Shattered Kingdoms

Set dates for raids. Like, saturday evening for 2 hours, you can raid. Any other time the inner guardian is simply not available. He sods off to Elsewhere.

The original CRS idea could have worked when there were 80 people constantly online, but right now it requires this sort of timed system for people to know that 'oh saturday I need to be online so they dont jack my relic' or something. And yeah, logging out should not make it easier to defend.

Also make the guardian's room an area you enter from a named exit, like 'sanctum' instead of 'north', so people can't just attack defenders from a room away, or at least block tactics like using certain cabal skills that make it next to impossible to defend against.

I actually like Nightwing's idea of despawning relics after 15 mins of the last cabal member logging off. That would stop the offline ganking but generally people will still log off because they care more about their lewt than their relic.

Speaking from the voice of experience, a qualified group can tear through an outer guardian in 20-30 seconds, after which as it stands right now cabal gate is disabled until they attack the inner guardian, which is usually too late to do anything about.

This idea isn't terrible but I definitely don't think it's the perfect solution either. Also, unless something pretty drastic has changed, siege weapons and the seigecraft skill in SK are broken and do not function properly. Also, lol @ ranged damage against a preped raid group. It's one thing to whittle the healers down with it while they chase you through group after group of guard spawns. It's another to try to apply it as an effective strategy during a short window where they have to stand there and take it.

I think its also worth mentioning that some cabals have a much better skillset to defend their relic than others.

SK has never been a level playground. One side is always better prepared/equipped than the other. This won't change no matter how you tweak the CRS system. And honestly, if you're talking about incentives to log in, taking away someone's cabal abilities and forcing them to go PK against another cabal is not a very strong incentive.

Defending vs attackers because you'll be crippled if they succeed is good incentive, but once you do lose, willpower to log in is drained, for a lot of players.

One other way to think about it, is maybe each 'relic' grants a certain skill or spell to whatever cabal owns it. So, for instance, maybe if you have the hammer relic, your cabal now has access to IA. (I hope IA is obscure enough), or a new skill altogether.

This also levels the playing field when trying to reclaim a relic, because now the attacking team is not at the huge disadvantage of a) Facing enemy cabal skills with no skills of their own, and b) Facing a supercharged inner guardian with no cabal skills.

What if carrying an enemy relic was no longer the job of the inner guardian? It would be up to a logged on PC to hold it, and the char would only be buffed as long as outside of their HQ. Only when there was no one on would the guardian hold the enemy relic, and they'd recieve no bonus while holding it.

Really really bad idea. At least when the relic is on the guardian, you know where it is.

I was charged with a quest item once, with the context of 'if the darkies get this item, your cabal will be destroyed'. All that made me do is want to hide under a rock somewhere and only log in when there's at least 3 of my friends around. Judge me if you like, but a lot of people would fall into the same category. Same with making relics player carried. People will just take them and fly to some random room, probably 30 leagues off the mainland flying over the ocean in a random direction.

lol

I don't like any of the CRS changes that have been proposed thus far. They all feel artificial and forced, and I don't think they represent an effective way for Dulrik to spend his code time. Clearly CRS would function way better with half as many factions and twice as many players. Equally clear is that isn't going to happen right away. With the average faction membership and the standard deviation in faction membership being what they are, you don't really get much fun out of the CRS system right now. You get heavy asymmetries in manpower that can be exploited for the already winning team to win harder, but this in no way leads to more PK or RP, and you get a series of relic back-and-forths when the other team is offline. In the ideal SK you would have 9-on-9 battles between raiders and defenders and that might be fun, but we just aren't going to see that on SK anytime soon with the current CRS structure.

As people have been saying in this thread, the CRS system may be a net negative in the current SK environment. It has never been one of the aspects of SK that makes me want to play, but that's just me. Maybe some people like it. A lot of the solution depends on what changes are in store for factions in 2013. There have been hints dropped here and there that there are changes coming (especially regarding tribunals and home cities), but we don't know exactly what to anticipate or how that will affect CRS. I don't think we can give very good input without knowing what's coming. In broad terms, I think CRS needs to be resized to better accommodate the SK player count. For specifics on how to achieve that, I would want to know more about the upcoming faction landscape.

Another idea would be to buff siegecraft..As it stands, very little if anyone bothers ever training it...One would think that a giant siege armament would do some damage to someone.

That is a good idea but in no way addresses the shortcomings of CRS. Siege weaponry should do a lot more damage, though. It makes no sense that it does as little as it does.