Region hawking

Region Hawking, an element of gameplay, is the practice of watching a dying region, and then refounding it to acquire foundership. There are some people who are quite successful at it, and have multiple hawked regions to show for it.

History

Origins

It's not clear when exactly region hawking began, although it must have begun at a few months after the introduction of founders.

The first group to make use of region hawking were griefers, people who would invade a region, empty them, and them refound them. Griefers are neither invaders nor region hawkers, both groups which elevate the act to a game, and play fairly and within the rules.

It's not clear when exactly region hawking as a moral, legal, activity, began, although some early region hawkers included Corinthe, Riemstagrad, Goobergunchia, Qaaolchoura, and Emperor Matthius. None of these early region hawkers hawked regions extensively, mostly because the regions which they wanted were mostly still available.

Naming

Shortly after the Gameplay Forum was introduced, Qaaolchoura, a budding region hawker himself at the time, picked up on the trend, created a thread in Gameplay, and for lack of a better name called it "region hawking" since to be successful in the field you have to watch the region with a hawk's eyes. As it turned out, the name proved particularly accurate, as many region hawkers and in-game imperialists began trading regions that they controlled, using them as a barter economy, in effect selling or "hawking" them.

Modern

In the prime era of region-hawking (2004), the main players were the Macedonian Empire, Joven, Emperor Matthuis, The Paraguay Quadrant, the Soviet Empire and Mykerinos. Regions were much harder to acquire in this phase and hawkers had to keep their eyes peeled for real-world country regions likely to come onto the market. Following a landmark first major "region-hawkers" conference, hosted in Algeria by Emperor Matthuis, an alliance was formed between General Farce of the Paraguay Quadrant and the leader of the Macedonian Empire. This led to the largest conglomeration ever seen in Nationstates of real-world country regions. With the sudden decision of General Farce to leave all Paraguay Quadrant regions in a single day, a glut of regions once again became available. Most of these were picked up by the Macedonian Empire, although some fell into the hands of a new player known as "The French Empire". This too eventually disappeared, as did the empire of Emperor Matthuis.

Misconceptions

Region hawking, like region crashing, is often stigmatized and misunderstood, and has thus developed negative connotations among some, particularly invaders who worry about founderless regions being taken out of the game.

Region Theft

One of the common misconceptions about region hawking is that it is used for the theft of a region, that is to say, when a group of natives decide to refound their region, a region hawker will knowingly and deliberately steal the region out from under them.

This is an unethical exercise, and genuine region hawkers will condemn it and give it back if they "steal" a region accidently. Those who do not are simply thieves exploiting a loophole.

Regional Empires

Another common, although not neccesarily negative misconception, is that any time that a player owns a large number of regions, they are likely to have been hawked.

To the contrary, hawking a large number of regions is well nigh impossible, unless they are small regions with names like "12rfhji9o," since regions are rarely abandoned or forgotten, and when they are, chances are that somebody else is hawking all or part of that set as well and you'll end up with parts of the spoil.

Chances are much greater that all or most of these regions had been nonexistant for quite a while prior when they were created and are part of an in-game network of regions.