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What to do against TO-s?

First of all: face it that it will be part of the game, if not forever, then for a long time yet. Admins will not do a thing against it, so it is useless to write the 1000th petition or open letter to them, asking, demanding or rationalizing nationality. So, even small countries with small population should stop petitioning for it, and instead prepare to avoid and avert it – spend your money, energy and organisation skills positively, for the good of your country.

What can you do to avert TO-s, if you are in danger of it?

1. Organize.
No matter how small your population is, you can deploy people in a certain way; that is to maximize the number of native congressmen in the regions that you have. Since in these countries a single vote can make a big difference, it is extremely important to know all your available voters, to be able to move them as necessary, and when it is necessary – meaning the end of the voting day, no matter the RL work or sleep, or whatever. Also careful analysis is necessary as to who and where would get the wildcards, if any.

It might require off-game communication channels and even specialty programs that follow live the election results and the movements in-, and out of a country. It requires to know your citizens, all of them and even to make concessions of democracy, by having only the necessary amount of agreed native candidates in every region.

2. Get help and publicity
Each and every country, no matter how small or unimportant can find some strategic position that can be useful for a bigger, more powerful one, and for that it might agree to help you. It might still costs money, and/or moving tickets and your economy must produce it – not on the election day, but before. Therefore you have to think of it in advance and make funds or stocks for the possibility. Countries that are part of alliances can have help from allies – but should also consider that nowadays it is not only one, but many country is at danger, so the help might not be a certainty – a country might have to contest with others for the limited availability of voters from friendly countries.

Publicity is also a good weapon to fight against an attempted TO – it gets the sympathy of some countries and individuals, who might, with a little prodding and providing them tickets, will help you out. For this you will need good journalists, newspapers and connections in many chats, forums where you can spread your plea successfully.

3. Recruit.
Each and every country should recruit new citizens all the time. The retention rate being what it is, smaller countries should always have complex programs and funds for recruiting and helping newbies to stay in the game. Even the smallest country here have people who has some connections to RL papers, blogs, community forums, whatever. Not only a big and hugely successful campaign is valuable – actually it puts an almost impossible burden on a small economy and makes retention rate smaller, because of the country not able to cope with the great mass of people flooding into the game. So it is really better to have smaller campaigns but often repeated RL, so people continuously coming into the game and in turn invite their friends to it.

4. Shed regions
Put aside your national pride, your belief in the fullness of RL borders, and shed unnecessary regions. There is always a bigger fish around which would get it with pleasure, for pride, conquest, medals, training, or even strategy; and its price, the possible contracts, for example to lease regions for training gets to boost your economy, gets to concentrate your people in fewer and therefore more defendable regions – I mean TO-wise. For it is much-much easier to defend a two-regioned country against hostile TO-s, than one which has twelve or twenty regions, and only a few dozen citizens living in each.

5. Infiltrate
The groups of TO-ing foreign citizens are never a coherent group. The method having a low moral value leads to not many people doing it easily – meaning that those who actually take part in the TO-s are doing it for a number of reasons – from simple greed to strategy or power – and if you find what makes each of them to do it, you can avert it. You can bribe those, who do it for money, you can reason with those, who do it for strategy and you can inflate the egos of those who do it for power and you can even provoke into resigning those who are susceptible for this weapon– any of these which succeeds disrupts the group that are or is coming into power in your country, and thereby making it less effective in their goals.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work with some countries, who do TO-s with highly organized military groups and in great secrecy.

6. Learn
Always learn for the methods of TO-s are changing, developing and therefore the means of defence must change too. Make secret service, which follows the known and possible TO-ist groups and persons all the time. Take care of your parties, all of them, even the smallests – a grandiose TO usually starts at party-president elections. Be always on your toes, for TO-s will be around more and more, as some countries grow in population and find that TO-s are a way of acquiring success and goals.

Finally: God luck – for you need it too.

I am against TO-s in general, although I do accept that sometimes they are necessary and so I do not generally condemn them. I wrote this article so that more and more people and countries have at least a chance of avoiding-averting a TO. If I helped even one of them, it will make me a bit happier, for I like everyone at least to have a chance of defending their country.

Quicksilver
SILENT LEGES INTER ARMA

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