Thank you moonflame, Snickie, and everyone for your helpful considerations and comments.
I have been for many years a strong proponent of long-range radio communication. One character in particular has used it to organize a large-area organization and meetings, helped make sure as many towns as possible have radios, and my other characters have used it for many other reasons. I've never been eager to remove radio use or to limit it, and it is a disappointment to me. Yet, I agreed to this change. I've also learned that traveling in person is more effective anyway.
Yes, we intentionally didn't have a general audience vote on the matter or discuss it first (though we did discuss it with a limited number of players/staff). We know that there will be (and is) disappointment. We don't expect praise or necessarily agreement for limiting something. The reasons are mainly to prevent CRBs, and we don't release information about such cases.
Pilot wrote:Radios have not been serving well the dynamics of a slow paced game, they have shifted focus away from local environments, and they have placed unnecessary pressures on players attempting to keep apart the interests of multiple characters in the same region. For these and other reasons ...
To answer Millhouse's question, you can ignore "other reasons". It's a saying, more than anything, implying that we've thought about the implications. The real reason is to decrease the information flow among characters of the same player and also characters of RL friends. It simplifies keeping information separate among characters, at least within the game. Otherwise, people can intentionally "accidentally" share information. There's also been confusion among sincere players about what is appropriate in terms of sharing and receiving information over the radio.
That said, we can move on to the other motivations for such a change, which are to turn focus locally (like turning your phone off

), to encourage travel, and to slow the travel of information to a pace appropriate for Cantr. It's also a change of pace. It was a change when radios were first added as well. We'll see how it goes.
TradeI definitely like being able to communicate trade over radio instead of having to travel and then learn the hard way what you should have brought or what they don't have, but that doesn't make this unreasonable to coordinate. It also may encourage better relations and in-person communication among nearby towns, as well as making the traveling trader who's aware of trading needs a highly desired profession. It also encourages actually keeping track of what different towns trade.
CombatWe're against quick or large-scale massacres, and that is one of the reasons (included in the CRB reason) for the change to radios. You can also expect changes in the near future to further limit murders in a way more appropriate for a slow-paced game.
I think that having things like power generators and fuel for radios is a good idea (although this could make things difficult for towns that have no fuel at all), though that requires a lot more discussion and implementation time. But, implementing a more complex way to have a long-range radio sounds like a good idea to me, if use of it is somehow limited to where it wouldn't bring back the problems we're avoiding (CRBs, focus on radio for information). Then players could go to a specific town on one side of the island that has such a thing to communicate with another town (perhaps with a specific receiver) on the other side, for example. The change is purposely removing any instant way to communicate over a long distance, however.
Let's see how we fair in this updated version of Cantr.
