Making Realms more engaging

[Mr_Bober]

Today, few players engage with realms. It's just a passive bonus to anyone but their owners.

Note: to avoid a wall of text, I'll use brief points. This is meant to start the conversation and give ideas, not provide a fully functional replacement.

Step 1: INVOLVE MULTIPLE VILLAGES ON CREATION
Like multiple people come together to create a village, multiple villages should come together to create a realm.
The Capital will build the coronation stone, while the other founders will have another structure (slightly less expensive) to become the main villages of the realm (which can take over if the capital is destroyed or abandoned). A minimum of X villages (3 or 5 imo) is required to create a Realm.
[Note: some will use alts, but some will coordinate with other villages in the area, which is the main goal here]

Step 2: OATHS
After a region is claimed, villages in it should have a choice: join the realm or stay independent.
To join the realm, the Lawspeaker should take an oath. To do so, the village should build some kind of monument to show their allegiance (with a realm flag on it!).
Once a village takes an Oath to a realm, they gain the realm buffs and access to the realm chat.
Those who do not take the oath, can still live in the area but not gain any benefits.
Note: a Realm should benefit from having new villages under them. To avoid spam, the value should come from active members rather than just numbers.

Step 3: MORALE
If a realm loses a region, all of their villages in ANY region should suffer some temporary negative effect -as a low morale buff.
Avoiding this effect should be an incentive to participate in the realm defense, even if your village is not in that specific region.
Note: neutral villages are not affected by this either.

Step 4: ABANDON A REALM
If a realm loses a region, any village in that specific region has a choice: stay loyal (without the realm positive buffs, but with the negative morale one as long as the region is not re-conqured by their Realm), or retract their Oath.
Once you retract your Oath, you are no longer affected by the negative morale buff.
Note: to avoid abuse, you are also not allowed to take a new Oath for a long time (a month maybe? or ever!). This should be an important decision, as if the area is reconquered you won't be able to rejoin immediately if you decided to leave. Same goes for switching sides. Should be another incentive to participate in the realm defense in the first place.
Note: this could also open to bigger mechanics of loyalty, or other buffs related to having "enemy villages" within your own realm. But should likely come as a second step, as it risks to become an abusable system with alt-villages.

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These changes should also come with possible other changes to warflags (and possibly rage). I won't get into those as there's another thread open about it.

I know these are not perfect, but it's a start. It would for sure make a few more people want to learn PvP in order to be able to help defend the realm and avoid negative buffs.

Ps. Happy new year, degenerates.

[sickaura]

+1

[Händler]

I like the fundamental idea of federalistic bodies interacting with the higher authorities and forcing more interaction and thus engagement.

Step 1 outcome would be: The realm's group of ppl who already belong to each other will now have to create multiple villages to create the realm. No other groups necessary to be involved.
It's very difficult for individual strangers in this game to join up in a village, it requires a lot of trust to be built or chaos to be tolerated (see open villages). By the same principle, multiple villages would not easily come together to form a realm.

Step 2 makes a lot more sense, since it acts as vote on the realm that demands authority and would prompt otherwise unaffiliated villages into action. It would also make it much harder to fully conquer a province, since every village in the province would have to accept the conquering realm for them to apply full control over just that one piece of land. It's a much more complicated mechanic than what currently exists though. If the attackers already challenged the province, and only afterwards villages get to decide if they want to accept the authority, it would currently mean that the challenge is over at that point and the areas in question would have to be rechallenged to siege the defiant villages. I don't know if it would be a good implementation of the idea behind it.

Step 3 sounds like bad or rather ineffective idea overall. There is no debuff that justifies losing a character in a predefined losing battle and most villages will choose to not fight, partly because many can't fight and others even if they have fighters will not fight even if in the advantage unless absolutely necessary by being heavily provoked. People would pack their stuff and flee a province or simply accept negative buffs just how they accept positive ones. People will often accept losing their entire base if it means their characters stay alive. If you want people to join defense of the province, you would have to:

1. Diminish loss potential from particpating in the defense (char/gear being lost), somehow even out odds of fights which would be dumb or drastically increase loss potential from the realm switching hands. And also..

2. have the villages in question be invested into the realm that the province belongs to. Otherwise no people will come to defend someone else's claim on the province.

Also, a mechanic like this if it entailed negatives on province loss would mean that villages of people would begin to form in clusters to cooperate in preventing their province from being taken. This is in direct contradiction to how the game plays out right now. People in the game try to build distance from one another for the most part, to not get in each others' ways, competing over resources unnecessarily and to minimize risks of being killed by other individuals or groups. The form of cooperation that Step 3 demands you can see at Brodgar village kind of chaos, where people build a loose large group that simply serve as big target. Worst case it would discourge PKing generally, which would take out the fun of the game overall since the dangers are what make the game fun.



I like the idea of villages swearing fealty to the realm, as sorts of vassals in that province - as they will never be full members of the actual realm group if you use your head for a moment.

A lot of the game is hide and seek, so any form of transparency - generally speaking - is very bad and potentially deadly. When someone knows your coords, or even when someeone simply knows you exist and where to find your base can be enough. For villages to interact with the realm of their province they would need to reveal themselves somewhat. Currently nobody forces you so much as to even write into the realm chat or show yourself on surface level if you were to make a base underground. Optimally speaking, it's best if nobody even knows you or your village exist in most cases. But if a province challenge meant to make choices for every village in that province, it would reveal the existence of each of the villages on there. The attacking as well as the defending realm could exploit this information against the villages on there.

The way I see it, not just the villages need incentives to join fights vs big guys on attack, but the other way around is much more important: the big bois with the massive resources to form realms and conquer provinces are the ones making the big moves and choices. They need some very good incentives to consider small bois as valid or acceptable/tolerable parts of their realms at worst and even as extended parts of their groups at best.
These realms/groups do nothing for you and each separate village in a province when it gets down to it is still ultimately a bunch of hostiles that have ample reason to aim for your skull and belongings.

If you already want to go down that route, then the realms should not simply provide buffs for the small guys in it, but the villages and claims on a province themselves should be the value to a realm that the province holds if you asked me. Similar to how the subjects already passively provide experience to the realm ruler or whatever. That way, the villages could become the key resources that realms would value and they would see ample reason to get on the good side of their "vassals", whom they in turn could then rely on for maybe defense. Meaning, for example, give big groups a reason to ally with their vassals other than personal reasons of "I know and thus trust these people personally". Which could be that as long as they are around and actively participating in cooperative rituals/ceremonies where both sides have to interact, both sides gain something from it, some boon for the realm group and also something for the participating village. Factions would have reason to defend their subjects and vice versa then because they profit from them not just passively staying alive but proactively interacting with them in some realm rituals (coop raids/dungeons?). They would form a bond that is not necessarily reliant on trust initially, but where both benefit from each other enough to have no reason to not participate in the realm's rituals together, where they get opportunity to interact in whatever non-hostile manner.
If the realm group never interacts with the villages in their provinces, there is no connection between the province being challenged and the villages in it other than them potentially fearing that they will be targeted by the challengers, which is already a negative that anyone is exposed to currently when a province is challenged.

[MightySheep]

Realms since inception have always felt like they added a skeleton of what could be a cool system but then just left it as just a skeleton and didnt really give anybody a reason to engage with it.

I dont think it helps to suggest some big vague concept of an idea because at this point were lucky to get 5 min dev work so Imo better to suggest specific small changes.

[Detharon]

Step 3: MORALE
If a realm loses a region, all of their villages in ANY region should suffer some temporary negative effect -as a low morale buff.
Avoiding this effect should be an incentive to participate in the realm defense, even if your village is not in that specific region.
Note: neutral villages are not affected by this either.

That doesn’t really encourage being part of a realm. One of the biggest pain points of having a realm is that the challenge window is completely random. Sometimes the time is convenient, but most of the time it isn’t. Expanding realm is annoying because you literally have to plan your life around it.

Similarly, unless you’re ready to play at 4 am because someone challenged your realm, it’s not possible to defend all of them. Losing is a negative effect on its own, in the form of decreased authority gain.

Realms need move polish, but I'd rather see gradual improvements rather than a large overhaul.

[azrid]

Too many words they will never consider this
Try giving small bite sized ideas that can be added over several years if you want to see any change at all

[Mr_Bober]

Step 1 outcome would be: The realm's group of ppl who already belong to each other will now have to create multiple villages to create the realm. No other groups necessary to be involved.
It's very difficult for individual strangers in this game to join up in a village, it requires a lot of trust to be built or chaos to be tolerated (see open villages). By the same principle, multiple villages would not easily come together to form a realm.

There's no way to stop that from happening, but I believe not everyone would go that way. Every world I create connections with those settled in my area, as many other do.
Adding someone to your village is extremely risky (and yet we often do it), but making a realm together does not mean giving them access to all of your belongings (like inviting them in the village would), so I don't see the risk.

Step 2 makes a lot more sense, since it acts as vote on the realm that demands authority and would prompt otherwise unaffiliated villages into action. It would also make it much harder to fully conquer a province, since every village in the province would have to accept the conquering realm for them to apply full control over just that one piece of land. It's a much more complicated mechanic than what currently exists though. If the attackers already challenged the province, and only afterwards villages get to decide if they want to accept the authority, it would currently mean that the challenge is over at that point and the areas in question would have to be rechallenged to siege the defiant villages. I don't know if it would be a good implementation of the idea behind it.

Defiant villages could just stay neutral, no need to wipe them out. There's potential there, but it would need a rework of the siege system as well. Too much work.

Step 3 sounds like bad or rather ineffective idea overall. There is no debuff that justifies losing a character in a predefined losing battle and most villages will choose to not fight, partly because many can't fight and others even if they have fighters will not fight even if in the advantage unless absolutely necessary by being heavily provoked. People would pack their stuff and flee a province or simply accept negative buffs just how they accept positive ones. People will often accept losing their entire base if it means their characters stay alive. If you want people to join defense of the province, you would have to:

1. Diminish loss potential from particpating in the defense (char/gear being lost), somehow even out odds of fights which would be dumb or drastically increase loss potential from the realm switching hands. And also..

2. have the villages in question be invested into the realm that the province belongs to. Otherwise no people will come to defend someone else's claim on the province.

Also, a mechanic like this if it entailed negatives on province loss would mean that villages of people would begin to form in clusters to cooperate in preventing their province from being taken. This is in direct contradiction to how the game plays out right now. People in the game try to build distance from one another for the most part, to not get in each others' ways, competing over resources unnecessarily and to minimize risks of being killed by other individuals or groups. The form of cooperation that Step 3 demands you can see at Brodgar village kind of chaos, where people build a loose large group that simply serve as big target. Worst case it would discourge PKing generally, which would take out the fun of the game overall since the dangers are what make the game fun.

I disagree, plenty of debuffs would push people into action. Like reduced or halted quality gains on stuff.
People don't stay away from PvP because they might die. They do because it's pointless right now. So unless you enjoy hunting down sprucecaps, you have no reason to go fight. The chances of KOing someone with interesting gear are low, and the chances of actually killing someone are almost zero unless you catch them in a dungeon.

This would give a reason to fight. And the big guys might even have an incentive to teach the little guys how to fight, and provide them with decent gear in exchange for their help.

That doesn’t really encourage being part of a realm. One of the biggest pain points of having a realm is that the challenge window is completely random. Sometimes the time is convenient, but most of the time it isn’t. Expanding realm is annoying because you literally have to plan your life around it.

Similarly, unless you’re ready to play at 4 am because someone challenged your realm, it’s not possible to defend all of them. Losing is a negative effect on its own, in the form of decreased authority gain.

That's why I said warflags and challenges also need a rework, but there's another thread open about it.

I dont think it helps to suggest some big vague concept of an idea because at this point were lucky to get 5 min dev work so Imo better to suggest specific small changes.

Realms need move polish, but I'd rather see gradual improvements rather than a large overhaul.

Try giving small bite sized ideas that can be added over several years if you want to see any change at all

I see your point, but I don't think it's the case with jorb and loftar. I believe it's more likely they'll work on a new system if it catches their attention, rather than do small tiny changes that don't really improve the system enough to be worth their time.

Let's face it, it's not like tiny suggestions get their attention. We still get the wrong tools from belts with the default auto-switch, despite being a QoL fix asked for years and that everyone agrees with (eg. stone axe rather than woodsman for chopping trees, axe over shovel to destroy stumps, or low-q blade over high-q for butchering).

Large systems, like Realms, Siege, and Credos have too many issues to be fixed by small patches. IF they want to work on it, they need fresh ideas worth their time.
You're welcome to suggest tiny changes if you have some in mind, I'd gladly read through them. Maybe you're lucky and they'll actually consider them.

[azrid]

They absolutely respond better to low development hours high impact ideas.
This is the biggest mistake people do when posting their ideas.
They write a huge paragraph of "grab bag ideas" and then expect something to change.
Jorb has said before, when he was active on the forums, that he would like every idea to be a separate thread.
I get it though its fun to yap about the game we all like.

[Mr_Bober]

They absolutely respond better to low development hours high impact ideas.
This is the biggest mistake people do when posting their ideas.
They write a huge paragraph of "grab bag ideas" and then expect something to change.
Jorb has said before, when he was active on the forums, that he would like every idea to be a separate thread.
I get it though its fun to yap about the game we all like.

I understand, but some things can't be changed one brick at a time.
A system like realms will never be changed mid-world, which means any impactful change has to be on world reset. And with the current state of things, that would make it a 5 year plan

[SnuggleSnail]

I didn’t read any of that, but I bet that, like all other realm suggestions, it involves doing a lot of work nobody is interested in and assumes player motivations are whatever an outside observer thinks is cool