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.
Your entire argument seems to rest upon multiple faulty premises.
First, that intent does not matter. Sure, sometimes it's hard to divine. That doesn't mean we aren't allowed to try, and it absolutely does not mean that when people flat-out
publicly state their intent to abuse game mechanics, we can't punish them for it.
Second, that a feature having an unintended, abusable side effect, or being poorly balanced, means that we want you to abuse it. Sorry, but no. I shouldn't even have to address this.
Third, that the fact that we know about that abusable aspect and have not yet changed it, means that we intend for that abusable aspect to remain. Have you noticed the state of dev work lately, Chenier?
If you really want me to fix the problem of being able to deconvert peasants too fast with that option, I'd be happy to simply remove the ability for priests to influence followers at all, and tell everyone exactly why.
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?
No, I'm not going to claim anything of the kind, but I have
never agreed with that interpretation of the IRs. Tom and I had multiple arguments about it.
If he wants to come in here and state that a priest who is deliberately abusing the fact that influencing followers loses followers is not an abuse of game mechanics, and should be protected and allowed to do whatever the hell he wants, then that's up to him, but that's what it's going to take to change this, Dominic.
So go ahead. Go tell Tom you want to be able to be a priest who is telling peasants, "Don't follow this religion!" and still get all the advantages of the protections priests enjoy. See how far you get.
If it were up to me, I would have long ago changed the code to allow priests to be expelled from their religions. Probably alongside the schism mechanic, so that if they really wanted to remain priests, they could try their hand at being the head of a religion, but that would have taken a lot more time.
Infiltrators already get booted out of their class if they go rogue, by any means. I don't see any reason why priests should have an
effective inalienable right to be a priest
in the religion they're currently in.
