The whole gate thing has been jarring ever since I gave LotC a try. You have such a massive playerbase, inviting the ability for people to hop on whenever, even on Euro/Aus times, and have enough people to roleplay with. That is not something any other mcrp server has, yet...
... The gates and the ever looming concern of mcpvpers. Too many times now I've spent 30ish minutes checking several towns, found them closed up, and logged off. There's only so much time I can allocate out of my day to roleplay - if 30 mins of that is spent (sometimes unsuccessfully) finding that roleplay, then most days I just won't bother at all.
When I first joined a year ago, I thought about writing up a post about how the coexistence of mcpvp and roleplay harms the latter and keeps the upper echelon of quality roleplayers either away from the server entirely or, if they are on this server, they're huddled up in little pockets in order to guard themselves from being forced into a faction server experience. I ended up not writing the post, because I thought I'd be shouting into the void of a largerly mcpvp-oriented server. But now, reading the posts on this thread, it seems to me that people do want some sort of changes.
Maybe it's time to pull a m******craft and make a separate ecosystem entirely for the pvpers, giving opportunity to abolish the jarring pvp defence systems like ugly city walls and hell, even allow roleplayers to be the ones to shape the outcome of politics and major conflicts.
I understand this might be a completely outrageous take by LotC standards still, but it's been at the back of my mind for an entire year, so I might as well lay it out.