As Lands of Legend currently stands, there is not very much reason to band together and cooperate above having a friend or two. Ranks within a 'nation' have historically meant rather little, as there was a large failure to enact organization. It tends to be less beneficial to team up with a bunch of people, because then you must share resources and are often easily taken advantage of. Likewise, you rarely know when someone is going to turn around and kill you.
But this is a roleplay game. Ideally, you should encourage cooperation and conflict between players through the usage of groups. While admins can usually bring together groups on occasion for the duration of an event or two (or on rare occasion a good number more), mechanically this is not easy to accomplish. A solution which would replace the current 'ranks' system, bring players together to cooperate, and encourage an actual economy with growth would be a proper faction system.
Specifically, a faction would be an organization that is a collection of individuals, with a single one as their leader. They would be able to donate gold into the faction 'treasury', and the leader would be able to utilise this gold for various advantages that benefit the group together. Let's take a closer look.
Player-Point-of-View
Leader: The leader first attracts followers and then applies for the creation of a faction. I recommend requiring four people total in order to start one. The admin would choose whether or not to grant the request. The leader would be able to access the treasury, adding and removing money as needed. They would be able to modify an MoTD (1), parcel out ranks, hire 'guards', modify which factions and races are friendly, and players who are friendly/unfriendly. Finally, they'd be able to add/remove players to/from the faction, respectively. This would initially be completed via a simple menu interface accessible from the HuD, but I would like to see a proper panel implemented eventually.
Member: Members would be able to donate money to the treasury and fulfill ranks. They would also be able to view the MoTD, friendly, and unfriendly races. Some samples ranks include...
... Smith
... Builder
... Diplomat
... Craftsman
When gaining these ranks, they would gain the benefits that apply to each. This would usually be a direct "bonus" to skills, but might also be a "bonus" to the end-results of crafting. Regardless, it would be beneficial to figure these out and how they should be done by discussion. Just important to know that a rank would have a bonus that is added upon being given, removed upon leaving or no longer having it given.
Note: It would be ideal for ranks to be something that the leader 'buys' in order to give out, with money from the treasury. This gives gold more value.
Admin-Point-of-View
Admins would initially receive a factions edit verb with which they can view the various factions, view the properties of each, create new ones, and modify the properties of each. This is how a leader is placed as the head of a faction, and where the admin may modify things as they wish. To begin with, this panel would look much like most of the game's, but I would like to create a fancier real one.
Implementation Details
Create a new datum and place the variables necessary on it. Create a global list which holds the organizations. Proceed to function similar to a class, with plenty of procs for playing around with factions and their various uses. A new hud object would need to be placed that can be used for it. When a player is added to the faction, their ckey is what is added to the faction list. A new proc for mobs would be added that checks all available factions, looking for the ckey. If I can think of a more efficient way, I will do it instead. Upon restarting, the ckey would be checked on every list of organization and removed where it appears.
Note: Making every organization check for its members twice a day would be a good idea. If a member is not found for two weeks, they would be automatically removed.
Since it would be implemented as a datum, this would not be too difficult.
Possible Future Expansions and Synergy
- Claiming territory for your group.
- Pleasant panels...
- Integration with a dynamic spawn system, to replace guards.
- Synergy with balanced NPC units.
It's just a bunch of us who have joined together to build a fort out in the middle of nowhere to keep stuff safe, but as it is right now random people can just walk in and take stuff from us without us even knowing about it.
The guard idea would make this a lot easier for us to protect our supplies if we enemy a certain player/group of people.It would even make things more interesting when factions are at war with each other to see players/NPC's fighting it out over that land. It would also make for great night raids.
It might take a long time to get this to work but i'm all for it, I would love to have this in the game, because it would make player interaction tons more fun.