SwordCraft

Looks good. I'm curious about the rank war system, though, since it helps you gain reputation. Is it safe to assume that the reputation ties into your adventurer rank ( D - S ), or is reputation a PvP rank / currency since it can be bet?

Also, in the hub description, you mentioned that players can join one of four guilds that fight for territories.

Do you plan on making the whole overworld PvP / PvE, or are certain areas PvP specific. e.g. Are certain areas of the game PvP-enabled, or is it the default? Will there be safe areas in the event that there is open-world PvP since there's no guarantee that the guilds will be split evenly.

One suggestion that comes to mind is, if PvP is instance / event based, such as the rank war system, you could have it scaled to a degree so it's not entirely one-sided.

For example, if one guild has 10 members and the other guild has 40, you could have it set to a maximum of, say, 12 participants depending on the scale of the war. To determine the size, you could grab the number of players in the two factions, and using the lowest one to determine how many participants to use. If the number is lower than the preferred number ( say 15 for medium wars ), you could either set the maximum participants of both sides to the lower number of players of the two guilds or set the maximum participants of both sides to min(lower_number + 2, preferred_number).

This would look something like:
Guild 1: 10 players. ( lower_number )
Guild 2: 40 players.
Rank War Default Participants: 15 players. ( preferred_number)
Rank War New Participants: min(10 + 2, 15) = 12 players

The reason I'd recommend scaling down instead of setting the maximum participants to the lowest number directly is so the larger guilds aren't punished for having more players, but it also makes rank wars more doable for lesser guilds than to set it at a static 15 participants when they might be severely out numbered.

Regarding Rank Wars: aside from ranking up by earning / betting rep, would there be another benefit to rank wars over missions? Since it is PvP, but if it equates to a duel-mode, it could get stale after awhile. Not to mention you'd have to have rep to bet to use the feature, so if you're on a losing streak, you'd have to find a way to grind rep to bet rep.

A couple of ideas would be to give additional incentive, such as a leader board for guilds and after X days provide some type of temporary buff for the guild in the lead and/or a temporary buff / cosmetic reward for the top adventurer. An option to have a rank-based shop that contains cosmetic items that are available based on your adventurer rank.

As for the fights themselves, you could implement random modes within the rank wars themselves. Something like a ring-out rules or environmental hazards ( blizzard zone making fire less effective, for example ).

First, since certain buildings are safe zones, will there a be a system in place to prevent people from fleeing into buildings when the tables get turned? For example, if Player A attacks Player B & C, and becomes overwhelmed, is there a system in place that prevents them from entering the safe zone until the game recognizes them as out of combat?

An idea to implement the concept would be to add a timer that gets checked when the player tries to do something that requires them to be out of combat. This timer could be set every time the player uses a combat ability, or a combination of the previous suggestion on top of being set every time they are at the receiving end of a hostile ability. ( e.g. being CC'd and attacked would trigger the timer, but being healed or buffed by an ally wouldn't. ).

Second question, is friendly-fire enabled? Naturally, I think it shouldn't be enabled since it would cause guild fights or territory raids to be more chaotic, but it's something I thought was worth asking. With that said, will there be any abilities to heal / buff allies, and will those abilities not work when used on a member of an opposing guild?

This actually helps a lot because it was my main problem with the game making sure Guilds are balanced throughout game though I didn't think of your idea I've thought of the 2 I mentioned above reducing to 3 guilds, rank wars only against opposite guild players, and I also thought about assigning guilds to players at start automatically though they could choose to leave if they wanted.

I'm glad it gave you something to think about. I think you made the right call on lowering the number of guilds down to 3, as well as deciding to set rank wars as against opposing guild players only.

As for assigning guilds to players automatically, that's a bit strange. The main reason is because if they can leave, then it could lead guilds into seeing a huge player influx anyway. While it's not perfect, one way to slightly battle a guild from getting too big while giving players a way to pick the one they'd prefer is to allow them to pick their guild, but lock access to the ones that are severely more populated than others. You can use a similar idea to the guild faction war I brought up earlier.


Lock Threshold: 150%
Guild 1: 12 players
Guild 2: 11 players
Guild 3: 8 players


If a player makes a new character, their options would be either Guild 2 or Guild 3 since adding 1 more to Guild 1 would push it over 150% of the lowest guild member count. You could also use this to determine when to allow / disallow guild members leaving factions they join if keeping the balance at both character creation and in-game is important to the gameplay.

To add further incentive, you could make it so that if any guild is actually lowest in population, the player gets a starting bonus ( currency, rep, or a temporary buff ).