[sadbot]

The OP makes a lot of vague points that I don't really agree with, and it seems like this post is more about the Geladynian raids on Beggar's Hole than anything else. Although I don't know much of that situation at all, it does seem like very shady practice to raid an established location like that with no notice or forewarning of any kind. If this happened to any of the major nations there would be a public outcry. This does raise a couple of questions though:

• Does Beggar's hole have NPC guards, or an NPC or player driven watch of any kind? I'm assuming not given the OP's talk on NPCs and their usage. This kind of excuses the no notice if so, though an activity post/ping of some kind should probably still be made for such an event and I couldn't find one anywhere.
  
• Was the scene locking mentioned actually started only once conflict began? If people were getting locked out just in the time that it took them to relog on another character that would be present at the time of the raid, I can only assume that people were claiming that there was a scene lock before conflict even began, or they deliberately started conflict very quickly in an effort to abuse the scene lock rules and prevent themselves from getting outnumbered or overwhelmed.
  

Another major point to be made here in regards to scene locking, is that Beggar's hole is arguably not a valid location to initiate a scene lock in the first place. It's debatable if somewhere like Beggar's hole would be subject to it or not, but this part of the ruling comes to mind:

Exceptions to Scene Locking

1. If the conflict is started in town or other area where NPCs are likely to be, this rule does not apply. (This is most places in towns with the exception of areas such as sewers. The reasoning being that, in this scenario, it actually is conceivable that someone would notice what's happening in a reasonable time frame to cause interference.)
   

If nothing else, it would be a valid exception for those that literally live in Beggar's Hole to not be blocked from participating via scene lock.