I've noticed a few things with the gods plugin currently that seem to be a bit of an oversight by the plugin developer, as well as a few things that are simply functions that unintentionally cause a bit of ridiculousness to deal with down the road.
The first thing is that the priest of a particular religion is not able to be selected by any sort of electoral process, or something of that nature - the god simply chooses a priest randomly and assigns them the position. The worst part about this is that if a religion gets a priest they dislike, there's no way of getting them out of the position, and that person is free to do what they will - waste power with curses and blessings, or what have you. This seems to be a prime opportunity for a religion to be flooded with people interested in wrestling power away and wasting it all so that the religion in question is left with no power and must start from scratch again. I guess this could be a good PVP mechanic, but it seems a bit cheap to me personally.
Secondly, the fact that anyone with the inclination can make a god out of nowhere and begin worshipping it as their own has created some interesting... challenges. Soundbyte_mantra has noted to me that there were, at last found, almost as many religions as there were active players on this server - that's some 75+ different religions. I don't know about you, but that gives almost no one the opportunity to succeed with a particular religion and makes religious wars much more infeasible when it's just two players fighting against one another - it gets pretty boring pretty quickly. There isn't an option for very many full-scale assaults on another religion, and epic crusades and battles, which I'm sure would interest people greatly!
Finally, I'll be the one to admit it - the power thresholds on religions for various types of items are a bit too low, especially if we factor in the first two options and cut the number of gods down to like, 5 or 10. I know that Elohim is already up to 385 at the time of this post, and while I'm not anxious to have this power level taken away from us, it does sort of give followers of Elohim an unfair advantage over the rest of the players - namely, that we have the ability to get pretty much unlimited diamond equipment, provided we wait long enough. I know that I personally have chests and chests full of diamond swords, shovels, picks, hoes, and axes, and I'm pretty much set for me and three other people for all the tools I'll need for quite awhile. Given that we're trying to make ourselves a survival server here, that seems to be a bit unbalancing.
I'd like everyone's thoughts on these topics - and I understand the third one might not be popular with many people, but try to limit your nonsense for another thread, and post only constructive criticism. Anything like "OMG DON'T TAKE OUR POWER AWAY WAAAAAAAAAH" is stupid, and you can take that to another thread. With that said, please, comment below!
~ Islid
