Hi team! As a new player, I don't want to pretend to know all the myriad details of this discussion, but I'd like to offer my observations as well. The problem seems to be that with a dwindling database, the relics will end up with the people who are willing to wait out their enemies and run raids when they are offline and success can be reasonably reassured. Based on this conclusion, my suggestion would be to disallow the re/capturing of items while no enemy is on to defend. (Perhaps by making the relic fail to spawn, and then despawn within a set amount of time after the last member has logged off. Alternatively you could make cabal grounds inaccessible save for a key that you make out of your enemy's corpse (like cutting out some guy's eye to trick a retinal scan).
I can think of a few problems with this right away so I guess for the sake of time, I'll go through what I've thought of, with the caveat that I'm still pretty stinking new so some of my ideas might be waaaay of the money. If so, sorry (but it's my birthday week, which makes me brave and bold and forum-posty.
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1. People would cap and then just stay offline for days. - This is already sort of a problem in reverse, where people whose item HAS been capped are already more reluctant to log in.
2. It's pretty hard to raid. - Now this might just be me, and let's be clear I'm afraid to fight bunnies all by myself, but for this idea to actually work, the current PVE aspect of raiding might need to be toned down a bit.
3. It's extra coding. - Yeah, sorry, no way around this one, but at least it's not the same level of complexity as building a bunch of different raids.
All that being said, I do love the idea of lasting consequences for warfare. I've never played a mud with that system before and once I learned about it, I was super intrigued. I have a few ideas for that, but they're fairly muddled and I've probably said enough backwards off-the-wall things for one night.
flame gently. <3