I did try to make a Siege character once, years ago. He still has his AOS cape. The problems, as I saw them, were:
1. I could only have one character.
2. That character would have to live out of his bank box, because I have 6 fully developed characters on a production shard. I'm not giving up my prodo shard home.
3. Skill gains would take forever; I can only play a couple of days a week, so it would take over a year to get that one character developed. I just couldn't see taking a year or more to get to the point where I could start to play the shard.
4. Siege has all the problems of a production shard, all of the skill and balance problems that came with the AOS ruleset, all of the problems with rampant griefer tactics by red PK'ers, all of the RNG item crap, all the artie and power scroll balance issues that a prodo shard has, but it takes forever to gain a skill, and it has the same crappy post-AOS ruleset problems that all the prodo shards have. To me, it's just a production shard without item insurance.
5. Not all PvPers want to be factioners. I, for one, don't PvP well with others. I wouldn't be in a faction on the prodo shards if it wasn't for the leet items. I would want to be able to have gear of faction quality that was as cheap and overpowered as faction gear, without having to work 10 times as hard as a factioner to get it. How about this: If my PvP thief manages to steal 5 faction items and turn them in to the thief guildmaster, I get to choose one faction-quality item with the same stats as the faction one, maybe with a "fenced" tag on it?
To me, Siege just isn't worth the trouble.
What would it take for me to play Siege?
1. Most of the people who are interested in playing Siege have been playing a long time. We've spent literally thousands of hours doing the endlessly boring, repetitive tasks that are required to level skills, when we should have been able to gain those skills by actually playing the game. The last thing we want to have to do to play on an advanced PvP shard, is to have to do the same thing over again, in slow motion.
2. We've got friends, guilds, enemies, customers on our prodo shard. We're not just going to drop our houses and 6 or 7 characters on a prodo shard to pick up and move to Siege. We're also not going to live out of our bank. We don't mind having housing work like it did in the old days: A house decays over the course of 14 days unless you log in and open the door.
3. I can't see any reason why we are only allowed one character on Siege. I don't like changing shards a lot. If I was going to play Siege, I would want to be a regular player there. And that means I would want to play a thief sometimes. I would want to play a warrior sometimes. And I would want to play a mage sometimes. Maybe a crafter or tamer. I wouldn't want to be limited to just one character; that is a biggie that stops a lot of players from going to siege.
4. Why not just get rid of faction items on Siege? I think you would have better PvP interactions without all the faction items. The only reason my prodo shard thief is in a faction is for the leet items. Remember that you can only steal from other players if you're a member of the thieves' guild. You can't stay in the thieves' guild if you kill an innocent. It's pretty hard to play in factions without ever getting a murder count. Not that there's anything worth stealing on a prodo shard in the post-AOS world.
5. Bring back real penalties for murderers. Make people think twice before going for those 3000000000 murder counts. If you do that, you would have to give all murderers a clean slate as a one-time event. Then be sure that they know that, if they die while red, they will have permanent stat loss when they rez. They can't go into town. Real consequences for their actions.
