Swordmaster of Hoeth wrote:If admins and mods are as ruthless as Malekith, as manipulative as Teclis or as opportunistic as Imrik then they would not stop from achieving their goals because of the "community". They sacrificed Naggaroth and Ulthuan, why would not do it again in the cyber world
Joking aside I am aware that the main challenge would be merging the contents of 3 different forums without losing identities and posts of the members. I remember not that recent problems with server update on Ulthuan and that was "just" an update, not merging. I can imaging some kind of deal between the respective owners would have to be struck too.
However, not so long time ago an idea of Elven raced merged together was considered insane. While we still don't know if 9th edition is going to be a continuation of ET it is now a possibility. There is no harm in discussing that possibility so that this time, maybe, people will be prepared and will know what they want to do.
- If the rumours that WH:9th will be set 100 years forwards after ET events comes true,
- assuming that there is a wish form GW to reduce the number of army books (i.e. a single AB for Elves)
- and with the understanding that GW wishes to replace non-coyrighted races with new names of which they would own the copyright,
then there are some consequences that I would expect:
1. 9th ed Elves will no longer be divided among DE, HE and WE. These names (and druchii, asur and asrai) will be not used anymore.
2. (speculation based on ET:K fluff)
9th ed Elves might come into two variants:
- one strong, centralized feudal kingdom based in the woods of Athel Loren, defensive and shy in nature, with tensions inside between anarchist tree-huggers and diverse dominating factions driven by the ambition of their leaders;
- many small colonies of loosely organized outcasts, rebelling against the central elven authority, roaming the oceans, trading or pillaging on opportunity. These would include long standing former HE colonies as well as Naggaroth tribes, some monster hunters, and former WE refusing the colonizations of their woods by organized Elves.
There will be two new names given to the two elven factions, the inner elvens and the outsider elven, both factions having traits blended from DE, HE and WE.
Both factions will be described in the same AB, despite they fight against each other as often as they can, one being more on the order side, the other one being more on the destruction side.
3. For our three beloved websites, that would mean:
- Druchii.net, ulthuan.net, asrai.org will lose their link with current WH universe.
- There will be no obvious link between present DE, HE and WE and the two future elven factions, so no heritage to transfer.
- NewElfName, NewInnerElfName, NewOucastElfName will all be copyrighted by GW and it will be hard to create websites with these names.
4. There would still be a need for a dedicated website where Elven tactics would be examined, Elven lore would be discussed and Elven models would be shown.
Today it is premature to guess whether the Elfs will be sufficiently monolithic to make a single website relevant,
or whether there would be so strong differences in fluff, tactics and model canons between the two factions to make two websites a realistic option.
Anyway, these websites would just link to good old druchii.net, ulthuan.net and asrai.org, which hopefully would be maintained for a couple of years before someone forgets to pay the server host.
5. In case there is a single website (which also goes along a decreasing public interest for websites, generally speaking), then it would be nice to have the former three website contents transferred to a giant threefold archive.
About governance, it is not unlikely that most of us old timers would lose interest into the future website - so power will be left to those bold enough to seize it.
This said,
Merry Crhistmas and happy New Year to all...