We're too far apart here to find grounds for agreement. You're still talking about realms, I'm talking about players.
Yes, you keep saying that, and I do understand that. But frankly, it's meaningless.
The argument you're making could be made about any realm losing a war: It's never fun to lose. But that doesn't mean that we should eliminate losing, because if no one ever really loses, then no one ever really wins, either.
What you're trying to do is get everyone to make all their major decisions about when and how to start and end wars based on purely OOC criteria. That would destroy BattleMaster. BattleMaster is not just another game of Risk: it's a game full of nobles, good and bad and in-between. You're asking everyone on the winning side of every war to just ignore everything their character would do, just so that the losers don't ever have to actually
lose anything, and that's neither reasonable nor realistic.
The terms are unreasonable because they'll leave no place on the island where these players can go if they don't want to play within the Empire.
Apparently, no matter how many times I say "
there's middle ground between those who hate the Empire and want no part of it, and those who want to have the Empire rule everything," you're just going to ignore me, because it destroys your carefully-built narrative.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter that much because people can just move their characters somewhere else. But it will negatively impact your player numbers on the island. Believe it. Don't believe it. Act on it. Don't act on it. Your choice.
Yes, you
totally have the moral high ground here, and you get to be the one making sad pronouncements of inevitability.
And yes, I know that when the war is over, people will leave the island, and probably the game. And that's sad. But I basically knew that when the war started—I know that's the way BattleMaster is these days. I want to change that, but your way is
not the way to do it.
Because like I said before: I'd rather see BattleMaster die than become a game of meaningless, empty wars, and despite your assurances otherwise, that's exactly what it sounds to me like you're advocating.
And in the end, Foxglove, what you are advocating is pointless, because it's a change that the vast majority of players in BattleMaster will simply never accept. Changing a culture as entrenched as the one in this game is a very hard, very slow process.
I can rewrite the code, but I can't rewrite the culture. Only the players, by acts of consensus and slow, subtle movements, can do that.
