imagine you have two towns. town-A wants to attack town-B on Date-D at Time-T. How would you handle this? there are a few issues: how does town-B initiate the attack? ~5 days notice, email town members to get a rough estimate of attack numbers army strength count before the battle and a battle confirmation dialog could we give town-B npc soldiers if people dont turn up? I dont think so, they decide when to attack therefore people should show. how does town-A defend? they have no choice on whether the battle takes place or when, they are informed of the pending battle asap via email. Any players not present are replaced with similar but weaker npc's?? high xp gain for participation and penalties for not turning up if you said you would. when I played lineage 2 there were battles at weekends only. I never took part but it looked like the developers were scheduling and maintaining the battles. This would harm immersion. opinions please, thanks.

I think this highly depents on the mmorpg. Usually MMORPGs have enough players, if someone decide to attack an enemy town the other site will take notice and start to build up a defense.

Mostly towns have guards, if they are attacked or not. This way you give the defence team a small advandage to compensate the better preperation of the attackers.

I would recommend trying out Space Cowboy Online for a week or so to see their battle arrangement system. Basically though, battles are organized by the players in the chat. Each side has a person who's the president for the month (essentially the leader of the guild that had the most kills the preceding month) and he's expected to organize attacks and such.

Additionally, there are events scheduled by the current number of national kills - after each 100,000 kills in a month, a Mothership spawns deep in enemy territory; epic battle ensues. The winning side gets benefits.

Its a pretty fun game, actually.

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Original post by Trinavarta I think this highly depents on the mmorpg. Usually MMORPGs have enough players, if someone decide to attack an enemy town the other site will take notice and start to build up a defense. Mostly towns have guards, if they are attacked or not. This way you give the defence team a small advantage to compensate the better preperation of the attackers.

the problem isnt trivial.

for instance the attackers could take advantage of timezones and attack when the the majority of that town wont be online.

if the town members are off on a quest should they be alerted? choose to return? forced?

if the outcome of the battle alters the balance of power in the game you have to make sure the town had 1/2 a chance to defend. You cant have the outcome dependent on the fluke of players being online.

If you dont consider anomalies then you end up with a broken game mechanic. Look at inflation in lineage 2 - what a mess.

cheers mushu, i think i will take a look

i hate battle arrangement system personally.
it ruins big part of classic strategy
but yeah, as its persistent world.
there will be population disproportion
like timezone difference or 'which side has more hardcore players?'
so it's a deal between artificial balance and strategy
if you want to make your game more strategic/realistic
forget battle arrangement system. it's a joke.
just make a lot harder to takeover towns.
or give them more than one towns.

I'd suggest limiting the town conquests to Saturday b/t 9am PST and 4pm PST and expanding the 'window' as the player base grows larger.

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Original post by KGodwin I'd suggest limiting the town conquests to Saturday b/t 9am PST and 4pm PST and expanding the 'window' as the player base grows larger.

that doesn't solve the problem, it removed the problem, at the most it is a hacky solution. Like manually removing money from the world to solve inflation.

I want a good approach to anytime battles. It adds immersion, it feels like the world lives and breaths.

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Original post by Heresy i hate battle arrangement system personally. it ruins big part of classic strategy but yeah, as its persistent world. there will be population disproportion like timezone difference or 'which side has more hardcore players?' so it's a deal between artificial balance and strategy if you want to make your game more strategic/realistic forget battle arrangement system. it's a joke. just make a lot harder to takeover towns. or give them more than one towns.

I am trying to remove battle arangement as much as possible.

If a group of people want to attack somewhere they can do it without any barriers. They dont need permission. They just have to wait a few days which I think is unavoidable.
if you where the leader of a town, you go to bed irl, you wake up and your town has been decimated - not fun on any level.

Not sure how workable this is, but how about a 'town bell' kind of warning system which translates into real-life.

So - a player is scouting around outside of town and suddenly ZOMG Holy Shit there's an army coming over the hill. They hurry back to town and sound the alarm. The alarm would probably be represented by a bell or such in the game.

The main effect that this bell would have though is to have text messages sent to the phones of whoever has signed up for it (I'm not sure how possible that is - and has potential to be expensive as well - maybe those who signed up for the warning service could pay for it in their monthly fees or whatever the pay system is). Now everyone with their phones on is now aware that there's an army coming, and if they're hardcore enough can run to the computer and log in to join the battle.

You may want to check out Planetarion and see how they handle this problem, as it seems to be very similar to what you have in mind.

One way to help the time zone problem is to make it so that in order to take over a town, you need to capture it and then hold it for a certain amount of time (like three days). So, even if a bunch of people from town B take over town A at 4AM, the people in town A can take it back from them the next day when most of them are offline.

For NPC's, you could make the people of the town pay for mercenaries, guard towers, etc. Sort of like a very simplified RTS game. If you had a good economy, such that it was costly for both attackers and defenders in town battles, then you'd have a decent balance where people aren't going to bother attacking a well-defended town unless they think they can handle the cost of trying to occupy it for three days, and then hold on to it afterwards.