It has its fun about it. Though I have participated in a very low amount of raids, defending and attacking, I tend to stay away from all the cabals that have those items for the fact, I don't really like focusing only on that. The Idea of loosing your cabal powers if your Item is gone is a fun Idea, it just needs more to the Cabal system.

Perhaps a sort of capture the city/town system. When a cabal has a town under there control, instead of just city guards, there would also be that cabals "special guards" And the captain of that guard would pretty much have the same stats as the cabals outer guardian. Ya gotta kill all the guards in order to capture or "liberate" the town. Its just an Idea but who knows maybe its in the right path. This might even be a way to get the Grinning skull more involved in cabal oriented raids and such.

I figure this new system would not work so well for the cabals like the Outlanders, Scions, Tribunals, Or Nexus. So perhaps some sort Unique approach to these. Maybe the outlanders would do something to the merchants, Or the town would burn untill liberated. The scions I am not sure for I do not know much about them. This could give Nexus another balance thing to worry about, Making sure the cities are controlled half by light half by dark, or even none at all. Not sure what the Tribunals would be... So I guess this would be more focused towards the Fortress vs Empire vs Orcs Maybe vs Ragers

Though This Idea is not important, I do believe the Cabal system is something that needs more improvement to. The Item thing is cool in all, it just needs more.

I've always thought of cabals as basically religions with very specific dogmas that also have clearly defined (even if shifting) enemies. Every cabal has a set of beliefs that are opposed by another cabal, and the dismantling of those enemy cabals is a critical goal in the fulfillment of their ideology. Unfortunately, "cabal wars" are about as evolved as the system has gotten.

A couple cabals, like Nexus and Battle, have a little better, in that their purpose can be worked towards in ways other than capture the flag. For most of the cabals, however, it's as simple as contributing to the never-ending fight.

I would imagine that if I joined a secret cabal of (what the rest of the world would see as) zealots or religious weirdos, a large portion of my time would be spent doing ceremonial stuff, financing the organization, and other non-combat related stuff, even if fighting was my primary means of attaining my goal. In CF, however, being in a cabal is about spilling blood, you just get to pick the rhetoric.

I suppose this is our fault, to some degree. If the player base as a whole wanted to make being in a cabal more about RP and other things, it probably could, even with little or no mechanical (coding) help from the staff. It's very likely that the reason things work the way they do (or are as "basic" as they are) now is because that's exactly how most people want it: a little bit of RP and organization sprinkled on top of their Team Death Match.

Honestly, aside from making the raiding system a little more involved or challenging ("time consuming" might actually be the phrase I want), I can't think of any way of making teh cabal system better that doesn't just lead back to "repetitive boring stuff that gets old" land. More Immortal-run quests and global events that are cabal-centric would obviously trump any mechanical change to how cabals work, but, as we know, that's unlikely to happen due to time constraints.