Shattered Kingdoms

Instead of losing all abilities or in addition to keeping some of the cabal abilities when their relic is gone make it so their doors always remain open, no outter guardian, and a financial penalty on a yearly or monthly basis (game time)?

I am not fond of any suggested changes in this thread, but that doesn't mean I am opposed to having a definite means of claiming victory for a winning cabal. I wouldn't know the right direction to go, but right now the system gives the losing team an incentive to get their relic back. Perhaps the incentive should go to the winners for keeping a relic and remove the penalties for losing your own. I don't know a good reward for that. Maybe money or even just echoes of the victory.

Crs, for what its worth, works. Dont change it. Add a new feature that may or may not be toed to crs. That is, if you want to do anything.

I like the idea of an incentive based system. How about adding a high level ability to each cabal that's only active when you hold an additional relic and/or allow current abilities to go beyond level 50, lower concentration or mana requirements per relic, etc...

I'm thinking nothing that makes PKing your already defeated enemies even easier to defeat. RP based, money based, something besides extra skills or powers or affects that make you that much harder to beat.

Right now, as it stands. CRS is 99% used when the other team is offline.

Here are options that could mitigate or stop it so that there is meaningful battles at the keeps:

1) If a keep is raided w/o any defenders online or within... 1min of online the debuff only takes affect after 24hrs (to stop ganking of relics on off-peak times)

2) When a relic is stolen, instead of losing them all off of the bat, how about 1 skill per 24hrs till it gets to the baseline.

3) Tied into one, make offline ganking nigh impossible... somehow.

Not that I'm involved with this sort of thing at the moment, but some ideas:

1st Idea> Org chosen vulnerability times that are publically known. (Meh, not my favorite idea).
2nd Idea> Buff the keep guardins, but for every online member make them weaker. (See below)

Something like:

> No members online > Invincible Guardian
> 1 Member online > Close to Impossible
> 2 Members online > Todays strength
> 3 Members online > Easier
> 4 Members online > Even easier
> 5 Members online > Easiest
> etc.

RP Concept, more members online less need for guardian to be as defensive.

Buffs, numbers, etc. are all tweakable

Something like this is already in effect. However, the sheer strength of buffed defenders coupled with the crippling effect of having one's own abilities disabled means that it's still usually a better idea to go after the stronger NPCs than to face the much more tactically smart and fearsome PCs.

There's literally no point ever to doing CRS as anything but a PvE encounter. Given how few defenders it takes to make such an encouter (even when rolling in deep with an offensive posse) more difficult or impossible than it ever should be, it's just not worth it to treat CRS as PvP fodder. I mean, it's been done with defenders and IS possible, but why when you can achieve the same result with less difficulty and no penalty? I've used CRS pretty extensively as both PvE and PvP over the years and I can promise you that unless someone gets caught with an unknown member or two of a faction online and willing to defend, it's just not ever, ever worth taking even overwhelming numbers to do CRS raids. And, really, even a five-man group is considered overwhelming for CRS. A good chunk of the system can be solo'd by a few different builds out there.

To make the system actually poignant and useful in the sense that it was intended to be useful (that is, promote PvP conflict between factions and to provide clear, objective guidelines, penalties and bonuses for "winning" and "losing" war states between factions) it would require a pretty extensive overhaul and that has already been shot down so many times over the years by D that it's just not even worth arguing for anymore. It's possible to make the system viable, but I don't think it will ever actually see the light of day as such.

Worth pointing out that all the cabals save for the Hammer can easily defend it with one person which unfortunately makes the Hammer relic the easiest to get.