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Has Spirit escalated? Hell yea we have.

But let’s not make this out to be Spirit is the big bad bully who is escalating for no reason.

as far as i can tell, the issue isn't so much that Spirit is bullying by escalating. people have said numerous times in this thread that they're perfectly fine with the escalations, and i'll join the chorus now. what i see folks saying they don't like, though, is the repeated moralizing and shame-on-you-ing from the group doing the escalation, whether it be posts here on forums, in discord, etc.

it seems like we're all agreed that Spirit has raised the ante numerous times. however, when Shadow responds in kind, we're treated to posts about behaving ourselves, both-sides-isms, remembering there are people on the other side of the screen. i'll be honest - this is a behavior that i do experience as bullying. coming here to tell us off for supposed toxicity, whether said toxicity occurred in public or private, whether it occurred in game or out, only puts a chill on all of our actions. it frames our actual responses as toxic, even when those responses are the same things you introduced to the conflict. if it's okay for you to escalate with XYZ, then it's okay for us to respond with the same XYZ. full stop.

tl;dr nobody cares that you escalated. people in this thread need to stop trying to browbeat us for meeting the escalation. no more TEDx talks. just play the unicorns game.

But you guys are doing the exact same thing, because ultimately who is, or even started, escalating is a matter of perspective.

it's literally not a matter of perspective because how this conflict started and who has initiated various 'milestone' activities is a matter of public record, which people have agreed upon throughout this thread.

..it really is though. Ask the Spirit web and you'll get a whole host of answers about the times we perceived Shadow to have escalated.

We were just responding to the escalation (from our perspective) with actions in the game rather than posting about them in this thread.

You should stop reading each other's webs/discords/OOC msgs. People who are leaking these to create content aren't doing anyone help either. I've, like most people I know do the same, said things that make no sense to my close circle of friends. Usually it's a joke, but sometimes it's just venting the pent up feelings I've about the game/recent changes whatever. And that's a very human thing to do. For example, we joked about me being a griefer for like the entirety of 2021, after I got issued with that wordage. And if someone showed all those logs to the person who issued me for it, that'd probably upset them pretty bad and cause more problems than there initially was. But nobody did that, and I am on much better terms with that person? So yeah, I firmly believe, it is not some heroic espionage move to tell people things that'd cause strife between players.

Now back to the war, is it progressing badly? I don't know honestly. I've only casually participated after work in the past few days. It looked decent. I got jumped a few times while trying to do the daily chores, as expected. But I also joined a few attempts to get rid of some troops and/or city defenses. And that's all I've seen. I don't think anyone is actively griefing anyone out of the game, by their actions, as far as I am aware. This war so far is making the game a lot more vibrant and that's always better than the alternative. I'd rather see 300 kills in kilstats over 20 combined kills in a whole week, we've been there before.

One thing though, I'm not personally a fan of how objectiveless/free of mechanical consequence this whole thing is. You can die 90 times over, and still claim your character "won", because death means nothing in this game, by design. You aren't locked out of repeating what you just did 30 seconds ago, you don't lose your gear/investments, the only thing you lose (exp) only really matters to people who are either newbies or people who are trying to get to lvl 200. That is problematic to me. And this design does make the whole thing about stamina, unless we are mature enough to just handshake and admit defeat IC. There's absolutely no reason to just give up, other than you know being camped whole day and not being able to do any of your activities within the game. (Which is only a problem for people whose top if not only priority in the game isn't PvP to begin with. I know this, because mine is PvP, hi.) This design does incentivize, the objective that doesn't exist originally in the conflict to manifest a new one and that is making sure the other side's engagements levels to drop. And that's not healthy, but it's the reality of it and I can't really hate the player, when I can just hate the game.

That being said, that's just my long term vision of this whole thing. I don't think we're anywhere close to that being a thing, but in time we can be. And I'd personally be just fine with however it resolves.

Has Spirit escalated? Hell yea we have.

But let’s not make this out to be Spirit is the big bad bully who is escalating for no reason.

A good portion of the Spirit army were galvanised by Nipsy throwing himself at our guards for hours.

We were galvanised by the blockades outside our orgs.

We were galvanised by the, from our character’s perspective, betrayal of Bamathis.

We are galvanised by constantly being told both IC and OOC that we are losing this war.

We are far past the point where it matters who escalated because nobody has clean hands here.

And to be quite honest? A lot of how this may look from the other side comes down to the simple fact that yes, right now Spirit is outnumbering Shadow most times of the day.

But when we have no mechanical objective how are we supposed to win this war? We have shown that we can raid Bloodloch during primetime when you have a good number of defenders sitting at the gates. We have shown we can clear whatever blockades you put up. We have shown we can dust all your shrines. We have shown we can respond to your ganks with more of our own.

Most of us don’t want to escalate, but we have been shown and told that what we have been doing is not enough, so now even many of the anti-war crowd are galvanised.