Quote Originally Posted by CannaWhoopazz View Post
Lowering the KD size as a solution to game longevity and enjoyment seems suspect at best. People will step up to lead sure, but most won't do well. More than likely, the leadership teams that exist will stick together. They enjoy playing together, so they'll continue to do so, just with less grunts to manage. And now there's a bunch or kingdomless grunts with nowhere to go. Not being kept by their old kingdom when the sizes get cut is going to sting, and demotivate them and we'll lose players.
1) Not anyone else's responsibility, especially not the devs, to get new leaders to perform well. Yet how else do you think new leaders develop at all? Your solution is to stick with existing capable leaders and have no new players develop into good leaders through practice, trial and error, learning, etc., which doesn't help growth at all. It keeps the status quo and keeps the stale game that only veterans stay into. Your thinking is backwards.

2) I'd be willing to bet there are very few kingdoms with a full complement of consistent players from one age to the next. There already are a bunch of kingdomless grunts, they're in a pool and they are picked through each EOA and convinced to come play for a top kingdom just to fill a province slot and push buttons when told to. That's how most 22-25 player kingdoms exist these days. Why not eliminate the stress of scouring the pool of players who are "taking a break" or "looking to merc" and trying to get them to fill your button-pusher slots?

3) Honestly, about the sting and the demovitation? That's only going to happen to players who are already not actively playing the game to acceptable standards. Maybe being let go will help them figure out why they are even still trying to play this game in the kind of kingdom they've been let go of. Maybe we lose lazy players, so what? What are they contributing to the game and its growth? Too many players are just "going through the motions" in their otherwise busy lives. You want to keep your busy friends? Reevaluate your kingdom goals. You want to improve your kingdom? Reevaluate your busy friends taking advantage of your enabling allowances.

Utopia is not hard to succeed at and enjoy playing. To grow and gain active players, you have to be willing to shed the lazy players. You have to show new players an environment of proper activity demands to succeed. IMO one of the biggest reasons for fringe players is that many lesser kingdom leaderships don't always hold them to a high enough standard. They aren't forced to learn what the game demands for success, they just come in and play how they feel like playing.

Smaller kingdom sizes will let leadership focus on developing a more reasonable number of players to function as a team and grow their own leadership skills in the process.