Here's my final take on it:
Buying regions as we know it today is going to be stripped out today.
However, I still like corruption as a game concept and it is very likely that something similar will make a return. However, we won't try to second-guess players again - replacements will be either blatantly obvious with no attempts to hide something that every player knows anyways, or they will be actually hidden so that neither characters nor players know what's going on.
No more "pretend to not know something you do know". I think that was the part that made this a failure.
