Dynastia wrote:When I invented the treaty lockout/perpetual earlies/pre-loaded inactives system (yes, it was me, sorry) it was all but unstoppable once it was in place, and despite what people are saying about it being 'eventually' combatable, if you put enough time into creating high-visibility backups for when your dictatorship ran out of visibility, you could extend your control for a ridiculously long time. Indefinitely, really, if you took the time to unlock, pass some bills and then relock every time you got a brief window where all opposing parties left. Nobody's going to hang around in a nation long enough for 30 fully visible parties to run out of visibility, one after another. Luckily, we held back on being quite so evil, and never kept a nation locked down for longer than it took for a fully visible party to lose visibility three or four times over.
But back when we were using those tactics, the world was pretty close to full. We didn't consider it an especially dirty tactic to bumrush a nation and treatylock it because it took a fair bit of planning, co-ordination and effort to get that 2/3rd majority in a nation with 5+ opponents, especially since we usually only had 2-3 players available for foreign bumrushing and couldn't rely on numbers alone. So while it was a significantly threatening tactic, I believe it became acceptable within the community mainly because everyone understood that it took a dedicated team to pull it off, you could see it coming if you knew what to look for, we could be quite easily foiled if you saw us coming and took preemptive measures, and we had no chance of winning a supermajority against twice as many opposing parties unless they were so ridiculously stupid that they thought the best way to defeat us was to all vote together against everything we proposed, and didn't notice that all of us except our 'designated opposition' kept swapping their votes at the last minute to help split the natives. (sadly, a lot of players were this stupid)
But when I look at how many parties the average nation has now, it disturbs me to think of how easily a single player, with no planning, could just grab up an empty nation and lock it down. I think if this tactic wasn't discovered until today, it would not be accepted at all by the community. And I think the only reason it's accepted now is because the precedent was set back when it was so difficult to get into a position to lockdown a nation, and so easy to prevent a bumrush. Now, with all the vacant nations, I think perhaps that the moderation should take another look at the tactic, while completely ignoring the fact that it's been acceptable for so long. The precedent was set in a much more active game, where the potential for abuse was much lower. It might be time for a change in policy.
I did it back when I started to play the game, in 2006 or so. With an empty nation, and it still was respected. If nation locking becomes widespread, and thus threatens to eliminate most of the game, a policy change could be in order. But until then, considering that most people don't use backup parties and even treaty locking has not been seen for years, I don't think that a change of policy is needed.