Faction Towns and respective functions

From what I remember from Sonoma is that the Finance Minister could raise or lower the town prices. This also affected the faction vendors. I can't remember quite exactly what the negative was, but if you lowered the town prices too low for too long it had a consequence. The faction vendors, at least at one time, were accessible to the general public as well. I remember being Finance Minister of Trinsic and placing 6 board vendors at the bank and dumping the town prices and farming the vendors all night with a non-factioned buddy on a non-faction alt. The system was awesome and I loved having my own discount whatever vendors whenever I wanted. However, this system would be damaging as hell to the shard as it was so exploitable.

Couldn't hanging out in a faction controlled town put plat in your wallet at a quicker rate? Currently you sit in the safety of your own home afk, but if you were in a faction controlled town with a factioner, you could get plat at 1 every 5 hours instead of 1 every 50 hours. That could spark fights, and real activity (because you wouldn't want to afk). Same monthly wallet plat cap. I would honestly do it because I have yet to hit the wallet plat cap.

Nice concept Wulver. Sounds like a decent start to considering incentives to A) Faction and B) Leave the house

Except abuse would be rampant because all you have to do is hide a naked faction char somewhere remote in town and watch the welfare come in at 10x the speed.

Great starting point though.

Perhaps using silver and not platinum would make it betteR?

Not with faction trackers out and about, and being a ghost/statloss would only count as normal afk check. Maybe recent combat activity would be a check?

Silver is not going to get me out and about, hell I don't even false advertise online numbers with my characters afk in a house.

I am still interested in getting rid of Yew as a town.

I don't think it is a very good idea to tie outside reward systems into factions. Not only is it prone to abuse and difficult to balance, there's also no rhyme or reason to it in the first place.

A better incentive, in my eyes, would be to implement a fully functional silver economy, with faction vendors charging silver. The idea would be to enable factioneers to fuel their PvP-desires by participating in PvP (and assorted faction activities).
A rough sketch of a system could look like this (all numbers are examples/placeholders):

• Faction vendors charge the following prices for reagents:
  - 1 and 2 silver pieces for members of their own faction
  - 2 and 4 silver pieces for those not enlisted
  - 4 and 8 silver pieces for members of hostile factions
• 80% of the vendors' silver revenues are placed directly in the respective town's treasury, 20% are removed from the game
• Placing vendors and guards costs silver, with guards being rather expensive. The Finance Minister decides how much of a town's treasury is available for use on guards each day.
• Each town is granted a small silver stipend each day, if the the coffers are empty.
• In addition to conventional means of earning silver (killing players in opposing factions, stealing sigils, killing faction mobs), the following income sources are introduced:
  - factioneers defending towns will be rewarded with silver from the town's treasury (be within X tiles of sigil, additional payout if you kill opposing faction members within the town's borders etc.)
  - factioneers killing opposing faction guards will be rewarded 20% of their cost
• Town treasuries are persistent, so wealthy towns make for jucier targets
• Faction crafters can "consecrate" (temporarily bless) plain weapons, shields and armor (no properties other than GM-made; blessed runics have no place in this era) at 10 silver pieces per day. They can use up to 3000 silver pieces this way. Items show up as [consecrated].

Silver payouts for the various activities may have to be tweaked, but then the system could be expanded for additional convenience. Say, a faction provisioner selling bags or pouches of 50 or 100 reagents each, at slightly increased prices. I know most people use restock scripts these days and yadda yadda.. but it might be neat to have a vendor who hooks you up with some reagents and bandages in one go. Combined with the "consecrated" weapons, it would be very basic PvP equipment.
In my opinion, factions shouldn't need more incentives than that.

I would rather use an unblessed vanq or power weapon than a blessed exceptional weapon anyday of the week. GM exceptional weapons for everything but an axer template are just awful.

Aye, that's rather the point I'm trying to make. Blessed faction weapons should not provide a mechanical advantage in PvP, and certainly not over non-faction players. For optimal performance, factioneers should have to turn to the same options as everyone else.
I can, however, see the merit of providing factioneers with a common tool that stays with them on death. A blessed exceptional weapon is a blessed exceptional weapon non-faction players won't have access to - but at the end of the day, it's just an exceptional weapon.

That said: Exceptional weapons should kill people, if slower than high-end magic variants, as long as weapon damage is implemented correctly. It's what I used to kill people on production shards.. given there was no barbed armor to contend with then.
I rather preferred the type of PvP the use of exceptional weapons fostered, too, as mages were not forced to run in a straight line the second their initial dump failed, because one para blow from that blessed power short spear meant certain death.

I guess the point I was trying to make was that the function of blessing gm exceptional weapons is useless because exceptional weapons are all but useless except on axers.

The only time my hands touch GM weaponry is when the tournament rules mandate it. Otherwise, it's a waste of time and I can shit out 1000 of any one of them and not bat an eyelash. I wouldn't waste my time blessing something that's effectively disposable.

Please, go put together the BoDs required to make an Agapite Runic Hammer, then get back to me on how much you want the fruits of those labors to be taken from you after one perfect synch-dump. Point being, and don't get me wrong, I've dropped runics in the field more than once now, 3 weeks weapon blessing is nice but it is NOT the hand of god or some major imbalance in PvP. It's an advantage, yes, but it requires a shitton of work and effort. Not too mention the fail rate on craft...again.

I don't understand why factioners shouldn't get stuff that isn't "pvp" related. Faction has bards/tamers for farming silver, crafters for the faction items, thieves for the sigils and warriors for control/defense. It is a whole system of templates that work together, they RISK more than normal players.

Maybe silver can be used with a crafter to put up faction banners on a home owned by a faction member.

That's a really good idea - 'like it a lot, personally.

The reasoning you gave is sketchy, however. It could only apply to non-combat-oriented characters in factions, and even then it is a stretch.
People sign up for factions voluntarily. The system is supposed to enable more PvP, and participants make the conscious decision that more PvP is what they want. How, then, can increased risk be a justification for receiving advantages, past the opportunity of capitalizing on the added target spectrum?

Let me put it this way:

NoXXoR the DP-dexxer is a character template built for PvP. The player wants as many opportunities for PvP as possible, so he signs the character up for a faction.
Next, he gets himself a blessed runic weapon, because all the PvP he wanted results in an increased risk of losing his weapon.

How does this compare to Birdy the Bard, who is not optimized for PvP and doesn't want to participate in it? When NoXXoR catches Birdy in a dungeon, Birdy is now thrice-effed: At a disadvantage due to the PvE-template, taking hefty damage from a runic weapon.. and if he manages to kill NoXXoR by some miracle.. LOLBLESSEDTHX4PLAYING!

There's really no inherent logic to this approach.

I wouldn't want to lose it, Blaise, and I understand you don't want to, either. But that's rather the crux of the matter: I would be so concerned about losing a high-end runic, that I wouldn't routinely use it in PvP (if at all).
If I did absolutely want to smack someone around with the best weapon available, however, then I should have to risk losing it.

The middle-ground is using effective weapons that one can replace without too much trouble, say a regular force/power variant, or perhaps a bronze runic.
The middle-ground can't be to also make the strongest weapon blessed. Not only is it problematic from a PvP-perspective, it devalues lower-end runics and regular magic weapons, because their redeeming feature and competitive edge is that they're easy to replace.

I'd much prefer suggestions such as Wulver's being taken into consideration. A way to "show flag" for factioneers, if they so choose, without impacting actual game balance.
'could retain the option for faction-crafters to produce specific, coloured runic weapons, even - usable only by the faction in question. It would be the opposite of "blessing", in a way, making them unusable by your enemies. So they would have to decide between hoarding them, selling them back or disposing of them (helping economy in the process).

The blessing is temporary and as time goes on, you will see many more unblessed high level runics hitting the field. I've dropped some in the past and mutombo just got an agapite spear looted recently as well. These things happen but the temp blessing is a nicety after all the effort put in. If it were permanent, it would be a serious problem/imbalance.


As for your nox fencer vs bard scenario, it works exactly the same as it would right now. Combatant comes on screen, PvM faction bard hits Recall Macro hotkey and leaves. End of story.

I have a Faction crafter, I risk getting punked every time I take her to town. (daily, for BoDs) I also need a serious support crew when I craft faction runics. Not only do I risk wasting charges on failed crafting attempts, I also risk getting ganked and looted of the entire unblessed hammer.

There's risk on all sides of the fence here. I'm not sure why anyone would even bother getting a high end runic if they're so afraid of losing it. This is a game and they are just pixels, not your kid's college fund. I don't have vanqs to have vanqs, I have them to use them. Same thing goes for runics. I will have them, bless them, and lose them when the blessing wears off. 3 weeks is effectively NIL in the grand scheme of things, so just let it go. You can also pretty much bank on every enemy running and hiding during the period of blessing anyway, so either suck it up and get ready to field with an unblessed runic or just bank it like a poser pixel collector and move along.

IMO, the best way to lessen the impact of faction blessings is to increase the number of people participating in factions.

The number of blessings of gold and agapite is finite, and as it is, it's nowhere near enough to supply all active factioners with a steady supply of blessed weapons throughout the year.