Hmm... I had not intended to start this thread and abandon it, but sometimes life intrudes, and forces us to do what we have to do, instead of what we want to do.
Anyway, there are quite a few reasons I think that adding more characters has actually moved us in the wrong direction. Most of them have already been hit on by others. Here's a rundown of my own reasons, some of which are duplicated from above.
1) Having a large number of characters creates more opportunities for power hording. Players who really enjoy this game tend to quickly learn how to gain positions, Once gained, positions are easy to hold. A quick rundown on my own characters:
* EC: Ruler
* AT: General, Lord (stepped down from general ~2 days ago)
* BT: Banker, Lord (lost banker re-election yesterday)
* FEI: Ruler, Duke
* SI: Duke, Margrave
* DW: Margrave, Vice Marshal
Do I really need to hold four council-level positions with four different characters on four different islands, in addition to the various duchies and lordships? As a result of holding all of these positions, I really don't care when a new position opens up in one of these realms. I have all the positions I want, and have access to more, if I really wanted them. Lots of other people apparently feel the same way, judging by the now-common occurrence of elections for council-level offices failing because no one runs, or the offices staying vacant because no one wants to be appointed. I've even seen circumstances where the only person that wants the office refuses to run, deliberately allowing the election to fail so he could make a point. He knows no one else will run, and can afford to allow the election to fail, then run and get the office in the next round. In some realms, region lordships are essentially meaningless, because anyone who wants one already has one, and there are more to spare for the next dozen nobles who show up.
The combination of lots of characters per player, and ready availability of positions and lordships pretty much everywhere has devalued their significance and desirability. If I only had three characters, that general's position would have meant more to me, and I probably could have found some way to contribute with it, instead of becoming a zombie.
2) The greater number of positions being help by the same person creates more demands on players' time. There is only so much time in a person's day. I used to spend multiple hours a day running just three characters. Now I've got six characters, but less time overall to play. So my characters end up being what I've always despised: Idle placeholders. Characters who hold positions of power, but let that power go unused, not contributing to my own fun, or the fun of the other players in the game. So I've started shedding positions. It's one thing to run your landless knight as a zombie drone, but running your combination general/duke/margrave/marshal/ambassador as a zombie is criminal.
3) Having lots of characters available is an enabler of one of my pet peeves: Propping up tiny realms with lots of doubled-up characters. (Or reinforcing large realms with an even larger contingent of ultra-reliable, ultra-loyal drones.) This is one of the reasons I liked Dwilight so much. One character per account, with no way for two or three people run a realm all by themselves with doubled-up characters. You either had to openly horde power by carrying all those titles around on one character (and thus people could easily tell what was happening) or you had to allow other people to join in the fun. (Interestingly enough, the most insular, friendless, and despised realms on Dwilight (Averoth and Aurvandil) both turned out to be giant multi-accounting scams.)
Doubled characters in a realm also lead to a proliferation of zombie characters in that realm. Yes, there are exceptions, but doubled characters tend to be zombies or practically NPCs. They rarely add anything useful to the realm beyond holding a spot. At worst, they are used by the player as nothing more than a second voice to parrot their main character's agenda.
Running multiple characters per island is a slightly different beast. It is in some ways both better and worse than doubling up in one realm. It doesn't allow some of the same concentration of power in a single realm. What it does allow is for more secret, non-obvious, and/or unbreakable ties between realms. You may not be able to run a ruler in two realms, but two or three people with doubled character on an island can easily have an unbreakable hold on two realms.
4) With everyone running so many characters, it can be difficult to get away from players you just don't like. We all know that there's always that one (or two, or ten...) player that you just can't get along with. But with everyone running so many characters, it can be almost impossible to get away from them. You leave the realm they're in on FEI, and two weeks later they join the realm you're in on AT. You pause that character and start another on EC, but they're already there, too! It may seem like a minor thing, but playing in a realm with a player you just can't stand can be damn painful, and just suck the fun right out of the game. A shrinking player base, and profusion of characters, can really cut down on the places you can enjoy playing.
5) A profusion of zombie characters leads to more quiet realms, where only a few players ever truly interact. Alice and Bob may both have characters in the same 5 realms. But if Alice likes Keplerstan and Bob likes Evilstani, then they are going to focus their attention in different realms. Alice and Bob may play in the same realms, but they never interact, because they don't care about each others' favorite realms. If both of them played in Keplerstan and Evilstani, and no other realms, then they would be much likely to devote time to those realms, and thus interact more.
The more I think about it, the more I think that our reaction to the shrinking playerbase (giving people more character slots and slightly decreasing the available land) was not the right way to go. The extra slots just diluted the meaningfulness of the characters we had. The slight shrinkage wasn't enough to compensate for that dilution.
I think that the drastic action of closing islands (yes, multiple islands) is our only remaining option. Shrinking down to four islands is probably a good first step: Stable, Testing, War, Colonies. What this means is that we would close FEI, AT, and then either BT or Dwilight. (Executive direction from Tom: Shut down EC and we shut down everything.) Change character limits to as follows:
War Island:
* Every account gets one noble character on the War Island. This is a special character, and is separate from all of the below limits/conditions.
Other Islands: (EC/Dw/Col -or- EC/BT/Col)
* All accounts can have get three active characters.
* Normal accounts can have a maximum of two active nobles.
* Donor accounts can have three active nobles.
* No more than one active noble character per island.
Or is this all an overreaction, and I'm just barking up the wrong tree with all of this?
