Everything is always reset the next day, maybe a few characters incorporate the events in their own personal stories or maybe they don't.
Would it be better if conflict and player actions actually shaped the world around us? Absolutely, but that's not really part of the design philosophy
Also, players need to accept other resolutions because if you don't then you get pvped because it's one of the only consequences players can force another player to accept.
So both suffer the same issue as any suffer settlement. Sure you can siege Brog for an hour or two but you'll never take it, hold it, be allowed to keep it, change it, or do anything with it.
There's choice here between Consequence and Freedom.
Freedom is like Skyrim. It's a great game, but because you can literally do /anything/, because there are so few choices in the game that actually have any narrative consequence, it also sometimes feels a bit... light? A bit pointless even.
Counterbalence that with say, Dragon Age, (I'm specifically thinking the first here) where the chocies you have, give tremendous narrative impact - but at the same time you're very much lead down one path then another, there's little real freedom.
(Then you have Witcher III which is a balence of both, but I digress
)
In Arelith, for better or for worse* we seem to lean towards Freedom, there's not much that anyone can really do to you, that has any real Conseuqence. There's a little, but not huge amount and mostly it's fairly well policed. This is good but can lead to frustration, as we see in some of the quotes above.
A more heavily consequence filled server would, in a way, empower players a lot more yes, but it'd also lead to some issues. Leaving aside questions of dev time/involvement/ect, the biggest problems would be having to work on the presumption that the majority of people would a) not cheat b) be graceful in victory c) be graceful in loss.
Let me bring up an idea here mostly by way of example. This is a bit of a wierd idea, and not one we'd implement I'm sure, but I'm using it to show my point.
Lets say we made it so that, when two settlments went to war, (Say, Cordor and Brog) if a PC from Cordor killed a PC from Brog (or vica versa) then they were put into the fugue for one RL hour, and their property was automatically released. If the leader of either settlment is killed, then the settlment leadership goes to the victor (the other settlment leader)
Some issues coming up
1) We'd depend on people indeed logging in if this happened,
2) We'd depend on everyone playing fair ooc. No discord meetups for raids, no wierd cheats, and there'd be a lot of incentive for such.
3) We'd depend on those who lost their property ect being basically 'OK' with this. Knowing what they're getting into and being fine with loosing so much.
4) We'd depend on the more powerful force being graceful in picking its battles. For example, if we gave more weight to PvP, it could make certain concepts entirely unplayable, dependent on the dominant faction of t he time,. That might make perfect sense In Character, but would really suck OOC, in a vareity of ways.
5) And of course this could be used to legitimtly grief/be nasty to people. Remember the heavier and more impactful you make the consequences, the more incentive there is to cheat, and to get very angry upon a loss.
My experience as a DM and admin has shown me, unfortunatly, that people are all too willing to get worked up over the tiniest of things, and to get very salty, and very nasty over even small mechanical losses.
I recall a poster who claimed, when the new Slight Of Hand skill was introduced, that they would keep all of their gold in faction accounts, just to avoid the chance of loosing a few hundred to a pickpocket. Never mind that such would be tremendously inconvenient, and prevent them from owning property, that smidgen amount of gold in a very small chance mattered!
None of this is to say I'm entirely against the opening posters idea, or of implementing a more weighty war system (IMO if we do, it should be High Consequence but also relivitly quick to resolve) Or that, indeed, I'm against adding more Consequences to Arelith. To an extent, 'Haters gonna hate.'
But... this is stuff to keep in mind.
* Really want to stress here, though it may sound like I'm very much against adding more Consequence to Arelith... I'm in fact not! I personally wouldn't mind a better War system of some sort. I just think its something that needs to be carefully considered.
This too shall pass.
(I now have a DM Discord (I hope) It's DM GrumpyCat#7185 but please keep in mind I'm very busy IRL so I can't promise how quick I'll get back to you.)