Best Of

Initially considering inputing this as an IDEA, but something in my heart is telling me that it'd get downvoted into the center of the earth for reasons I can't articulate or understand.

The idea, though, is pretty simple: the envoy system is bad and should be deleted. For those of you who don't know, the envoy system essentially means that 75% of a guild's active population has to be a resident of the guild's "home" city. This more or less irrevocably ties a guild to a city, which, I dunno, I have pretty complicated feelings about. Mechanically forcing a guild to be stapled to a city kinda inorganically cements RP into a single place, and makes certain plotlines/threads more or less impossible. An example, and this is going to be from my guild just 'cause I know the guild history better:

Way back when, there was some conflict between the Infernals and Bloodloch, which kinda became a mini-event. The Infernals abandoned Bloodloch for a time, holing up in a fort somewhere else, until the political tensions eased. They reunited, and we ended up owing Severn a favor (which he literally took like a decade to collect on, but it did eventually have some plot development even years later!)

This is the sort of thing that basically can't happen now. A guild is riveted to a city mechanically, which essentially dams off a lot of vectors for conflict, but more importantly, the stories those vectors bring, and the neat resolutions they may have.

There's other issues as well that are less about macro RP and more about Micro RP. Some people don't care what city they're in. Some people care a lot. It's a factor that makes a pretty big deal to a lot of folks' character identity, and the envoy system can put them in a place where they have to choose between their guild and their city. They have to choose not because of RP, but because some arbitrary mechanical system that lapsed because the guild is going through a population decline (which happens to all guilds) or god knows how many other reasons they might fail to keep their city quota. People invest a lot of energy in getting status and power in orgs, and having to possibly throw one or the other away because of some ticking clock gun that's been put to their head that was meant to force guild identity to be more tied to a "home base city" just feels like a really bad way to have a story run.

And, honestly, I'll admit that this is yet another small entry in a file folder labeled "I think the game has become too centralized around cities, and cities have too much influence on players and orgs both mechanically with regards to roleplay." I understand why we have this city-focused play (sorta), and why there might be an incentive to have guilds mostly tied to the RP of their "home cities." But I'm also not entirely sure who is hurt by, idk, 50% of Sciomancers living in Bloodloch, or 30% of Sentinels preferring the weather in Enorian. I'm not sure why guilds can't transcend their home base city if they want to, and I'm not sure I've ever heard a compelling reason that didn't boil down to "if we don't hold people hostage, we won't get the org populations we want." Which, I dunno, if the primary strategy for keeping people in your org is modeled after a hostage situation, I think you've goofed up somewhere.