By Tom's own definition in the other Magistrates case, this is not a realm merger, friendly or otherwise:
A "friendly realm merger" does not require a precise definition of every word. What I intend by those words is that I don't want realm A and realm B to sit together and say "hey, as one realm we would have better game mechanics on our side" or whatever, and then simply join up.
What happened here was NOT the scenario I see as a "friendly realm merger", because it was not an agreed act of cooperation between two parties. You can discuss the "friendly" part if you want, but there wasn't a merger. Whatever you call it, and it sure is a strange event, but it's not the event I ruled disallowed.
Certainly seems as if both sides did
not sit down and say that they should merge because the game mechanics would then favour them.
This case
should have been brought forward on the basis of it being a bug exploit, not a breaking of the realm merging rule. But you would need to prove that dustole knew it was a bug, despite there being no in-game announcement that it was. I would argue that this is not an
obvious exploit - in the way that getting infinite family gold is, for example, or falsely reporting sensitive message as vulgar in the hopes that another realm will read and act on them - and people should not be necessarily expected to know it is a bug. As I said in another thread, if this bug won't be fixed quickly, then there needs to be a message put on the Secession page for dukes.
