Ah...no. First of all, there's that little option labeled "Preach."
Second of all, intent counts. If you're coming straight out and admitting—as you, and several others are—that you are deliberately using the Influence options in order to reduce the number of followers of the religion, that's pretty damning evidence that you're abusing game mechanics.
You're both welcome and encouraged to remain a priest—once you have founded a new religion to be a priest of. There is no Inalienable Right to be a priest, or follower, of a particular religion.
Using and "abusing" these game mechanics have the exact same results. That's how much priests suck. You lose hundreds of followers for a 1% effect, if lucky. Using them for their intended purpose has the same effect as using them for any other purpose.
If "Influence followers" isn't meant to be used as a rapid "deconvert" action, then maybe it shouldn't act that way? Because there is no way for that action to be useful at doing anything else than precisely that.
It would be increadily easy to code the mechanics so that one cannot easily deconvert a region. If you don't, then that's because it is intended that these actions result in huge follower loss, and thus using them to do so is quite plainly using them for their intended purpose. As I said, that's the irony of the situation: Alaster was the one pushing the most to have ESA declared evil, and the whole of SA was pretty much united against Luria Nova: Influencing followers to decrease sympathy to Luria Nova is totally in line with what someone loyal to Alaster could have wanted to do.
And you should know full well that intent is an absolute !@#$ criteria, because the only way it can be proved is if someone admits to it. To have a rule based on intent is to allow everyone to break it with impunity as long as they don't admit to it, while the less insidious who admit to it get crushed by titan action. Rules on intent don't favor fair play, they do the opposite. And that's why generally intent was said
not to matter. It was considered to weight the sentence, not to determine the verdict.
And please, are you really going to claim now that the Dev team and Tom never cited the IR for the impossibility of players to deport priests or for religion elders to kick them out of the religion? Because that's exactly the reason that was given every time the issue came up. Only recently did you start admitting that "yea, maybe that should be changed". But you did not. The game mechanics are exactly the same now as they were then. And influencing followers to lower their numbers is insanely tame compared to everything else others got away with before.
