Message #127054

[Penchant]

Indirik. Please, for the love of god, read my posts before you try and assume I wanted politics to be taken into account. Where have I said that? Point to it, and I will admit it, but I do believe that I never, ever asked that it be judged by politics. Now I want you to read this carefully, because repeating myself is getting very, very tiring.

What I was saying is this: If we must remove a part of Dwilight, or any other Island for that matter, we should look at ways to ensure that you remove land with as little affect to your player base as possible. This means cutting out swathes of land that are not densely populated by nobles. Until recently losing several regions from what I assume were monster attacks, Morek had what I have to believe is the worst population density of a major realm in the entire game. They only had 1 noble per region. Probably because of recent events Morek has been getting a couple of nobles from the west, but they still are spread entirely too thin.

I want the main factor to that is taken into account to be realm noble density as compared to amount of regions, not politics, or an arbitrary reason that is no longer relevant (the realms in the west were just as stable as those in the east, so that kind of reasoning is just flavor text for a !@#$ situation).

Does that make more sense now Indirik? Can we please stop assuming I'm infuriated because the political situation was inconvenient? (I'm looking at you Glaumring)

Take some of your own advice there. While he stated politics specifically, he also said determining it by any other realm trait because you are still asking for realms to be targeted.

When the dev team sat down and decided to make a determination of how to achieve our goals, we set out a clear policy that we would not consider political boundaries when setting policy. There was a suggestion or two that perhaps the event could be used to help reshape the politics of some islands. We quickly, and almost unanimously, decided that this was not desirable. We do not want to sit down and say "These realms are good, and we should preserve them. These realms are bad, and should be destroyed." This subjective decision process is bad for the game and the players. Who wants to be the player that has the dev team come down and say "For the good of the game, we have decided that your realm, specifically, has to be eliminated."

Part of the assumption that you're making is that, if we would have tried to use political boundaries and specific realm traits to determine which realms should die, that we would have of course agreed that your realm would be saved. You have no guarantee that this is the case. Perhaps we would have closed the north. Or the south. Or the outside of both halves. Or pared the north and south down by 25% of the map size. Or maybe we would have blown a huge hole in the middle of both the eastern and western halves. Who knows? In any case, there's no guarantee that Barca, or Asylon, or Niselur, or Astrum, or any other specific realm would have survived the decision process.

So in the end, we decided to go with island history, and revert the western half to a monster-riddled wilderness. I'm sorry that some realms had to be destroyed in the process. But at least, in the end, every player knows that what was done was not done in an effort to specifically target any individual realm or alliance. This is true of the decisions made regarding all islands.

You have my personal promise on that fact. And if the personal promise of the dev team is not good enough for you, then there is absolutely nothing that can be done to convince you of how things were done, and why they had to be done that way.

Specific relevant parts have been added bold.