Need Feedback on a Faction Based Server

[CCK]

Hey Everyone, I'm CCK and I'm currently developing a Low Mid rate Faction Based server where 2 factions are constantly at war. I will not state the name and such so as to not advertise accidentally. But I'll list and explain the features I've scripted and will be scripting. I hope to know what do you guys think about it and create more awareness of what I'll be doing. The server is running but in Beta Phrase.

The main goal of this server is to build up a friendly community and in game wise, not just stop at WoE, and make Wars bigger. Take over the Towns that HAVE WoE and play within your Faction. It will be like a Huge GvG enabled server. And also, providing players the chance to contribute to Faction Quests and create an environment where what you do, affects your whole faction, so if you helped out, you will be made known of your contributions. Bringing back Multi in MMORPG. No more Having a big group of players playing an online game alone.

------------------

Implemented:

Beta Server -> Going Live on the 14 Feb

Ex Cards -> Poring Card Ex up till Randgis Card Ex

Premium Rush -> To be adding proper quests for Live Server

eXo Booster Pack -> 1st Edition : Basic Instincts

Loki's Playground -> To release on 50 player count

Faction Leader w/ Leader Items -> Debugging

------------------

I have already scripted some custom stuffs such as Ex Cards which is an enhanced version of the current cards, currently up to Gloom card. The only down side is that it balances out with your weaker stats,

For Example:
Soldier Skel Card +9% Critical
Soldier Skel Card Ex +12% Crit - 8 Flee

------------------

Another will be Gachapon, taken from Maple Story, you have to use Gachacoin or The Card (Event Item) to play. Mostly it'll be fillers at low tiers and random head gears for mid tiers, but the best Custom Accessory Card (+3 All Stats/Hit/Flee/Atk) is somewhere in there. Which is not obtainable through other means.

------------------

Next is Premium Rush. Factions will rush to complete the quest as early as it's release/reset. Which falls on the 7th/14th/21st/28th. Once completed, their faction leader will collect it daily till it resets the following month.

For Example:

7th Day Quest:
Requires: 10 Million Zeny
Rewards: 100 Bubble Gums Daily

So on the 7th, if the whole faction (Assuming it's 20 players) gathers up their Zeny, completes it on the 7th itself, the faction will be able to collect 2,800 - 3,100 Bubble Gums from the quest (Depending on the no. of days in that month)! The later they complete, the lesser the rewards. So it helps to co-ordinate within the faction and not waste resources if the faction think it's not worth it! Community involvements!

------------------

eXo Booster Pack

1st Expansion is Basic Instinct Booster Pack. Helps in Leveling and Zeny. Cards are 1-time use. Different cards for different levels. Includes an Uncommon Card "Evolution?", which gives a 50 - 50 chance to increase Or DECREASE your level. The card needed for Level 90-98 is very rare. You will get a chance to get back 6x of what you paid for the booster pack with the "Richest" card too.

In later Expansion, it'll be having Cards that will help in Battles. Eg. Job Skill Cards, Guild Skill Cards, Faction Cards.

------------------

Loki's Playground

A Faction Enabled Place where random and rare items are placed to attract Factions Members to loot them. There's a catch, since it's faction enabled, members of BOTH factions are able to enter. I'm sure that's what Loki would want. Hahaha.. But it'll be enabled after 50 active players are around.

------------------

These are implemented but not scripted by me.

Faction System (By Lilith)
Extended Vending (By Lilith)

------------------

These are the features I'll be scripting:

The road to being a Faction Leader

It'll start with a simple voting process. Over time, it'll be more in depth.

Don't like your faction leader? Challenge him to a fight for an Hostile Over Throw. Obviously he can find his best Knights to fight for him.

Or are you the solo type that wish to secretly take over the whole faction for an overnight fame and glory? Complete a Gruesome God Quest to receive "Memory Overwrite Master Key(s)" and slot it into a machine lost in time and let it do it's work! Players memory will be overwritten and will see you as their All Mighty Faction Leader.

------------------

Faction Relic Quests

Complete Faction Quests to unlock these Relics, an ETC Item placed in your inventory. Which will provide you stats or maybe even skills. Able to be Upgraded. All of these Faction Quests are cumulative as a Faction. So helping out unlocking it as a Faction member, hastens the process to obtain it. Quest difficulty and rewards given will increase as Server Grows.

------------------

Faction Assault

See those NPCs that your opposing faction loves so much? You will be able to kill (disable) it. Create a master plan on how you want to assault those precious NPCs.. Say, their HEALER? Play a mini game and get it right before they kill you, and you might be able to disable them for the whole day!

------------------

Town Assault

Remember the thing I said about making WoE look bad? This is the feature I'll be implementing! Take over those Neutral Towns to provide you the essential they are producing. From pots, to zeny, to equipments and all. What's best is that Faction Leaders will be able to setup when to have an Internal WoE fight themselves!

------------------

Monster Defenders

Once Town Assault is in place, you will need to summon monsters to defend your rightful place. Donate your Garm Fangs to your leader to summon Garm and watch how your Defender freeze any opposing faction members with Storm Gust before one of you Asura him to death!

------------------

Community Custom Story Line

I have already scripted the introduction of your story. You are a defender to your King that just died in a battle between the factions. Given the chance to revive, you have the chance to serve your king once more. But you were shown a scene where the King is mistreating your family after your death. You have to choose, if that was real, or are you interested only to serve your King? Joining the King will give you +20 LUK while Joining the opposing Faction will give you +5 Str.

The story will continue with "I'm coming home." for those who choose to return to the king. And "I am coming to save you!" for those who joins the opposing force. And from there, our Forum members will be able to give their own version of their story to follow and I'll be scripting it!

Well, I really hope you guys will be interested in what I'll be doing. Do give me your feedback on this idea. Currently the server is in Beta Phrase to weed out major bugs before releasing it. But you can join in to help!

Thank you very much for your time reading this!

[Triper]

Since nobody commented this yet, I will be the first.

The idea looks good and I've seen similar individual parts of this at some servers being highly successful so, depending on how you implement it, it can end being really good because you've pretty much everything that a player may want:
◙ Zeny sinks
◙ Guild work
◙ Party Play
◙ Fun
◙ Cool Rewards
◙ PVP/GVG
The only thing that makes me thing negative about it is if you can hold the pressure to make this entirely possible for a big time while maintaining players happy and how it will work together with other stuff already presented at RO like BG and WoE. If you can do it, you probably can have a successful server in hands for years.

[Bue]

Oh yeah, a faction-based server. I did one of these years ago based off of 三國志.

I recommend:
1. Throw out the story-line; you'll thank me later.
2. Throw out the factions; you'll thank me later.
3. Implement the 'Premium Rush' and 'Loki's Playground' without high-quality items rewards.

I've played on faction-based MMORPGs before and they usually get dominated very quickly and high quality faction-based features are difficult to translate in game; I would categorize your faction-base and itemization features as low quality, mostly because I don't see a prototype and mostly because it looks more of a 'on paper' type thing.

One reason why I give low marks is because one or two of your ideas can be expanded in complexity and features without the lame story-line and factions, i.e. 'Premium Rush' and 'Loki's Playground.'

[CCK]

Thanks Tripper for the positive feedback.

As for the negative side, the server is on mid rates which gives me time to implement the features gradually that will compliment one another. I have all the necessary ideas and logic to script this, just takes time for the in depth details. Only problem now is the lack of in Game GMs to help with the new players. So it is entirely possible to do this, the problem is, if there any players to make these features work.

Not getting any response on GM applications too though.. Haha..

WoE and all it's features like their dungeons, god item requirements drops and such will be under a more in-depth Town Assault feature. So Factions who takes over those towns will be able to use WoE as their play thing. I most probably will allow Faction Leaders to schedule their WoE too in game.

As for BG, I'm not too sure yet.. As players can only party/guild their own factions, it'll force players to play against opposing factions, so it should help in the theme of Faction Vs Faction. At the least I can do is duplicate the Queuing NPC to their respective Home Towns.

Thanks for the encouragements and I hope to hear if there's any more other negative sides that I may missed out.

------------------

Thanks for the feedback Bue!

The story-line would help in getting players involvements. I give due credits to contributors and I am sure, if you wrote a story and got someone to help make it part of the game, you will feel happy when players around you starts talking about the story line. That is why people like me wants to start a server.

As for Factions, it's the core of this server. It keeps players in having a goal to look forward to. It's like WoE, just bigger. So unless, the WoE system is flawed, I think it'll work the same way as WoE.

If you mean itemization by Ex Cards, I am currently running a Beta Server and it's already implemented, from Poring Card Ex to Randgis Card Ex. I have created and implemented it in all my servers since 7 years ago. Just that I was really bad at advertising (up till now too), thats why it didn't get any attention.

eXo Booster pack has it's 1st expansion called Basic Instincts which provide quick leveling and some return in Zeny. Will later be used to create special cards that we can't get with normal item scripts with the help of scripting commands.

Faction System is up. Premium Rush is up. Loki's Playground is up. I'm scripting the Faction Leader Elections at this point of time. And have written down some rough idea how the other scripts will be written for the rest of the Faction Features.

For domination.. That is a problem for WoE too. But in a Faction level, there will be many Guilds in one faction, which Should help dilute the power on both sides.. So instead of 1 guild dominating in the small area in WoE, they have to work together as a whole to defend the whole towns from assaults. So it's more strategy rather than brute force as certain aspect of assaults are not by who has the highest DPS but who has the best strategy and resources.

Every features I've posted can be branched out to a more in-depth one. That's why I'm trying to get more feedback to prevent the features to go imbalance before I start scripting them.

I hope that this would change your point of view on this concept. ^^

[Shayariel]

interesting idea, i havent thought about factions in ro yet...
isnt it hard to make it working and balancing it?

maybe i overread it, but when do you decide for a faction (as player) and how can you guarantee that the factions are populated even, or doesnt that matter?

[CCK]

It's time consuming but not difficult to make it work. For balance wise, I think we shouldn't always rely on brute force to win a game. Like dota or lol, you may turn things around if your opposing team is too distracted by your team mates, and win even if you're really lack of items. So I'll be incorporating certain features as a mini game which affects the outcome in some fights, like Faction Assault. The part on disabling npc will be using a text based mini game rather than brute force.

A player starts at a map with a small introduction, saying you died for your between the wars of the two factions. You were shown how the king is mistreating your family and given a chance to reborn. Players will then choose either sides, to carry on fighting for the king, which gives players +20 Luk, or join the opposing faction, who killed you, which gives +5 Str. Joining of factions are account based.

Population wise, I'm having around 10 players who doesn't really know which side to choose, but it end up 50-50 on both sides. I've placed a limiter to disallow joining a faction if it's theres a difference of 20 more on that side. But when they met in sanctuary, they were quite friendly. Hahaha.

[chrone16]

If this was to happen, ain't it better for the faction account-based rather than character-based. I actually left a message for you, hope you can read it 

[CCK]

It is already implemented as account based. Only Faction Leader is char based.

2nd Chars and above will be automatically teleported to their home base.

Hmm, I haven't receive your message yet. Where is it at?

Edited the 1st post to show which features are already implemented.