Shattered Kingdoms

Check out the announcement here.

Some additional elaboration about the update:

• There are two types of factions: tribunals and cabals. A tribunal that declares war on a cabal (or vice versa) will see the status on their diplomacy list for tracking purposes, but it will not cost any money to declare the war and neither side will have upkeep for maintaining the war.
• Leaders can "step down" by retiring, administrative action or being removed during monthly updates due to inactivity. If this occurs, all diplomatic stances with that faction will be reset to truce for no cost. This will be true even if there are two leaders and only one of them steps down. If there was a cabal war in progress and one side holds the relic, it will be returned as per normal after a truce.
• The 10x figure in the update note is vague so I will just list the exact costs here:
  
  • Declaring a war now costs 3 obsidian by the initiating party
  • Daily upkeep on a war is 3 platinum for each side (real 24 hour days)
  • Daily upkeep on an alliance is 3 gold for each side (real 24 hour days)

Looking forward to your questions and feedback!

inventory
(In the safe) a translucent glass pipe (brand new)



Feel like I shouldn't be seeing this?

Just to be clear, if cabal A declares war on cabal B, then cabal A loses their relic, is unable to get it back, and refuses to negotiate terms for the return of the relic, then one of the leaders of cabal A retires, the relic is returned automatically?

As quickly as the leaders of some cabals create characters and abandon them these days, there will be no reason to engage in any cabal wars. There is no incentive to organize a group to raid an HQ now, because the other side will just retire, and reset everything.

I get that this seems like a problem now. But the problem is not the rules. The problem is a faction of players who quit at the first sign of trouble, and you have now further incentivized that behavior.

If a faction loses their relic and one of their leaders rage retires or goes inactive, a truce is now forced on the other side - giving their relic back to them? What? Is that correct? If so, this update removes any reason to ever RP defeat and PK/CRS is even more of a rinse, wash, repeat cycle than ever before.

There are two situations where this may occur in error:
1. The item was looted from a shopkeeper while he was stunned.
2. Some objects were mistakenly built with the in-shop flag enabled by default. Now that it is easy to see such erroneous objects we will quickly clean them up.

In the future, only rogues who peek at a shopkeeper will see this.

Agreed. Instead of making a change that accomodates this sort of playstyle why don't you enable (FORCE) a leader to appoint a successor before they can successfully retire their character? This would not only allow diplomacy to be renegotiated by the remaining members but also solve the issue of a cabal being left without leadership.

From your message, it seems like it may not be clear to you what we are solving for here. I see most wars going on forever, started by leaders two (and more!) generations removed. New leaders come in and are burdened with a situation they did not create with opponents who have no incentive to engage in fresh dialog.

Retirement is an almost irreversible loss of character. I would encourage you to turn your thinking on its head. If a leader retires, all of the factions at war with it have won. And I would cautiously be open to making an automatic note post to that effect (ala the duelist guild) that would be signed by the leaving leader as an admission of defeat.

Sufficient punishment for abandoning slots without successors should result in that player not being able to lead factions for a period of time. Imo this action is poor roleplay where the player places pride over their faction's enjoyment of the game.

If losing a relic sucks, just do away with the system and incentivize relic raids with other things like tokens and rare gear.

If there is not some sort of in character or in game acknowledgement (whether it is an automatic note like you suggested or some other mechanism) of defeat from the "retiring" faction, I personally wouldn't consider the war concluded and I imagine many other players will feel the same.

Rather than giving the new leadership a "fresh start", it will result in war being declared again, the relic being re-captured, and the cycle continuing.

The rules that you just updated create an expectation / requirement to RP when there is PK, but this change essentially removes any RP aspect from CRS because an RP-less truce is forced on the winning side whether or not any of their RP demands or terms have been met.

For the record: I spoke from the same position as the player base when the idea of auto-truce was introduced to the staff. I understand and agree with the frustrations being presented here.

HOWEVER, playing devil's advocate and nodding to Mogor's most recent post, if everyone is following the new rule set (particularly #1), we might see less taking one's ball and going home. Instead of the winning faction being "a dick" and demanding the impossible from their adversaries, they might be encouraged to give the losers a more sporting chance at ending a war diplomatically.