Shattered Kingdoms

This is kind of a spin-off from Trosis' poll question post. My personal interest is to see some kind of automation within the game itself than can provide some means for one nation to conquer/take territory from another nation. I am not wedded to any specific implementation of that concept, but just to the concept itself. I want to clarify the type of support and of non-support for the concept:

If you voted yes, did you vote yes for just the CONCEPT of faction warfare that includes an automated mechanism for "taking" territory?
If you voted yes, did you vote yes for both the concept of faction warfare -AND- Trosis' proposal for how to implement it?
If you voted no, did you vote no against both concept of faction/territory warfare -AND- the proposal for how to implement it?
If you voted no, could you support the concept of faction warfare that includes an automate mechanism for "taking" territory, if it were implemented differently than Trosis proposed?

I prefer to hear feedback about the thoughts and opinions. "Lulz epic fail" would tell me you dislike or disrespect the ideas (or proposers), but it's the explanation of WHY it's epic fail or good idea in your personal opinion that provides the useful feedback to affect (or prevent) future efforts, experiments, etc. I know some of those have been provided in the other thread, but I cannot discern which of those are "NO-NO" votes and which might be "YES-NO" votes.

As always, thank you for your feedback. I always appreciate it.

PS - In my personal case, years ago when Dulrik suggested something of this sort, I was adamantly against it. I believe at the time, he made a reference to the game of RISK as part of the inspiration for his suggestion. At that time as a player I would've voted NO-NO. These days I find the concept more appealing, though I haven't been able to figure out how such a concept work in practice that doesn't encounter many of the problems raised in the other thread. However, I've never been the type of person to oppose an idea just because I disagree with the proposed implementation; I like to try to think of different ways to do things that people say can't work. My vote is in the YES-NO category, because I believe that a system *COULD* be implemented that works reasonably well, but I can't figure out how it could be automated, or not require vast amounts of IMM-staff support.

the concept is fine, but the proposed implementation was god awful terrible.

get the feeling that a proposal like this would require a lot of time and coding on dulrik's part...and frankly i'd rather him spend that time fixing bugs and making class balance changes. but in a perfect world where he has unlimited time, good concept - just needs the right implementation.

No No.
People do not match up their play times some times this is deliberate sometimes it is due to situations out of the players control. If the game has an automated tribunal territory warfare this is going to cause people to game the system. Which will either result in a white wash or a sea saw situation. Neither of which is the goal of the warfare. I am willing to guess that half the player base doesnt even know there is a second time when the population of the server spikes in the US AM. Not just around happy hour.

If you want an example why an automated system will not work look at cabal raids. If you want a system that is watched over by an Imm then you are restricting the game to time slots leaving quite a number of people with no way to reasonably influence the outcome of the situation look to RP events of the past where only one side shows up. If you also remember back to when cabal raids where implemented there was a significant number of people who disliked it enough to stop playing or stop playing in cabals. They have a stronger draw than Tribunals.

To go on having more territory is bad from a player aspect. More territory means more places bounty NPCs can spawn making it harder to find people, not to mention potentially costing you more cash when someone wants to drain your bank. While at the same time not stopping someone from gating into a location and killing you when they dont want to drain your accounts. The bounty NPCs is one of the biggest reason players do not interact with apposing sides as it is.

If an automated system was to be added to promote conflict between factions, adding something to give you mentor equivalent points for PKing if your in a tribunal you are at war with would promote it. If you wanted to make it tribunal v tribunal then add that limit must be in a tribunal to earn. But then you have the issue of what happens when a side should or wants to withdraw from a war to have a break time.

When the mention of a risk like warfare system I considered it. I thought about why Risk is a good game. I concluded that Risk is a good game because it has an end state. The rules of original risk where designed that the game would ramp up and then you would hit and end state and the game would be over for a restart. This is very much like monopoly which was designed to show limited resources and how that creates conflict and haves and have not. With no end state you are either left with a group being the haves and the other being the have nots then the question gets asked why cant we wipe them off the map we have all of their territory.

Also the most important reason why I think the Territory warfare code would be a stupid idea is because standard allies are next to each other. Taslamar and the empire are the most likely to fight over Territory but they have no joining boarder. Does Uxmaln just get removed from the map so every has boarders connecting.

Back in the told days when an Imm wanted PK to happen they just manifested and told their followers get on and kill someone. It was simple as that. Hell it wasnt even that long ago Marfik did it (before he left the imm staff). If you want to promote PK let D ease the rules of Imm manifesting and demanding things of their followers. I can expand on the idea but the reward of territory seems horridly unbalanced.

My final thought is what happens when enough people decide to game the system and all join one side to stack the odds just to see what happens when they win all the territory in the game, because people will at some point the same way a cabal decided to take all the relics.

I've sort of evolved my idea of this.
The territories correlate with bounty hunters.
If you have all 5, 100% of your guards spawn. 4 territories, 80%, 3 60%. 2 40%. 1 20%. 0 - no bounty NPCs spawn.
We could do that or an all vs nothing concept. This would give an advantage to the side that decides to go out and cap territories. Making them no jloot zones would encourage pvp in these areas.
That's the cut and dry goal of my idea at this point.
And I posted it to allow suggestions and allow the concept to evolve.

My questions to all of you:
What are the cons? How is it unbalanced.
What more incentive should we have for taking territories?

I agree with this. While the concept sounds mildly neat in theory, I don't think it would be a good direction for SK to start taking at all.

SK has a history of automated systems ultimately being disappointing, starting with CRS and going to now with the current bounty NPC/law system that's gone through so many iterations yet is still fundamentally a system that's more disappointing to me now than it was back when I had my first tribunal character 10 years ago, which was before bounty NPCs were "re"implemented. I'm much more of a fan of players simply deciding that if they want to take over a territory that they simply... take it over. You want to play a necro that declares himself "Lord of Teron" and constantly patrols the city looking for invaders to kill if they don't bow to him? Go right ahead. But I don't think that there needs to be a -complicated- territory system to accomplish that.

To that end, I think that SK would benefit more from additional ways to track and/or find PCs. Specifically, it would be nice if a handful of classes were given an ability to track and/or report on movements of PCs in an area, similar to the moot's raven and how tribunal NPCs currently behave. Right now the only real "locate" features aside from extremely rare scripted loot is the locate object spell, and that's deep magic at best.

TL:DR; Back in my day, you didn't need territories to "take over" an area for the Empire/Adepts/CoN. You just rolled into that faction and constantly killed everyone in the target city that had a problem with your dominance. If someone killed you instead, you ultimately failed in taking over that territory. That's all the territory control that SK needs.

Ive been mulling over the idea in my head. I posted this in the other thread but I figured I should throw it here. Its a system to encourage but not enforce active tribunal conflict.

A limited code change requirement to increase the willingness of people to enter into PvP. Add a scripted NPC near each judge. When a group of a tribunal heads to that NPC they get the option to start a quest if there are members of other tribunals online. The NPC then opens a gate/rift from them to their foes stones. They NPC then sends two messages <insert tribunal A> are invading <insert tribunal B> hold the city for a day and you will be rewarded. A counter starts 30 min. If the attackers are in the Inn room when the time ends they win, if not they lose. Winners get a scripted vendor that has several different options that you can only perform once per victory.The rewards could include a one use scry item, potion of true sight, standard "good" PvP potion scroll wand or staff (single charge so no recharging), a blank overpowered scroll/vial or scripted item for religion spell. If required engaging more interest this could contribute towards mentor stat attribute at the end of the month.
If capital cities gets boring you could add coding to attack each city with a similar challenge, Everclear Seawatch etc. Then if you really wanted territory give and take you would have something to work from. However territory changing hands seems like a really bad idea from how the game is designed currently because there is an end state to gaining territory and once its reached its either lame or game breaking.

This solution encourages players to join and engage in tribunal warfare by giving them a PvP path to get something that takes PvE. It encourages people to engage in PvP in your foes cities because thats how you get the reward. It doesnt force someone to PvP but they know their foes are going to get an edge if they dont if scrying is included they know that a gang might be in store for chickening out anyway. It is relatively simple to implement a builder probably has enough scripting power to do at least 75% of the work if not 100% once the exact terms are set out and approved by an Imm discussion.
Importantly it doesnt take a "huge build effort" and has tuning dials built into it. If the rewards are too good they can get nerf if they arnt good enough they can get buffed. If attacking or defending is harder they can get better rewards. If tribunal guards are making it impossible with out draining an account a small amount of code should be required to even the playing field with buff or nerfs to bounty NPCs based on numbers of attackers defenders. If the one room inn is too hard for attackers (who need to sit there) give them a few rooms to be in so they can move around while occupying. If constantly attacking a capital is boring you can add other areas. Its "simple" solution that encourages with out forcing people to engage, non tribunal members can help but are not rewarded directly (they could always demand one of the items from people they helped).

I feel as though we had a "hold the area" type of game durring the Battle for Grahme. People hated that. Because people would not engage and picked off a few people to convince the monitoring Imm that "the empire currently holds Grahme."
I like the concept of a timer method to take over. It's a decent thought. But I'm unsure it would be incentivized with the "cool loot" concept. People would farm the timer to get boss loot easily. I feel as though this theory would be be better discussed in it's own thread. I'd like a little bit more elaboration.
Purpose: earn loot by holding an enemy in for 30 minutes.
Attacking incentive: gain loot for winning.
Defending incentive: stop enemy from getting loot?
High potential for abuse.
I want to legitimize this idea more, but I don't have a full grasp on the concept.

The concept of "Lord of Teron." It ms cool. But never happens anymore. Especially for newer players. And this only works while that character is online.
It is easy to paint yourself as a villain. But how often would someone hunt finney in Teron if he made the same claim? Everyone would bow. Give him a crown. Game over.

Regarding the current bounty hunter/law system. I agree that it is not ideal in it's current form. A good start to changing this would be to ignore bounty hunter kills as far as the law is concern. Only murder of PC's count as murder and can make your crime list go up.
Because it is true. As soon as you're wanted, you can't pk in that city anymore.

"Take over an area by killing anyone who comes into the land."
Doesn't really work with the current stance on rule 1. I mean, you could put out a note and then give anyone who walks in a warning. If you see them again, kill them. But I don't think Azoreth is going to claim to be the Leader of the peacekeepers, just to spark "im taking over for good" RP. There is nothing tangible to measure his claim. They're empty words.

I dunno. I'm rambling at this point.

Do you realize that right after you said this doesn't work, you described a simple way to make it work?

The only reason it doesn't happen anymore is that people don't do it: There's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from claiming Teron as their land and then killing anyone they don't approve of being there. That would be a perfectly legitimate RP angle.


The problem isn't that people don't have enough ways to PK, because they already are plenty of ways people can PK, the most easily accessible to every person being to just send a tell to someone to meet them in Teron and duke it out. The problem is that people don't -want- to PK, and no manner of complicated territory system is going to change that fact any more than the current tribunal PK based system does.

I explained a way that it could work, attempting to make the point that it very very rarely happens.
Thakathi's war against the empire is an example of it happening. But other than that, I don't remember a time in which it's happened.

"The problem is that people don't want to pk."
And why don't they want to pk? Because they'll lose their loot.
Look at the post on the forum site where jomino said "hey pongsom, take Taran on 1v1. That's fair." Pongsoms response was "my loss would be greater than his loss."
Perfect example of why we need to better incentivize pvp. I want to see other suggestions as to how to accomplish this.