been strident in his approval of their policies. TCol has been pushing smaller players out of Mal Motsha (sounds similar to 1 of the founding myths of this game, doesn't it?)
"War is an integral part of Illyriad", they tell us. "Players should neither be ashamed nor afraid of war in Illy", they say. " The player who wants peace above all else in a fictional game like Illy is not a mature gamer", I hear. And so the "militarisation" of Illy gradually progresses, where war between players becomes more and more common. And now a server-wide war, currently involving 14 of the 20 top alliances at last count, is something we are apparently prepared to countenance when war used to be rare and brief in Illy.
The tragedy is that H? (well maybe except for Kumo and his running tally of cities sieged) has nothing to do directly with any of the above. People are only coming after you because you stand between them and alliances who want to "militarise" the server.
And as long as this warmongering, E-word like sentiment in Illy stays (which, in defence of H?, they did nothing to introduce), we will never be able to compete in tourneys without a beady eye on the tourney standings to see if certain alliances have or haven't committed. Every little thing, like claiming sov next to a new, 112 pop player which just appeared, could be a causus belli. Soon, like more pvp oriented mmorts, we will have to log in every hour just to see that there are no red armies heading to our capital.
I think Epidemic said before in one of the other 1578676163 threads dedicated to this war that many players here are in retirement from that dog-eat-dog, kill or be killed mode of play and want a more slow-paced game, with lore to explore and mysteries to discover. (Epi, if you think I'm quoting you out of context then attribute this to me).
In that case, this war was never about power, glory or whatnot. This is a war over the future direction of Illy, whether we continue in the same vein or transit to "more war". Nothing to do with H? per se.
Illy has already gone some way down that dark path. Will H? help bring it back from the brink, or will this devolve into a spiral of shattered cities and abandoned accounts because, on both sides, we are going to war because they "attacked our confeds"?
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