I agree with some of what you said here.. But definitely not the notion that there are too many titles for everybody as it stands.. There are the government positions, the steward of cities, lordships, and marshal. Doesn't seem like too many to me..
But I do agree, that we need a limit on the # of titles displayed, Elder ranks makes the most sense to me.. and I am not sure how I feel about the idea of we need 'X' number of members in order to qualify. I don't think there is going to be a surge of Guilds being created just so someone can have the title of Grand Mega-Supreme Emperor of the 'I am better than everyone' guild..
When I started playing, there were the 4 government positions and lordship. That was it, at least as far as I recall.
Then more titles were added, like marshal and vice-marshal, so every realm has at least 2 more titles, possibly 4. At some point duchies were created (correct me if I'm wrong, but duke used to just be a lordship title with extra perks), so every realm gained a handful more titles, and then duchies ceased to be tied to cities, so many realms got a few more. A typical realm of 28 nobles and 10 regions (2 cities) shared 14 titles, now that same 10 region realm can have 3 dukes and 2 armies for a total of 21 titles for what is probably half as many nobles, going from a ratio of 2 nobles per title to 1.5 title per noble.
Getting a title used to be hard and used to mean something. Now, they come a buck a dozen, one can be new and barely even try and a title will come. The number of titles per realm grew while the player base shrank.
