Interesting, as I feel playing on Emperor level would help the faction play style. I also find it odd you keep saying this as I'm not seeing people argue against factions. If anything, it appears like the DG is getting even more players due to the faction system. I don't see how pushing emperor difficulty level is trying to remove factions, or is this a manipulative thing that I'm just not seeing? [No offense meant, just a serious statement]
I think the picture is not black-white here, pertaining to the interest in keeping factions. Factions is bound to be a better sell than the obsolete traditional one, as people like to identify with a core concept in a competing setting, not some blurred and carebearish thing. There are arguments supporting an emperor level, I admit that, but not all players here are that competitive, they simply log on, read the game forums, post and vote. Many of these would be happy with warlords and noble levels, and we already upped the ante with added civs, random civ/unrestricted leader and so on.
City flip option enabled also makes for higher risk. We are quite possibly Prince 2.0 as it stands, with the faction-based system (which is run for the very first time, historically), BTS increased the level of challenge, there are numerous new variables to consider, new game features, we got a huge faction of mainly veterans (tribals) and another huge faction of entirely new players (legion) and a medium faction of mainly veterans (mysticracy) and a medium faction of mainly new players (only me as "veteran", but I am no real veteran, since none of my ruleset ideas ever won through, to be a veteran would require strong influence on ruleset).
If you recall from the initial debates and polls establishing factions as the core ruleset, it was a very close race. Some players here swore that they would make this "experiment" fail, and they even repeated that several times, so many times, that I actually believe them. Kind of shame, now that we see factions attract more than the communal organization we had before.
The core outcome of making this Emperor level, is that we create a caste system of elite demogame veterans on the top, telling newbees what to do, just so people can stay alive. Prince would level the playing field, and enable non-civ professionals to contribute with their ideas, so they are not ridiculed and isolated based on some CFC-slang or demogame terminology, or frozen out simply due to limited game-technical skills.
We need an accessible playing field, now this is first time factions is run.
This was also somewhat speculative, as people now could phase out "unwanted prince votes" due to Easter. The consequence of the perpetual repoll system some seek to institute, is that people voting for a majority poll never can rest safely after a poll, but must make sure that the outcome of the poll is implemented long after. This means, no one can ever write "final run-off poll", due to the insecurity if a result is not allowed to stand. The perpetual repoll regime regardless of previous outcome will just generate a "concrete shoe" policy that forces players to make sure the original poll result still stands, which just gives us extra labor. The original outcome winners will from now on remain vigilant, since their first poll never will be really valid.
