Suggestions

I actually think this lore tidbit is sadder than exalting. When dragons go off to serve their deities here, they can always visit home, write letters, and interact with the world from a lore standpoint, if not a gameplay standpoint. If they just disappear forever? That sounds a lot more like death to me.

No support. First, this would not fix the issue for most of the people that don't exalt. A lot of them don't use the official canon for what exalting is, so it's pointless to expect they would do so for any other similar mechanic. For many of them, the issue is that an exalted dragon cannot be recovered or bred or interact with any gameplay mechanics anymore, rendering them 'dead' from a gameplay perspective. This wouldn't undo that, and that shouldn't be undone anyway since it is the point of the mechanic.

Second, the people that never exalt are the only people that are affected by their decision. They are perfectly capable of making an informed decision on whether not exalting is important to them, and within a few months probably understand what the consequences of that are better than I do. I assume its mostly just perpetually full lairs so they can't buy new dragons or hatch nests, which is a pain but something that can be worked around if someone is really dedicated to not exalting. They aren't going to hurt the servers just because they've got a lot of dragons, plenty of active exalters have full lairs a lot of the time too. Once they've hit their lair cap they can't keep breeding new dragons, so it's not like they're generating too many dragons anyway.

Edit: Only tangentially related, but if the problem this suggestion is trying to solve is further incentivizing exalting, one way I've seen suggested here is an exalt shop, using some new exalt-exclusive currency to buy items, some of which are also exclusive to the exalt shop. If some of those items' tooltips said the items were made by exalted dragons, it might help convince people that exalted dragons are perfectly fine.

Exalting is already canonically the highest honor a dragon can receive. As other users have said, someone viewing this as anything else is either unaware of the canon or is choosing not to for their own lore. People who have issues with exalting will probably still have issues with this. My primary issue with this would be if it didn't count towards Dominance (and since they are going to an entirely different world instead of aiding their deity, I imagine it wouldn't). I can see having an "exalt-but-not-really" mechanic making battles [i]incredibly[/i] frustrating, and many in-flight raffles not counting non-exalted dragons, etc. Edit: [quote]Only tangentially related, but if the problem this suggestion is trying to solve is further incentivizing exalting, one way I've seen suggested here is an exalt shop, using some new exalt-exclusive currency to buy items, some of which are also exclusive to the exalt shop. If some of those items' tooltips said the items were made by exalted dragons, it might help convince people that exalted dragons are perfectly fine.[/quote] I think this is super cute and would love to see this added.

I am attempting to figure out how this is different from exalting and I'm not seeing any significant differences besides a different lore (that can already be solved by just having a head-canon).

I'm not sure I see how this would fix the issue, honestly.

So, I'm not sure how pitching dragons down a hole in the ground where they disappear forever is meant to be a more positive interpretation than them leaving home to serve their gods. Seriously.

But regardless, people choosing to interpret exaltation as killing isn't something that needs to be validated by the site giving them an alternative. If they want to see it that way, it's their choice. But it IS a choice, and that's not something that needs to be catered to to try and "fix" it. Either they live with the consequences of not exalting or they change their mindset. Either way it's a problem they have created and one that they need to solve for themselves.