[FaeLenx]

Trying to keep this short, I feel like there's a lot of different stances people have on Korvara and how it should be handled. I'll leave long rambling paragraphs of what I'd consider supporting arguments in spoilers and put abridged versions below.

Me and many other people who have made PVP capable builds look at it and think, 'huh, I guess now I have a reason to carry a red letter around that isn't just to make me feel more masculine.' Most people look at it and think that they'll just do their usual standing around and casual RPing in a new set of pixels with maybe a fight here or there. Small groups are already planning on which factions to secure to make some neat RP empire. Some people are bemoaning that this will ruin SL2 and turn it into Eternia. Somewhere in the middle of all of those groups, like four guys are talking about bards. Bards sound hype. We're all happy about those guys and how excited they are.

But this new direction is a hard pivot from how SL2 has run for years now. It's felt more like RPing in a AAA MMO. You have space to do it, it's designated as the 'RP-ZONE.' But every major storyline is mostly player run. The game is designed to function without player input and would look the exact same if you palette swapped it out to be just a strict RPG MMO. The people would probably sit in the exact same place, right there next to the fountain. This new direction makes it sound like this game will have actual stakes and consequences. There are a lot of BYOND games that achieve that since the low budget requirements of making a game on this platform means that developers can get creative with their game design and formula, but SL2 has never had a situation where the mechanics of the game would be forced to mediate or moderate player behavior. Players moderate it between each other, but that's next to impossible now that there are going to be positions in the game open to a specific and limited amount of players.

TL;DR: SL2's current ruleset can't handle mechanically incentivized conflict.

Some of the faction leadership spots seem easy enough to handle without too much trouble. Votes can be set up mechanically, are somewhat cheesable, but people caught cheesing them could just be handled. Well and good enough. Then you run into Geladyne. Geladyne's only listed method of turning these player held positions down to someone else is through succession. This means one of a few things. Either someone can hold this position indefinitely, someone can hold this position indefinitely or pass it down to one of their friends as they wish, this lore needs to change, or we need to figure out and endorse creative ways to facilitate handovers between individuals. Maybe you can make it so it becomes a bidding war between the true successor and the crown-stealer with money or other resources to simulate bribery or getting support after the crownstealer pays his way to getting the official successor paperwork muddied up. But that's only half of the issue.

The other half of the issue is that this implies that you can merc that successor. Me and three of my friends could find any single person on SL2 today and beat them in a PVP fight. There needs to be balance, moderation, or a lot of rule updates to make this not the meta, even if it's for that one position that's marked as character consent for death...

TL;DR: Geladyne's successor situation is a spotlight on all of the questions and concerns someone could have about leadership positions specifically.

If you make it so that it's straight successor and players have to leave the role mostly willingly to pass it down, it's really just an unimportant soapbox for one person and their likely friends to hold for the duration of Korvara's existence. If you make it so that players can steal it with PVP, you run into imbalance issues. If you make it so that it's the former but storytellers or GMs or something are allowed to overturn the succession for story arcs made by players, you're just going to make those moderators a target for grief and complaints of bias. The solution I would propose instead is that succession for these positions is turned into a more understood process or ritual. Coding it would be work, but if it was coded in then that would just be better. As long as it is arbitrary in its decision making process and isn't tied to someone's interpretation of how politics should work, people can make an RP around whatever gameified ideas might be implemented.

TL;DR: My solution is to add in mechanics or processes that could decide successors without the need for a moderator or interoperator to deal with conflicts or handoffs. The ideas for each nation are listed below, as well as means of having 'conflict' without forcing players to freeform problems at the potential harm of other players (but still at the potential harm of those characters).

Ideas for Succession
Telegrad

Here we have the first of the four empires that someone might want to control. Telegrad is listed as a mostly agrarian, communal society that is the direct result of people fleeing Geladyne. It is listed down as a vote, and a vote it probably should be, but where do these votes come from? It's assumed that players will have some manner of making votes for their characters, I would hope that it would be one per player rather than one per character, and then I would hope that there is at least some barrier to entry so that Telegrad doesn't have voting cycles with 80 voters when Telegrad itself only has 20 active citizens or some other tomfoolery...

But I think it could be made a bit more interesting. Telegrad is listed as an agrarian society, and it's assumed that there will be NPCs present to cast their votes as well. If there could be a block of voters equal to roughly 50% of the human voters (determined at the end when it's all tallied) that are decided by material contributions of wealth (money, or more thematically crop goods) that could let a slightly less popular person buy their way in through politics by showing everyone how much he can provide while in a position of authority, then you could set it up so that each side also had a hidden bid to buy those voters off. If it's crops, then suddenly you have people actually incentivized to pay for farmgoods and get them out of the system if Korvara has farms like SL2. Which I assume it would.

So that's my idea there.

Ideas for Succession
Duyei

Duyei are similar to Telegrad in that they're a voting system, but they're dissimilar in what they value. They could have a vote similar to Telegrad, but instead of a silent bid of crops for a 50% of player voter NPC voter block, it could be an event that runs in tandem with the vote where players fight monster groups in support of one leader or the other for that section of the voting block to impress the NPC voters. It would give players in this faction the ability to get more EXP, flex their narrative purpose, and also decide the successor through mechanical combat means without resorting to straight PVP. Duyei care about killing monsters, making killing monsters a requirement. Or just overwhelming player support.

Ideas for Succession
Meiaquar

This is an interesting faction because how do you encapsulate so much intrigue and backstabbing in a game like this? The further you abstract it, the less on theme it gets. The obvious answer is to just make it a flex of money against money in a series of five silent bids. The money disappears each bidding cycle, you don't get to know how much your opponent bid, but you do know if you won or lost the last bid, and this way you can sorta decide that over a week long span so that there can be a chance for people to run around and try to figure out how much each side is spending so that they can save for the next bids... But honestly, the best answer probably lies in those mentioned sub-leadership roles rather than an abstracted social deduction game.

Ideas for Succession
Geladyne

Make it trial by combat. We might as well have at least one place that is trial by combat, and at least a 1v1 moderated fight can be easier to keep track of than any complicated successor line stuff. Making it so a character has to die to pass down leadership is just inviting in a lot of uncomfortable questions like what it'll take to kill that character and if other characters are also at risk. It might require some fenagling to make a system that works for scheduling out a 1v1 fight against an incumbent like having a challenger approach an NPC and then the incumbent has to pick a 2 hour time slot to stand in and take any mentioned challengers, but it's better than everyone trying to set up concurrent backstab plots and complaining OOC about it when a piece of paper hands off ownership to another random friend of the old leader.