Questing kills grouping

[Hoofhurr]

It seemed to me like Warhammer would be the answer to a lot of your outline if they had a lattice system of fronts and advancement. Perhaps if they had greatly reduced the amount of time they spent on developing the classes and characters and had spent that time on developing the end game RvR, the game would have been better.

Here's an idea. I really loved the concept of leveling a guild up. What if instead of the characters having classes the guilds had classes instead? You could have 'scout' guilds whose members would all be scouts and they would derive every ability they have from the guild and not from their own personal exploits. You could have the Magician's Regiment that would be your magic users. The Phalanx regiment that might be your tanks. The Healer Regiment etc.

There might be a shadowbane-esque guild architecture where you would belong to a network of guilds. Healing Regiment=>The Purge=>RedShirts Alliance etc. The regiment level might be where you derive your skills from as a character, the guild level would be your identity as a group of regiments, and the alliance level might be linked tightly to some geographic space that you've claimed.

If someone were to join the game late they would join one of your regiments and immediately have access to a broader base of skills and bonuses than someone without a regiment. At the same time you would reward characters who stayed with a particular regiment for extended periods of time.

I realize this is still an advancement model but you shift the advancement focus from the character to the unit and from the unit to geographic space. Maybe if you have several healers from your regiment online and in the same area you gain bonuses to your healing and maybe if you are fighting on your own turf you get bonuses for defense so that a smaller group could fight off a larger zerg.

This game probably wouldn't have any pve component at all. I think also I would like people to be able to switch between regiments in the guild with each play session to fill class vacancies as needed. The only penalty might be that you have to actually spend the time developing a new character template and make the trip back to the regiment quartermaster. Planning out and equipping a character would still be fairly involved as would the intricacies of character skill so that this in and of itself would be prohibitive and keep people from constantly switching classes. People might get to know 2-3 different classes and become proficient but not have to level a character all over again because the power of the character is derived from the power of the regiment which continues to level as long as 'some' players are earning xp for that regiment.

Just some thoughts.

p.s. In the beginning of planetside, they had the virtual reality shooting and driving ranges so you could train and get a feel for the different weapons. Maybe the first few levels of my fictitious game would have scripted mock battles with NPCs filling in some of the holes so that players could spend as much time as they wanted getting a feel for how the different regiments perform. Perhaps we could finally have a game where formations of some sort actually play a role. One of the players could assume the role of field lieutenant and a formation grid would appear on the field kind of like in Rome Total War indicating where players of a particular regiment should stand to get the maximum bonuses. /shrug.