If I remember correctly I'm almost certain topics about birds on lotc being abusive or otherwise too powerful have popped up from time to time. Been looking through some recent posts and saw that birds are being sent to random personas, so I wanted to touch on this topic and see what the community is thinking.
Currently there are relatively little restrictions on birds, you just do three emotes and shoot a PM to someone with a message from almost any location to any location. I think this is a little too powerful. I remember talks about some bird plugin being made but I don't think the solution is a plugin (but it was a cool idea).
Just have a place in every city, every hub from cloud temple and a few places along the roads where you can send birds. Should be able to receive a bird from anywhere realistically but you can only send birds at these specific places.
Does this resolve the problem of receiving birds from random people? No. However I think it does place a more realistic restriction on birds being used in combat settings, where 1 random person usually not involved in the combat directly simply walks around a corner and sends a bird to several people in the span of a few seconds since they are not locked in the weird 1-emote per round thing. This also prevents near instant responses unless the other player is near one of the bird places so its an 'unknown' if your bird was received or not until you get a response.
It generally feels a bit weird how quick communication is in our medieval fantasy setting. My suggestion may not be the best, but I wanted to share and see what other people think about birds on LoTC being more powerful than our Aenguls and Daemons.
Let me know what you think, I feel like this is potentially a hot topic atm