Westgard has the peculiar distinction of being a realm that was created, by the dev team, with a singular purpose in mind: to be a frontier realm to fight a near-hopeless battle against the hordes of Western Dwilight. At no point in its existence has it not had to fight for its life against monsters.
Significant efforts have been made in Westgard to make the most of that from the start - the idea of the realm being a wall of light and civilization against the wilderness. Given its position, Westgard also has the peculiar distinction of never, ever, being short of battles. It will never be a realm that sinks into endless peace as it always has action on its doorstep.
There are significant numbers of players in the realm who enjoy the Player vs Environment gameplay (probably unique in the game). That doesn't mean that people don't get frustrated when they have 10,000k+ rogues bombarding them day-in, day-out, and start to feel demoralised and overwhelmed. But I think it's important to note that there is a proportion of players who enjoy the battle against the wilds that you get in Westgard when it's well balanced.
It has been entirely aimed at redirecting monster hordes away from Westgard, to give the realm a fighting chance.
I haven't done it for at least a month or so, due to RL time sinks, though.
Such efforts are appreciated and do help to make Westgard a good place to play. It's that old D&D Dungeon Master rule that you have to try to make adversaries challenging, but not crushing, to make things entertaining for the players.
Killing Westgard will force them to migrate East with a hatred towards Astrum. This is good as it lowers total density and thus the monsters, and it creates new opportunity for tension
That may or may not be the case. It's sort of the same rationale that was behind the big freeze (kill off places to force people to migrate), and that didn't entirely work. It's important to note that very many of the players in Westgard went there specifically because it was the realm that was created on Dwilight for the players who had to move characters there from islands that were closed. People went to westgard because they had the chance to create something new from scratch. That was part of the attraction and lured in players (like me) who had never played on Dwilight before. If Westgard is destroyed, players there may migrate to other realms or they may simply stop playing on Dwilight. Personally, I couldn't predict which way I'd go. The main things I enjoy about playing in Westgard in the West are things that I couldn't get elsewhere on Dwilight. More than likely, any OOC theory that's based around purposely killing of Westgard (or any realm) with the idea of forcing players to migrate to other realms is misguided.
The reason he does so IC is due to his belief on the Bloodstars and the Bloodflow specifically which he'll come preaching in Westgard soon and to him faith is everything.
The Bloodstars do have a presence in Westgard - you just have to look for it - and priests were invited to openly preach in the realm in the early days. Then, at some point, they simply gave up and disappeared. You have to remember that the nobles in Westgard were largely entirely new to Dwilight and had no knowledge of the Bloodstars or any other native religion. A priest of the Bloodstars came to the realm and started to teach the nobles about the religion. Then that stopped. From their perspective, priests stopped showing any interest in them.
However, from an OOC point of view, you have to wonder whether the West of Dwilight having different religious beliefs to the Bloodstars would make the place more interesting. On balance, it probably would.
