Why Preach?

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 ajqtrz wrote:

Who gave the said alliances the right to make the claim of sovereignty?

The developers. The front page marketing animation lists several selling points for the game: Customize and Specialize Your Cities, Vast Interactive World, Deep Military Strategies, Player Driven Marketplace.

"Build, plan, gather, craft, trade, scheme and fight in this free to play strategy epic!"

 ajqtrz wrote:

But the argument we have here is if the land claimers have the right to take any area of the map from the rest of us for their exclusive use by other methods than the currently accepted settlement rules.  I argue that they do not, and you, apparently, that they do.  That is a point of contention.

Accepted by whom? The developers created the rules of the sandbox. Those players have taken action within the scope of the game rules. The imposition of additional conventions has been projected by the community. That is by definition the metagame, and it is a messy process. Nowhere have you provided that there is a moral, ethical, or logical basis for the "community" (as you egregiously misuse the term) to inflict its rules upon everyone in the game. There is also no precedent that an aggrieved minority must accept terms dictated by people on the forums, in GC, or anywhere else, when they have full recourse to other methods within the scope of the game. 

 ajqtrz wrote:

You might note that no better formlation, other than perhaps, "aggressive game play" has been offered, nor, I suspect, can one be had since the actual overt actions and words of the land claimers matches with the dictionary definition so well.

Blatantly incorrect. Several very sensible rationales have been offered by those players. You personally have attempted to shout down their valid reasons with ever louder claims of "bullying" and "coercion", but you have no authority here. Other threads have dealt extensively with their logic, and I personally found several points to be extremely logical, and far more logical than your highly abstract and wildly hysterical gyrations.

I know that you are going to try to shout this down, but I will detail my thoughts for the benefit of other readers. 

The argument that swayed me, personally, to the logic of land claims was the examples of close range combat during the last war. With accounts and alliances mixed across the map, many players on both sides of the war found themselves ambushed by well prepared enemy players launching short range attacks after carefully planned war declarations. eCrow has run mock siege exercises, and the advantage of proximity and preparation cannot be understated. Enemies launching distant attacks into a dense cluster will face a ferocious defense. In contrast, an ambush from short range will lead immediately to the loss of troops and quite likely the cities as well. I got knocked into the dirt by Dark Blight in Elijal, purely by superior numbers and proximity, and that was with the benefit of knowing about the exercise in advance. I watched the siege notices flash past during the last war, and it was obvious that isolated players had been caught completely off guard and were surrounded by sudden enemies. Many of the players who founded the land claim alliances were survivors of those battles, or players whose accounts had been thoroughly devastated by such attacks. It seems completely reasonable to me that a military oriented alliance would create a secure buffer zone so that they could never again by ambushed completely by surprise, or face the harassment of constant short range attacks. At the time those claims were established, the Broken Lands were still very much a frontier, and they were not displacing any current residents of those regions.

I believe that establishing such a zone is a common sense reaction to an actual form of attack that happened repeatedly in the last big war to rock the sandbox. Historical fact, not hypothetical, not disputable. I watched it from the sidelines two dozen different times. There is nothing about your cherished 10 square rule that prevents an adversary from settling a battle city only 10.5 squares from your doorstep. The metagame obviously allows the imposition of a much bigger security zone, and in the absence of viable alternatives, establishing a completely clear zone is one way of creating better security for your alliance.

If that inconveniences you in some hypothetical and very small way, I would suggest that it is probably 1000x that inconvenience to have your armies and cities smashed to bits in an ambush. I haven't heard anyone step forward with a more palatable idea than land claims, that manages to address the very real zone security problems that are fully grounded in actual historical fact.

 ajqtrz wrote:

Perhaps, why it is necessary to use..... hmmmm....."aggressive gameplay" to establish a homeland?  Anyway you state it, even stating it, sounds bad.

It only "sounds bad" because you are the one saying it, in a strongly slanted monologue that lacks any historical context within this game.

 ajqtrz wrote:

In any case, how would you put my challenge to explain the necessity of not land claims, but intimidation by threats of coercion? The challenge remains.

No, it doesn't remain. You don't get to define a crazy context of debate, and then appoint yourself as the judge and jury of everyone else's ideas. People have refuted your imaginary situations with actual things that have happened during the multi-year history of this game. For example, I refuted your statements that land claims were new, with evidence about Slaves to Armok and Dwarven Lords, only to have those actual facts get completely ignored in your vitriolic narrative. As another example, I stated that crafting could be profitable, and that several local trade hubs were profitable centers of exchange. You doggedly denied my actual experience in favor of your own ideas, instead resorting to ad hominem attacks when I wouldn't reveal what items I crafted or what hubs I found profitable (which was a cheap and very transparent attempt to obtain with words what you were otherwise too lazy to research yourself).

Bluntly, you don't get to keep claiming that the sky is falling after someone has shown you the acorn. You can't just respond, "Well you haven't addressed my points about plummeting clouds!" when there was credible evidence presented to the contrary. It is unreasonable, illogical, and poor form to continue beating the drum about this non-issue "issue" of land claims when you have wholly ignored the many valid arguments to the affirmative, and failed to address even a single concern held by those parties. Concerns, I might add, that are rooted in historical fact and not hypothetical tyranny, and which were put forth in the context of a strategy posed in a video game, and not some kind of wild eyed moral judgment upon the real life ethics of those players.

A few months ago, I was on the fence about land claims. Since then, you have provided nothing but hysterical predictions that failed to materialize, and the claimers have (mostly) made sound arguments based on past experience. They have won me over, if not for the validity of their ideas, then by their ability to make their case in a calm, sensible format that deals primarily with facts.