If Perdan didn't know what was going on, they have no one to blame but themselves. I, and probably others, invested considerable effort into making sure that Perdan's ruler was kept up to speed on what was happening. If they didn't share it with their realm, well, not much I can do about that. It's important for the rulers to keep their realms up to date. And it's important for the players to demand that their rulers do this. There's nothing more boring as a player than to sit around in a realm where you're not fighting any wars, your ruler never talks, and you keep getting all those island-wide notifications of foreign events.
In addition, the Perdan/Vix war was able to happen the way it did not just because Fleugs stepped in and said "hey, let's have a war". Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Fleugs was willing to step in and take a risk. That's great. But Fleugs could have gotten elected and then sat on the throne picking his nose for a week and damn near the same war would have happened, because everyone involved had already planned to have that war. The only difference being that it would probably have also involved Eponllyn and Caligus going after each other, too. The way it turned out, Perdan/Vix will have their private war not because Vix/Perdan agreed to have one, but because Eponllyn has a long history of *not* interfering in foreign wars, and Caligus and Sirion both stated months ago that they would not interfere if the two went to war. (Although, who knows what Perleone will do. But they're small enough that if they try to interfere with the war, Perdan and Vix could quickly beat them into submission.)
When was that, 2003?
Politics *always* happened. Eight years ago it was a lot harder for a single misstep to have fatal consequences. There were more realms, and more players per realm. That made realms a lot more resilient and it was much harder to wipe out another realm. It was also less likely that someone on the opposite side of the map would march over and beat on you. Back in 2007, when I was leading the Kingdom of Alluran on BT (way down in Eno, which no longer exists), the idea of us marching all the way north to fight Melhed/Thalmarkin would have been simply ridiculous. Today you *have* to consider all those distant realms, because they can and will march over to you and express their displeasure at swordpoint. On smaller islands like FEI and EC the effects are even greater.
As realms and power structures get more fragile, and the size differential between large and small realms increases, it's way too easy for someone to get wiped out. Trying to start a local border dispute could easily end up killing your realm when that bordering neighbor calls in a friend, and their combined demands for peace end up being that you give them 2/3rds of your realm as the punishment for your unprovoked aggression.
Most of the politics involved in setting up a war isn't "How can I get a war going with Keplerstan?" It's "How can I get a war going with Keplerstan, but in a way that keeps everyone else from joining in?" That doesn't mean setting up the perfect war, or a no-risk war. Just a war where you don't get curbstomped for being the aggressor.
Ha! As if the ruler's channel was fun. It's one of the most frustrating, irritating, overrated experiences imaginable. Of all facets of the game, that's the one thing that will make me cringe and rethink logging in to play.
That's a nice sentiment, but it's completely divorced from the reality of the game. You can try to set up any kind of little, local war you want. But once you start the war, you don't get to decide how far it spreads, or who you get to fight. If the guy on the other side decides to call in his friends, what are you going to do about it? Or if he doesn't call, but they come anyway?
The subset of rulers is quite small, many of them constantly complain about the political system we are currently left with. If such a small and experienced group of players can't collectively sort out jumping on each others wars, there is little the greater player base is going to be able to do to resolve this. The statistics don't lie, either BM gets a paradigm shift, or it continues to die. We can "correct" the density issue all we want, that is not magically going to correct the entrenched mindset of those that rule and guide the realms, and without that great density isn't going to mean all that much in the long run.
