Chat

1. What are your thoughts on changing from a 4-month year to a 8-month year?

For me personally, I feel like an 8-month year would be far too long and would sap some of my interest in the game. I do think having the additional time for exploring plots and threads without them being out of date would be nice, but we already allow people to use "liquid" time to continue old threads until they're concluded.

From past experience I am also absolutely certain this would lead to more people fast aging their foals. And while this is absolutely allowed for everyone, when it comes to my own personal characters, having siblings and children aging up too fast breaks my immersion and makes me extremely uncomfortable. Again, I can't stress enough that this is an allowed feature and that this is only my personal feeling toward it.

Considering how often people want to move on to the "next" character or move their legacy on, the fact that we would be waiting 2 literal, real-life years for a foal to be of age to have children (not counting real, mental maturity), seems excruciating to me considering I have only been a part of the game for 2.25 years. The foals that I would have had back in March of 2020, would only have just been able to have their first foal in March of 2022, and would have only just foaled in July of 2022. To put that into frame, Suleiman would still be a just turned three year old, and would not have even had his first foal, let alone have a territory. All of that character development that has happened over that time period would not have happened at all. He may have had other experiences, to be sure. But the foals that he's had and lost, and the context of the connections he's had to other horses would be vastly different.

If you go back and look at site threads from March of 2020, you can see how absolutely different the game is now. I don't mean in how it's played, obviously, but in the characters that are in it, what is going on politically, etc. Extending the length of the game year isn't going to change how often people have to leave for personal reasons, it's just going to mean that their characters were here for a comparitively shorter amount of time.

2. Do you think the battle rules wording for challenges issued/answered should be adjusted to per month instead of per season? Why or why not?

I don't have a strong feeling on this. I like the drama and I feel as though the battle board is underutilized for real challenges as it is, but I can see why others would want it to stay at per season.

3. Do you think the experience limit should stay as a per-season cap or have the wording changed to per month?

Again, I am on the fence about this one. There has been a LOT of discussion in the past about how long (especially as a new player) it takes to get to rank 3, so reducing the experience cap to per season (effectively making it take twice as long to get to rank 3 as it previously did, in the best of circumstances), feels like it will hurt new players the most.

Alternatively, gaining XP at a faster rate than your character would be progressing in age/experience/gameplay also feels bad.

4. Do you think raids and escapes should be adjusted to per month or stay as per season?

Just like the challenge board, I feel like these are an underutilized aspect of the game. Reducing it to per season would make them an even rarer occurrence.

5. Should the Lagoon/Peak elections stay as once a year in an 8-month season? Or should there be a second election period?

I think 8 months is far too long for the Peak or Lagoon to go without leadership if someone has to leave. That being said, I think we could maybe get around this just by adjusting the rules for prompting an out-of-season election if leadership is MIA, and therefore leave "set" elections at once per year.