I am playing an ambassador on Dwilight, and we now have to do treaty maintenance.
The general mechanics works well, and I understand the rationale.
However, maintaining treaties is one seriously boring activity.
Basically, for those who aren't playing ambassadors, you figure out that some treaty is "38 % degraded". If it reaches 100%, the treaty gets cancelled. So you have have a button that says "maintain treaty". You click it, spend 12 hours, and now the treaty is only "32% degraded". That's it.
What it means is that realms will have to tie up people in place in order for them to perform some activity that involves no RP, no battle and no obvious increase in stats that your realm-mates could see.
I do have an idea on how to change it such that it gets more fun, but retains the basic meaning of the mechanic. The treaty maintenance rate could much slowed, but it could be made that to maintain a treaty, two ambassadors involved would have to actually meet. This would foster interaction, rather than encourage people to stay in the capital and turn into button-clickers, but it would maintain the idea that unattended treaties do degrade.
It would not work for one way treaties, but I see no reason why these would degrade: you should be at war for as long as you want to be.
