Shattered Kingdoms

At this point, I'm sure a fair chunk of players have experimented with this, and we've all seen it in action.

I'm not sure allowing 1 cabal character and an indefinite number of tribunal characters is helping anything. Coupled with the unpermanent nature of 'retiring', SK has moved further towards a state where, when things aren't going your way, you can just hop ship to your already GM and factioned alt on the other team.

Isn't there something blatantly off in one player having a character in the Guardians, one in the Black Hand, one in the Talons, and then one that's MC/Legion? Oh, and let's say the BH character has a leader flag. And the Guardian character is HF of some religion.

I'm not sure why 'dual membership' came with 'unrestricted number of factioned characters', but I'd personally suggest reverting to either, 1 factioned character (whether that character is in a cabal, or a tribunal, or a cabal/tribunal), or to make it 'even', possibly 1 Cabal character and 1 Tribunal character. So you can do 1 in both, or 2 separate characters.

Undecided.

I try hard not to discriminate IDly based on whether or not I think this character is an alt of an enemy, but it does frequently make me suspicious of this new recruit is really just trying to feel out my faction on his alt so he has more info to combat me on his main. I'm not accusing anyone of anything here. Just stating my frame of mind when it comes to this particular rule.

If a player has a certain amount of availability and more than one character to spend it on, then that character must necessarily choose which character to log into. If these choices involve taking different sides in a conflict, then it is inherently true that allowing multiple tribunal members does, in fact, influence the choices and shape of the who list distribution with players being able to play "the winning side" without inconvenience.

I am more concerned with leaders than I am with the rabble, however. If we take the ONLINEAT session durations for each of a player's characters, which immortals easily can, we should be able to clearly see categorical differences in the presence of a leader character. This can be calculated objectively. If characters are allowed to have multiple leaders, a two-way analysis of variance can also be conducted and the interaction effect will reveal if they favor their leaders appropriately. The system could automatically test for and remove leadership flags from players who do not appropriate their time accordingly.

There's every possibility to have this conducted transparently and fairly.

I support limiting players to one leader flag per character and one faction membership should they have a leader flag. There are over 50 leader flags in the game, however. It might be time to kill off some Gods or something.

As for the general rabble, I wouldn't be upset if the potential to have spy alts was taken away. Everyone knows who the roster checkers in any faction are.

I actually agree with grep here at least. I have a really good IC example and logs I'd be happy to share with imms to drive this in, but I have seen someone with alts in at least two factions try to get or influence the faction I lead into fighting a war I had reason to stay out of for the time being. Something I expressed to them on the first character before they used the second to try and influence other members.

I see no reason someone should have characters in multiple factions if they have leadership in any faction (with the exception maybe of the cabal/tribunal split that is currently allowed).

I would normally agree with one tribunal faction per player, except that the playerbase is small and I have this feeling if limited to only one, dead or wildly outnumbered tribunals would become even more common, which doesn't seem a great thing either.

There is absolutely no secrecy about who all is in a Tribunal. No one joins to find out who all is in the Tribunal that is utterly easy to find out from when they log in and you see that [ ] before their name.

I always thought it'd be amusing for there to be a finite amount of people allowed in any particular faction. So many ways it could go wrong, like certain people monopolizing positions with their friends leading and what not. It would still amuse me though, that way folks couldn't join the winning team. Might encourage people to also keep their character rolling so they don't lose a prestigious position. Then again we already see leader flag camping. Oh well, I thought it just might be interesting to see people scrambling for membership instead of knowing that no matter what, they can get into whatever faction they had planned to join since the moment of character creation.

That's an interesting idea. Maybe instead of a finite number, each member cost the faction money to maintain their position. That puts pressure on people to be actively working for their faction.