First off my own interests in terms of Strategus has nothing to do with my way of thinking. I cannot stand for illogical stances (in my view) of situations and I call them out as I see them. I've lost nothing nor gained anything from this bug as an individual. So don't try to pin a bias on the fact that I fought for the defense; if anything I could see first-hand how this issue changed the facet of the defense entirely, and pretty much ruined 3 siege defenses in a row.
The issue is being discussed in the admin forums thus will not go into too much detail.
If I can offer a snippet of my personal view; That rule (locking down a fief) never took into account this bug (or badly implemented feature, as another admin would call it). The rule was made to target clans who intentionally wanted to prevent the enemy from attacking. I would trust you could make the distinction between preventing attacks and fixing gear problems through the only other mean possible. The fief has been open to attack for the last three days. Nobody is locking it down anymore, and if anyone did, I'd have no problem supporting you and pushing for a ban.
I know FCC has a lot invested into this attack already, so its normal for you guys to be against what has happened. I understand you guys can be upset, but honestly, you have been fighting a crippled defense for three battles due to a bug badly implemented feature, which was fixed through the fief transfer.
So FCC abusing a badly implemented feature; aka: exploiting it, is OK. But Blackzilla attempting to fix the problem isn't. This is what the issue is coming down to.
Apologies, but my ability to judge based on the circumstance tells me that the transfer was an alternate option to fix the problem. If you want to attack the city; at least man up and do it the way it was supposed to be fought. I have a hard time being convinced that a bug badly-implementeed-feature justifies actions against those who wanted to fix the problem and provide the battles the way they were meant to be fought...
In essence... I want fair-play. I want to play these battles the way they are supposed to be played. Are you against this? Or will you take the easy way out and point at the black-and-white rule that never took into consideration this bug, nor created to address this issue?
Take care
Gash, thank you for expressing your opinions.
I will attempt to address the key issues you have focused on.
1. The badly implemented feature is indeed annoying, we do not have control over it though.
1b. It is true that we could have not attacked smoothrich and instead allowed him to enter his fief and manage the item list; however, sieging is very very expensive and due to the time limit on fiefs, it is nearly impossible to successfully siege a city on the first attempt; the majority of our city sieges this strat have actually been all or nothing gambits, we have had some success with them in the past but we also had some devastating losses when attempting such. When the time runs out we are forced to retreat and lose a lot of the gear our troops had; it is too big of a risk to gamble on such an attack when the defender has enough troops to outlast the time limit. As for allowing smooth to manage the gear and then continue sending wave after wave; that sounds nice in theory, the problem is that the fief had a large amount of gold locked inside which we really wanted in order to offset some of the cost of the very expensive siege process; if the fief owner was able to return to the fief then he would be able to take all of the gold onto his own character at which point it would be impossible for us to get it as you cannot take gold from a character; it would also allow for the fief owner to sell off all the extra gear they looted from us and then store all that money on himself as well as to invest in even better gear for the defence. Sieging is already a brutal endeavour and making it harder on ourselves and removing all the rewards for being successful defeats the purpose. That is why we have not sieged again since the fief transfer; there is no money left to loot, it is all safely on people.
2. You suggest that the fief transfer was actually an effort to deal with the poorly implemented feature which was making things harder for the defensive army. Neither zilla nor smoothrich has ever stated that the purpose of the fief transfer was to fix the item problem in order to allow for better sieges. If you review some of zilla and smooth's posts, they generally do not admit to it even being a transfer, zilla does say that smooth thought it was a transfer but says he himself was going to steal it away! (if he had stolen it away then that would also mean, no more sieges) Smooth said he was just giving it to someone he liked better than FCC who wanted peace with FCC (thus, no more sieges if peace was achieved.)
2b. There is a clear cut rule which forbids transferring fiefs that are facing imminent attack.
There you are Gash! I hope that you now have increased understanding of the events than you did prior to reading my post; regardless of whether your viewpoint changes.
