I'd actually not assumed it was a 'gold sink' given how it operates, was just answering the thought put forwards that it was - and the 'if you've got the gold' may be fair enough IF that had been made clear at the start - something that's 'indefinite' does not only last a week!
Well it helps to know some of the thinking behind what's going on, even if it's after and not before and during the launch of such a major system - but it's still awfully clunky, not particularly intuitive,and VERY expensive, for someone to become involved in. Fostering communications is great in principle, but this rather lacks any way to do that. Even a chat channel for the citizens of a town would be progress, since there's no way for people to actually communicate with a majority of those they are 'campaigning' to lead - though to really work, again, that needs us to be able to be in more than one channel at once, a fairly long-standing request. Encouraging us to 'communicate' without the tools for effective communications isn't too helpful. You of all people know that forums and such don't reach anything like a majority of the playerbase, and even system messages over the in-game tools are frequently not read, so the existing chat channels won't help either (and since young player are only able to access the help channel, even general is of little use for the 'whole' community).
Ironically, if it's so massively expensive, the devoted RPers are amongst those most likely NOT to want to throw money at it because mainly they've not been collecting huge piles of money. Developing the system later so it does include a gold sink seems slightly odd too, maybe it'll work it being both a RP enhancer and a cash total reducer but it seems a tricky combination to pull off - I fear we're heading for a 'huge amounts of gold gives access to the goodies' process, again. May reflect reality, but in a game that's to some degree escaping from reality, fairer processes are needed.
Helps to have some indication what, exactly, the Governors could be reasonably asking the King to do - even though, on my main shard, we don't have one to ask. Again though, that really needed to be clear from the start, to inspire people to get involved. Will there be future systems to allow town populations to participate in, say, 'wars' against dungeons or creature types that benefit the town treasury, or be things crafters can do to build the town? Yes, we can try sort out story based things similar to those for ourselves - but in reality, player run things are not significantly attended, and this sort of 'towns and governors' idea needs a lot of support from you folks to work, and lot of interaction and discussion with the players to get it running well. There's a huge potential, but what are the plans for it to be developed and supported? Some of us doing what we can won't make it anything like as powerful and important a tool as it could be, so we need some leads from you folks what is actually possible and practicable - and saying 'shard EM' isn't really good enough when shards will almost all be down to one EM at best, and so if that one person leaves or is absent for any reason, it all goes up in the air again....
I do wince at this though " This is UO, we give you the toys to play with in the sandbox, and you do with them what you will." Please, start by giving us toys that work as intended, with clear instructions HOW they work. A lot of this annoyance could have been avoided by just clear, accurate communications early in the process, not an internally contradictory note at the last minute before it went live. 'Creativity in our hands' can often end up, in UO, as 'us players working out a way around a system that doesn't do what we want', or even worse the systems you spend so much time working on being ignored, under used or actively avoided because people don't enjoy them. Please don't let this one go the same way.
