Futbol, I know it is still possible to give someone a crown. But there are a few things that aren't really factored into this sort of statement:
- Not everyone is keen on some second-hand crown. Because it is highly possible that they will help the first team get the crown, and then a bunch of the first team will just hit VM or go inactive, and not bother to help the rest of the group of alliances get the crown. I've seen it happen on Nagidos - as soon as This Is Not An Extortion got the crown, a bunch of their players, including their top player (I think) hit VM or went inactive. Their top player came back after a bit, but other players remained inactive. I don't want some essay about how your teammates are fanatically loyal to each other and their allies and would never do such a thing - I have no doubt that a fair few of them would stick around. But I bet that there will be who would have taken the help from HEROES and REPO, and then just walked away the moment they got that glittery golden crown on their profile.
- So far as I know (and I did ask a couple of more experienced players), the Victor of the World award, i.e. the award for the first team to build 4 wonders, is just that. For the first team. Yes, you could in theory have passed everyone the crown, but I don't believe that you could have given everyone the Victor of the World award. And while a crown is nice and shiny, that Victor award is rather precious as well, because it shows you were the original winners of that world.
- The debates over who is in the primary alliance. Who gets to be in that main team? I bet that not everyone in Thermo would be above everyone in REPO/HEROES. And that means that you get the dilemmas - do you swap players around, including swapping out players who have been with you for a while? Or do you just keep it to the players currently in your team for the first set, and look like you are playing favourites and ignoring any players in HEROES/REPO who, in terms of size/skill, would deserve to be in that main team.
I'd also like to comment on you calling this one of the major backstabbings in the history of this game. I'm not sure what servers you have been watching, but what you call a backstabbing here really doesn't match up to some of the other events I've seen, and this is coming from someone who has only really started playing properly last October (had a little stint back in 2013-2014 for a few months, but I don't remember much). From what I can see, you guys dissolved your pact with REPO, and players from both sides started attacking earlier (I don't know who started it, but neither set of players would be in the right). That's 1 ally turned on, so that is obviously going to be signalling to HEROES that you are looking for more fights. The next thought would be whether they would be next. So really, you could say that Thermo terminating its pact with REPO (even if it was the case that REPO were also in favour, which again I don't know), is what caused HEROES to dissolve its own pact with you.
So, let's look at some of the pretty severe backstabs that I feel are much more serious than the dissolution of the pact between HEROES and Thermo:
1) HEROES + Mallorean Empire (en94 Mesembria).
- Call me biased if you want, as I was involved. But look at the facts: Neily fully agreed to an NAP, and early on he wanted us to become their academy. This was delayed due to issues in the politics in O64, but HEROES did not say anything about a termination of relations. There were a few refugee issues, at least one of which was pretty contrived to say the least. And suddenly Neily turns us red with zero warning, and starts a full scale war on us with a whole load of cities under attack within 3-4 hours. Apparently it was a spontaneous decision, but given the speed with which everything happened, it's my belief that Neily (possibly alone) had been planning to ditch the pact with us for a while. So it went from somewhere between an NAP and a pact, that several HEROES players were anticipating would end in us becoming an academy, to instant heavy attacks, with absolutely no warning.
2) This Is Not A Drill + Bloods (en95 Nagidos).
- Controversial as to whether this was a backstab move, but so is your claim, to be honest. After a very long-running friendly relationship and NAP between Bloods and TINAD, which actually helped TINAD/Extortion to win the crown because Bloods stayed almost completely out of WW as part of their respect for the NAP and friendly relations, TINAD declares war less than 2 weeks after obtaining the crown. They gave their long-standing friends and allies just 24 hours before TINAD would attack en-masse. Yes, TINAD declared war on a lot of people after WWs, but to only give 24 hours notice to a team that you have been NAP'd with for a huge chunk of the server, and that were not provoked into such an action by Bloods (unless you count one player who attacked TINAD, ran back to Bloods, and for whom the refugee rule was honoured by Bloods), to sort out defending against them, is ridiculous.
3) Black Dawn + Noobs (en97 Pagasae)
- Black Dawn and Noobs were working together to help clear out one of the bigger teams from an ocean. It was pretty obvious that eventually there would be a war between us, but given the co-operation, to have Black Dawn announce their intentions by just attacking us, is a bit of a backstab. (There certainly wasn't a grace period before the war started).
4) The Langolier Ones and Lords of the Rim (en95 Nagidos)
- Same as example 2, I wasn't in either of these alliances. So I don't know the minute details. But what I do know is that TLO turned on their LOTR allies while the LOTR founder was in VM, and that this was suspected by a fair few people to be done in order to take advantage of said founder being in VM.
5) Mayhem/IA + ITM (en94 Mesembria) ??
Now, this isn't about the dissolution of the pact. That was talked about by both sides long in advance and there was a large grace period. What I am talking about was the move on The Exiles. From what I have read here and heard in-game, the plan was that ITM, IA and Mayhem would all attack The Exiles together just to try and wipe them out (part of a long vendetta due to an Exiles player trying to get Mayhem to help them betray ITM). Yet from what I saw, very shortly after the first ITM attacks on Exiles, Mayhem/IA suddenly took in a bunch of players from Exiles, which definitely isn't what they had told ITM they would do.
I'm sure I could think of more. A self-serving group of players within an en95 alliance I was in split off and formed their own alliance all over our territory. And then we conducted a merge with another nearby alliance, and one of the two founders of that other alliance, after taking a bunch of handovers to come to our core and help us with our wars as promised, split off and joined the earlier group of betrayers and brought some players with him and attempted to bully even more of his ex-members into following him. That was a smaller scale event, and I am sure there were many others like it. Here on en94, Flying Myth Units merged into Enigma, the enemy that they had sworn to help Drunks fight against. One of their leaders even bragged about that betrayal.
In virtually all of those cases, an alliance (or alliances) have broken some sort of agreement with another alliance, with basically no warning (1 day isn't much of a warning for a fully developed 3/3 server to restructure their defence, etc, as I believe Bloods were probably going to go back to fighting the other alliances they had already been fighting against, after WW was complete. And this is only from a few servers, let alone all the older servers. So really, HEROES dissolving their pact with you after you already ditched a pact with your other ally, and some of your players then attacked REPO early, isn't much of a backstab. If you are willing to turn on your pacts and can't keep your own players from breaking the war deal that you made with REPO, then why should HEROES blindly follow you around? I think these changes have definitely brought new life to the world, which is something we needed. But Thermo made the first big move here, in terms of ditching the pact with REPO officially, so you can hardly complain when that yields negative consequences for you.