Slagpit, I believe that you fundamentally misunderstand the cause of the accusations being levelled against untagged farming by netting alliances. The context in which you've written this post implies that the middle of an ongoing conversation was, in fact, the beginning. It was not.

The idea that untagged farming has been driving away players has been around for years, but has never been much more than a fringe complaint. The community as a whole rejected the complaint for the exact reason you say, everyone wants to compete at the highest level possible. This is fine, and reasonable.

However, since the first reset of EE (or, more specifically, since LaF was blind-sided in the first reset of EE) a small group of players strongly associated with "netting alliances" have begun levelling accusations that the practices employed by "war alliances" were driving players away.

This accusation may or may not have been true (I believe it to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways) but the fact that it was coming directly from players who had, for years, been amongst the worst perpetrators of untagged farming was not easily palatable. Despite the lack of main-stream complaints, untagged farming does drive players away. It was in direct response to these accusations that members of war alliances began to point out the hypocrisy present.

At first, I believe this counter-point really was meant to invalidate an opposing point, rather than be an argument against untagged farming. The statement was never meant to be "don't farm untags" it was closer to "practices with the potential to drive players away are also necessary to keep the game fun, therefore wars ought to be accepted for the same reasons as untagged farming is". Unfortunately, this quickly evolved. Netters continued to demonize wars and members of war alliances continued to draw an equivalency between those wars and untagged farming. This equivalency meant that both became demonized simultaneously.

It's been a tit-for-tat series of escalations all along.

As I said at the beginning of this post, you've implied that the middle of this argument was the beginning. The accusations (at least, in a main-stream sense) that netters are ruining the game by farming untagged players was not the beginning of this conversation... and the reasons why SoL has got a "free pass" on untagged farming can be found in this fact.

SoL has not complained about the deleterious effects of wars, so no one has bothered to bring up the issue of SoL's farming practices.

In the end, I think that your final statement has some validity. Expecting netters not to farm untagged players is very similar to expecting war alliances to only use half their turns during war time. But it is equally valid to say that expecting war alliances not to war is very similar to expecting netting alliances not to farm untaggeds. Since this latter statement is where this overall discussion actually began, it is the one that has a stronger bearing on the overall issue.

-Fooglmog
Guy with no clue.