Stretch goals were for the kickstarter lol. If there are funding problems at this point I'd suggest working more on the main content and getting it out there advertising it hard. Seeing a working polished game will spark interest. Nothing is worse than a game that hits setbacks and misses release goals or worse yet released with bugs. The hype starts to fade the longer it takes to release. New content can come in expansions 
I think it is safe to say any game can become a failure or success. Maybe you guys might want to talk about races again lol.
I personally would like to see humans evolve into humanoids and add more common races to the genre such as elves, dwarves and orcs for roleplay value.
@Tuoni I was thinking the same thing. That's the reason devs have to put filters into place lol.
As humans we assign evil/good traits to animals based upon our own bias. For example, most people would call a snake evil either based upon their fear of it or its biblical symbolic reference. However, a snake like most animals is motivated merely by survival which in its inherent nature is pure neutral. An alignment is a result of choices. Choices come from the ability to think with rational thought. Of course for a game I guess the gods can assign their alignment although I don't see much rationale in a bird being good if all it does is sit on a branch and tweet while hunting for worms.
All I'm saying is the majority of the things you can hunt should be neutral so as not to flag someone who is just out gathering resources which is the point of my topic
PvP seems to always be the most argued point in any MMO I've ever been associated in lol. It boils down to this, everyone isn't going to be happy and you just have to be able to try to please the majority of the players so the game doesn't tank.
Animals really don't have an alignment unless they are sentient. Most should just be neutral. I really hope there is a good balance because almost every game I've played tamers have been OP.
It's hard to translate real life into a game. Most normal people do not spend every waking moment care taking over their account. In a perpetual world that you have to leave for large amounts of time there needs to be safeguards in place to prevent others from taking your stuff. You can't expect players to be guarding their belongings while they are offline. Hopefully there are tools within the game that can help with that. Maybe the ability to hire town guard npcs. In LIF when judgement hour came you better hope most of your players can be online or you stand to lose everything.
@Gothix Sandbox doesn't mean no rules. It means open world with no linear path. You are allowed to go where you want and do what you want. UO is a sandbox and there are plenty of rules governing pvp and other player interactions. The game will crash and burn if there are not rules in place that control griefing.
I was playing Outlands free UO server which started off as fun. But then the pks and thieves started invading and the devs gave in to those same arguments; that the blues just needed to play better. Needless to say the pop of the server plummeted. I personally find players whose only course of gameplay is to hinder other players and laugh as a scourge.
Making upkeep higher for towns will only hurt the little guilds even more. Do invading guilds have to retain control of the cities they take? If not what is to stop them from coming in and just destroying everything then leaving desolation in their wake? That is what happened in LIF when I was playing. The landscape looked like scorched earth everywhere you walked on the server.
No matter what you do if there is pvp there are going to be those players that just want to grief. They will use every legal way of doing it and skirt every rule that stops them.
Since the leader of a town is the guild leader and if you merge with another guild I would say it is possible the other guild could in effect initiate a coupe. In SWG, UO and SWTOR all those guild leaders are chosen by majority membership support. A member can freely choose to throw their support toward another person for guild leader. When that leader gains majority vote the leadership changes. There are reasons why these systems work and it is the reasons in the rules they already have in place. There is nothing worse when a leader up and quits and no one has control of guild functions and in this case town functions. That's alot riding on one person.
So back to a merger. If the new guild has more members I'd say they have a good chance of wrestling away control. I'd say you need to think before inviting larger groups to your town 
I just hope there is a server once/month event run by the devs. Those always seems to hype up the players. I remember when the Battle for Trinsic took place in UO to get ready for the Trammel launch. We had right about 10 people call off work to get into it that night. The next day the bosses weren't very happy lol.
I thought the same thing in the beginning until my son pointed out you can click the header to the forums lol.
I personally don't like any kind of pay to win
Our playing group has always found it is best to seriously organize the group 3-6 months out before launch. Hype will still be high enough with the players to wait for the day to play. Nothing worse than to have players quit the game before they actually quit the game lol. It is also hard to plan for a game that is not set in stone on details. We had a rather large group beta SWG and planned our organization almost 2 years out. We thought we were prepared until launch day when our plans hit the battlefield so to speak lol.
I would even prefer a city npc blacksmith shop, weapon shop etc where a player can bring their wares to deposit on the vendor to sell for you. Didn't I read where a city is eventually formed around a node where someone is picked to run it? Maybe have a sales tax set by this player so that each sale removes this tax from the profits and deposits it into a fund that can be used strictly for city improvements. Different cosmetics could be placed around the city using these funds.
I just don't want to have to run around looking for what I need. I'd rather spend an hour doing something useful rather than hunting for a deal on items.
I prefer ingame tools for being a merchant. However, during my UO days I used UO Auctions which was a 3rd party website alot of people used. It was well ran and there was a rep system built into it to avoid bad sellers/buyers. I would much rather have ingame stuff. I'd rather have one market area than have several player run markets. SWTOR has a nice system. It is quick and easy for both seller and buyer. I'd also like some kind of auction system because high end items you want to get the most out of. Auctions is the best way to do that.
@Crowdac If that is the case then that would be great. As you get older your hand eye coordination gets terrible and pvp becomes more frustrating than fun. I tend to steer away from solo pvp these days lol. Are knowledge gains general gains from which you can spend them on the areas you wish? Until I actually see the knowledge system working I have no clue. I will have to wait until beta to start to find out. I'm not complaining, I'm just gathering info for my gaming community
It would be nice to have an actual character builder eventually. One where we can select stats and expand out into knowledge with unlimited knowledge access to see how skills stack in stats.
@Meiki No one has to do anything in the game but to reach certain levels of knowledge, yes you will be forced into pvp. No matter how you play on the words that is the end result lol. Sounds kind of like the SWG system for their achievement system. You had an ingame check list you could pull up of everything you had visited within the game. Once you arrived at a very specific spot the achievement unlocked and you got a check next to it. Sometimes the spot was a pain in the butt to find also and you walked around in circles for a few minutes lol. I do like the pk penalties in the game. Hopefully that cuts down on griefers.