No. Tanager, I have no ill will towards you whatsoever, please don't think what I'm about to say is directed at you in any way, but no.
Let's talk about asymmetrical feedback distribution. Pretend for a minute that you own a global business with geographically dispersed customers. Your businesses makes a consumer good used across your whole customer base, let's say cookies. However, unlike other cookie producers, you change your flavors on fairly regular cycles. For this to be successful, you rely entirely on your customers, the cookie eaters, to determine what the next Flavor will be. You provide a means for any customer to send you their suggestions. Sounds great, right? You want to sell cookies, they want to pick cookies they like, everyone wins!
Next season's cookies are being planned out, and you see an overwhelming response this season, you get a number of messages equal to 20% of your total customer base. Wow! That is great, they all say they want oatmeal cookies next. Great, a 1 in 5 response with a uniform message, this is outstanding. (And to be clear, that kind of response really would be considered overwhelming back in reality).
You bake the next run of cookies, the much solicited Tanager oatmeal ones, and our they go to the store.
But something weird happens. In one market, western Europe, the cookies sell even better than expected. But everywhere else your sales plummet. In fact, you sell so few cookies everywhere else that even the great sales in western Europe aren't enough to keep you in business. With heavy heart you have to close the Tanager cookie business for good. How could this happen? Everyone said they wanted oatmeal?
What you didn't account for was the possibility of an asymmetric feedback distribution. Your assumption was that the 20% of all customers feedback was evenly distributed among every type of customer you sold to (and this kind of assumption is used quite often for certain types of analyses). Unfortunately, (because you had not built into your feedback system a way to verify the details of your customer profile when they sent in a suggestion), ask of those requests for oatmeal came from one small minority of your customer base. That's right, western europe. In fact, where the response distribution was less than 5% from any other area of your customer base, western europeans had a response rate of over 50% (math not exact here, just an example). This created an asymmetric feedback response. Without realizing it, you catered the central characteristic of your entire business to one vocal, organized minority. And it ended badly.
Now you know where I'm going next, I'm sure. Replace cookies with online game experience, replace Tanager with the dev team, and, well hell, we all know what should replace western europe in this case.
This is the fundamental issue for Siege. If you took the time and read back over the last several years, this issue is at the heart of ALL major issues between Siege players and the devs. Here's why:
In the past when many, many more people played here, there were enough coherent, vocal representatives of each play style on Siege that it was rather difficult for any one group to create this type of asymmetry. As time went by, two things happen,
First, dev team resources began to shrink significantly. This resulted in a looser standard on what were acceptable practices for game management because the mindset was We have limited resources, let's focus on the critical stuff (Stygian Abyss, High Seas, etc)
Second, the very nature of Siege began to work against itself. Created as a haven for the players who preferred the earlier, bloodier, riskier days of UO, Siege attracted strong personalities who liked that in game adrenaline rush. They may not like getting PKed, but they like that it was a possibility. And over time any number of these players would form, disband, and reform into various combinations of guilds and alliances. But BY NATURE, the personalities in these would eventually chafe and go their separate ways. With one notable exception.
GIL at first glance seems completely out of character for the model I just described. If you read through their old material, NOTHING about it screams Siege Perilous. But in the context of a shard still in its wild wild west days, GIL could attract people because they WERE different. They represented order, with arigid hierarchy and seemingly inflexible rules. They were the good guys fighting for order against overwhelming odds on Siege. And even now the appeal to something like that is obvious.
Unfortunately for Siege, that type of structure, one that attracts order, hiearchy,and a willingness to subsume personal interest for the safety of the group is FAR, FAR more likely to remain intact vs the haphazard collection of highway bandits. Even the current VICE alliance hangs together by the thinnest of margins on a daily basis.
But GIL remained. As entropy did its terrible work and the game, the shard, the players slowly and inexorably faded, GIL remained relatively cohesive.
Which brings us to the last few years, and back to asymmetric feedback distribution.
If an EM creates a mob and drops the players in only to have everyone PKed, the scraggly lot of VICE players are not going to be unified in ANY kind of response. Just ask Max how successful he's been in keeping everyone in UO Cart or or Discord server (hint: not very). But GIL, by nature, will set a response and act on it. Because at the end of the day, if you don't, you won't be in GIL very long. If that response is email the EM and Mesanna, from their end it looks like a random sample off Siege is really really upset about something. There won't be a competing response from VICE that comes anywhere near the same level of volume, because we are a bunch of crotchety independent donkeys for the most part.
There are direct examples of this in the recent past (e.g. Councilgate).
We often level a lot of criticism at GIL, but it is important to remember, for the most part, this hasn't been premeditated. It is just the natural evolution of or little social system.
So Tanager, if you've made it this far (and bless you girl if you have), you can see why ANY solution that ends with "let's email/post our picks for time" isn't workable. Because my dear, that road only leads to oatmeal.
