I never played on the war islands. They closed before I could get a character on them. Bringing one of them back would be a possible way to bring back some former players, as well as help retain existing players. If this were done, I think the rule set would really have to be discussed thoroughly. It needs to be done in such a way as to minimize the code differences between it and the normal islands. One of the original reasons for closing the war islands was that they complexity of maintaining the multiple code bases with differing rule sets was making coding and bug hunting extremely difficult and time consuming.
As to the idea of closing an existing island, the idea is to reduce the available land to increase the density. Simply merging islands will not accomplish this. We need to actually remove regions from the game. Some possible ways to increase density, not all related to closing and island: (Note that I have not really considered code complexity or time required to implement these ideas. This is just brainstorming ideas.)
- Redraw the maps of existing islands to reduce region count. SameCharacters / LessRegions = HigherDensity
- Lop off parts of islands. For example:
- Sink Kalmar islands on, it's worthless anyway.
- Lop off the Riombara/Suville portion of AT/BT.
- Sink the Dark Isle on FEI.
- Drop a huge meteor into the center of AT, blasting a giant crater into the island. Fill it with an inner ocean, and divide it into sea regions, and maybe a small island or two. You can combine this with lopping off the corners (Suville/Darka/BoM) to create a "ring" island.
- Sink one of the halves of Dwilight, maybe as part of a Zuma attack.
- Crank up monster spawn on all islands. Whenever a region goes rogue, and is completely surrounded by other rogue regions, (i.e. is not attached to any non-rogue region) it gets permanently blighted. Leave this going until the desired loss of regions is complete. (May require some hand tweaking at the end to leave you with a playable island... Or not!
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If closing an entire island is truly the way to go, then I don't like the idea of merging islands. This is a huge can of worms, and will cause massive problems across the board. And not just potential bugs and an absolute nightmare to code. What about people that have two characters on each of the islands merged? Now they'll have four characters on the same island? Once they are merged, how do you then trim down the total number of regions?
Instead, I, like many others it seems, like the idea of an invasion-style "test". Do some kind of invasion and see which island dies first. Whichever one is the first tog et wiped completeyl, closes. The others can be restored, partly or completely, perhaps through a tapering off of the invasion. You can do an automated invasion, perhaps with a GM-played "leader" that has some, but minor, influence over the invaders. Tim can whip up some basic "AI" to help guide the monsters through a short/simple decision tree. (Tim and I have discussed this in the past.) This time, rather that completely delete the regions from the DB like happened with BT, leave them there, but blighted, for possible future reclamation.
