Realms are hot poopy garbage.

[strpk0]

stuff

Hey look its that one guy that doesn't play the game yet proposes sweeping changes to entire systems
How did removing fast travel work out again?

[SnuggleSnail]

I think you're doing the thing where you're thinking about ideal circumstances where everybody sorta behaves within a desired set of confines like it's a game of dungeons and dragons with acquaintances, but this is a public place on the Internet.

Whatever you're imagining playing out is wrong. What's actually going to happen:

• A bunch of extremely cheap & easy alt villages maintained by chars that study nothing but bluebells living in the capital
• Centralized control over buffs remains due to above
• Minimal expansion outside of your capital to prevent other relevant people from getting buffs
• People getting fucked by inactive realms
• People getting fucked by being covered by bad realms
• People getting fucked by being covered by no realms
• Dummy realms stopping you from expanding your own kingdom
• You being locked out of any of the fun """competition""" you're imagining because you can't fight and you're not as autistic as others
• An inflated disparity in quality & character progression because of unequal access to buffs that kills competition & trade
• Another incentive for mega-alliances, and additional multiplicative power from being in one due to concentrated benefits
• Continued lack of trade competition when a limited number of groups have buffs like mountain trad that are insanely required
• In some cases people's ability to even be involved in PVP basically shit on because of lack of access to integral buffs like marriage of the sea
• Some autist/s will feel obligated to maintain the realm/s in spite of not really enjoying it

It's been six-seven years now and nobody has come up with a single idea for realms that didn't have all of these same problems the second bad actors are introduced. Even if we do come up with some amazing idea that the last nearly decade of brainstorming hasn't produced is it better for the game if realms are worked on in detail for 1% of the userbase to interact with over other content?

It seems so self evident to me that either realms should be remove entirely, or at very least their buffs disabled while they're in such a bad state. I don't think I'm being facetious or unreasonable to say I have ///literally/// never seen a single positive argument for realms existing that wasn't hypothetical, and even if I had it wouldn't justify the thousand extremely large downsides. This game doesn't handle convoluted all-encompassing mechanics well.

[pawnchito]

I think that people see the buffs and feel "well yes realms are good" when in reality it's not realms but the buffs they like. Only like what 5 people actually have hands on experience with them. At first I was in the same camp as these bois and their suggestions but trying them out has proven to me the criticism for them is justified.

[Potjeh]

Yeah but if you need one province for each point of realm buff you can't exactly avoid expanding beyond your capitol. You need five provinces just to get full mountain tradition bonus, and you'll probably want some other buffs as well. And everyone living in these provinces will get any buff the realm has.

Good point about auth maintenance tho, I forgot that village auth is based on LP gain. Should be XP gain like realms are.

And yes, the whole fighting over provinces things is obviously something only big factions can do. It's still a reason for more actual PvP, what benefit is currently there to do it besides contesting meteors?

[SnuggleSnail]

Sure, with a province system you can't entirely exclude anybody if they're autistic enough to move and or operate out of your province/s, but that doesn't mean it's fun for anybody involved. At the beginning of the world you have no fucking idea where the good realms are going to emanate from. You have no idea how long the good realms are going to last. Even if you do, you have no idea if they're suddenly going to have a problem with you and decide to never claim your province because fuck you. I don't see how this can possibly be fun for anybody involved, except maybe the people fucking you over getting a stiffy for their hard work to grief you working out so well.

XP is easily bottable, and it has been done historically. Admittedly seemed to have not been as big of a thing recently, but I think that's more due to everybody being done with realm's bullshit. Easier to quit before things like authority become a problem. Likewise, when you make total XP gained over a large area a relevant currency player population affects things wayyyyy too much. I can say with certainty my world 12 realm gained more than x10, probably closer to x20 or x30 the authority it after 8 months than it did when it was way smaller 1 month in.

Hot take: everybody capable of competing in PVP at a higher level explicitly plays the game to do so, and is going to engage in PVP regardless of incentives. Adding overpowered rewards to winning PVP doesn't make it happen more, it makes one of the two sides win more decisively, and the other side quit faster so it snowballs into no PVP at all much faster. There were EXACTLY 3 fights around thingwalls this world. There were sometimes 3 fights in a day just from people standing outside of walls spamming racial slurs, the old faithful method. Meanwhile people on the outskirts feel even more spooked to try joining in because of progress differences. "I won't even try to fight the guy with the meteorite B12, I don't have a meteorite B12 so I can't win"

Additionally, the incentive for top players to group together to achieve any common good is awful for the game, and probably one of the hardest things to undo. The /fact/ that there have effectively only been two groups capable of engaging in meaningful PVP for the entire time I've played seems self evidently VERY BAD and has been directly caused by every significant group joining one of the two teams, likely in large part because of benefits like realm buffs