Ok LS, for the sake of my curiosity and better understanding (It is academic right now.) I have recovered my post of the conversations we shared and that I will now share here with your player's info removed for their privacy.

I actually sent the first communication by sending messages of a bland nature telling your player that my hits were retals for hitting the Fist. Exact words don't matter--only that those messages were duly and appropriately sent. It got interesting here:

Your player:

tell you what, you had recovered more land on your first hit and now you are just being greedy. I believe you where going to hit me one more time which is unacceptable.

Thus I have retaled your over retals. If you hit me again we will tag kill you. If you dont believe me spy on all of our tags you will see we have full turns and we are ready to rock & roll :)

My analysis:

He's retaling me because he thinks I'm going to hit again so he bounces an attack and then breaks me. Now if he had instead simply asked me to call it good at two--one to recover lost and and another to profit from lost military and such, I'd have probably said yes since I wasn't going to have my military ready for a third hit in the 72 hour window anyway. Instead as you can see he threatens a tag kill. Any possibility for civil discussion is immediately damaged. Frankly I think I was pretty nice in...

My response:

Probably if you were actually civil and asked nicely to take back a little land (I'm still way ahead) I would probably have gone along since I don't actually care about my country. However, you are trying to intimidate me, and if there is one thing I really hate, it's a bully. I will therefore discuss with my clan the option of getting tag killed. I really think it's the right play since the second it becomes known that bully tactics work on us is the second we become your farmland forever after. Killing us will be expensive for you and you simply won't finish well. Frankly judging by the quality of your retalling it is likely our restarts would finish ahead of you anyway. We'll let you know in a while what we decide to do.

Analysis of my response: I definitely was a bit insulting in claiming better finishes for our restarts, but this hardly constitutes a threat. I think I was completely in line to state that I didn't like being threatened, but saying that dying might be acceptable to us hardly amounts to a threat.

Fianlly I send a simple message after my final hit:

We choose death.

Now those who are not familiar may thing I geared up tanks and did a bunch of ABs or something. (Believe me, it crossed my mind.) Instead my final act was a single PS on a country that hit the Fist five times.

Are your notes much different than mine. I'm really curious which were the magic words that made you feel so threatened that you thought I deserved death since if suicide had been my plan, I had the opportunity to do it. I was a very good boy and chose not to.

NOW3P: That's world class advice and you are absolutely right. Unfortunately that is the first country of any kind I have played in three years and I was kinda out of the loop and not really knowing that team server even had FAs to deal with lots of cooperating teams. I was never a big AT poster back in the day, but a bonus was offered to my country to post in here. Since I have done that I now realize this discussion is probably exposed to fewer than 100 people which means it might actually be worth my time to actually get to know a few people. I simply didn't know that yet, but in the future I won't be as ignorant.

One final thing to you LS concerning, "There is a reason that we keep getting new applications."

The reason you keep getting applications is that lots of people like to play for the sure win. Your team holds the balance of power. Syoto is my clan mate and he understands there is a bigger challenge than smacking the crap out of small independent groups. For all the people like you who are happy with a sure victory, there are still a few people like Sy and me who want to see if we can make it across the mine field and finish top 15 without a huge entourage of supporters to deal with stuff like kill runs. If ever we win, it will have taken a great deal more skill.