The storyline with the Presiding Archmage election has been really awesome, and it has only barely got off its feet. I have to give major kudos to DM Titania for working on this, and whoever else that I might not realize. And, there is of course a huge possibility that I should just stay tuned and see what's in store. But I've had this on my mind, and while everything is in flux storywise, it seems like a choice time to give my personal feedback and experience regarding the Arcane Tower developer side.
You may read this and think that I'm asking for the Tower had the ability to exclude people. After all, that's what most threads about the Arcane Tower I've lurked on tend to be about: of a time most don't have firsthand of when someone acted exclusively, resulting in the Tower getting gelded.
Yet, Arelith at its best is about player leadership and action driving the world. Now, abuse of that can very easily harm a story or a community. But I think part of the beauty of Arelith is that there is the ethos of stopping and recognizing that allowing player driven world comes with a potential set of consequences, and saying that it IS manageable to maintain high degrees of player agency and maintain inclusivity which is necessary for any community to grow and sustain. To say that the Tower is somehow the exception to this is to limit the roleplay in a way that other communities do not deal with, creating a static pocket of the world that is by its nature less appealing to deal with.
And besides, the rest of the server seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
The grove recently got beautiful main guild house quarters, and PVP around use of the portal in my experience is a real thing. Temples are starting to become occupied by players, opening the door to the establishments of groups that can excommunicate/exclude. A counterpart arcanum (an amazing group that goes out of the way to be inclusive) has - for all I can tell - an impenetrable hidden fortress, exclusive by design! Though on a different scale, settlements by their very nature are exclusive and have abundant and often used mechanics to support that. I'm saying these things are potentially exclusive, but the fact is that this possibility of abuse is a consequence of player agency - there's nothing meaningfully unique about that fact in any case.
Now, that's not me saying that the Tower isn't awesome. I obviously think it is! It is one of those amazing places in game that you can see player history. You can see the glory days of wise Sincra Talos, of Hound, and the rest. You see reference to the history everywhere. But it feels like something vestigial, from the lack of any guild hall, to the broken quarters, to the fiat in-game that seems very insinuative of "this is not a player community, don't try to make this into a player community." You feel like you're Homer, looking around at the ruins. It is all very neat, but the legend wears thin when you realize that the whole thing feels like it was put into timeout, maybe for good.
To problems of moderating and encouraging desired behaviour, consider an alternative solution: if there is desired activity in the Tower (e.g., necromancers allowed, political neutrality, no monstrous races, free passage to the portal) make Thoramind's Codex include meaningful guidelines, like Guldorand's charter, that are vague enough to leave room for player leadership. What do you gain and what do you lose? From my perspective, you give an enduring community in the Tower the tools that most every other community has, and you retain every ability to reign back issues that you had in the first place. What a deal!
Thanks for reading!
