Nonsense.
There was nothing wrong with our tax rates they were hardly "comical", as evidenced by the fact we were able to run them perfectly fine for more than a year before the war protests, in fact by Dustoles standards Aurvandil is running very low tax rates, by my old standards, the tax rates of Aurvandil were low.
I'm pretty sure you saw these already, but since you've either forgotten or just disagree with the premise, I've decided to help by pointing you toward the relevant facts.
I would like to point out a few things, that I hope that Mendicant will take to heart, and into the in-game discussion (I can't remember, is he played by DamnTaffer or NoblessChevaleresque?):
- The devs have already located two separate bugs that, together, made this effect much greater than it would otherwise have been. These bugs have been fixed. No, the damage hasn't been reverted: we just don't do that. We didn't take away the family gold that Thulsoma got through exploits, either.
- The situation that Aurvandil has come across is, indeed, an unusual one. In addition to the bugs (one of which may have caused extremely high sympathy to the SA realms in some regions), they had a large number of realms declare war on them, immediately after a secession, when they had already been running very high tax rates, and without any non-combat-class nobles available to mitigate the damage beforehand or repair it afterwards. This unusual—even unprecedented—confluence of circumstances can make it appear as though there's something shady going here. However, if you take it all apart and look carefully, you'll find that only the bugs have anything to do with the devs' actions or lack thereof. All the rest is due to Aurvandil's own action and inaction.
- Despite what has been claimed, both previously in Thulsoma and Averoth and again in Aurvandil, the devs do not run SA. In fact, there are only two devs in SA, and neither of them writes code. I know of at least three other devs on Dwilight (including myself) who have, at various times, interacted with SA, but who have never been on better than lukewarm terms with them. As a concrete example, Alanna Anaris, during her time as Queen of Pian en Luries, invited SA priests to the realm, but had already ensured that they would find next to no interest in the religion amongst the nobility. She has always opposed SA hegemony in the southeast.
Naturally, you can dismiss all this as lies designed to take suspicion away from the true conspiracy. Indeed, that's the usual response when someone provides evidence that contradicts a conspiracy theory, even when it is not provided by someone who is accused of being part of the conspiracy. However, I would hope that Mendicant's player has enough integrity to at least provide this information to his realm in-game, to let them see a rebuttal of all the hatred and flaming being spewed there in OOC messages, even if some of them will dismiss it as nothing but propaganda.
You can listen to me or you can plug your ears and go "la la la", the choice is yours, but only one of these options will actually help you.
Yes, you could run those taxes BEFORE HALF THE WORLD DECLARED WAR ON YOU.
Does that mean they have no effect? No.
Does it mean you should be able to run them now? No.
Your regions WERE getting those tax complaint messages every day, weren't they? Before, however, positive effects compensated, so you were essentially having stable morale.
Now with the war protests, you feel the FULL force of the war protests. If you weren't running a limit tax rate, you would NOT - you would have some positive morale effects left to compensate for parts of it.
You run your engine on its physical limits, don't be surprised if it blows up when it meets a bump in the road, and while you can blame the bump, your driving style DID contribute.
And until you realize that and act on it, we have nothing to discuss. I see that a few of your regions have now reduced tax rates, though by far not as much as I had suggested. But you will probably notice a difference in the morale drops between those and the other 2/3rd of your regions which are still running high tax rates.
I'm inclined to believe the guy who designed the game and the guy who contributes the lion's share of the coding.
