Although I support this to a certain point, I do not believe it will help overall. If anything it may deter some people from wanting to even play due to the fact that the game would "fall flat" to them. Limiting Cabal Numbers is nice in theory as well as it means Cabals with low numbers now have fewer people to go up against. This however also stifles creativity. Think of it like this. Do you think there would be high RP characters like what we have seen come from Knight and Nexus if those Cabals are full? Probably not. Sure, we'd see fewer crap characters, but we'd also see more "blah" type characters than anything else.
By limiting the amount of characters you can have in a Cabal means you're forcing some people to play a certain way. I'm very open to the idea of people having multiple Qclass/Qrace characters, but I'm part of a small portion of players on this front. I also am in full support of strong hour checks for rares too though and every time I've tried to push it, other Vets have clearly stated they'd rather leave than have to deal with those kinds of hours since 20 can be more than enough for some. I do realize that people who have limited time would find it difficult to achieve because of family/job/school, so I stopped trying to say we needed to raise it despite the fact that rare circulation is horrible at times.
This idea does kind of fix some of those issues, but it also nails some of the other issues from other players. The reason why I do not outright support a limit on lower numbers in a Cabal is because I don't fully believe that players should know how to PK excessively which with fewer members the ones with far better PK are always going to get in while others will continue to struggle. It means if you're going to be RP oriented then you're going to need to find a Cabal that allows you to RP more than PK. Many people who play will get a Qclass/Qrace and play them for a very short period of time with very few exceptions to that. The ones who stop usually get beat horribly bad or just get killed and they stop playing the character/delete the character. If they stop, the lower number cap means it sits there for a while. Got in at the beginning of the month? Well that's a spot that will be taken for nearly two months. It's not feasible and you don't know for sure if that person will come back or not. If they do and they've been booted a lot of other things can happen good or bad that no one else may enjoy either.
There's nothing stopping anyone from sticking with one character though. It takes me a VERY long time to find something I actually enjoy, and even if I enjoy it that doesn't mean I'll ever get passed 400 hours. I have had characters with very strong RP make it to 300 hours without issue, but RP isn't enough so I get bored and I'm always thinking of new concepts to try out. At my peak of playing characters because I can't find something I enjoy it's usually like 5 characters and 3 of them are in a Cabal, but it's usually the Cabal itself that I realize stifled their RP. A Cabal is there to give people an edge in some fashion or another, but in most cases we come to find out it stifles us to some degree. Going Uncabaled means you have free reign in both areas to a very small degree not being good, where adding in a Cabal means you're stuck in that Cabal unless you quit the Cabal and in some of those cases it means you may have enemies after you because of it.
Stifling creativity is essentially all this is really doing despite the positive side of it overall. I understand where it's coming from and I've at one point or another thought about this or mentioned it, but with the smaller player base we have left, we don't want to alienate those who are playing because of the ability to have such freedoms. The character I've had the longest was Egui Aome back in like 2005 with 1200 hours. I only played them for the most part, but after a few hundred hours I got bored and rolled other characters. Longevity has its downsides as well. Though the characters are rich, it gets boring as hell reiterating things repeatedly over that period of time. If things don't change in a character chances are they're going to delete because they've been around for so long. I finally deleted because I was so tired of them and I haven't come close since then to playing that long on a character. That's not to say everyone is like that, but would you rather be forced to have one character with all the perks that you find out you absolutely hate every aspect of them, or would you rather have the ability to find your niche in a different set of RP that still allows you to find a different path/cabal that would let you discover new greatness? I'd rather leave it as is than find out that regardless of what I do it wont be good enough to reach your full potential as it is now.
@Fireman Were you around during the last one? I can assure you that that sucked ass. I finally got to level 49 as an Invoker and literally within a weeks time there was a Pwipe. Sure everyone was on the same level again and even playing fields, but it wasn't exactly fun and it kind of pissed me off. Didn't we lose like a third of the player base after that as well? Incentives to join an opposing Cabal is good though. It could give people the option to gain things they couldn't before by playing the Underdog, but it can flip on them at a moments notice too depending on interest in the Cabal. Look at Savant. Back in the day I could bend over any Warmaster at any rank and took out a lot of bigger names 12 years ago without ever even being in Savant. Then I got into Savant and met a Monk who just rocked me completely despite it being very close in the end due to spell damage and an unknown weapon back in like 2004/2005 and now that's not going to happen. Warmaster steamrolls most Savant members so horribly bad that no one wants to play them anymore and changes suggested have only seen to be implemented towards Gladiator benefits rather than anything else.
There's too many issues going on though and although I still do like the idea to some degree overall, but I don't see it really helping us at all and it also hinders newer players coming in from being able to discover what we already know about the game. They'll be forced into a situation that most of us haven't had to deal with for nearly two decades because we already know how it works to some degree adding in the changes we were here to notice while playing. They wont. Help files not being updated as things are changed are much larger issues when it comes to Newbie Friendly parts of the game. I would like to see why others would feel this would benefit the game best though.