Wasn't planning on posting my story, but since it seems many people had the same issue recently I might aswell mention it. My town was raided because of this silent update ~2 weeks ago.
I am not a complete idiot and have almost 6 years of HnH experience (which's claims and authority system salem's system is based on) and when I was planning my outer brickwall I did check for that sort of information and found all the related info on both wikis and forums. That's what I've found:
My friend pmd devs describing the situation and linked
this JC's post(which is deleted now as you can see). After two days he got a reply:
Which is
So yeah, don't bother paying your upkeep anymore folks. Competing for top ten towns was never easier, just spam dem flags inside of your brickwall and never pay. Working as intended.
I don't think there is any conspiracy to this, it's not that hard to find out on your own if you are an active raider, but dev's reaction is what bothers me. "Oh well, we forgot to mention a crucial update, suck it up, the best course of actions now is to erase all the proofs it was not always like that and call you a fool", so basically it looks like they only want to cover their own mistake, that's a very demotivating attitude and I don't think I would want to come back to salem untill community management will start to act more responsible and respective towards community (and less biased maybe? oh well, I said no conspiracy).