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Even if it were (I don't agree that the harm is overstated at all) I find the arguments for city-locking guilds to be incredibly flimsy, and if a system is causing any harm, while also being unnecessary, there's no real reason to keep it.

Like did we all forget that the Envoy system, or at all locking people out of cities based on guild membership, is a relatively new thing? We had a whole Aetolia, for years, without having a mechanical contrivance forcing people to stay in their guild's parent city, and it was fine. If you want your guild's RP to reflect city-totality, that's still perfectly viable if this system were deleted. There's nothing stopping you. This is just arbitrarily constraining guilds whose RP may not fit the strict confines of one city for essentially no reason.

And, furthermore, I think the concern about this somehow entrenching tethers is absolutely silly. Just look at the Spears event; spirit showed up in force, Spinesreach (mostly) sat it out. Both of us have the envoy system, yet both of us had wildly different responses to that event. Why? Because of the conflict structure. Conflict structure is what guides conflict, not necessarily tethers. There's lots of solutions to that problem, but mandating that we forgo roleplay and hardcode city membership is a ludicrous proposal for fixing it. Idk maybe you're concerned about what might happen if your guild has some folk on both sides of a conflict, but navigating that situation sounds like nothing but pure fun and joy to me. It's roleplay, and, I'd like to point out: it's conflict. A real, live conflict right in front of you. It's just not an easy "our group of guilds versus your group of guilds," which sounds tremendously boring to me (if we're talking about that being the sole conflict axis-- obviously this is fun a lot of the time).

The arguments for keeping it are not flimsy, people are simply refusing to acknowledge any type of concern that runs contrary to what they want, or explain it away with 'fun rp choices', but trying to round up the things that have been said that were equally outrageous is more effort than I am willing to put into this conversation. At the end of the day I care far less about what I deem a, at most, minor inconvenience to some players, than a lot of you. I'll state my opinion one last time.

I do not think that problem is as bad as it is made out to be.

I do not think that the level of forced direction present for guilds is all that terrible. This is an opinion that is directly opposite of the opinion I held when Oleis originally hard restricted citizenship.

Edit: Had some grammatical errors (probably still do) cause this was a 30+ minute wip that was eventually scrapped. >.>

If guilds have a strong identity independent of Cities, then what's the problem? Why do people have to be adherents to one city or another in this case? It's worth pointing out that Aetolia isn't like a lot of other IREs, with their multitude of diverse cities and guilds. We got the four cities. That's it. That alone places a lot of limitations on how people express their characters, but being able to mix-and-match guilds and cities in this way gives people a lot more breathing room. I literally don't see how these diverse allegences are a major problem. If you want the simplicity of being a Teradrim Bloodlochian Ivolnite, that's totally something you can choose to do. If you wanna be a Duiranite Templar Omeian**, if it fits your character and scratches the itch you wanna scratch, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to.

Tying guilds to cities in this forced way is way, way more stifling than whatever imaginary problems might arise from allowing people more freedom to pursue their RP, and forcing them to be even more ingrained in the city identity (without making it be the guild's choice a la the Syssin) would make them superflous and antithetical to good roleplay. You're framing this as "we should make players make choices" while also arbitrarily taking their choices away, and that doesn't make any sense. If they have an actual conflict, that's a real choice. If they have a hardcoded backend system forcing them to be in one city because they're in a guild, that's not a choice, that's the very definition of a contrivance.

**I've just been told this is pretty rare (was just something I made up on the spot), since The Templars envisage themselves as a wing of the Enorian military. Great! That's their guild RP, that they chose! Nobody had to force that on them! Pretty cool, if you ask me! This is an RP-driven limitation, not an arbitrary mechanical constraint. Good RP!

Forcing guilds to work through what to do if, say, Bloodloch and Spinesreach went to war and they got some people from both guilds in each city sounds like a lot of fun to me. Making it so you must be a citizen of a given city to be in its guild just seems like doubling down on the Cities Got Too Much Mechanical Authority problem. I don't agree that tying guild ID even more to the cities is the right call. Might as well delete guilds at that point, if you're going to make them inextricable entities from their parent cities.

I think guilds have a lot of identity despite being tied to city and I do not get the argument that deleting the envoy system means we should basically delete guilds. I think players having to make choices is good! I think Aetolia really suffers from a split Allegiances issue. Where your character can have their loyalties split far far to many ways and it is a bit stifling for both conflict rp and pk.

I will say that I do agree that opening membership of guilds to both tether cities does enforce the watered down 'superorg' that is a tether - as well as really watering down the takes of the cities and guilds themselves.

Why should Enorian characters care about the mission of the Sentinels? If you care about those things, why is your character a citizen of Enorian? Someone could argue 'nuance and complexity', but it seems to me like most of them would just not want to be part of Duiran or want to keep their city rank or whatever. If you are incompatible with Duiran's takes, you're probably not compatible with the takes of any of its guilds and you are just fooling yourself.

But we're too far down the road for that, imo, which is why I'm cool with just opening it up and seeing where the chips fall. Maybe we could migrate a guild here or there based on these notions.