First, something that rubs me off about cabals, is the idea that all caballed characters should be constantly raiding. I will give you an example. When I was playing Gharahka (Imperial), we had a big group going through Aran'gird. I had personally never been through the entirety of it. 6 imperials on, one fortress player, no imperial lowbies. Fortress had lowbies. Ok, so we are doing our thing, I personally was having fun exploring the area, maran lowbies were ranking, dunno what the sole maran was doing. Ok, some imm switches into inners, and starts bitching at us for not holding orb. Viable role choice? Yes, ofcourse. Imperials are about dominating other. But let's inspect the outcome. We come out of Aran'gird, head to fort. The single maran gets the living daylights ganged out of him. By six imperials. I am 100% sure he did not have fun summon/ganged by six. We roll the maran inner in like 4 rounds. Head to Palace, down orb, set two sets of hero cents, and healer camps at Centurions healing.
5 or so Maran lowbies come up and start pounding on cents, but 45 minutes later they have not made it to the Vanquisher. Maran lowbies quit, and by this time also 3 out of 6 imperials have got bored and quit. Needless to say, the hero maran quit infuriated, since 6 man gangs often need lots of eq, and the guy was likely looted to the bones.
So, Empire dominated, GO ROLEPLAY! But who had fun? Did the imm in question enjoy seeing the 6 on 1? Or cutting off ranking from the mid levels? Perhaps the empowerment imm of the healer enjoyed seeing him do something of a great purpose to his cabal (healing centurions)? Dunno, what concerns me, is that none of the players did.

I like cabals in which it's possible to decide yourself when you want to raid, and when not. What fun is it raiding ragers 6 on 1? The powerless dude will quit anyways. I liked Nexus since it was never advised to raid an empty cabal. When I see possible cabals to raid, if raiding is what interests me, my first pick is always the one with the most defenders, not the least. If there is no way to win that one, then perhaps progress to the next most. The ideal situation being, that raid-counter raiding will happen enough so I can leave empty cabals alone.

Bottom line, I would like to see raiding cabals rewarded when there's actual risk involved, instead of pushing players to fish in the barrel. The reasoning I like to use (being an evil player) is that I'm so ####ing awesome, that it's pointless destroying a cabal when there's no one to see how awesome I am. Or that I'm such an evil bastard, that it will waste my talents to go kill the watcher if there are no maran corpses to desecrate (sp?) on my way!

Of this rewarding system, it does not have to be something huge or hardcoded. No divine prowess of amazing mongoosiness. Just mayby, if an imm catches it and thinks it was something risky pulled off. Or mayby even if it was risky but wasn't pulled off, a small nod, cb Good job, mayby small imm exp. Hell, just drop 50-100 imm exp for every participant, I know it would make me happy.

This was a longer rant than I thought, and will have to continue once my class ends, but I swear eventually I will get to the point where the cabal system is made super appealing for mid-low level players.

To be continued...