Region crashing
- "Invaders" redirects here. For the alliance, please see Invaders (alliance).
Region crashing, also known as Invading, Raiding, or just Crashing, is a process where a group of nations all move into a region with the intention of seizing the WA Delegate position. A region crasher's enemy is the defender, who does everything they can to stop the attack from occurring.
It should be noted that the militaries that are formed around region crashing typically have the intent of taking and holding regions until they see fit to release them. This differs widely from griefing, in which to goal is to completely destroy the target region and refound it as a trophy. However, occasionally pure-breed crasher regions will grief, especially if their target is a defender region.
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A Technical History of Region Crashing
Region crashing was once predictable. Under the old NationStates server, each region was assigned an unchanging update time. Once a region's update time was known, raiders were able to slip in seconds before the update. Unless the defenders were able to gain targets from covert means, or ready to react instantly, the invaders would take the target. However, fixed update times also permitted defenders to slip into a region held by an invader delegate right before the update, thus liberating the region. This allowed Invaders to have large armies without the need for switcher puppets, which will be discussed later.
On the new server, regions needing to be updated are randomly put into a queue but always within a fixed time frame. In the past, before the inception of National Happenings and National Feeds, it was extremely difficult to pin down the exact update time. As such, the raiding style in NationStates was forced to shift from sheer numbers to one of more covert means. Many times, raiders had to covertly infiltrate a target region for days, sometimes months, and operate intensive internal investigations to weed out spies. On the other hand, defenders had no need to keep their puppets hidden and operated openly and with impunity. As a result, Defender militaries swelled while Crasher enlistment declined sharply.
For this region, defender alliances are typically larger than those of Crashers in terms of magnitude, although crashers have attempted to counter the Defender alliances with Raider Unity. This concept has allowed crashers to remain strong against their foes, as well as establish an unwritten code to prevent infighting within their ranks.
Crasher/Defender Relations
Raiders and Defenders are obligatory opponents. In the fierce intelligence struggles, many members of either side feel that speaking with the other will implicate them as a traitor, in fact the Defender alliance TITO has a policy to never accept any former Crashers into their ranks and all members are prohibited from conversing openly with known Crashers. At the very least, neither side walks into a meeting without looking for ulterior motives.
To date, there has been only one (known) attempt to appeal to both Defenders and Raiders on behalf of the players. Hosted by A Better Colonial Ambition and DEN II, the Global Summit saw raiders and defenders gather and hammer out a rough accord to "legalise" certain raiding practises. In practise, however, the GS Accord could not survive the intelligence wars, and several infractions upon members before the GS Accord was signed played key roles in influencing certain clauses. For example, DEN's intelligence agency plotted with a now-unknown 10000 Islands member in an attempt to infiltrate 10000 Islands' "Council of Nine". Certainly, when counter-intelligence operatives found this out, it presented a serious impediment to the Global Summit's progress, and a clause was added banning governmental espionage, or spying with the intent of ruling, or invading the ruling body of an enemy. Nevertheless, such intelligence attempts continued.
Other problems with the GS Accord included the interpretations that various raiding army commanders placed upon it. DEN took a very liberal viewpoint and toed the line between violating the accord several times in verbal remarks. Others continued following old practices or failed to live up to promises. For example, DEN vowed not to invade any regions until the Accord had been settled upon, however, a single raid a few days after that announcement only hindered the process.
We can see examples of skepticism in the Alliance Defense Network's approach to the Global Summit: they refused to send any member except by a masked IP address so that it would not be possible to trace the movements of key ADN members. Other defenders were not so wary.
Needless to say, the GS Accord was doomed to fail, however. Under the command of "Steve Owen", DEN declared war on the ADN, allying with neutral armies Imperial Germany and Ireland, hoping to gain out of the conflict that these two regions had with the ADN. Quickly, the GS Accord fell apart as declarations of war flew about, and within no time, all GS Accords had been breached by members on both sides.
To date, no second attempt at a second Global Summit has been made, although the idea is still out there, and several members have discussed this briefly, though never across the defender/raider lines.
Having had the upper hand in the intelligence stakes for some time, The DEN HQ have torpedoed recent attempts by defenders to negotiate and continue to take delegacies at will.
Crasher Regions
Some well known Crasher Groups, both active and historical include:
- The DEN
- Catlandatopia
- The Black Hawks
- Lone Wolves United
- Fox Rite
- Children of the Grave
- Invaders (alliance)
- The New Inquisition
- The Swamp
- The Cathedral
- Unknown
- The Brotherhood of Blood
- Blades of Conquest
- Roll the Bones
- The Shamrock Union
- The Commonwealth
- Atlantic Alliance
- World Pudding Alliance
- Rebel States of Heleth
- SAOP
Invading was first made prominent by a group of players that became called the Farkers, who all arrived due to the game being linked on the website Fark.com. Later groups such as the Atlantic Alliance and the World Pudding Alliance took up the hobby.
Warzones
Warzones are a set of special regions, set up with their own rules and griefing criteria, which were created by the Moderator in order to quell the flow of Crashing upon tradition targets. It was hoped that invaders would attack these regions rather than user created founderless targets, thus revealing the moderators of some of the endless complaints that naturally came from natives when their regions were invaded.
The Warzones ultimately turned out to be a complete failure, with most invaders ignoring them completely, mostly due to the lack of actually nations contained within these regions and the total lack of community. More or less, the Warzones just were not fun to attack. Today the Warzones are mostly play things for Defender Armies who want to "raid" without actually attacking a user-created region.
Most Crashers consider the Warzones to be almost insulting to their half of the game play and believe they demonstrate a complete lack of effort on the part of the Moderators and Admins to comprehend the Crasher Community as a whole.
Raiding
See Raider.
