Having to be persistently online to not lose your shit is awful, I have a very painful real life experience of that in a browser-based game called Glory of Fellowland. It basically requires so much of your time if you actually want to be active and attack people and live, while simultaneously the ppl who are weaker can just chill under a peace flag immune to attacks (then you cannot attack or train most units though, but there are ways around it). Then they figure out your online timer with spies etc. and remove their flag when you are sleeping, and sieze a city from you. You wake up they are behind the flag your city is gone, nothing you can do. And these game servers can last for years, with large alliances controlling the game, and then if another decides to join they will just do the peace flag shit if you don't have 24/7 supervision on everything. Removing the peace flag only gives you an hour attacked window, and the troop movement can easily take that depending on distance and more, and it can be slowed down as well with certain stuff and buildings.Idk. When New World launched within the first month we sieged Brightwood and held it until we got bored and quit. The great thing about sieging in that game, is the defenders get to set their siege window. So since we all have jobs and shit, we set it between like 6-8 pm and we knew a couple days ahead of time when it was gonna happen.
We were allied with another small group of really good players. It gave us plenty of time to plan and fill out our 50 man roster. At first we would go to the siege sight ahead of time and just plan the attack. It was great.
As much of a letdown the actual game was and the lag issues inside the siege aside...it was a pleasant experience and it always felt like whoever was better won.
With MO...its always been about who can sneakily siege your shit down. Either the defenders are at work or asleep or at fucking Christmas dinner with their families(looking at you RPK). Nobody likes that shit. It doesn't feel good to be stuck at work or out doing irl stuff and coming back to your hours and hours of work GONE without you being able to defend it. So many great guilds quit MO1 because of that. It was so demoralizing. The only ones left were the no-lifers...which was also me at one time so I get it. But you're never going to have a healthy game when its designed this way.
If SV would just copy NW and allow siege windows to happen...they could reduce the cost of sieges and all that dumb shit they did. Make keeps invulnerable (yes I know it breaks Henriks vision) until that siege window. You'll get much better fights and a much better gaming experience for everyone.
I basically devoted my life to that game for some months, and it really didn't feel good, sure I did well, we even won an entire server with a guild, but it was hectic, every morning immediately back to pc and there till evening basically, there was no such thing as a email notification setup for attacks either unless you paid for it I guess and I was doing it f2p back then, and in any case it won't help that much when you sleep lol.
Attack windows are super essential to any game like this where you can siege others' stuff.