so there you have it. The status quo is maintained because those with the power to change it have no interest in doing so.
But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't change. It doesn't mean that no one on Atamara wants change.
Like I just said, all it means is that the rest of the people are sheep who are willing to be led around by their leaders. Change one charismatic leader from a stodgy stick-in-the-mud who cares only for his own power to a fighter for change....actually, change just one, and you'll pretty much get Silnaria again. The stick-in-the-muds have accumulated too much power already.
That has nothing to do with coding, sinking islands or any other thing we could do. Sinking an island just to "renew" is is a lot like nuking planet earth into a wasteland in order to get the corrupt politicians who have taken over out of power. It's... not strictly wrong, and it'll accomplish the goal, but it is a tiny bit excessive and it will damage the innocent most and those you want to hit least.
I don't fully disagree. I don't think that sinking Atamara is the best answer to its stagnation. However, if you're already thinking about sinking one or more continents, I think it behooves you to at least seriously consider sinking the continent that, by all the measures we've done, has the lowest
engagement, as well as the highest character count (and second highest player count, by a very small margin).
Yes, people will leave. But that's true no matter which continent you sink. And wouldn't it be better to have a higher chance of improving the density on all other continents to a really enjoyable level, while at the same time removing the continent that, again, produces the most drones and the least creativity, and has the political situation that pretty much everyone agrees is most likely to remain stagnant for a very long time?
If you sink AT because you want to break up the mega alliance, it will re-form elsewhere.
No. Another alliance may form elsewhere, but the alliance on AT cannot simply be remade anywhere else, any more than the unique cultures you find on Dwilight could simply be transplanted to another island. It is too dependent on its own history and geography.
I think you view BattleMaster as being a little too homogeneous, Tom. The various realms and islands are not just easily-replaceable cogs. If you destroy one island, the situation that exists on that island at that time will not simply spring into being on another island within a few weeks. Not even within a year. The people will scatter. The powerful realms will lose their power. In many cases, the double-characters that bind realms together inseparably will not be able to do so anymore because the island they've moved to already has one of that player's characters on it, in a completely different position. Or they've moved to Dwilight, which cannot have double-characters.
Tom, I think a big part of the disconnect we're seeing here is that you haven't been playing the game for a while (at least, not that
I know of!), and haven't seen how things really are on the ground. You're only really able to make observations of the forums and the statistics. And we all know perfectly well that you hated forums from the get-go, which, no matter how flexible you are, is going to give you some bias in your observations against the forums. Similarly with Dwilight. And the EC and Atamara are two of the earliest continents in BattleMaster—it's not at all surprising that you're going to have some bias towards them. You've even come right out and said that you won't sink the EC because "it
is BattleMaster".
Well, frankly, Tom, the EC hasn't
been BattleMaster for a long time now. BattleMaster has been changing over the past nearly decade-and-a-half, in ways you couldn't have foreseen, and in some ways I don't think you've really been following. And that's wonderful, and amazing, but it does mean that your view of the game isn't as accurate as it was six years ago when I joined the dev team.
If you're not willing to listen to the people on the forums because we're just a small subset of the game, then
don't just act on your opinion, because you're even less representative of the game than we are right now. Vellos and I have been developing a set of surveys that should help to gauge interest and engagement across a variety of different criteria, and once I finish rewriting the cleanup script (which is my top priority just now), I hope to be able to get those ready to go, and start gathering
actual data on all this stuff.
So if you won't listen to us, then wait for the data. Then we can all see what people
really think.