Dear Razmael,

There has been a lot of discussion in regards to the House purge in the next IC year by players both on and off of the forums. (Most of the forums talk has been in this thread, in case you haven't seen it already: http://forums.aetolia.com/discussion/298/abhorash#latest ).

We are writing to ask you to very seriously reconsider the need to pare the number of Houses down to four. We all agree that it places an extraordinary burden on us personally as leaders. Worse still is the fact that there is at least some metagaming going on in all Houses right now in an attempt to not be in the fifth position. None of this truly measures the amount of activity a House will have once the purge is over, or even whether the House itself will contribute to the game in a meaningful way.

At this point, the impending purge seems to be more detrimental to the game than anything and unncessarily so. With the three bottom Houses all so close in numbers and activity right now, the final year will inevitably be even worse that what we've seen so far in terms of metagaming and players feeling burned out. At the end of it, there will very likely be hard feelings, resentment, and the very real possibility of established players quitting altogether because the House they felt the most attached to no longer has the same place as others.

At this point, what reason is there to force this on us when the five remaining Houses are all contributing fairly to the game?