I am pretty new, I showed up and attacked someone and died day three or four. I was then asked by multiple people and heard people in voice chat on discord ask me what my problem is, or what I was about. Since when I showed up I made it clear I did not care much for PK, but people did not care or pay attention to the fact that I played God Wars for almost three years and was pretty fine with PK, I just wanted more RP than most Pk oriented muds offered. But the player base and some of the staff did not apparently think that I was open to learn and "try" the Pk out, but the community really soured my first experience with it, so I have not bothered to try again.
The purpose of that story was to let everyone know that if you want more new players actually looking to learn to PK it does not matter how many changes are made to the system without a community mind set change. That is not an insult, just my opinion on it, most players here seem to be either favoring Pk or at least view Pk and RP equally, so I understand the want of getting like minded players, but in my experience this game is already a pretty Niche market of mud players, I do not mean you wont get more players just that the base you are targeting without changes to the game is small, and that needs to be taken into account and the staff and players need to have realistic expectations.
That being said, I like the idea of being able to join a cabal, I've seen plenty of players with fancy flags next to their names and would not mind being able to join one, my personal suggestion for this is maybe make it so you can join before 50, as I am on character #4 and have yet to reach 44 let alone 50, so being able to join at 15 or 30 might see the cabal get more use.
Second I think the cabal either needs to do away with the moderate equipment restrictions, but maybe keep the unique restriction? I do not know what that is so someone else will be better suited to say if this is a good idea or not. I say this for no other reason than the fact that universally I have been told by players and some immortals to avoid Moderate, some players said to play whatever I wanted too but to make sure that I avoided moderate since I would forever be severally gimped. Maybe the staff and some of the players in this thread view it differently, but my discord messages would argue that the majority of players actively discourage the use of this tier, so doubling down on that system sounds like a bad way to go. It is either that or the staff and players need to have a heart to heart and figure out what should/should not be recommend to new players since a lot of players seem to think or at least tell people moderate is not worth the time to play.
I have heard of cabal equipment, never having been in cabal I am not exactly sure what this means, but maybe it would be possible to make equipment and enough of it so that players can equip themselves either completely in it or at least enough of it to finish off a set of equipment after they hit the rare limit from moderate whatever that is, and make the gear better than other level 50 non-rare equipment but slightly worse than rare equipment. Or maybe make it so that as they progress in ranks they loose access to some of the equipment, could make the cost of it rather cheap for example, but have it all be rotdeath like the merchant equipment currently is, so that once you progress past the first tier you now can't purchase a couple of pieces and continue this until the rare restriction is removed so that at that point they can't buy any. I do not know if that is possible or not, someone who is familiar with the systems will have to let me know.
I did not say this to offend anyone here, and if I did offend someone I am sorry for that, this is just from my experience a few things that jump out at me.