I have this to say in answer to it. If setting up a condition where one alliance WINS an island is considered a violation of the social contract...then I would say that is how the devs should step in. Make an official ruling on the problem and say it needs to be fixed or said group of players will be punished. One issue with Atamara is that nothing like that ever happened. There was a lot of sniping about Atamara, but never anybody in position of authority saying "do this, or this will happen." With an explanation of why of course.
Fair enough. But yet again, until quite recently, the idea of intervention has occurred less and less over time so to expect a sudden change was probably unlikely; that is probably why we were so intent on trying to choose glacier locations impartially during the Freeze. We had also seen how the Colonies had self-organized their own solution and perhaps expected others to be inspired, if not replicate identically. But in retrospect, the similarity to EC may have warranted an admin declaration to the island.
It should NEVER have been up to a literal conspiracy of players.
Not a conspiracy. A community of players.
The League's main opposition was Darka and their allies. They were strong. Why did the Devs decide to eliminate Darka and allies artificially? Why didn't the Devs do the same to CE and Strombran coast and left Darka and BoM untouched? Making CE alliance weak by freezing their regions would have made the game play interesting and would have kept the two sides in competition.
(Conspiracy theory: I feel that Devs did that with a purpose to test the wisdom of leaders of League nations. They wanted to see what the League will do when left alone on an island (a genius plan). Of course, the League failed the test. Why the Devs wanted to do this experiment is a mystery.)
First, Allow me to quote from my last message:
At the time of Ice, we were quite focused on trying to be impartial and so chose the locations as neutrally as possible, with vague forum polls affecting the locations. While we may have meant well, I think it was a mistake to not choose areas based upon factors like wars and attracting players. I have tried to keep that in mind in more recent events now, particularly the Invasion on BT.
Second, we didn't really 'choose' where. There were polls on the forum that had vague questions. The locations were determined based on these poll results. Not quite random, but close enough for our purposes.
No conspiracy or test other than that expected of every player in maintaining a fun game for each other.
