Guild based vs faction based

[Thudz]

To tie this into the "living world" discussion, I picture it as something like EQ....


There are a number of factions out there and you can go work on raising your faction with any of them and this will bring you certain benefits.

But The Purge, say, can go wipe out an orc camp completely on our own, plant our flag on it, populate it with some NPC drones and it's basically "The Purge" faction. The NPCs will then behave just like they would for any other faction -- growing the town, defending the town, working to conquer other towns, but in this case the mayor is us and we have far more direct control over what the NPCs do.

In an orc town, you can give suggestions to the NPCs and so forth, basically as if you were trying to convince the "orc boss" on a course of action. For a player faction, this still works, but the suggestions simply come up to the guild as a list of player inputs which you can read or ignore at will.



That's my vision of a fusion of "faction based" and "guild based" gameplay.


Incidentally, I would make PvP "always on". There is no case where a player cannot attack another player.


In fact, different factions may handle this sort of thing differently.

If you're allied with the High Elves and you kill another player that's also allied with the High Elves, you might both lose faction regardless of who killed who or who started the fight. High Elves don't like infighting.

Whereas Orcs might actually increase your faction, because they just love a good fight (provided they liked you to begin with, anyway). They like infighting.

Could probably do a lot of interesting, but pretty simple, faction-specific rules for things like this.

I like where you are going with this. We need to blend more RTS in.