Judgment Hour is a time of the week when the belongings of a guild may be destroyed or sacked, meaning the guild must organize itself to defend its possession, making walls and defensive structures paying off.
Town Claim protection at Judgment Hour is, as I imagine, a way to protect smaller guilds from bigger evil guilds that want the total destruction of its smaller rivals. And it works fine to this end, indeed, preventing slaughters.
But at this last Saturday Judgment Hour what I see in the war my guild is involved was a bigger guild working to coordinate eight allies, all of them fruit of work and well done diplomacy, into a major attack against a medium guild that declared war on us 3 weeks ago which just had to log out to protect themselves. This is quite the opposite a JH should incentive.
We have something like 80 to 100 players marching into this guild lands. Arriving there, we confirmed what our scouts had alerted us of: the guild, far from being a small one, had 5 to 6 different guild claims, probably on the name of alt chars, and let everything they had inside their Town Claims or Private Claims. Most of it was not even protect by walls, since they knew that stuff could not be destroyed.
The problem is that, knowing that any of their stuff was not at risk, their entire guild log out at first sight of the enemy. At that 1 hour by week where the guild was suppose to defend itself, they had to do nothing. They did not need allies, they did not have to talk to us to cease war, they did not have to review the value of declaring war at us, they just log out and tomorrow will continue the guerrilla fighting, making one or another level 1 forever protected monument. At the same time, all our effort in diplomacy to join allies and war coordination of 100 players did not pay off. The opportunity to end a war and force peace in a major blow was gone by something that looks an exploit on smaller guilds protection used by a medium sized guild (50-80 players).
Ok, everybody may say we could place a siege totem to destroy their claim, but the costs are prohibitive (Vostaskus ingot) even to bigger guilds and simply do not pay off to destroy one monument that they can rebuild with no effort (remember, they are zerging level 1 monuments).
So, they declared war on a guild which, with its allies, is at least twice its size, and we can hit no blow that would mean to them a disadvantage of staying at war, since not even in the one hour they were suppose to defend they had to defend. They do not need to pledge for peace, they just have to sit and watch as we can do nothing ever. The war may endure forever, even though one side is more numerous, organized and dedicated to end it.
Summarizing the suggestion: during Judgment Hour, this one single hour in a week, turn off Town Claim Protection, so that guilds have to actively defend their claims and stuff and stop abusing on small guilds protection. It is not enough time for someone to lose everything it had, but it is enough time to the winning side make the losing side rethink about the value of being at war, making peace something that they may actually want. Because the way it is today, there is no penalty for them for being at war. For the small guild, it is an incentive to build walls and make alliances, do not engage on wars they can not win or even play the vassal role on a dominated land if they do not want to restart somewhere else. Because Life is Feudal and those were the options a small feud had.
Turning off Judgment Hour Town Claim protection is a way to make ending wars a good deal.