Originally Posted by
JeffT
There are currently 3200 players and 64 available combinations of races and personalities (8 of each). If everything were perfectly balanced and there were no player preference concerns, I suppose we'd expect to see 400 of each race and 400 of each personality, or 50 of each race+personality combination.
We currently have 4 races at or above 400 provinces, and 3 personalities. We have another 3 personalities over 300 provinces (~10% of players), and warrior is close -- really the only underrepresented personality is sage. Similarly, human is really the only race that concerns me, from a 'amount played' perspective. But human, dwarf, and sage all suffer from the same issue -- they're not exciting. They're strong, but they're not exciting.
Frankly, if everything were perfectly balanced, you might hope to have 0 race+personality combos over 200, so I don't view having 3 over 200 as a failing because there should be more. A lot of what people play is driven by either personal preference (e.g. in spite of Avian's popularity, there are plenty of players who refuse to play them because they require more activity), or thematic desire (e.g. there are a lot of people who will play undead regardless of whether they are technically strong or weak). Claiming out of hand that elf (and heretic/mystic), for example, isn't viable as Verminator does in spite of having two combinations with ~175 players, over 400 total players, and those personalities each having over 300 seems off.
To answer Nightmare's question, in a nutshell -
From a gameplay perspective, we want to expand options and diversity of playstyle. We want to reduce the impact of safe provinces (whether those are 'cows', or just t/ms larger than core) and expand the capacity of hybrids. We want to make mobile gameplay easier and make it so that you could be competitive -- if somewhat disadvantaged -- on one login per day, instead of requiring constant logins.