The Kingdom

The Kingdom, formally the Kingdom of Graal, was a short-lived, monumental project of the Military Community inspired by the hit HBO series Game of Thrones. The Kingdom showed the potential of a unified community, albeit certain issues arose immediately after implementation, particularly after the election of the King.

An article from Xiao's blog (Xiao was the one who received and tallied the votes for King):

The Kingdom system has now withered and died.

The idea was very, very good. A game of thrones inspired accumulation of the entire Military Community would have seemed like a crazy idea to me if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. It actually happened, the entire community was involved in the system.

However, there were significant issues. For one, all the houses were very weak (aside from House Regium), and there weren't nearly enough officers to support the large scale of the system.

It had it’s moments, sure. Like the Crawford revolt – After Vulnus was crowned the King, Crawford rebelled. And all the other houses rallied behind House Regium and destroyed them. A 12 hour PK battle was ended in 25 minutes, and Crawford agreed to return to the system and was given the territory of Deadwood.

As much as I wanted it to, this system was never going to work. There are a few big factors to this.

Auel created his house with the expectation that he would win the King election. After the election, not wanting to manage his house as opposed to be the king, he went inactive.

As mentioned before, the guilds were weak and short-staffed. The King election itself contributed to its failure. All the confusion and disagreement caused a lot of infighting, but I will admit seeing all those people in the castle was cool as fuck.

All in all, good idea, and poor execution. However, the system did prove something very important:

Community unification IS POSSIBLE! The kingdom system proved this, now can we replicate it?