Back then, there also wasn't a whole bunch of NPCs. Rarely people used NPCs for more than just transporting stuff. Couriers basically. Now, everyone's become much more political and people who try to be evil on their own tend to be voided.
Another issue is that everyone is just so powerful that not much happens at all. It's kind of the same reason why they never make Superman videogames. How are you going to have fun playing a character that is basically a god? Of course, people have always been super powerful, but back then everyone had their own niche and talents. Now, everyone's just senjutsu this and sage mode that. The uniqueness is gone.
There are efforts to at least diversify from the Gifted Blood trio (duo?), albeit, to stay competitive at the S-rank you have to either be extremely talented or at least have a trump on the caliber of sage mode, Rinnegan, or some custom tech(s). I mean, I've done well without sage mode for a while, but power creep can't be avoided with just new Nara techniques every 3 months. Eventually you kind of run out of stuff to imitate without becoming repetitive, OP, or simply a pirate copier.
Why do we need rules exactly? Have you all forgotten their was a time when we use to have war all the time and got along just fine? Konoha and Kiri were at each others throats for years. We would invade each other quite often... never an issue. No need for a method or NPC.
War is what formed many of our characters. Uetto is a prime example of this. Hell I gained my fame (what ever little it may be) from the war with Kiri really.
The only thing needed is for people to stop fighting OOC. Stop getting so but hurt over every little thing and get back to having fun.
There will always be the little common curtsies of invading and war. Like no blowing up a village on a whim. No entering a village automatically while no one from the village is online to stop you. Things of that sort. Typically no entering a village via space time to attack it. This is why we come from the outskirts to a village.
It is not so much as rule but more of a sense of pride, honor, and dignity as warriors and for our nations along with respect for our fellow rpers. Just because you are enemies does not mean you should not respect each other.
There are rules because a sense of pride, honor, and dignity as players (I won't even get into as characters because not everyone's character flaunts honor and dignity) can cut both ways, especially pride. A system run solely by morals only flows when all of the drops have similar compositions. That's not really the case right now, from what I can tell, not to mention newer folks who have never actually been in a SL Great War (I admit I did little Leaf RPing during many of the Konoha-Kiri skirmishes cause there used to be much more than that around here) won't have that same instinct on what is legit and what isn't.
This isn't just to help out those with great rocks, but even some of those with not so great rocks. I mean, that RP in Iwa, for example,
could have been worked out. Anyone who read the OOC can tell you that it could have been worked out with a compromise suitable to both parties. But at the end of the day, the OOC destruction of The Akatsuki was considered an offense too far with the accusation of god-modding lumped with the offending party, and so the void power gets whipped out for the first time in the country since Bocchiere left (that I recall anyways). In hindsight, perhaps it was better to some degree that it got voided at the character level, but at the player level, I've come to kind of feel bad about it because Iwa really could have went to war with Uzu over that (presuming there was anyone left that is lol). There could have been some interesting RP that followed up from that.
You can't just up and void an entire battle in a war. A war takes a significant amount of RP to actually do right, and nobody wants to invest that much time into a RP just to have it voided. So if anything, the rules are going to hardcode what can and can't be done so that battles and wars don't get voided except in the most extreme cases. And that incident in Iwa is not what I would consider extreme by any means.
...Like no blowing up a village on a whim. No entering a village automatically while no one from the village is online to stop you. Things of that sort. Typically no entering a village via space time to attack it. This is why we come from the outskirts to a village...
This is all mostly a test run to see how things would pan out in the event that other nations wish to engage war on us as well as to simply create some sort of plot story to Role Play in general...
The first quote is of a few things that I imagine would be added. The second if is a practical way of going about this; I mean, it's been so long since there has been a sizeable RP war that involved conventional nation vs nation fighting, I imagine many of us (I know I at least) don't really know how to incorporate it into modern SL fighting. We don't even know how other RPers would necessarily react to war; the whole zombie thing is a bit of a feel, but that's not really a war, that's some spiritualist playing demon with a few shinobi nations.
For the official record though, I do not endorse account sharing.
In the fine print, that's a brilliant idea!. However, having a sort of NPC-based war first would be a good idea to graduate up to player wars, just like in many FPS where you normally start off popping AI before you go running off into competitive multiplayer (I would never recommend someone who has never played FPS before to start with even general multiplayer. Knowing controls is a must in general multiplayer). So while I don't agree with all NPC's on a single side for a general principle, having all NPC's on one side to start with might actually be a far better way to draft this all out.