I'm all for the Orcish sphere continuing, given that it's holding some of the best roleplayers in the game, and given that it's had some of the best RPTs/player-culture internally for a long, long time. Probably since the beginning.
Which isn't to say that a lot of people aren't right in saying that it won't do anything good for PvP, and also isn't saying that all that goodness is shared at all. It's not. 'Orcs vs. humans' is essentially closed off to any sustainable intersphere roleplay. Sustainable conflict needs to be low-level generally, over resource nodes, and between people that can live with eachother, in the same general area. Orcs and humans can't achieve that, because they are in a state of constant warfare.
Parallel ALMOST got it right, once or twice, even in a game with semi-automatic 35 caliber armor-piercing rifles. If Staff want that, then they've taken a lot of steps in the right direction, mostly involving guns being 'replaced' with the equivalent of single-shot rifles(because that's what bows are, still).
Players can't achieve it, though, not in SoI-That-Is...and if they DID, it'd be completely anti-Tolkien and Staff'd take away everyone's RPP because it'd involve orcs and humans sometimes working together. You can't 'be the change,' not until there's a world where this sort of thing actually gets.
Songweaver&co. almost did it, almost, and kudos to them(though that clan had many problems we discussed elsewhere, and was as good as it was bad, but was REALLY REALLY good when it was good, and only sorta bad when it was bad). Hillmen vs. orcs vs. Utterby was an interesting dynamic, but orcs remained the same: unable to produce sustainable conflict with Men of Twilight.
SoI-That-Will-Be can have sustained, low-level conflict that explodes into bursts of high-level conflict. Men-of-Twilight can have low-level conflict with Men of Shadow, and Men of Darkness can likewise with Orcs.
So: close orcs. Close Utterby. Close Laketown. Do whatever you like, I don't care, but
sustainable conflict isn't on players *until* Staff create a world where it can actually exist. You can't 'be the change,' not in this world you've made, Frigga. Laketown won't fix anything, not if orcs exist. But orcs are an amazing sphere from everything I've heard, so have a place for those players and a plan if you do decide that sustainable conflict's worth designing.I'm sad to hear that Laketown's not close!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Two weeks?
More to point, what's actually broken that it's even going to fix? Laketown's just a bigger Utterby with more fishing crafts. Utterby's big enough as-is. Laketown's an air castle, for all it'd actually fix. New shiny rooms aren't the 'problem' with SoI, not what the players are actually bothered by. Nobody's sitting around thinking about how 'this game would be so much better, if only this entire CITY was a dock!'
Laketown's what we need...if everything else people brought up gets fixed when it happens.