The rumor mill IS fun. Very, VERY few people know what was happening behind closed doors, I'd argue 2. Of those 2, both are now inactive/declining in regards to time dedicated to the game as well as in-game presence. In regards to what Coldog said, stats do not lie. I'm uncertain if he added TBS' merge into Hi or not, but I'd definitely be interested to know what the village count in the last 41 days is excluding the gains from TBS. In regards to the irreconcilable differences between Hi and T_O, that's something I can touch briefly on. There were multiple approaches from Hi to T_O in regards to mend the relations between the two as well as to initiate a vote of confidence from T_O into re-merging back into Hi. The issue was Hi was not in the proper state to begin the process, as well as an attempt to force T_O's hand that led to an ultimatum. That was the turning point in everything, and Hi began a VERY rapid decline once it was made clear that leadership never even communicated to the tribe that T_O were to be marked as enemies. Sammich tried, but he had entirely too much on his place in regards to RL happenings, but in-game he inherited a massive shitfest with no end in sight. In an attempt to tidy everything up, he made ONE bad decision, which was the issuing of an ultimatum to T_O. Everything else had a very fine purpose and went towards a plan to actually get each tribe to fight COS as their own entity while bringing the locals as well as members in strategic advantageous points into Hi to use the perks for recruitment/unity. Ultimately, the issue boiled down to too little, too late. Had Hi listened to Sammich early (minus Peach) and not been stuck in an archaic mindset of "well XYZ helped us win world 11," and actually pushed to eat their inactive accounts and create super players to rival COS' without cutting member growth off as well as making useless and baseless alliances/naps/cease-fires, they -could- have potentially put up more of a coordinated fight. Hi let COS get too big, too quick, and without resistance, as well as never handling their own intertribal issues. At the end of the day, this is merely a world of "what-ifs", and a world to learn from. Don't piss in someone else's sandbox, and expect them to be okay with it.