Excommunication of Pope Emeritus Crowley - The Rise and (Immediate) Fall of the Latin Bloc

For those of you that are just joining us and only now discovering the latest crash out of the week:

Crowley excommunicated himself

What happened? Why is he in Sierra Leone?

It's surprisingly, or considering Crowley, not surprisingly, a very short story.

He had an idea, he met an obstacle,
he swore revenge and left to act on it.

But let's go through the story from my POV

11 June - 1 AM
10 Hours after the Alliance update

After spending the day looking at the chaos happening because of the update, lots of embassy discussions and yada yada boring talks, developers deciding to fix a bug at midnight completely changing the alliance costs and damage bonus formula making the discussions happened during the day outdated and wasted time...

Well after all that I receive a message

And that's how it all started, or rather, how I first came to know about this, because, seemingly, while I was talking with other BEER member states about this new update, Crowley (who was not a government member) was proposing to France and Italy (initially as a joke, but then France's president wanted it to happen so serious talks ensued) that we should leave BEER (that I just joined a week ago) to join this latin bloc with them

And as every good informed and respected president is, hours later still no one contacted me about it

11 June - 8 PM

~5 Hours after the 0.25.0 Hotfix announcement

It's chaos everywhere (https://app.warera.io/article/6a2b01d295615e1faa7d1258), WarEra chat and discord server are going wild, game is lagging, hotfix article was very badly received, Vatou is crashing out, morale is low and people are trying to recalculate the new alliances cost...

...and in the middle of it, word of the Latin bloc idea spread around, and the first pings and questions arrived.

Except that no one from France or Italy contacted me yet and I still knew almost nothing about it, so I was doing an amazing "101 how to not be a president" abroad

Amazing.

But there's still a question unanswered:
What exactly is this latin bloc and what is its purpose?

Well...
Let's go through the few info I was given

So we have the members, but Africa? Isn't Italy and France allied together with the countries controlling Africa? Especially Egypt?

I guess this is the "respect and loyalty to allies" that they were boasting about after the switzerland takeover

But let's get back to our final part of the story

12 June - Midnight

The general chaos caused by the hotfix was finally calming down, but for me it was only about to ramp up

After successful talks with France and Italy, Crowley reached out to Portugal to propose his latin bloc idea

But this is where he met his first obstacle,
Portugal was not as excited about this as France was

And this is how Crowley's dream of the latin bloc came to an abrubt end.

But for him, this was unacceptable.

https://app.warera.io/article/6a2b261dff25ec4bea1eeb94

It was now a personal war.

It was now time for his revenge.

And that's how his story ends.
But mine was about to have a different ending.

I had forgotten about the existence of a bug. A bug that allowed Crowley to display the MoFA badge near his name even though he was not MoFA

And that bug was about to drag me into a diplomatic nightmare at 1am

The first messages arrived

The first pings arrived

So, after 2 days of update chaos, endless diplomatic talks, vatou leaving the game, my vp being temporarily unreachable and my MoE enjoying his vacation blissfully unaware of what was going on

After 2 days of that, I had to go in damage control mode HR edition at 1am

But thankfully everything was cleared up immediately!

Good Ending!
At least for me...