What ever happened to the community patches you guys were going to start doing? We need them now more than ever. I know you are busy working on the upcoming patch and ultimately the expansion, but we have yet to have any major game changing patches in many months and realistically the next few patches aren't going to bring much activity.. (at least long lasting activity). We need things to log in for daily, we need more open-world incentives and reasons to get out of our cities, we need major game changing updates to keep things interesting. Im sure you guys can afford to spend a few days or a week on a 'Jesus community patch' if it is something the community wants and if it will be a low-dev, high impact positive change on the game. Even doing a few of these changes that I am listing off would slowly help to improve the game. Please consider it.

I've spent a long time talking to lots of different players with lots of different play styles and mentalities, and heres some changes that I've come up with that should be somewhat easy and fast to implement that I feel majority of players would agree with that would also (in my opinion) drastically improve the game.

Siege Changes:
- Add siege windows. Clans can chose a 8 hour window in which their holdings can be sieged. You are still able to siege a clan outside of their window, however it will cost 5x the wager amount to drop the siege in their off-hours. (I know this is coming, but this is how you should set it up.)
- New siege system. Instead of waiting 22 hours between dropping the siege and actually being able to take the city, this timer drops down to 45 minutes. Because of the 8 hour siege window, I feel like this would create more conflict and ultimately end in more fun, chaotic sieges. This gives another reason to be logged into the game as you can be sieged and lose control of your city at any time.
- New shard carrier system. When you drop a siege, you now have the option to chose between siege stones or a shard carrier. The shard carrier would be limited to 1km of the sieged holdings system, and would be marked on the map for the defending clan. A shard carrier only has the ability to cast utility spells and transfers and can not ride mounts. (shard carrier can still melee and parry and shoot a bow). The player who initiates the siege can chose to use siege stones or to become the shard carrier.
- Large siege stone HP reduced by 50% (they have way too much HP and you are able to place two. This makes it a much closer decision between choosing if you want to have a shard carrier siege or being able to place two large stones)

Runebook Changes:
- Change runebooks to consume runestones instead of portal shards. All runebooks can now carry/hold 4 blank runestones that can be deposited or withdrawn at any time, on top of all of the bound rune slots each runebook offers. After using one of your bound runes inside of your runebook, it consumes the rune and you are left with an empty or 'ghost' slot. You must re-mark a rune at that location and then add it back to the book to save that spot. If you re-mark your rune in the same tile as your previously used rune (ie, you used a rune to outside of serruk and remarked it inside of the same tile name 'serruk tile') it will automatically re-add that rune to the 'ghost' slot.
- Add a 10-15 minute cooldown between runebook uses.
Reasoning: In my eyes, the major issues with runebooks are the ability to spam teleport around the map and control all of the major mobspawns at a very low cost and being able to almost instantly teleport in 10-15+ people to a specific location. This kills organic open world PvP, ruins seiges (naked bspike rushing stones), and is a major incentive for players to remain inside their city at all times (if you aren't farming or porting somewhere with billboard or runebook you will always be inside of your city) which further reduces population and overall pvp. These changes are a good start to nerfing runebooks travel, and will further allow you to re-balance mobs and drop tables related to travel. (you need them to drop more commonly than they currently do with portal shards, and have them more spread out. Shit mobs drop low amounts sparsely, medium mobs drop them common-uncommonly, specific high end mobs drop them very commonly and multiple per kill - think DFO loot tables. Cairn giants had a 5% drop of 4runes, other mobs had lower drop rate and only dropped one. No one wants to be forced to kill hundreds of oathleiges or hooded ones to be able to play the game.)

Billboard/Village Changes:
- Remove teleportation feature from the billboard. This kills organic pvp and is another major incentive for players to always remain inside of their cities which further kills population. Most players just use the billboard and villages as a form of 'money printing' when the games activity is low. Players abusing this system will slowly ruin the economy.
- Change village timers back to what they were at launch or in beta (each village goes live once or twice a day, every hour a few villages will go live but at staggered random times throughout the hour). This will balance the billboard changes as you will need to make your way to each village when it goes live, they will go live much less often - which in turn goes into my next change: better loot.
- Buff the village loot to be much better. I can't remember exactly when the change was, but just change the village loot back to before you guys nerfed it last. Each village you cap should have a relatively high chance to give you maps, runestones, 2-10k gold, q3-q5 enchanting materials and a very low chance for r80 materials.

Holding Changes:
- All holdings will now cost gold upkeep to maintain. The more holdings you own, the more your upkeep will be. I've talked to multiple people from different clans about this, and we came up with anywhere between (15k-85k per 24 or 48 hours - obviously this can be changed) depending on the holding. Each holding will have a specific upkeep cost dependent on the location and 'value' of the city. Example) Uqtu could be 22k per day to upkeep, while Ramlaji could be 17k per day to upkeep. Apautan could be 45k per day to upkeep. Hamlets would be cheaper than cities, holdings without mines would be cheaper than holdings with mines. Wonders would be more expensive than cities without them. For every holding you own, your upkeep costs go up by 2% for each holding. Example) If you own 20 holdings, you will pay 40% more for each specific holding you own. Uqtu would go from 22k per day (if you only owned uqtu) to 30,800 gold per day if you owned it + 19 other holdings. This would be an extremely good gold sink, would require clans to work together to pay for their holdings, and would free up many holdings that clans do not use frequently or care for. This would be good for newer clans and be an incentive for clans to either be organized and all put in effort, or to split up into smaller clans so their upkeep is less. With this new system + the village/billboard changes that I detailed on above, villages would become a clan activity again with specific intent. You could also eventually tie this into your territory control by giving clans an extra bonus for keeping the villages near their holdings captured.
(I know you guys talked about doing this with clan platinum, but I personally think doing upkeep specifically with gold is a much better idea. Leave clan platinum for later on down the road and add specific benefits to gaining it and using it.)