PVP Factions

[Potjeh]

I'd go with the KISS principle here and just make the claims expire if you don't log in in long time (two weeks or so).

[Ai_Shizuka]

Two weeks? So basically one can't even go on vacation without losing his stuff?

Two months maybe.

[Potjeh]

Unless you're vacationing in Somalia, you can log in once in two weeks. You don't have to actually play, just log in and log out.

[Ai_Shizuka]

What?
So when I'm somewhere around the world to see stuff, relax, party and generally have fun I have to find an internet point to log on a videogame and save my stuff?
Because I don't have a laptop. And even if I had it, there's no way in hell I'd bring it on vacation with my friends or gf.

So no, a videogame and the internets in general are not one of my priorities when I'm on holiday. Yeah, shocking.

[Potjeh]

Who the hell gets two week vacations anyway? And I have a hard time believing that anyone who regularly uses internet doesn't go to an internet cafe to check his e-mail/facebook/whatever while on vacation.

But seriously, two weeks is a completely arbitrary number. It could be a whole month, but anything over that is just pointless because inactives will take up all the good real estate. Even a month is a bit too long.

[Junkfist2]

It's one thing to have a skilled thief breach the walls and take what's inside without leaving scents that can't be detected by anyone but a professional ranger. If said thief could instead do away with the claim stake after breaching the walls, then there are at best two scents for a ranger to track, and anyone else can take the contents of the property without risk of retaliation...

...What's evil is characters being able to commit theft with absolutely no chance of retaliation.

First of all what difference does it make how many scents he has to track if one is a long-lasting, many-use scent that's easily located, as a "Destroy Claim" scent would most assuredly be?

Secondly one thief can already break down a wall, pick things up and drop them outside of a claim for a horde of others to loot scent free.

Totems shouldn't disappear on their own for the reasons people here are talking about with vacations, etc. Someone should have to make the judgment or risk/reward call to actually destroy the thing. If the person vacationing doesn't want his claim destroyed by non-looters he can leave a message on a runestone, "vacationing from (date) to (date)".

[Delamore]

I suggest that claims never actually go away, but over time their soak decays unless you repair it and after a set time they no longer generate clues and will be marked a different color when you have show claims turned on.
When destroyed the LP placed will be refunded, but there should be a time limit between creating claims of at least a week.
What this means is that claims used to block anything can and will end up destroyed and that abandoned claims can be dealt with by anyone without risk.

[Potjeh]

That still doesn't solve the problem of map getting littered by ghost towns. If claims expired, abandoned buildings would be taken by someone.

[Delamore]

That still doesn't solve the problem of map getting littered by ghost towns. If claims expired, abandoned buildings would be taken by someone.

But it does solve that, after alot of time the soak would be at 0 and you would not leave scents so if anyone wanted the buildings they could tear down the claim really easy.
Combine that with faster off claim/village area decay and ghost towns vanish.

[jorb]

I'd like to opine that ghost towns aren't all bad. Finding an abandoned village in the right place and time can be awesome. The problem mostly arises when the entire greater RoB-area is a huge ghost town, because that gives a bad first impression of the game, and we have enough of those. Apart from adjusting the decay mechanics, I think it'd be fair if new characters had to go through some quests and some legwork before being given the ability to build stuff. This would sort out the five minute players and the alt-fuckers completely, and also put early new player fail builds a little further away from the RoB. When I say "some quests", I mean something simple to the tune of 10-15 minutes worth of playtime.

Also, with quality coming in place, it'd be fair if lower quality stuff, the kind that a noob would build, decayed significantly faster than high quality stuff.

A salvage mechanic, as per the above discussion, might also be a great incentive for players to deconstruct and recycle used building materials. This might be especially helpful with getting rid of higher quality buildings that are clearly or explicitly abandoned, but still haven't been eaten away by the decay timer.

I think those things, or a combination of them, should take care of the ghost-town RoB.

Oh, and... factions, something? Meh. No offense to the OP, but I think the idea is based on a flawed understanding of several important game mechanics.

(BTW... WoW? Really? The only thing WoW does well is graphics and polish. Blizzard has a great feeling for craftsmanship, and I admire them for never releasing a game that, for what it was, wasn't polished to the Nth degree, largely free of bugs, stable and thoroughly tested. Starcraft remains one of the greatest games ever released, and maybe that was why I was so enormously disappointed with WoW. Underneath all those bells and whistles, WoW is a ghost world where nothing ever really changes. You move through the world, and it changes you, but you do not change it. Great way to make a man feel impotent. This game has largely grown out of that particular frustration, in fact.)