Shattered Kingdoms

Binary, yeah, that's a good word for it. I think the game the game would seriously benefit from the increased dark vs. dark conflict (fine, I guess Legion could finally have an ally in BH but who doesn't want to [REDACTED] up the Empire) that giving the North a tribunal would help facilitate.

I just don't see the logic behind taking away options and expecting it to increase the playerbase. I can imagine people getting excited by the resurrection of these tribunals, though.

It worked for Kevin Kostner. If you build a tribunal in your corn field the players will come. Or was it a baseball field? Whatever. This can be our field of dreams!.

We’re only talking about the Black Hand though.
I think it would make more sense to reimplement it as something else.
It wouldn’t really be fair to bring back the Hand and not the Guardians, right?

Ignore my last post about changing npc guards based on if light or dark controls the cabal.
I think a lighty or darky controlled faction would be good for both sides and could work for repopulating the north.
Darkie RP is that they’re trying to resurrect the CoN. The lighties could be trying to destroy it or keep it dead.
I still think it would be cool to watch lighties and darkies fight over who controls the mercenary rebels in the north.

Unless we only wanna bring back the Hand and leave out the Guardians?
Are we going to put forth effort to bring back both?

People seem to be more excited about the Black Hand, because, let's face it, evil is cooler. But I'd dust off my racist elf [REDACTED] for GoA. Taslamar isn't a great fit for a Sylvar elf who thinks all the other races are corruptible and rather incompetent.

Can't imagine the lighties or anyone else with something against the undead would let the BH come back without a fight. It would be rather disappointing if they did, no?

I really want to discourage getting your collective hopes up before you get some sort of official nod from D on this. I never said this was a possibility. I just said that if it WERE, you would have to put in lots of work. It will never be an instantaneous rollback.

Also, to Tragonis's point, it had been built: They didn't come. We didn't have the numbers to support 5 tribunals when 5 was the number.

On the Guardians, that situation was arguably MORE screwed up in the scheme of Pyrathian politics and might be even harder to roll back. I remember watching that situation unfurl and just marveling at how awful it got compared to how it could have been. It was, after all, an elf that refused to accept elven help and let the Empire get a foothold in the country.

When did GoA and BH get removed? We could just look at mudstats.com and see if it had any positive effect whatsoever. But, since the numbers had been on a continuous decline for many years until recently, I'm going to hazard a guess and say it did no good at all at best and had a deleterious effect at worst.

I took an 18 year break from SKs until this April and have a limited understanding of what all has happened during that time period. However, it seems that some of the issues that caused players to flee en masse have been resolved while others have been forgiven by the playerbase. It would be a huge disappointment to me and the other invested players to just let the recent resurgence go to waste when there's the potential to capture that interest.

And, regarding the death of these two tribunals, in my opinion mandatory GRPs are unfun and unfair to begin with, not to mention when the outcome is more or less fixed anyway. If both of these tribunals were going to be removed no matter what players did ICly, then I think it's unreasonable to insist upon an extreme amount of player effort to restore things to normal.

I strongly dislike the term "mandatory GRP."

Nobody forces anyone to participate. There are occasionally changes to the world for various reasons, and we make story lines to help them make sense. Plenty of these stories have been ignored, with the outcomes shoved into the game with little input from players. Like the Black Hand roleplay, again. (Or the zombies, which we specifically built to respond to player input, that could have so easily been a weekend event that didn't result in such a great impact, but I digress.)

However, being on staff, we are damned if we do and damned if we don't involve the players. There was no greater outcry from the playerbase about the mostly uncontensted removal of the BH than there was for the slow decay of Sith'a'Niel and the political turmoil that plagued Ayamao for almost a year. People complained about both. And they would have complained if we had just ripped up Mortoon or the Bastion with no explanation... So we tried to give one.

I'm not saying that you're wrong to want your tribunals to remain in tact or that the complaints are invalid. I get it. It is -literally- a game changer. It lessons the number of choices available for 'official' rolplay paths. It cheapens the world on some level. But it's also cheap to just roll it back with no conflict or roleplay.

Nothing that monumental is undertaken without consideration and debate among the staff. This wasn't a fun discussion with unanimous agreement, even among us. But I can't promise that every large-scale decision is going to go through the players: I can pretty much guarantee that they won't. Not because we don't care about your opinions, but because we can't facilitate everyone's desires. It's hard enough to do something that everyone agrees on (sacred suits); to discuss exactly how to go about trying to fix situations like 10-man factions mercilessly beating up on a 2-dude crew are even harder.

Not that this change fixed it; we still see a lot of that. But it was an earnest attempt at positive change. And any roll back will be treated with the same roleplay. You can involve your character or not.

If a GRP has world-changing outcomes regardless of player interest or participation, then I'd argue it's mandatory. I understand that staff put a lot of effort into these things even if players don't like the outcomes (and as a writer, I really -get- how much that sucks), but these types of events don't get players interested, then perhaps the approach should be reconsidered.

I might be alone here, but 'd rather see a entirely hands-off approach from the staff than GRPs with plotlines developed by the staff that have lasting impacts on the game (I'm entirely against GRPs at all, to be perfectly honest). I want stories that start out as my own idea and develop organically with other players. That's why I play SKs and not one of the gazillion other RPGs.

Clearly there's a lot of issues at play here regarding why the tribs were removed and why they should/shouldn't be reinstated. But regarding the 2vs10 problem, that seems like more of a general issue of 1) PvP in SKs not being properly incentivized and/or balance issues and/or PvE time sink complaints and 2) people getting involved in PvP when they should really familiarize themselves with werttrew's how to avoid PK post.

But it's like when a soda company changes their drink and everyone's hates it and then they go back to their original formula and now it's the most awesome thing ever. Might work with bringing back the tribunals. Or maybe it won't. We only know that doing nothing will likely result in no change. Do we have much to lose by trying it?

The problem with this sentiment isn't that there is a problem with you having it , it's that other people have completely different viewpoints. Sometimes people have both conflicting viewpoints on the same issue of global RPs. I've literally seen people bemoan GRP events, yet repeatedly say their favorite moment in SK was the Leviathan RP or another GRP.

Personally, I'm not the biggest fan ever of GRPs because I think they require a ton of time, and are entirely too high risk for not enough reward. That said, I've really enjoyed some of them over the years, like the Uxmal/Empire war event. I think the truth of the matter is probably somewhere in between. People like GRPs that scratch their particular itch gameplay wise, and don't care for ones that don't, and/or limit their ability to scratch their own itches for a time. It's just incredibly difficult to have a global RP that feels important to participate in unless there is a possibility of bad outcome. Forcing a "no outcome" or "good outcome" situation when people are actively trying to influence a bad outcome seems even more disrespectful to player intent personally. There is a good quote from a show I watch though, "We can talk all day long about looking out for yourself, minding your own business, just trying to survive, but it all boils down to an excuse that isn't worth a damn when the world is burning down around you. Doing nothing is just as bad as doing the wrong thing."

As far as the removed tribunals go, I think the strongest reasoning for bringing them back absolutely boils down to the greater variety of RP it could offer. I think the strongest reasoning against it is the further fractionalization of the current limited players seems very unwise when people already complain about not seeing other people. To me, I think the latter is stronger at the moment than the former, but I also think the more support everyone shows for the idea the more likely it is to happen. While I don't see it being a likely occurrence, if there were four or five people who currently didn't play ready to sign up to fill a new/different/reopened tribunal, that would obviously go a long way towards minimizing the theoretical impact of stretching players out more. Basically, despite it being unlikely, everyone voicing their support for something and backing it up with why is the right way to handle this kind of thing. Better to try and possibly fail than do nothing.

I'm just going to second Meissa's sentiment though, I don't want anyone to get their hopes up because these kinds of decisions really do reside with Dulrik. He's more likely to be swayed by sound, well-thought out, ideas than vague emotion though so I suggest everyone keep that in mind when posting their support in this thread.