Look, I am sorry for singling out Allison because Allison is just a convenient example. She made it easy because she's the only person to openly admit to being fine about what a lot of other people are tacitly fine with. And Geronus is right, when it comes to this stuff I am pretty close to an endangered species these days. But none of this comes from my own personal desire to have the game be a certain way, though obviously I have one. it comes from how the game once was, and more importantly, how everybody said they wanted it to be for Dwilight. I'm excluding here my beefs with SMA and things like the Zuma because they're not relevant to this point.
Titles are also a good example because they're the very first thing on the 'do' list on the Dwilight wiki page. Why is that? Rewind to 2006.
Similar discussions were had then, some around the FEI, which had lost its designation as the 'RP Island' well before even then. And when I say we had a lot of RPers, I don't mean that the only thing we're missing now is people who would log in and write paragraphs of text about whatever they did that day (though some did). These were people who could take a black screen with white text on it and convey a real feeling of place and time. It wasn't one thing they did; it was a thousand little things, and collectively it made BM special for a lot of people, most of whom clearly aren't around anymore to talk about it.
One key factor was that you weren't guaranteed a lordship like you are today. You could spend 6, 8, 10 months in a realm and be active and eventually be made lord. Duke could take quite a lot longer. This has more to do with arithmetic than player attitudes: when you had to work hard to get a title, you instinctively valued it more and you paid attention to what the people who had titles said and did. When the player count dropped and it became significantly easier to get not just a lordship but even a duchy or a kingdom, of course the value of a title went down: the cost of acquiring one had gone down. You would never have had a character like Allison drift between a half-dozen realms and be able to get ahead without making an investment in a particular realm's hierarchy -- that is to say, without hobnobbing around the people who had titles and 'playing the game.' This didn't take a whole lot of extra effort, particularly when you already had someone who (as has been pointed out) invested a lot of time in plots and micromanaging.
You also had more intra-realm factions, because realms with 60-70 people had internal politics to spice things up. The last potential war and the current one on the FEI were both heavily influenced OOCly by rulers needing something to do for their players (not necessarily a bad thing) -- and in some cases outright OOC ruler channel chat about what we can do to make things less boring. I never saw this in '06 and '07 because there were so many more moving parts in each realm that it was pretty unlikely for all of them to stop at the same time and need an external push.
I also remember Tom having a pretty good reason for having a single d-list and not a whole discussion forum. I don't remember exactly what he said but somebody explained to me (hearsay, sorry if this isn't accurate) that one of the reasons was because he knew it'd turn into an OOC snipe-fest between players over whatever their characters were fighting about. Perfectly natural for a conflict-based game but not productive, and one of the things that dampened that for me was when characters could really pull off a 'medieval feel,' whether through RP or just simple letter-writing. It was like a built-in reminder of 'hey, this is just my character, Sir Dingley Dang, and I am just the actor.' It didn't always work and you still had sniping, but it was a nice hedge and it attracted people to the game. I'd run into about a dozen of them on the Internet over the years (though not as a clan or anything) and they were not people who would come onto the d-list and fight it out. If the game or people on the game made their experience less fun, they'd just leave. At the time, it was mostly game mechanics and bugs - and a lot of those are a hundred times better today. But the atmosphere of the game has changed because of title arithmetic.
When Dwilight first started, stuff like 'people will use titles' didn't even get discussion because it was just assumed as a base-line. The notion that a character with major influence would or could become a character of continent-wide influence who didn't care about this stuff (and this was not just one occasion in Terran, either) would have been foreign to everybody. This is reflected in the wiki, in the Dwilight welcome page, and (I think) even on the 'report an SMA violation' page. I didn't have a lot to do with any of those things besides the RP Primer, so if I have unreasonable expectations, it's because that's what a lot of the game had six years ago.
Sorry I'm not showing appropriate reverence to an internet noble. Just seems strange to me that you'd eulogize one example whose chief attribute was a lot of time and dedication to play the game but not the dozens who made BM a place that was something beyond just moving internet soldiers around a game board.
