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[Garronus4]

Hi all,
I haven't been around long on this server, but I've logged a significant time investment due to the unique geopolitical challenge of Loka. I hope my proposal provokes some discussion at the limitations of the current township system.

Currently, settlements are limited to only town members building on owned territories. This inhibits adversaries from griefing or gaining a territorial advantage on enemy soil and ensures no nefarious, secret tunneling. Yet for all of this safeguard's good qualities, it falls short of what I believe Loka could be. Currently, this policy detrimentally affects productivity if a town no longer accumulates active members, and eliminates a labor bartering system from taking hold in Loka. My proposal is to implement a dual citizenship for allied states.

1. A dual citizenship would account for a citizen both towns. The current implementation doesn't allow for allied states to place blocks on allied territories, making a full-fledged alliance or large, multi-faceted builds impossible. Additionally, this would allow towns with only one or two active members to keep hold of their town, perhaps at the decay of influence on outlying territories.

2. If two formerly allied states' relationship decays from allied to friendly, the dual citizens would be required to pick a city for singular citizenship. My implementation suggests a click-prompt similar to the existing tutorial and menus, but I'm admittedly ignorant to the plugin use on the server at large. **An issue brought to light by @turtlemaster01:

The only Issue I see is with conquest bugs that could be presented because of some bork in coding.

Solution: "Issue the click prompt mentioned, and issue an automatic deferral to the first town the player was a member of in lieu of decision."

3. To limit rampant territorial expansion by members of the same alliance, a dual citizen would be limited to two citizenships. I believe this would eliminate the threat of daisy-chained alliances due to a small player pool.

4. A player may only have two citizenships. If a player wishes to change their affiliation, there should be a time bar of 12 hours to avoid large alliances from immediately smashing smaller alliances or city states.

There are obvious revisions to be made, but any feedback would be appreciated!
Thanks for your consideration,
Garronus4

 

[Power_258]

Agree, I think I would work in someone else's project. Due to my timezone I spend a lot of time in the server with 4~ people online wich is kinda boring, having some prohect to work on for shards or something would be nice.

 

[turtlemaster01]

The only Issue I see is with conquest bugs that could be presented because of some bork in coding.

 

[Garronus4]

The only Issue I see is with conquest bugs that could be presented because of some bork in coding.

Yeah, a code break could be an issue, especially when/if an alliance discontinues. I'll edit my original post to account for this here:

My implementation suggests a click-prompt similar to the existing tutorial and menus, but I'm admittedly ignorant to the plugin use on the server at large

and amend it to "An issue brought to light by turtlemaster01: "conquest bugs due to unforseen coding errors" Solution: "Issue a click prompt and an automatic deferral to the first town the player was a member of."

Keep 'em coming.

 

[Jedoi]

I can definitely see the benefits in this, but there are also some drawbacks. I'd like to point out a few things. Which town chat would a dual citizen see? When they use the town portal at spawn, which city would they arrive in?

What I would suggest is a somewhat simpler system: Perms. Let me use an example.

I live in Auru. I see Auru town chat. I use the Auru town portal. I'm in an alliance with Arvik. Arvik wants me to help them, but I don't want to leave Auru. The leader of Arvik types /g perm Jedoi (or something like that) and gives me the ability to build in its borders, nothing else.

There used to be a way people can be in as many towns as they wanted, and could switch their home town using a command. (Home town being the one with town chat and portal.) But they could build in any town they had "perms in." This was removed because we wanted people to only have loyalty to one town, however, and to limit betrayal I believe.

I see too many issues with dual citizenship, but I could see perms potentially working as long as they can only be given to allies. IE, Asmund can only help Asmund. The Covenent can only help the Covenent. This would limit the possibility of betrayal (which is illegal anyway, although only within towns. There are no rules about alliance betrayal, so that would have to be clarified.) and it would also encourage smaller cities to form alliances.

I dunno, that's just my take on this. I've wanted perms back every since it was removed in the first place years ago, heh.

 

[gabrosen]

LORE!

 

[Cryptite]

Indeed the greatest problem with this suggestion is this part right here:

this would allow towns with only one or two active members to keep hold of their town

In fact we want these types of towns to die out or be absorbed into larger ones if they can never grow. I understand that sounds a bit harsh, but land mass is finite and a town occupying a space is significant. While we're not about to run out of room anytime soon, little towns of 1-3 members generally die out by design.

There are many many more benefits to having a smaller quantity of large, healthy towns than there are to very small ones. Large towns contribute to Loka in a political sense, but they also possess infrastructure and communities that lend themselves to onboarding new players to Loka easier. I'm not saying I'm advocating for the death of small towns, but we have a 3-player requirement to keep a town from going inactive for a reason.

Jedoi also stated above a lot of the other issues we have with this kind of system, predominantly the "loyalty" thing. If you can be in multiple towns; which one will you really spend your time on? We're still (always) mulling over the concept of "building day-passes", but other things have taken precedence lately.

I always love seeing suggestions though, so keep em comin!

 

[Power_258]

Agree

Indeed the greatest problem with this suggestion is this part right here:



In fact we want these types of towns to die out or be absorbed into larger ones if they can never grow. I understand that sounds a bit harsh, but land mass is finite and a town occupying a space is significant. While we're not about to run out of room anytime soon, little towns of 1-3 members generally die out by design.

There are many many more benefits to having a smaller quantity of large, healthy towns than there are to very small ones. Large towns contribute to Loka in a political sense, but they also possess infrastructure and communities that lend themselves to onboarding new players to Loka easier. I'm not saying I'm advocating for the death of small towns, but we have a 3-player requirement to keep a town from going inactive for a reason.

Jedoi also stated above a lot of the other issues we have with this kind of system, predominantly the "loyalty" thing. If you can be in multiple towns; which one will you really spend your time on? We're still (always) mulling over the concept of "building day-passes", but other things have taken precedence lately.

I always love seeing suggestions though, so keep em comin!

Well I think making players have to choose a town to count as an active member for would solve the problem.

I personaly think adding a command to give permission to people from other towns to build on your territory would be a better alternative.

About the town portal conflicts maybe a command to choose wich town to go would fix the problem, for instance by using /g portal Auru will set you to go to Auru next time you use the town portal

 

[Garronus4]

Thank you for your replies!

@Jedoi,

Which town chat would a dual citizen see? When they use the town portal at spawn, which city would they arrive in?

An alliance chat, maybe? The town portal has me stumped; my internal monologue assumed allied states would be near enough to each other this wouldn't be an issue.

I like the idea of permissions: it's simple and effective. The idea I wanted to bring up with dual citizenship is to aid development of new features and advance community involvement. I think your approach may help retain new members, giving them a "trial" of town membership and the server dynamics before they commit.

Would permissions be limited only to allied states?

the concept of "building day-passes"

It may prove more useful to extend the "building day-passes" Cryptite mentioned to cover friendly states, too. I would love to see a labor market develop past the jobs already present on the server, letting people gather resources for a payout on another person's territory, or building walls, etc.

@Cryptite,

The weak towns should die out. No questions asked. Ascalon would be more dead towns than territories otherwise. Occasionally there ends up being a disparity between player investment in a town, leaving one or two townspeople attached to their dying homestead and leaving them marginalized by the server. My suggestion was to find a way to perpetuate their involvement long enough to gain new members, sort of like a time subsidy. Obviously this solution could require a more comprehensive approach, or be eliminated entirely by a permissions implementation.

I've wanted perms back every since it was removed in the first place years ago, heh.

Jedoi mentioned there was a permissions system prior that was taken off- can anyone elaborate on how it worked or direct me to a link in the forum/wiki?

 

[gabrosen]

Jedoi mentioned there was a permissions system prior that was taken off- can anyone elaborate on how it worked or direct me to a link in the forum/wiki?

You were simply able to join and/or own multiple towns I believe...

 

[Cryptite]

find a way to perpetuate their involvement long enough to gain new members, sort of like a time subsidy

An inactive town has over a month of real time before their town is effectively lost. They need only meet a minimal amount of requirements in order to keep their town running. Provided there are three unique players in a town playing at least once every week or two and paying for the gen cost, then their town will stick around.

It's our thinking that a town that cannot fulfill these requirements probably has bigger issues to solve internally than build permissions at a friend's town. Is this a problem that you've noticed happening (is there an example?). As I've generally observed, perhaps less than 3 towns in the history of Loka since this new world have died in a way where this could have even remotely applied. Virtually every other town's members simply went inactive (99% of the time this is the issue).

If a town were having issues with funding, their allies could certainly help (and I've seen this happen before). If it's 100% simply just down to wanting to building from time-to-time in your friends' towns, then a simple temporary build perm would suffice.

The reason we don't want it to be more than that is people lose loyalty to their town and just "squat" in other towns, building there, and generally leaving their own town to rot.

 

[Power_258]

If it's 100% simply just down to wanting to building from time-to-time in your friends' towns, then a simple temporary build perm would suffice.

Well I would be ok with this, what do you think of a command that allows town owners to give perms to other people to build in their territories for a given ammount of time and inside a certain zone?
Why not?

 

[Xovious]

I like the thing Jed mentioned with the permission to build in towns, because if you recall, when alts were disallowed, the people that wanted to build in Arvik, or vice versa could not. Now we can't have fun building projects with our friends, and that gets kind of boring. I get where you're coming from with the towns dying out part, but maybe you could add a rule that doesn't allow people to make towns next to each other just for the ability to have more land? (Builds and etc) because people could easily bypass the build permission by being able to access doors and etc, which essentially allows them to edit the town as they like, possibly even live in it if they're not in the town itself. Along with that issue is the fact that you would somehow have to have zones restrict them as well? Would zones restrict them based on ownership of the zone if they have permission to build in town, so would they have to be added to a zone to build in it, or would it still be level based? Many questions that need to be answered before this feature could stand a chance at coming out, but I strongly support it because I would love to have a Nokiaman and Stampen building for me!