Spotting Guide

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- “What is Spotting?”
Spotting is an activity where you look out for any ongoing raids or a setup for one.

- “Why should I do it?”
Spotters are the eyes of defenderdom, we rely upon them to let us know when raiders are up, spotting is now more important than ever since raiders can get pilers numbers up to the hundreds.

- “How do I do it?”
By going to the world activity feed, then using the top right box buttons to filter out all useless information. The filters you should have on are the "Moves", "Members", and "Endorsements" filters.

Outside of update you're well off just by using the Moves and Members filters, while during update you should use all 3.

- “What do I look for?”
Moves into vulnerable regions (vulnerable regions being those with an executive delegacy or without a governor), moves into a feeder or late-updating region (Carcassone, NationStates, and Wintreath are notable examples) are also indicative of raider activity, admissions into the World Assembly, or multiple endorsements in a short span of time on a single or very few specific nations. Onto some more specific cases that you’ll find:

Tags: I’ve seen some people report tags as ongoing raids, to avoid making this mistake here's a flowchart for you! (I’ve also taken the liberty to add a few additional pointers to it, not just for tags)

(“What's a tag?” In our case tags are raider publicity, using vulnerable regions as platforms for it, the damage done by tags is purely cosmetic and can easily be undone by the next update.)

Off update raids: 2 or more WA nations moving into vulnerable regions while endorsing each other, a specific group of nations, or one single nation.

I’ve found that most often than not the only raiders that attempt to do off update raids are noob ones, due to that sometimes it'll take time in between their lead moving and their endorsers following them into their target regions, with this in mind, if you suspect a region may be the target of a raid, keep an eye on it.

Open stages: Sometimes raiders will be openly preparing themselves for an occupation on a known raider Jump Point or an IJP (Instant Jump Point, a region created during update, due to this it won’t update until the next update), the way of identifying this is simple, they’ll be endorsing one nation that's serving as their lead, or multiple specific ones.

("What Jump Points are out there?" Most, if not all, organizations have their own Jump Points, however the ones that sees the most use are Suspicious, and City of Yharnam, you may ask your officers for what other Jump Points exist.)

Stealth staging: In order to have the highest chance of succeeding on establishing an occupation, raiders will attempt to use “clean” nations, these nations are ones that have never been used for any raids before and that aren't known to be controlled by a raider.

This is probably one of the hardest things to do as a spotter, as most often than not you’ll be guessing what nations are cleans and which are not. Despite the difficulty of doing this, there's a few things to make this easier that you can look into, such as the speed at which this nation answered issues (say around 8 seconds between issues or if they answered them at that exact timing, if they answered any at all), the speed at which they got into the World Assembly (such as joining or applying it shortly or immediately after founding), or if the suspect nation is themed in a specific manner such as being based around a character of a movie or show.

Personally, and to make this easier to myself, I only look into nations recently admitted into the World Assembly, but you may want to look into nations that have only applied, as they can be used to stage in a short span of time.

Lastly, I’ve heard that using the moves+founds+members filters can be useful for catching additional sleepers, however keep in mind that your feed will also be filled with foundings, adding onto the information that you’ll have to go through.

- “Do I have to do this all the time?”
Nope! Everyone knows that spotting, while essential to defending, is one of the most boring things to do. What you can do instead is check the feed every few hours and see if anything interesting has happened. Regardless, any amount of effort that you put into this is appreciated!

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Using your dossier:
You can also use your dossier to keep track of raider nations by adding them on it, without the additional information from the world feed, this can be also used for catching stealth attempts. However you obviously will miss anything that happens in the world feed. I recommend that you have a nation specifically set for this purpose if you intend on doing this.

WA Tracking:
Sometimes you may want to track down where a raider currently has their WA membership in, to make it easier for yourself you may want to disable all filters except for the “Members” one, meaning that you’re only left with applications, admissions and resignations.

As to how to track it, it can either be very simple or very complicated, sometimes raiders will resign and immediately move their WA to a known nation, or they may resign and not have their WA membership in use for days. This is something that you’ll learn on your own, such as learning what puppet set belongs to a raider and such. Keep in mind that if no one is able to find the WA of a raider, there's the possibility of a stealth stage.

Looking Through Delegacy Changes:
Sometimes the stage for a raid will be missed or a noob raider group may not be spotted, so, after update, something you may want to do is look back through through any delegacy changes that occurred during that update, to make it easier only use the "Members" filter on the world activity feed.

From there on look through any new delegate that you don't recognize. To confirm whether that the nation in question is a raider (unless the new delegate makes it obvious that they aren't a native of that region) you can; look at their residency streak, this won't 100% confirm that the delegate is a native, as they could also be a sleeper, however that could give you a good idea of who they are, you also can check their posting history, which would confirm if they are a native or not.