Incentive: Bonuses and items would be the biggest influence, would need a bit of balancing - or it could be a unique form of item. Maybe even really over-powered gear, but it has a fail rate/maximum number of uses, so it's more of a strategic bonus.
Also, I tried to think (with the Scholar/Priest/Warrior idea) of ways to give people with no interest in pvp a way to participate behind the front line. Maintaining infrastructure and gathering intelligence/knowledge instead of hunting/defending.

Seperation: That would be the ideal situation, or current teams could be replaced with a faction system (not really plausible imo). I think it depends on whether people prefer to have the "SELF : TEAM : FACTION" or the "SELF : FACTION" Would they want to balance team and faction duties? Or have the two merged.

Balance: This is the major reason I thought a "higher power" (NPC) would control the overall direction of the faction. Whether strong AI were spawned on weaker factions to make up the difference, or higher incentives were offered to make the weaker factions able to compete with lesser numbers, they could effectively have divine intervention to keep the balance as best as possible.

Also, I don't really mean to say it's "forced PvP" but more "excuses for PvP". You don't HAVE to fight, there should be other options to advance (as mentioned above: knowledge/building/etc) but it gives people excuses to fight and take it less personally - you are both trying to kill each other for faction score, so it is socially accepted that opposing factions would pvp.


This model is to illustrate the basis of the idea, every so often - when a certain number of people are online from both faction - emergency orders can be issued forcing warriors to assemble and fight over a new relic/artifact to win rewards.

After the fight, a mission for Scholars could be to research the artifact and the Priests could be tasked with building their own artifact/momument to the triumph. This way non-combat players can help in the fight if they want, but if they don't they still have a challenge to overcome and are vital to the factions success.

Interesting to hear what other people think.

Other than the amount of work required to implement something like this, I have no other complaints anymore. Excellent suggestion

Factional Warfare(Term came from EVE)

Pretty much, as Madr mentioned, a team or individual is signed up to be part of the faction's military. This is purely voluntary, unless you didn't want your director from doing it in the first place!

In the never ending wars that'd be part of this thing, "Faction Officers"(generally higher level members of the faction or people with more kills from fighting) receive missions from "High Command" that he and his lower ranks do for "Faction Points", which can be turned in for PvP oriented gear.

Such gear is "volatile". As in each death reduces its durability by like 20%, rather than 5%. This offsets the fact the gear is often vastly more powerful. Incentive to do the missions for points. In fact, even ships could be volatile, with their deaths become a complete destruction event.

While we do want people to take the rewards outside this zone and use them in fights they (hopefully start) are involved in, we don't want this to become "if I lose in FW, I'll take revenge by putting 4 ada kits in your HQ". Radia's post(below) is an awesome idea, and would work here too.




Missions for the Faction officer to take his squad to do would include things like scouting, fire base building, demo-man escort, siege, and raiding. But the point is all missions are military objectives.

Another way to work this could be dynamic member caps, if there are say 3 factions, all factions must have +/- 5/10% population of the others. New members can't join unless this is met.

This does pose the problem of making one faction bigger than the rest (450 character join all three factions, 150 each. 300 leave two factions leaving the third faction +150 members to the others). But on the other hand those 300 people are factionless and no one can join the third faction.

It sounds like a good idea to me in the whole, but it also sounds like a completely different game. How big is this idea of factions going to be exactly?

What's wrong with good ol fashioned hate? How about a ship skin upgrade... Ur ship with 'truck nuts' to first team starts a war. Nothing like a hm with chrome balls on the back.

Well, my original suggestion is designed to tack onto the current gameplay - as an "extra" rather than a "change" to the current system.

bump since s_m_w liked this, still interesting to anyone?

Because of the interest from one of our Devs I'm going to go ahead and move this to Accepted!

+10% currency from colonies while afk