First, we have the problem of skills. T2A officially began on October 24, 1998, and at that time, several skills did not exist yet. For those skills, what would happen to players on UOSA who had those skills? Would we remove 100 points, would we disable the skills and leave them with 100 points less to work with, or would we simply allow players to continue using those skills, but prevent any gains in them. Each solution presents major problems, and only solves part of the problem.
Second, we have the problem of houses. For the first two months of the T2A era, houses were owned by the key holder, and for the first month of the T2A era, housing existed under the original system with no lock downs whatsoever. On each iteration through the time frame, players would quite literally lose ownership of their houses for a month, and possibly lose ownership of their houses permanently. This creates a completely incompatible system with what is seen just before reaching this point, which is a clear ownership system with house bans, friends, co-owners, strong boxes, and a twice removed rule set on lock downs and item decay.
These system changes would wreak havoc on the general environment, and they would be combined with numerous other changes at the exact same time, each of which would represent major problems for everyone involved.
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On another note, the idea of selecting certain elements of an era (or entirely custom elements) and using those elements is a dubious proposition at best. Granted, while it is possible to put these decisions to a vote and go with popular opinion, the process of doing so will necessarily pair down the decisions to what the popular majority want. This creates a narrowing scope where those who do not conform to the popular opinion of the moment either adapt to what a certain group wants, or they leave. Past examples of this pattern on other free servers have shown that a large percentage of those who are not in the majority quit, narrowing the group that is in the majority for the next issue to an even smaller group. This pairing down effect ends with a fractional group that has the changes that they approve of, while many of the others have moved on, or remain in the minority. This ultimately creates a server with the vision of a particular group of players, which ignores the necessity of certain changes that are not considered palpable to the majority.
Further, such a system is rife with "politicization" of the process, with players attempting to garner support from others for a system that they like, in order to influence the game. This necessarily makes popular opinion a poor choice (not that popular opinion was ever a good argument to begin with), due to the fact that decisions will be controlled by those who have a vested interest in something changing in a certain way. The popularity system also encourages cheating, with no real way to ensure that each player is given 1 (or 3) votes.
While I could explain the advantages that we have by using a system where no one person's or group's opinions rule the day, I think that the statement was best put by one of our forum posters some time back:
Ultimately, there is no compelling reason to change our current formula, and as it stands, we will continue with our current goals.Eaglestaff wrote:Keep in mind that sticking to the "Era accuracy" creed is the solid rock upon which this shard rests its back against and is a great insurer of longevity as far as maintaining players because they know what they are getting. Its easy to replicate something that already existed as best you can because you don't have to come up with anything new and risky and you can justify all your policies and decisions on one principle. Everyone knows the plan and no one is going to com,plain and quit when they think the ship is starting to deviate off course because it never will.
