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Recent events have promoted a retrospect of choices made within the party of Clan Wolf, both under my leadership and the Party Presidents that followed.

Clan Wolf has always held the mandate of being a party for all players. New or old, we will help you the best that we can and attempt to give you as much opportunity to achieve your in-game goals as possible. Throwing the gates wide open like this also means that we sometimes leave ourselves vulnerable to unfortunate situations. Such as:

Opportunistic achievement medal grabbers that are sent to congress and then disappear once the gold is won.

A chicken loving mulit-player becoming CP who has hidden in your party longer than a KGB sleeper agent.

And recently, a PP getting elected and then banned.

Freedom inevitably invites abuses of freedom. That's the downside. It can't and doesn't outweigh the upside though. All the players that we have been able to mentor, motivate to continued activity, and help achieve their individual goals free of favoritism and party politics. In the face of our greatest enemy, low activity and player numbers, we see this as a sincerely positive goal.

There is also only a reasonable level of responsibility for these events we can take. We do not have the tools in place to vet players and determine whether they do or do not have multiple accounts. We, like all other parties in Canada, do not have the ability to ban or remove players from our party. We, like everyone else, do the best with what the game mechanics allow. Game mechanics that allow a player to enter a PP race, go through the election process, become the PP and is only banned AFTER they have won. Really Plato? Couldn't weed out this activity before hand?

There is another side to this coin that initially took me awhile to appreciate. Being unable to create your own personal private club forces you to accept a cold reality. You are going to encounter people you don't like. Worse. You may have to work with people you don't like. eRepublik has this in spades. It's an interesting life skill and I'm sure there are many levels of social examination to it: ex. living in peaceful co-existance with your fellow man, etc. Here in this game it's something to the equivalent of taking a crash course in zen philosophy while simultaneously taking electric shock to the balls. The reflexive response is to troll. Cross your typing fingers and pray that you can drive off the individual distressing you. Doesn't always work and worse, you could have just made an enemy that will haunt you for the rest of your eRepublik life.

Interestingly enough Lord Beorn started out this way for me. I've known him since he started in Clan Wolf. He was very active and ambitious. Everything a PP eagerly looks for. He was so ambitious in fact that he left the party, started UPC and poached CW players to make it. It was at that point that I wasn't a big fan. To his credit he made UPC a successful party. His leadership skills were obvious.

Several months into his party's existence, he almost lost the very party he worked so hard to create to a PTO, just narrowly escaping it with the assistance of CW. The next month his party numbers had jump considerably and what would much later be revealed was he had created multiple accounts to protect his party from PTO attacks. He was caught and ultimately lost everything. His party, his account and his reputation. I honestly could not find fault with his actions. He tried to protect something that was very valuable to him any way he could and paid the ultimate price for it.

Now I can't imagine even attempting to come back from something like that. But sure enough, a couple days later, a new account was created. It's Lord Beorn. Still wanting to play eRepublik. I honestly don't know anyone else that would do that. Most would just walk away from the game and never look back. In a game riddled with apathy and inactivity here was a player completely willing to start all over completely aware of the undertaking before him. It was impressive and it did inspire me. I invited him into Clan Wolf and helped him anyway I could. He kept at his new account for awhile attempting to find his place in the game again. Until one day he said he had found another way.

Enter Sabzii. This seriously over leveled account with near 40,000 strength. Sure as hell at the helm, Lord Beorn. Fully admitting who he was too.

Now firstly, the concept of a veteran account being taking over by a new player is not a foreign concept to me. In other browser games I've played the practice is encouraged. Typically a long standing player just gets bored of the game and wants to quit. The account is then passed to a new player so the account is not wasted and the resources are kept in game. The original owner of the Sabzii account had even come forward and said he was happy to see some one was using it. All seemed well with the world.

Not so much.

Lord Beorn's faults had already been exposed. Blood was in the water. It was an easy target for trolling, lynching and witch burning. Amazingly, and again to his credit, he continued on. The admins had even reviewed his renewed account. He had done nothing wrong in there eyes. Yet he was the continued focal point of some seriously abusive stuff that went above and beyond anything called for. He fought back enough that was warranted to defend himself, but not nearly as much as he could have. Instead he volunteered to be the Minister of Education during my term as President. As he was getting shit-kicked from every different angle, he wanted to help new players in the game. … To give him the honesty that he never received at the time, he was pretty good at it too. Regardless, it just continued to demonstrate to me a resiliency and sincere love of the game. Something that is becoming more and more rare each month that passes in eRepublik. I openly continued to support Lord Beorn/Sabzii but inevitably he had more than he could take and left for UK.

He returned many months later as Maximus and I have been very happy to have him back. The same ambition and love of the game had not faltered. No matter what people thought of him you could not deny that he loved to play the game. Articles, comments, involvement in politics, still after the ups and downs of everything that he went through.

I don't know why Maximus made multiple accounts again. I can guess his ambition got the best of him and he really wanted to be the CW PP. I know he had big plans for the party. What I can say is this. He is my friend. I hope he does return after his ban is lifted because the game would be lesser for it if he doesn't and I would miss him.

This leads me to my final point. No one is all good or all bad. We are all a mix of our own virtues and sins. If I had never allowed myself to consider the concept of working with someone I didn't like, I would have missed getting to know someone I very much enjoy knowing and playing this game with today. eRepublik gave me that.

And in the end, 'Were you not entertained?'