Suggestion to refresh factions and provide incentive to PvP.

Our group takes on new players, but we do so at a low rate and only once we've determined that a person is a good fit for us. I'd be surprised if the com guys aren't always taking on new people too. It's just a matter of putting yourself out there.

I tend to avoid CTF because I don't like being on foot, and I don't like playing in trammel (no push through), and all of our fans show up and team stack as soon as a single SL is spotted in the lobby. Or maybe they're always team stacking and I'm just not always present to see it.
Either way, I think Telamon has done great work with CTF but I don't think it should be a cutthroat competition among the shard's biggest pvp groups. It should be a place where people learning the ropes can get their feet wet.

If by "team stacking" you mean joining the same team with your friends, then I guess SL is the best team stacker on the shard at this point. How about stop being such a curmudgeon about it and have a bit of fun with it. It's nothing to make a big stink of and a great venue to encourage practice in combat and potentially usher more fights into the field. If "stacking" is such a terrible thing, divide your group into two or three groups and invite randoms along with you. I've played several matches lately and since the launch of the shard, with total randoms on the mic or not. It's fun to just go throw spells and shit around and warm up to hotkeys, for the inexperienced. Either encourage and support growth, or bear witness to stagnation. That said, I do think that push-through should be disabled in CTF. Refresh potions are free-use and that 1s or more delay can mean the difference between a kill or an escape.



As for the Faction overhaul, the newsletter said we can expect it in the coming year. That said, getting all the ideas on the table is not ever going to be a bad thing. No ideas are bad until they are implemented as bad changes. Ideas are just fuel for the fires of collaborative change, if we're adult enough to discuss them in the open.

I agree that clustering it all into one town would basically destroy it. I also don't agree that SL numbers are a problem. The shard population is just not enticed to get involved because it is a costly endeavor fraught with time wasted for the little guys.

I was chatting with bart last night over some brews and saying that it would be interesting to possibly limit the amount of towns able to be controlled by any given faction. It would ruin anyone's desires for shard domination, so that may be bad, but the thought was this. If there were an actual profitable incentive (like every other facet of the game) to hold towns, it could drive others to work together to bring in that profit.

If the max towns controlled were four, that would leave four up for grabs to the remaining non-dominant factions. In essence, most could at least have a town controlled, or at worst, two factions would have four each while little guys struggle to get involved. The benefit could come in the form of a platinum reward increase on the monthly welfare plat, if you were actually taking part in sigil defense or getting legitimate points for faction kills, or even crafting traps and clothes, etc, during that 30 days.
The more towns you have, the more benefit you get, so it would always be a desirable thing to try and hold max towns per faction. Maybe even bump it to five towns total for max profit, so there would be a modicum of dominance without completely stifling the competition into nonexistence.

However, there is a whole lot that needs to be handled before any serious Faction change will make a bit of difference. A Household system, as has been discussed, that could prevent cross-factioning players and actually provide direct accountability to registered players, will need to be implemented before any such system could even begin to have abuse mitigation implemented.

Well, it may be a bit of an unfair comparison because I probably have more exposure to the TEX guys since they are at the Occlo bank showcasing their new members. And that's awesome for the shard. I do think what I said about certain styles of play being extinct is 100% spot on though.

I honestly feel like the entire town control concept is flawed. I know that it is called "factions" for this very very specific reason but I still feel that it is flawed. That's just me.

What alternative form of objective/target would we fight for? The whole purpose, as I see it, is to provide something to fight about. Not just fighting because people can fight.
Not saying I entirely disagree but what then can we fight about? I just don't really see incentive to go fight anyone unless there's a reason to. The kill alone has always meant very little to me in combat oriented games.

Well, I sort of feel that faction fighting is currently in that state of "just fighting because people can fight" right now. And there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't appeal to everyone, but it does appeal to some people. Like me.

I don't really have an alternative to the town control system. I've been toying with the idea of working on a PvP roleplay faction guild (who knows if I'll do it or not) just to get some fighting going. But I have zero interest in controlling towns or having blessed weapons or whatever. Mostly because I don't like either of those two concepts.

The appeal of Factions on OSI was that it was rooted in incentives, or so I thought. Order/Chaos was the "orange just to be orange" system tied to no other mechanics.

There is a real shortage of financial/beneficial incentive here so why would anyone bother spending the time and energy to take over towns? If it's just going to get taken back in three days, unless you can invest another 6+ hours, there's going to be a problem with motivation. Several people have voiced concerns with the lack of a profit center in Factions and I've even said, fight just to fight in the past. But if fighting is what you hope to make your only game here, the only profitable option is PKing. If there were financial incentive, unlike OSI that actually impacted many players uninvolved in Factions, more people who "just want to PvP" would likely be taking part and putting forth more effort to get a foothold.

Yeah. When factions first hit on the production shards I thought that some of then unique items / weapons that they had to offer were pretty cool, but time has definitely taken away that coolness factor.

People were fighting just because they wanted to pvp/had rivalries back then as well. Few players had access/knowledge about the day to day tax and vendor situation.

People don't need to be paid to fight. People don't need to be paid to pk either. There are many financial games to play in uo, but pvp has never needed to be one of them in order to interest people.

Yes, if you pay people to be in factions they will join it but they won't be fighting. And then they will piss and moan and demand help from telamon when players attack them.

Imagine faction vendors supplied cheaper ore, regs, and boards. Players would then feel obligated to only buy regs this way. Then they would get very salty when telamon hasnt given them easy ways to access the vendors and forced them into pvp situations they never wanted.


There are other reasons to take town ownership. You may perceive some victory in it or take pride in it. You may want to create blessed weapons or get vanity mounts or place regular cost vendors adjacent to banks that only a select few will buyout. You may want to place traps during or prior to a battle for strategic reasons or summons guards for the same.

In my opinion all these things are to the benefit of a consentual pvp system that already trumps order/chaos in many ways.

It would be nice if heat of battle returned and statloss was re-implemented in era. Unfortunately the board warriors here that rarely hit the field have cause it to be nearly removed. Now when i kill a faction thief he can be ressed within a few minutes and be back at it. It is aggrivating to have a vocal few nonparticipants making changes.

Telamon is the only one making changes. I'm not sure who ushered in the statloss timer reduction but I can't imagine it was people not currently impacted by it. The fact that the only profitable PvP is murdering, is a pretty key indicator that there's room to make another venue for sustainable "employment" doing what you love to do. Crafters can always make money with BoDs, regardless of market. PvMers loot mobs and treasure chests, while PvPers are effectively forced to murder for profit if they don't want to do crafting/pvm to support their play style. Unless of course they want to run a sweet reagent business on the side from faction vendor convenience. /snore

It's no wonder Felucca shards are plagued with PKs and short on big group fights. There's just no better way to make money killing other people.

I'm sure once travel restrictions are in place for sigil carriers (no gates), heat of battle travel restrictions will be turned back on for Factions. If base swarming with fresh res characters becomes a problem, I imagine the statloss timers or impact would get adjusted to suit as well.

It's definitely aggravating to see so many people so passionate about things and yet so cynical about progress or potential for improvement.

I would like to know if you think there are any flaws with the way that holding and controlling towns currently works. I have always felt this way. I don't think that your opinion should be confused with you advocating for things to change, but I think you've been in factions long enough and have enough experience to pipe in. And you're pretty much a voice of reason.

Well, Chris has received our opinions and had brainstorming sessions a couple of times in the last year.

One thing that has often been agreed upon is that 6 hours seems like too long to be expected to guard sigils. What typically happens is noone bothers to guard and they just check in every so often and re-steal sigils from unguarded bases. Yet at the same time, people have often felt like less than six hours is too small a window to be expected to get online and fight for them. There have been many suggestions and ideas but none that have ever felt 'right.' (Just like cynic's suggestion imo.)

I think it's plausible that people just aren't currently gungho enough to put in the time to fight for their sigils. Maybe it's not the system's fault at all. Maybe people just don't take enough pride in winning for 3 days to dig in their heels and defend a base. All of the major factions right now have at some time made an honest attempt at a base defense. But I think it's understandable that they wouldn't want to put 12-18 hours a week into guarding their base.


My only true complaints at this time are the reduction of faction stat loss period and the removal of heat of battle. Previously (and in era) if you got a killing blow on an enemy factioner they lost 1/3 of their skills for a period of time (15-20 minutes). Some players have been very vocal that somehow that timer was preventing combat from happening. Now it seems to be five minutes and this is annoying for several reasons. It marginalizes the affect of a kill in a battle. If you take a key player out, you spend your mana and resources and they may res on the field or sacrifice res and re-enter the battle almost immediately.

Two nights ago I was defending my base and I didn't have the manpower on to stop the entirety of the raid. But what I could do was take a risk and kill their thief in order to delay any sigil stealing for a period of time. Unfortunately, this does very little good now without a worthwhile window of statloss. Imagine you were a true brit and the healer hut is only a few screens from your base. A thief could steal and die and res at the healer and try again nonstop without any risk of items. I've had experience with stealth thieves in that base that were willing to try all night. Now you'd have to battle them constantly with the reduction of statloss.

As far as heat of battle is concerned - at one time (and in era) if you initiated combat with a player, even legal combat, you would not be able to recall for 30 seconds or so. Recalling is very easy, and very quick. Now without heat of battle players can engage a large battle and just disappear. I have seen a big 5on5 battle where one side dumps their mana out and says "bye" and recalls as a group. I have seen players that precast recall, equip a weapon and swing for awhile before disappearing. Recall is a very convenient spell and I'm glad it works here, but it doesn't seem right that it's such an easy escape from a battle you picked. I think you should have to hoof it. Chasing and running has always been a big part of UO.

But none of these things are causing a broken system.

The only things truly essential to factions is 2+ sides that can engage in legal combat and the prevention of blue healing (ie you cannot perform beneficial acts on that target.)

We have that. There are many players that often say all they care about is pvp and battling and such. This should be more than enough reason to see them hitting the field. All of the points and town and base stuff just spice up an already working system. I've never believed that players needed any incentive or payment to pvp or pk. Most pks and pvpers are independently wealthy. I can't think of any pks or pvpers that got into it for loot. There are many pks that don't even loot. And I hope that there are never platinum rewards for factioning. There is already enough politics in factions and to add in a constant circus show of players trying to figure out how to get at that platinum (by switching sides or multiple accounts or whatever) just sounds awful to me. Let pvp be about the pvping. It would be terrible to make it about trying to squeeze platinum out of the server.


Anyways I still think most of the issues with the pvp scene are social. There's a year long history of accusing enemy teams of having too many players and groups recruiting to compete. Now it seems like there are three big groups and it's probably pretty difficult for someone to break in and compete in that environment without joining one of them. For that matter, the majority of the players aren't just out looking for small fights. They're scouting with ghosts/blues and ganking and running.

I don't like either of these suggestions. Of course, I don't really want to argue with you about it but I would like to put my opinion on the record to avoid bad changes being hastily implemented, like with the reduction of faction statloss.

Anyway, I don't like the idea of limiting the number of towns one faction can cap. There's no point of competing for sigils if you're guaranteed to get one.
I'm strongly against adding profitability to factions, because it draws people in who aren't interested in pvp and just want to make money. They will then die to the actual pvpers and hate them and complain. It's a bad model. Platinum rewards would make this particularly bad.

I agree, to an extent, that you shouldn't really add the potential for wealth into factions. Obviously if people get bored, tired, quit, whatever, and one faction controls for such a long time then their wallets will get fat with nothing to stop it from happening.. Take for example my assumption you guys probably have close to 60k silver now, if not more, just from consistently capping towns uncontested.

However, something does have to happen. As it stands right now, towns mean diddly squat. Yeah, sure you can own a town and place traps/guards but we all know that just lessens the chance people will fight in those towns now, which is contrary to the goal to refresh pvp.

I know some things were tossed around in a faction chat a long time ago, like the addition of rank specific mounts, etc.. While this would be a welcomed change for me, I don't think it'll be enough to get people moving.

I sure as hell don't have any ideas and I'm looking forward to hearing other peoples ideas, since mine was soooooo bad lol.

Well I don't really agree something has to happen. I don't think there's any real case for that. Again this system worked the same and we fought tooth and nail for it a year ago. I think it's the pool of players and the lack of fresh teams more than anything.

Yes and no, I think the fights that were had over a year ago had to do mostly with it being a smaller server and the current selection of pvpers being mostly separated along with a selection of non-pvpers giving it a go. SL wasn't the large force it is now. A year ago each faction had a small selection of people and fights generally were always back and forth which made things interesting. You also had players that were not normally known for pvp joining in on the mix: Apoc, Atraxi, Wulver, etc...

I would have to disagree and say that it's gotten a little stagnant and I only say this because the server still has an influx of players but none are attracted to pvp, especially not in factions. There aren't any new names out there and there aren't any current names (one's not already in factions) deciding to give it a go.

There's literally no reason to fight tooth and nail for it, at all. Hence the reason no one gives a damn to anymore. Those fights a year ago were great, and brief. If there's no incentive to keep trying to take down the top team other than doing it...well, you can see for yourself that people (PvPers included) would rather just go farm for platinum or holiday mobs or other such beneficial actions in game.

If you can't see that there's room for improvement in Factions, perhaps you should try reading some of the more recent forum articles about OSI and how there's always going to be complaints. I just read one about Faction statloss that had an interesting suggestion buried within. Variable statloss timers depending on where you died. I personally feel like forcing anyone to take a 20 minute break from PvP at any given time, is a detriment to PvP as a whole. Three accounts is not the answer. This is consensual PvP and the only reason I can gather for statloss is to prevent base swarms during sigil defense.

Perhaps remove Faction statloss, so it's free to fight like O/C but put the 20 minute timer on for statloss if there are sigils held in bases.

I don't think there absolutely must be a financial gain to Factions but it's pretty damn clear people would rather PK than OJ around here and I guess I just don't see the reason.....oh, I mean aside from people not wanting to play if the win isn't easy.

It is ridiculous that players that are taking three month breaks from pvp come into this forum and say that 20 minute stat loss is preventing pvp from happening. You want to change everything but you don't even participate. You support shortened stat loss but how many times have you been in stat loss since this change? I'd bet 0-2 times. How many times did you try to re-enter the battle within 20 minutes? None.


Let me be very clear. Factions is better in every way than O/C and does not need an overhaul. Almost every change that has affected factions has been bad. Let us have an era accurate system and then tweak it only very carefully. If you actually believed O/C was better, then why is there not a real history of players playing it here? Why don't you just play O/C? Maybe ask Telamon to remove blue healing from it and stop trying to change a faction system you were never going to truly participate in anyways.

Get Telamon to give you plat for playing O/C for all I care. But stop begging for awful changes daily to factions.

People are pking because the targets are alone and weak and oranges are traveling in packs and not standing around waiting to get ganked unawares. This has nothing to do with money. And honestly, I think most people would rather faction. They just don't want to do it lately unless they're sure they can't lose. Which is in my opinion the bigger reason for people's dissatisfaction with the scene.

LOL, who are you even talking to? People have been concerned with the impact of Faction statloss for oh, I dunno, 13+ years now? There are still threads to this day going on about it on stratics. To answer your question, I haven't suffered Faction statloss in probably over a month because I haven't been PvPing at all. As I said earlier, the people who asked for the change are likely people who are currently impacted by that mechanic (players looking to fight but being put on 20 minute breaks because they picked the easiest method of finding fights....joining a non-SL Faction).

Let me be very clear, your opinion on the good or bad of Factions is no more valid than anyone else's. I never said O/C was better and have always stated that the lack of restrictions therein made it stupid. I absolutely would love to get into O/C if blue healing was prevented or there was a flagging orange system for getting involved in an O/C fight.

The fact that people aren't running out to fight all the time is absolutely about money. Otherwise you'd see as many people fielding every single day as you do in CTFs or Holiday events. It's about the risk vs reward wherein there is no reward to Factions outside of bragging rights. There's plenty of reward for PKing and far less of a challenge to face while still getting your rocks off killing other players.


I understand you don't think there's room for incentive in Factions and your opinion is just fine to have. You can stamp your feet that it's "just fine" all day while you sit back summoning guards and daemons with half a dozen teammates behind you. I really couldn't care less about how fine you think it is when I can read quite clearly how much it could benefit from fine-tuning in attempt at perfection. Wait, let me guess, you also feel that 7 hours of capture time is perfect in a 15 y/o game mostly played by adults with full time jobs and families, right?



But hey, maybe you can find some cool bug to abuse to make a point about how 'bad' the changes are or have been.

Try to make it personal all you want, you're still wrong. The most active factioners are com and SL right now and neither team is on this board asking for money or changes to factions in order to get them to do it. It is a constant shit show of non participants demanding changes, and they don't even try it out after they get what they asked for.

Please pick something else to meddle with. This is a perfect opportunity for you to make order chaos that perfect pvp system you will never try.

We were larger and more active a year ago than we are now. We've picked up new people in the last year, but we've had others fall to the wayside. Those that we do have have been less active, especially during the holidays. I know that our supposed large size gets blamed for everything, but we're really not that big.

Well, rather than factions being a flawed system, I would say that we're the ones to blame for that.
The pvp community on this server is quite bad, I don't blame anyone for not wanting to join it. The community here is split into two sides that completely hate each other, and newcomers are forced to pick one at the expense of having the other take a shit on them. The amount of hate and incivility is enough that I think most rational people thinking about pvp would look at the pvp community here and think twice about getting involved in the mess.
If a new player joins your side of things, they have to deal with us. I'll be the first to say that we're relentless in pursuit of our enemies and attack them whenever we see them, even if they're on blues minding their own business. We'll even kill the alts of people we don't like in town.
If they join our side, their reputation will be completely shot. Our alts are also targeted at events and in town, and the groups that don't like us are ghosting constantly trying to get easy ganks on us. There's also an incredible amount of shit talked about our side, both in public and behind closed doors.
And if they don't pick a side, they get ganked into the ground by both sides looking for easy kills.

The reason we're not getting new blood is because the pvp community here is unwelcoming.

I believe that there's really only one way to encourage a more active pvp scene. That is that the pvp community as a whole needs to mellow out and take it down a notch. No one wants to walk into the middle of the battle of Verdun and try to have a good time.

I don't see a problem with this. If people want to go make money instead of pvp, that is their prerogative. Forcing pvp upon people or making them feel like they're forced to pvp to get ahead will make them bitter.
The whole point of factions is consensual pvp, it's there for people who want to pvp. Not people who want to farm up some cash.

One of the important functions of statloss was that when you killed the enemy thief you got a break and could relax for a minute. It also keeps enemies down when you kill them and allows fights to actually end. Though part of that is circumvented here because everyone has 3 accounts.
I would like to see statloss restored to the way it was, back up to 15 minutes.

I don't believe that messing with statloss or removing statloss will change much. Why do you think a lack of statloss would encourage factions to be big? Just because you have to take a break when you die?
Often by the time I've recovered my character's dead ghost and restocked, my statloss is up. Even when it was at 15 minutes. I didn't think it was a particularly big detriment, and it sometimes kept people from ressing in the middle of a fight and grabbing their reg bag to fight again.

Once again, what's the problem with this? People should be free to do what they want to do. If they want to play on reds that's fine by me.