More Meat for the Grinder

It's kind of incredible how much content has been cut from the game. Some removals I agree with - did we really need playable halflings? - but when you put it all together, it's a staggering amount of content that's just not there anymore. I once tried to compile a list, but it got so long that it became silly. It ended up being over 75% of Armageddon's original clans, for instance. Large chunks of existing clans as well, such as the GMH hunting divisions and the northern Byn. None of it resulted in any greater concentration of players, either. Instead of playing in the same handful of clans over and over, people just began to play indies most of the time. Clans somehow felt more populated back when we had three noble house combat clans in Allanak, Kadius and Salarr hunting divisions, Tuluk's vast array of clans, something like six open tribes, eastside 'rinth gangs, the Council of Allanaki Mages, the Atrium and House Terash, and whatever else I'm forgetting. And that's just the clans. I'm not even getting into the actual areas, races, etc. The few additions that have been made in recent years are completely dwarfed by what's gone, either removed entirely from the game or rendered useless by the removal of its purpose (Canyons of Waste, northern Tablelands, etc.)

Despite the fact that total player numbers haven't gone down that much since those days, there has been a huge collapse in player involvement. How many times can you play a soldier, Bynner, GMH merchant, aide or Guild member before you just decide that Allanak has nothing left to experience? So you end up playing indie after indie with minimal involvement in the wider game. Starting a new clan is so prohibitively burdensome that it almost never happens, and you can't really accomplish anything meaningful on your own. You might do a stint in Kurac, Crimson Wind and one of the few remaining tribes, but then that's pretty much the sum total of what there is. It has become a game that just runs out of experiences after a few years. It used to take at least a decade to fully experience each clan, and by the time you'd been through half of them, so much would have changed that you could do it again with a fresh perspective. If we don't count nobles and templars since they're out of reach for most players, Allanak now has what, five clans in total? And two of those are GMHs that are both the exact same gameplay experience and also not really even part of Allanak anymore beyond the occasional merchant dropping by to make some deliveries before returning to languish in Luir's.

It has become such an impoverished game. It's just boring. You can feel it emanating from every player when you move around the game, this stifling miasma of apathy and uninspiredness. You encounter the same types of characters over and over with a new sdesc because people just run out of ideas. On top of the sheer lack of player options, the shrinking clan selection has also resulted in a general lack of conflict and other interactions between clans. You rarely meet anyone out in the world, you rarely hear of friction between groups, you rarely have anything to do with other clans when you play in one. Zalanthas has fallen into this strange state of stasis where nobody can come up with anything new because the web that used to tie the game together has fallen apart. Spend an hour walking through Allanak and you might meet representatives of three different clans, instead of a dozen like you could in the past, and those three will have little reason to care about eachother because their clans occupy completely different aspects of the game. There's no overlap between the game's remaining clans. They don't compete, they don't cooperate, they just coexist purposelessly and wither away because they have no real reason to be there.