Bullshit argument. Go fuck yourself.
B: Is no fun to anyone who is forced into it
Argumentum ad populum? No thanks. You've got no evidence to prove this.
and C: Makes heavy changes that are not needed.
I'm afraid you will have to explain this. Since this thread keeps popping up, I would say that this issue must be addressed.
Going to lay it out my way. Herocraft is made with the combined force of Minecraft and the Heroes Plugin among some other plug ins to make stuff smooth. Now Minecraft is a sandbox survival or creative game. In this case we are going with Survival. Heroes is a PvE and PvP plug in that focus on group style combat with only a few solo orientated classes.
The entire paragraph was completely unnecessary. We already know all of this. Stop trying to sound smarter than you are.
With that out of the way, Herocraft has towns and player built factions by word of mouth (Technically). Each of these towns are usually ran by community leaders. Or in the off case its ran by some random it usually fails. Lets use the Tree Creepers and the Fire Creepers as well as Newerth and Camelot as examples.
Still, nothing new.
The Tree Creepers are openly evil in their ways and in the past they made a nice name for themselves in doing such. Now the Fire Creepers are looked at as being the good guys in this mini war, but in reality they are both evil (Or in moral standards at least) FC attacks random Neutral towns all the time, more than the TC do in some cases. Which brings me to Newerth, a peaceful crafter town that (If it had more active leaders) focuses on building. We are Neutral though we do hold alliances. On the other hand, Camelot is a bit more PvP active and they have no alliances and are still Neutral. Camelot attacks as they see fit and Newerth generally never attacks (Aside from a few PvPers we have in our ranks)
First of all, you should be using fictional factions. Naming existing guilds and towns is only going to cause further irrelevant circle jerking and flame wars. And to make things worse, you're also a member of one of the towns you're covering. Not a good start.
What is this, anyhow? A history lesson? Are we doing a fucking school newspaper now? Oh, pardon me, I thought we were discussing the alignment system. I didn't realise we're actually just shitposting with our sophisticated faces on.
Back on topic, what you've done here is explained how you see current affairs. What you have
not done is give any indication as to how it
should be.
On the one relevant note you're bringing up, you are suggesting that neutrality can exist with alliances, which goes against the very idea of being neutral. The only acceptable diplomatic relation apart from "neutral" that equals an alliance can be had with other neutral entities. Anything else forfeits neutrality and makes you rogues or freelancers flying a false flag rather than a neutral group of builders.
So basically it comes to politics. Is America Evil for attacking other countries? Is Canada Good for not starting wars? Then why are they aligned? Because its in their best interest. In war, their is no good or evil, only the victor.
And now we're suddenly in real life. Kick it off with a striking line, continue with some more bullshit that I can't even be arsed to disprove (it's pretty unrelated tbh, comparing Minecraft factions to IRL factions just doesn't work) and end it on a cheesy note. Whoopee!
So to cut it short, these restrictions would totally reshape Herocraft into a more linear game (Although it would still not be totally linear, just partly) Which should never be the aspect of an online game, nor should it be of a sandbox. In the very least, the karma system will only effect individual players, but will still bring a problem when wars some into play.
Aside from the fact that it took me like 15 minutes to reconstruct your retardedly jumpy train of thought, it would actually not change Herocraft that much. Most towns would just be evil, some might be good and almost none would be neutral. I don't really think I understood your definition of linearity, but considering you've so smugly left many things unexplained that needed expanding on, I'm not going to try and decipher your imbecilic and sorry excuse for a critique any further.
I don't mean to bash either, its a good idea in theory, but would never work/appeal to the players.
Jesus Christ, can you get any more lurid? If you can, please try again and include in-depth explanations on why you think an actual alignment system instead of a half-assed and irrelevant collection of flashy descriptions wouldn't work. Maybe I would actually be willing to try and discuss this with you.