I was talking to a friend yesterday about MMOGs and the subject came up of having a persistent world with lots of neutral towns and each town can be captured by a faction (PlanetSide-esk). Anyone can start a faction but must capture a town within a set period of time for the faction to remain active. Faction ranking is decided by the players through voting/person with most exp or some other method. Those with higher ranks may have extra abilities, such as organising teams, controlling NPCs or getting warnings of enemies approaching. Smaller/Starting factions are given protective bonuses (in an attempt to keep balance to the world) Do you think a system like this may work or that it would be too hard to control the world balance?

Some things:
-Faction ranking by votes means that everyone will vote for their own faction.
-What about when towns run out? Since anyone can start a faction they will run out pretty quickly...

Surely you could figure out a way of balancing things.

Also, why do factions need a city? Why couldn''t there be factions that are hidden and thus have no city under their control? There could be some other method to determine which faction remains active - hidden faction would really be fun!

On the other hand: if all towns were occupied by factions, a new would-be-faction simply had to capture one and declare themselves openly. This way there would be a maximum number of factions, but I don''t think this is a problem, if the number is reasonable.

One thing that might be difficult is the matter of large factions becoming even larger. There would have to be a balancing factor the prevent a total domination of one faction.



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There are only 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary and those that don''t.

Bad Entertainment

Overcomplicated. Fsck democracy. Real simple - player first joins in to the game as a free agent. They start in a non-pvp safehouse area which has portals into various anarchy (pvp and otherwise)-zones where they can hunt and level up. From the anarchy-zones they can walk to kingdoms. Each kingdom has a throne. Taking the throne makes your faction own the kingdom, and thus can teleport or respawn there, and gives you access to priviledged areas of the kingdom.

Teams are very simple - you start out as the leader of your own team. You are an omnipotent ruler of a 1 man, yourself. You can allow people in, but you must offer them a contract - this may be simple subservience (you''re on my team and I can kick you off) - equal ruling (you can hire and fire people as well) or some complicated democracy. You also give players power on what they can do in your kingdom - can they set taxes? Raid the armoury?

So you can build yourself a nice power structure of lietenants, administrators, infantrymen, and servants who have cut deals just for the right to access your hunting grounds. A player could exist as a wanderer, keeping some sort of magical storage artifact off in the anarchic wilderness and simply cutting deals to allow access to the kingdoms, or as an assassin trying to sneak into the throne room of some great kingdom just to stir shit up.