Are you referring to me? While it is true, that COUP came to us to ask if they can pull it off and if it is within the game’s rules, it is not true that we are backing it in any other way. Of course we anticipated that people will be getting upset about that, but that is true for pretty much every large scale operation.
We haven’t made any public statements about COUP and counter-COUP so far, because there is no obvious technical problem (like for example the insufficient rating system) that can be solved easily. When COUP started we started having game design / gameplay vision meetings to clarify our own vision of the game and make it communicable to the community. We are trying to answer questions like “Do we want this kind of economic conflict in the game?”, “How easy should it be?”, “What can affected players do to strike back / defend themselves?”. All these questions don’t have a single, simple answer and are hard to implement into code. So I kindly ask for a little patience, so we can sort these things out.