December 6, 2018Despite the dozen telegrams I've received over the past couple weeks, and not to mention the person who decided to come on to our region's RMB last week for a few days and bash us for not having enough "democracy" over a series of twenty or so posts, The Western Isles has not given in to increasing demands to burn down our embassy with The Pacific. Why?
First, The Pacific was the first and only game created region to accept our embassy request two years and 206 days ago, as of this writing. We have had no other game-created-region embassies since, and not for our lack of willingness to have more. Ironically enough, their embassy rules don't even allow us to post on their rmb, but hey, at least they were willing to accept it. We appreciate that. The Western Isles has arguably been one of the most active, if not the most active role-playing region on this site for the past few years and, yeah, it's nice that one of the largest regions lets us stack our name below their WFE and we do the same. So, it seems a bit ironic when delegates from regions who have refused our embassy requests try to tell us to break one we have had for almost three years.
Also, The Western Isles has been and still is, largely autonomous and isolationist. The few attempts we have made at involving ourselves in any sort of inter-regional anything have resulted in pure stagnation. It's very difficult to do anything between regions past the point of embassies, which anyone can tell just by reading these "treaties" the GCRs and Europeieieia like to plop out every couple months, where the main points are usually "collaboration" and "communication" and "fairs." The Western Isles has existed in our realm of good solid role-playing, and our community has repeatedly reinforced that this is the niche we do best in and want to continue to excel in.
The Pacific did nothing wrong, and The Western Isles has no qualms against them. Personally, I think coups/expanding to other regions is cool as hell and the best and most entertaining part of the worst part of this website - raiding/defending. The ability to use a little subterfuge and a lot of time to gain control of a GCR or other big region is impressive. Raiding/defending on this website sounds about as exciting as playing with a frisbee by myself, and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would care enough to take part (which may be why they have to shove fork fulls of digital medals upon the loyal privates who enlist) but I can understand why couping a region is fun. Who among us hasn't dreamed of being in control of a GCR and savoring all of those free, limitless future soldiers region-members? It sure would save on stamps.
All embassies (usually) do is enable some slight inter-regional communication. It's also a nice little way to get some free cross-advertising. That's why when I was President in my first term, a couple years ago, I made sure to accept almost all embassy requests, and plan on doing the same now. Because, honestly, why not? The Western Isles is not some elitist, better-than-thou region nor do we care to be. We seek excellence internally, mostly in our quality of role-playing. We don't try to somehow rise above by only building the crème de la crème of NationStates embassies, which it seems so many other big regions do. "You must apply on our forums for an embassy." "They are reserved only for allies." Okay, all power to you, but don't try to attack The Western Isles' divergent policy of liberal embassy acceptance.
In short, the people trying to get The Western Isles to drop their embassy with The Pacific couldn't give two, or even three, shifts about The Western Isles. Their entire motivation is just to make The Pacific look ever so slightly worse. We don't care. We haven't ever been involved in inter-regional affairs to a significant degree, nor have we attempted to. We have, however, attempted to create embassies with many of the regions now attempting to convince and/or guilt us for having the ever so slightest bit of loyalty to the one GCR that was willing to click the "accept embassy request" button on this website - a website whose primary purpose, at least according to our members, is to answer weird issues and role-play with our friends.
Hail independent thought.
