Suggestion New ways to get Capital

[Strongeee]

I personally think there should be some sort of way to get Capital besides PvP. People keep inviting good PvPers from other server that come on and attack and don't play too much and leave after a while. This makes it harder for the group of people who cannot click fast enough to even kill the PvPers.

So I was thinking of some ideas
Capital isn't based on "Territory Strength" Instead based on a new name, maybe "Capital Points"
Capital points are earned from doing all different tasks, like

Contributing materials for spawn expansions (Maybe have a weekly contributing chest where people put in materials to improve something in spawn. Lets say, The town portal building. If the town portal building gained enough materials then the build team can work there sexy magic to upgrade the building completely! I hope this would bring some new and refreshing look in spawn every so often

T-gen battles will still contribute points to the "Capital Points"

Lore artifacts - Once in every blue moon, There could be an artifact that can be some sort of item with some lore attached to it. It can be randomly placed around the world of loka on any of the 3 main continents. Finding this artifact rewards you with some "Capital Points" and + you can have a cool artifact to show off (For all those collection lovers)

Random world events - Some events that is not advertised in any quest or a server wide message. Just an event you see while you are adventuring around Loka! this can be a camp that a boss mob is attacking and you save them, Then they pack up and leave. Or some sort of collapsed building with a NPC stuck inside. This feature will make people get on there horses and go out in the wild and do some random PvE events.

The reason why I think this should be a thing is because Not everyone is good at PvP, those people who are not feel powerless and are unable to defend and sometimes attack t-gens. This kills peoples morale to even defend against people who can PvP. So no world Capital for them? That doesn't seem all that fare to be honest. T-gens should still be a PvP mixed with a bit of PvE event. But for those people who can't PvP shouldn't feel left out from a chance to get Capital!

Thank you for your time c:

 

[Grubul]

Well, I agree on new ways to earn the conquest points, but it was wars that declared land in all of the man history.
Everyone is not good at pvp, but as a town, it unites many players. Recruiting pvpers helps.

 

[Hypotemabus]

I believe I am of a similar opinion to Strongeee. Loka is about much much more than just Pvp. However your towns fame or obscurity is completely and totally Pvp orientated at the current time. Work and endeavour in other aspects of game play does not equal status or reward. My town for example was first to level 25. On the last world with the old system that would have carried a little more status. It just feels kind of irrelevant. Hypothetically speaking with the current system a group of dedicated players could spend months building a grand city to just get pushed aside by a group of trash talking Pvpers (who just joined) and whose allegiance is to 3x5 cobblestone hut with a missing roof. To have the status of ones town, hard work and endeavour in things other than spam clicking and trash talking, pushed aside, unappreciated and forgotten by a player demographic which is notoriously fical and inactive is a concept which vexes me greatly. My concern is it might be a bit demoralising for some who have worked really hard in their endeavours to then feel they are not as good as someone else who is not nearly as active and has hardly done any work to gain their status other than point and click to victory on a few occasions a month.

I am not the best at Pvp, I am okay but I prefer strategy, lore, community, managing town economy, red-stone but most of all building. I am a builder at heart and so are a lot of other players on the server. I understand it has already been said that other features will be planned and that the system is very Pvp orientated. But I agree with Strongeee that their needs to be something else (prehaps rather radical) which counts to capital in order to accomodate other skill sets and aspects of play, hard work an initiative.

Perhaps the implementation of other types of points towards capital and maybe different paths to obtaining capital, status and strength of your town. One example which springs to my mind is the potential to win though, Military Victory: (Current Pvp system), Economic Victory: (gathering resources, market, wealth, town productivity), Development Victory: (Building and redstone, levelling up your town and an abundance of other factors). I must confess the concepts could be much more well refined than what I have mentioned here. You could even do it that they all filter into each other to give a total and combined score. At the moment I feel their is a great division building between Pvpers and players with other skill sets to the point where I think some of the Pvpers view others as useless dead weight when it comes to victory and success.

Last point I want to make is I love Strongeees idea about Lore events contributing something. Taking part in them and obtaining artifacts and what not would be epic!

 

[Cryptite]

We discussed this and came close to implementing it several, several times over. I understand where you guys are coming from entirely. I think what's missing from Loka is like the PvE equivalent of Conquest.

The issue is Conquest has in its very title the concept of War. You don't win wars by building pretty buildings. You can win wars by having lots of resources collected, but you have to put those to use (in fights) for it to matter. Because Conquest is inherently PvP oriented, it wouldn't make sense to (even be able to) lose Capital because you didn't farm resources or build pretty things.

It all comes down to one thing; grinding. The biggest reason we didn't implement some sort of gathering element to earning Capital is because it plain and simple rewards those who play more. There's just no other way around that. If you have a system that you win by collecting more things than other players, you've just handed victory to either the largest group of people or the group of people who can play tirelessly.

We tried to come up with some sort of method where you could gather to help, but that fights were still the most important, but it was still unbalanced. In a system called Conquest, one expects conflict to be the means of achieving victory. If you're overall victorious throughout the month, dominating your foes and achieving successes throughout the battlefield. I'd expect to win in that system. If, however, capital day comes around and it turns out I lost because 2 players afk'd some sort of redstone machine, or just spend all night mindlessly mining stuff over and over again, i'd be pissed.

Unfortunately adding these elements to earning Capital remove the skill from the game of Conquest.

That said, these other ideas to earning Capital, even if they don't directly contribute to Strength, they do still matter. You have to have the armor, weapons, and potions to go out and fight. I don't think anybody really discounts this though so I don't need to beat on this matter.

What I do think needs some work around the Conquest system is adding more meta to the game so that it doesn't just boil down to the TGen fights. There could be some additions to the system where smaller forces could do "things" to make a difference in the game. This would have an added benefit of allowing people to get into the Conquest game sooner, perhaps without having to have a set of Prot IV armor.

Additionally, yes, the concept of players who only need to login a handful of times throughout a month to do their battles, win, then leave; that sucks. We've been batting around the idea of Strength decay recently and it'll probably be a good thing to add to ensure that somebody couldn't get all the points they need for capital in the first week and then effectively stop playing except maybe to defend their territories.

On to the points about feeling like your big towns don't matter, I can also agree with that. It sounds like what you guys are lamenting is that there is no official 'server commendation/recognition' for achievements like there are for Conquest. We made a choice when we added Conquest that it was going to be the thing Loka should be known for above all else. We felt it was the one thing that Loka had that nobody else did. Lots of servers have towns, lore, pve, etc. Nobody has Conquest. Because of that, I think in the end Conquest will still be the biggest achievement one can earn in Loka. There will be other great achievements, but we've chosen Conquest as our flagship feature and it needs to stay mostly PvP.

Obviously 'more PvE' is coming, but it'll be a long, slow addition. We have new content coming soon that will add some custom items that could in a small way affect the outcome of battles in Conquest. As things like this are added, Conquest could very possible turn in the favor of those who are completing PvE objectives and getting items that can't just be stockpiled real quick.

Rest assured, we talk about Conquest every day and what we can do to balance it better; unfortunately adding a grinding mechanic to it would really ruin the system, I'm afraid.

 

[Hypotemabus]

I think when 1.9 is implemented the dynamics of Pvp will be changed so radically that Pvp will no longer be who has the most expensive mouse and who can spam click the fastest. Hopefully Pvp will become more accessible to some while we all learn to use the new combat dynamics. I will be interested to see what T-gen battles will be like. Almost feels like 1.8 Pvp training is irrelevant xD

 

[Lazuli73]

But my buildings are pretty! That has to account for something!

Okay okay, serious face. The reason I left Cerulean was that I didn't want to get involved with conquest. I don't come to Loka to pvp, I come to enjoy the unique lore and community. Makosa is meant to be a lore hotspot, so to speak. There's no tricks up my sleeve, I have no evilly evil plan. I know there are bound to be other towns like this on the server. Perhaps the towns that wish to be lore-focused don't have to run for capital, what if that competed for something else? Something designed specifically them, something where they can reap the benefits of contributing to the servers lore.

 

[Ajaxan]

I've been meaning to post something about this for awhile. I'm actually quite internally conflicted about this one though. This is mainly because although I feel like it should more than just PvP that makes a town stand out I'm also 100% aware that in real history it's all about conflict. If you couldn't fight and defend yourself, it didn't matter at all how advanced or magnificent your town was.

That said, there are still many, many cities that were able to become incredibly remarkable without having to have the strongest armies. The city of Venice was never a military powerhouse but their importance in trade made them too valuable for anyone to attack. Another city, Dubrovnik (You may know it as King's Landing from GoT) was also not very capable of defending itself but was able to survive and prosper by cutting deals and well executed political moves.My point though is that despite my own conflicted feelings and that fact that 9 times out of 10, conquest is what makes cities and towns famous, I too believe there should be other options.

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(If you are completely unfamiliar with Real Time Strategy and Turn Based Strategy games skip over this next part)
Age of Empires, my favorite RTS game of all time is almost completely based around Military and the idea of fighting and conquering other nations to win the game. Even so, it is still possible to win without going out and looking for a fight. You can build a wonder or called sacred artifacts called relics to win as well. So even in a game based heavily around Military they added other ways of winning. Another game, Civilization, one I'm a bit less familiar with, embraces the concept of multiple ways to win beyond simple conquest. You can win through Technology, through Politics, and even through Culture. In Civ5, the only Civ game I've played, You won through technology by focusing on tech and building a rocket to Alpha Centari before anyone else manages to do the same or manage to destroy your nation. You can also win through politics by establishing a world government that you (as the leader of your nation) are elected president of. And Finally you can win through Culture by making your nation so beloved and Magnificent everyone basically moves to your nation and leave every other country.

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For those that didn't read the above, don't worry you just missed my video game based proof that victory through Conquest doesn't need to be the only option. And yes, I say victory, because I and many others consider becoming Capital "winning" for that month.

So what should those alternate ways be? In my mind, it needs to be something as useless and wasteful as conquest. You can argue about it all you want but when it boils down to it, conquest is essentially useless. Yeah you can now actually collect the blocks you break inside their territory... or you could have just gone up 200 blocks to where they hadn't claimed territory... You also reduced their industry output though! Which means very little if they ever decide to spend 10 minutes mining or cutting down wood. Back to my point though. Assuming you understand where I'm coming from in saying conquest is essentially only a tool to decide who wins and to waste resources, we can discuss some other possible ways to decide the winners.

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Production: Whats the best way to waste a towns resources? Well make them give them away of course! Through some NPC or similar questing system Towns could be tasked with collecting a certain resource or resources and delivering them to something or someone to be rewarded with Capital point. there would be many limits on this though. For instance, your town would only be able to fulfill a quest every 6 hours or something. Strongee your idea was very similar:

Contributing materials for spawn expansions (Maybe have a weekly contributing chest where people put in materials to improve something in spawn. Lets say, The town portal building. If the town portal building gained enough materials then the build team can work there sexy magic to upgrade the building completely! I hope this would bring some new and refreshing look in spawn every so often

The only reason I disagree with it slightly is because at the rate we put resources into that chests, they'd have to come up with a new building everyday.

Population: Towns with more people, tend to become more successful. I know there are examples of this working against a town, but in general, more population is always better. So I'd suggest a simple trickle of points coming from active members logging in on a daily basis. So an active town, is going to be rewarded. Now I know the first thing you said to yourself after reading my last sentence was "ALT ACCOUNTS!" Don't worry, this is easily avoidable. Its very possible for the server to monitor not only the players logging in but their IP Addresses. So you can, for instance, have the server check to make sure each player logging in for the town also is on a different IP address. there may be a more elegant way to handle dealing with this problem but I believe towns should be rewarded for activity. Note this again doesn't punish new towns very much as long as they are actively recruiting. Even the newest towns normally have just as many daily active members as big towns within a few days. I also want to mention that this one would give the least amount of points out of all options mainly because it doesn't drain any sort of resource, its literally free points.

Unfortunately, these are all the ideas I can come up with that, I myself, believe wouldn't be too hard to include. So I'll end my massive suggestion here. Sorry for such a long read, hopefully you guys like some of these idea too.

--- I should note though that despite bashing on the Conquest system as not being the best way to decide who wins, I still think its an amazing system. I've played on more Minecraft servers than I can count and I've never found a system so well executed. Hell, in most servers that even come close to Loka there is normally no system at all for Towns/nations to officially fight and decide who wins. The simple existence of the conquest system is something unique to Loka that makes it amazing.

 

[Cryptite]

Production

This is where I loosely tie in new PvE stuff. Imo it shouldn't be the grinding and turning-in of resources that give you Strength as it were, but it should be that going out and collecting this new stuff (for example, that's more useful than potions in combat, for example) and then using it in Conquest fights/newthings that give you the edge(s).

Population

Yeah population tracking is a tough one, but determining town activity is a little easier. We'd certainly have to make sure we're tracking alts as well, but then there's the whole question of when people figure out at which specific intervals they have to "logon for a minute" to ensure activity, then just go away.

Strength decay is something we're probably going to implement and decay can factor in a couple things:

• How big is your territory? Did you drop your TGen count to a low number, even none because you've gotten a high amount of strength already?
• How active is your town? If it's pretty damned inactive and you have strength, it should probably start to drop on you.

We do want to make sure people winning Conquest aren't just doing the absolutely bare mininum. They should just do BGs if they just came here to pvp and don't care what it changes or if it affects anything other than their lust for a battle.

What's evident is that there are a number of people who don't really give a single shit about winning capital. They only really log on for two reasons:

• They enjoy open-world pot pvp and there just happens to be a fight going on at the moment, so they're on for the fight then gone immediately after it's over until they're told a new one is coming up.
• They want to win the game just to prove that they can or that it's easy, but they're gone again after they've proved their point.

Ignis, for example, is the West capital but only did it just to prove that they could. Rozzok is currently left trying to actually 'finish' being a capital. They haven't instituted policies, probably don't care to, even.

On some level this is our fault because we probably still haven't provided enough incentive to being capital. Only a couple of the policies are worth it. They all need buffs with probably the sole exception of Arbor Day (and even then, really only Kalros cares about that). Honestly each policy should be extremely attractive. You should really have to think hard about what you want. Most people can rule out 4 of the 6 current policies.

One thing we fairly miserably on with the new world is the resource distribution/protection. Yes, certain continents have different resources, but like you said; just go 200 blocks to the right so you can get that log and ignore the territory. I think we've learned from that and will ensure that any future resources added will be either really hard to get or possibly 'capturable'.

The biggest conflict-generators are when something is truly scarce. If everybody can ultimately get a resource, then it's not attractive, there's no reason to engage other towns to acquire it, and it's not missed if it's lost. If we had more scarcity of resources, I think we'd see a lot more interest in some of our systems.

 

[Ajaxan]

If we had more scarcity of resources, I think we'd see a lot more interest in some of our systems.

As much as I hate to admit it, yeah this is super important for generating conflict and its why many real world places in the past and even today still exist. Control over all or majority of a resource means you are important whether other people like it or not. I won't lie, the only reason I attempted to take on Hilo in the north was because I thought Arbor day would prevent me from getting Spruce Logs. When I realized I could still get them inside my town territory I wasn't nearly as concerned about trying to fight them because I could deal with all the other policies.

 

[Grubul]

When I realized I could still get them inside my town territory I wasn't nearly as concerned about trying to fight them because I could deal with all the other policies.

You can no longer do this i belive. All our spruce inside town becomes Oak.

 

[Cryptite]

Yep, that was a bug that you could get it in your own town that we fixed recently.

 

[ChuckToast64]

While this won't really go to gaining Capital, have you guys consider implementing player quests or dungeons within your towns? I tried doing a dungeon on the last map, but it was not completed due to the world reset. This could be a way to show off your town, vet new players, and up the role play/lore.

 

[planzorg1]

I think an idea that is glossed over is the concept of the PvE equivalent of Conquest that Crypt was talking about. If we could implement a town reputation system that was as deeply competitive as Conquest, where there are rankings for each town (Basic Town, Developed Town, Burgeoning Civilization, Illustrious Civilization) that are earned through PvE aspects, it would take a lot of the animosity people have for PvPers away. Towns could score points towards the next rank by completing dungeons very far down the road, having territory stretching a certain distance, donating enough resources to beginning players or stuff like that. Maybe having a monthly building contest, where the server can vote on their favorite building made by the different towns and the town who wins gets a lot of points. That could be a good outlet for towns that focus on leveling like Dark was talking about for Amberfell, or towns that just don't want to do conquest, because if you are not interested in PvP, there are very few outlets for you to play late-game.

 

[Lazuli73]

Maybe having a monthly building contest, where the server can vote on their favorite building made by the different towns and the town who wins gets a lot of points.

Who would be the judges?

 

[planzorg1]

Everyone who made something submits their name into contention, can upload a picture on the forums or have people visit their town, and then you get prompted to vote when you log in, just like for capital picks