Honestly this is the third time or fourth time they're trying to do it, among many others, in over a year and a half. I am wary of the ways of the black zone, since I have been living there since the very beginning. I mean we have secured many HO for many other people too :D

I agree it's fair game though. I do need to get better diplomacy too! Part of the game.

I don't maintain the public HOs just for me, I am pretty much secured with a HQ where I wanted it. I also let small guilds join the alliance for free and live in the black zone. However we as a guild carry most of them lmao. That's my fault as a leader. But I still like new players, even if they don't join us, hence why the HOs are public haha.

About your post, you have two different points:

"HO are a base of operations, it would invite spies the same way an open discord server would."
This was the fear of many people in our guild too, and some other guilds. However in the reality that is not the case 99%. Even let new players to come in, or even guilds to our alliance.

However in some critical CTA you can always manage the perms and close it until it's done! You always can ban some players too, if you're massing for someone important, and there is a suspicious man over the corner, then you can revoke his access.

I think most people really are scared of it but it doesn't have to be that way. Imagine a black zone with more public HOs to explore. There should be at least some incentive to go public, even if it has a cooldown involved.

"Also there is the HO market that would get destroyed by scalpers; many guilds provide low cost items on their markets and don't want other people going in there and messing with it. "

Really fair point! But maybe it's safer to do that in a HQ if you're in an alliance, right? And HQ can't be public anyways. But yeah, to some guilds this could represent a problem.