Agree with the idea of
making the world being more opened to small groups of players. For example, in the beginnings I played this game as a member of big guild but soon became disapointed of the expectations and bindings, so I decided to leave this awesome game. Later I realized that me prefer "small" gameplay with small settlement, which I built with my friend. We made own guild, but every day we are confronted with unpleasant fact it is necessary to have at least 10 characters to get a Tier1 monument. Due this "feature" we need to make our small territory divided in 5 separate personal claims, but center and 2 tiles of our walls are not covered (rule of 2 tiles between claim borders), so we are forced to avoid usage of aprroximately 17% of space we could effectively use and also we need to repair 8 tiles with walls every 3 days as it is suffering by decay because it is not claimed (it cannot be).
I am looking forward for the patch 0.20, where are the developers intending some kind of "Territories and Taxes", which I translate as prayed liberation of this big guild rulings. Hope, I will not be disapointed again and the developer will come with some alternative way of Realm claim for small groups of players
There are some pictures of our small settlement on Skjultland: