For each public area on a planet there is numerous duplicates of each area, this is evidenced by how sometimes when following someone not in your party, they may dissapear infront of you. Even though you both went from a public area to another public area without passing through a private area, you have gone to a seperate instance of that area, thus they just dissappear. They would simply make each instance of the area experience the same event.

So victory/defeat would be decided upon what the majority for the community was?

Yeah, exactly