Re: Closing islands - Some islands have decayed past the point where they are no longer viable for play. The play experience on some islands has decayed to the point where it is detrimental to the game overall. The game needs action, strife, and conflict.
Continually allowing accounts to add more and more characters to shore up character counts is not helping. IMNSHO it has actually hurt more than it helped, for reasons enumerated in multiple other threads. Players have more characters than they can actively play, resulting in lots of zombie characters, and players with no ambition or drive to better their situation or position because they already have all the responsibility they want or can handle.
The hope is that improving the play experience of the game will allow us to retain more of the small number of people who join and try out the game.
Re: Opening new islands - Thee is no time or resources available to open new islands. Although community involvement can help in some instances, in essence crowdsourcing the work, it can only go so far. There is still a mountain of dev-only work that needs done, and extremely limited coder resources. We could, theoretically, simply dupe one island. I don't really know the full scope of effort involved in that, but there's no way it can be as simple as: 1) copy, 2) paste, 3) play. It also does not solve any of the significant issues that players have pointed out over the years with just about all of the maps.
In addition, we don't need a new, large island to hold everyone. EC is one of our smaller islands and it could easily hold one character from every active account without breaking a sweat. You wouldn't really start feeling the lack of elbow room until you hit somewhere around 600. If we could everyone to play one character on EC, then we would have a very active and dynamic game.
Re: Single character per island - We've done this on Dwilight for many years, and the resulting political landscape is much more dynamic than any other island. Players are much more engaged in their realms, without the problems of mules, drones, and political deadlock resulting from multiple characters per account. In short: If you're bringing in a second character for no other purpose than to add headcount to a depleted realm, you're not helping.
Re: How many original realms - I'm not sure. I think EC opened with 8? There is a page on the wiki about it. "Original realms" or something like that. The exact number was uncertain due to how long ago it was, some info lost during the Tiki>Wiki conversion, and lost players.
I hope all this makes sense. I'm in a bit of a hurry right now.
