Ok, so....I have looked over the proposal 2 more times and still like it.
And this is why.
• The "New Luna" issue
When you look at this thread you'll notice that there's people who think New Magincia will be New Luna and don't like it, and think it will not be New Luna and don't like it.
I, for one, find it unlikely it will be New Luna, and think that's a good thing.
I think it's unlikely to be New Luna because of the lack of proximity of NPC vendors, shoppes, etc; places to buy resources, repair things, etc. And also I find it likely that the 15x15 limit will have an impact on who builds there.
And I find it not being New Luna to be a good thing because we already have a Luna. Not because I hate Luna, I don't particularly hate it anymore than I particularly like it, it is what it is, but because we already have one and we do not need two.
There is one situation within which New Magincia will be New Luna (in the sense of being primarily a place of commerce where most player traffic comes from people buying things, and perhaps in the sense of a place where people bank sit): And that is if the players of a particular shard really want it to be that way.
• Player Control
This isn't what many of us, myself included, thought Draconi meant when he told us that we as players would have a say in what happened to Magincia. But Draconi is gone, and I for one frankly would have kind of preferred New Magincia without player control.
If one is going to have a player-driven city at all, though, one where players have a direct and immediate and meaningful impact on how the city looks, feels, and its culture? Then I'd be hard-pressed to think of a "better" way than by allowing players to, literally, build houses within it.
This means, of course, that if on a given shard players really want New Magincia to become New Luna? Then it will.
• RP Sense
The proposal makes RP sense. Pretty much everything in there has an RP basis that makes a certain amount of sense.
To me that matters and it matters a fair amount.
It also matters that the RP is appropriate. By contrast, look at the Faction proposal from awhile back, where the proposals fit the RP, but the RP itself was flawed, tone-deaf to both the audience it was pitched to and the audience it should have been pitched to.
I feel such is not the case in this proposal, which feels more solid to me, from a fictional perspective.
• Fairness
The proposal has fairness to at least a marginal degree. It's far from impossible for pretty much anyone to scrounge up the 10k necessary to put in for one of the 10k/one chance slots, and even easier for a 2k/unlimited chances slots. Fears that this would become a rich man's playground or some kind of gold sink are pretty much put to rest by the existence of the 10k/one chance slots. And technically even one chance at a 2k slot that's purchased is enough to win it, just, as was the case with the golden tickets from the tale of Charlie Bucket, ones odds increase if you can purchase many chances (for this part of the contest).
• Conclusions
I guess there's probably other things I like, or don't like for that matter, in this proposal too. But it is late and I shall stop here.
Do criticisms of this proposal, I wonder, stem more from it lacking merit, or from it not being the way we would have gone?
It surely isn't the way I would have gone. I would have had a combination of quests and collections, wherein we in essence picked from several different development plans. One would have been New Magincia from Ultima lore, more or less; one would have been Old Magincia, more or less; one would have been a hybrid. (Like say, collect a certain amount of woods, the city becomes New Magincia. Collect a certain amount of marble or rock or something, the city becomes Old Magincia. Collect both and it develops into a hybrid.) Shards that lost the Magincia Attack event from way back would have had to work harder to achieve any result at all. However, I'm sure that my system would have had its detractors. Probably a lot of them, maybe even some of them who would have asked for player housing.
But on its own merits, it's really not bad. I'd put it more along the lines of the Abyss housing quest but on a grander scale. And that one went off fairly well. I suppose they could screw this up in implementation.
But I'll deal with that if it happens.
-Galen's player
