Hah, a little bit. However, the problem is that the new additional features are often not well fleshed out, and insufficient work is done to integrate them with the rest of the experience. For example, you can now build capital buildings in designated realm/subrealm capitals, but other than a small production boost in that city, they don't actually do anything. For example, i suggested that local capitals be able to implement a food tax, which could replace the need to set trade-links to gather food from every town in a region, and would also mean you could tax your vassals as a game function, which would give more incentive to offload towns to other players. But this idea was not taken up.
Also, you can now make a family House, and have members and designate a successor, but the feature is purely RP with not much in the way of integration. For example, you don't get to make buildings or compounds related to your "house" and houses aren't integrated into the message system. Also, new players just spawn a house straight away, but then quit playing with their one-person House created. The way this was implemented was absolutely terrible: making a new and entirely separate sub-system for the "House" idea, which doesn't actually integrate with anything else. A much better idea would have been to generalize the concept of a membership-organization based on the realm code. Then, the new system could have been used for memberships systems such as guilds, knightly orders as well as Houses, and would have come with the messaging system for free.
The current devs also being players is a also terrible idea in general. Old players are dedicated to the status quo, so they don't want to risk any idea that might shake things up. To add to the "retracted community" thing, i've suggested ideas that would make more openings for new players and the old influential players recoil in horror at every idea put forward.
For example, I suggested that slumbering players should eventually lose their holdings, because, you know they're not playing anymore, and having them lose their towns after a month or two would create impetus for recruiting new knights, while always ensuring their are openings popping up for new players to carve something out, since realm borders would crumble if existing players didn't renew the ranks. But the old established players were absolutely horrified by this basic suggestion, since they value the in-game "tradition" and "history" more than they value a dynamic game experience.
The need for clearing out slumbering players is clear. They clog up tons of towns with people who aren't playing and they remove the need to keep knight's offers going. Also, when new players look at the game's map, they only see a game full of existing kingdoms, which looks "full". There needs to be some sort of way to indicate to casual new players what sort of opportunities there are.
Check out the number of knights offers if you log in right now: zero. And, I can tell, you there are more slumbering areas than zero. So much more could be done to inject life into the game without needing to change any of the actual game's coding itself. For example, if a subrealm ruler slumbers then the game could spawn knight's offers for that subrealm automatically. Then, there would always be offers popping up to join areas that had fallen away. This would solve a problem where if the next-door baron slumbers then you can't resurrect the subrealm because there are no remaining members, since new knights would pop up in that barony automatically. Sure, it would make things more unpredictable, but that's only going to be a good thing.
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Topic: Might and Fealty (Beyond Battlemaster: Sandbox Strategy-RPG Medieval RP) (Read 138553 times)