Town Membership System

This is a system that would allow players to actually be a citizen of a town. I was bored and just was brainstorming if this could be possible.

Membership:
You will have to donate a lump sum of gold to become a member of that town for a month. Membership can raise or lower depending on your activity with the town. Donating resources and interacting with town vendors will lower your membership fees. Militia members have additional ways to decrease the fee. New players may not be able to afford to be a member, but they can sell resources to town members for them to donate.

Resources:
Each town will have resource meters. If it is above certain thresholds it provides discounts on items
bought/sold in the city. If they fall below that threshold things become normalized and then gradually more expensive.
Ore, Wood, Gold, Meat, Veggies, and Wool/Cotton would be the main resource types. They can be donated to the town after harvesting.
These resources will deplete at a quicker rate depending on how many members a town has. Membership will be less expensive the more raw material you donate. Titles can be granted to those who donate the most of certain resources, and other rewards.

Town Leaders:
Leadership can be voted in and they can work alliances/war with other towns. This will expand benefits and trade of resources. If you don't want others to share in your bonuses you can declare war on them. Normal members do not participate in battles, but they will be prevented from buying/trading from warring towns.

Militia:
There will be a sub-guild for pvp fighters. You may fight against any enemy militia member if you have declared war on that town. If you die in a pvp fight, you are transported (you don't lose equipment) to the town that killed you and you must pay a fine or wait out your sentence and you are no longer a member of your militia (you cannot be rez killed). You cannot be harmed by an enemy or attack an enemy unless you re-join into your towns militia. If you kill an enemy your membership fee goes down, you may even get paid for your contributions each month. Since you have to pay a membership fee, killing your own characters over and over will not grant enough pay back, they will be fined and/or wait out a sentence.

The militia system sounds like item insurance pvp to me, no thank you. And factions already fight for town control, how would this factor in?

Would be cool for player run towns imo. Too many faction players would probably take issue otherwise.

How much control of a town does Factions have here? None, that is how much, so it would have no impact on faction play. You would have to become a member to get the benefits. One reason factions doesn't allow changing prices is that it effected everyone on the shard.

It is a bit like item insurance but it isn't the only form of pvp on the shard. So you don't have to worry about that, you can still take part in Order/Chaos, PK, Factions. You aren't necessarily experiencing "death" but being held as a prisoner of war, the fine of gold will feed into the enemy town if you decide to post bail. It wouldn't truly be as easy as CTF pvp, as your character could get locked up for more than 24 hours upon being captured.

I like the idea for player run towns. I would edit a few of the rules. Such as "war". Within the boundries of my player town, Wispfelt, I have worked very hard to make it "common ground" for all players regardless of reputation. I feel the citizens of the town should be able to decide if they wish to be a "war" town and able to declare war on other player run towns.
As we all know, there is no true "no pvp zones in Fel, even in game cities have factions and thieves whom turn grey. But I also feel that if you are fair with your rules, and up hold them yourselves, many of the players will
respect your "rules" for your town.
Great thread, thank you for starting it.

Westra/Marjo

Governess of Wispfelt

You can do all of this with player run towns. That is what player run towns are, you have members and you can pool resources, have allies and enemies. You cannot do this with the normal towns. The membership fee and resource donations are taken out of circulation, essentially a gold sink to obtain perks from the city. It will also let you directly interact with a town more than factions. Factions is good for what it is a pvp system, with pvp related perks.

I don't think the pvp portion is necessary but it would give pvpers another way to compete since they get the short end of the stick here anyways. It is also divided so non-pvp town folk don't have to worry about getting ganked as if they were in factions, it has a more regulated combat feel to it. Factions is more like ISIS coming into town and slaughtering everyone that is different. Where as this is more like following Geneva Conventions and Laws of Armed Conflict.

I feel this is more geared toward end game players who can have a good time doing things that aren't just sitting in a house or killing blood eles and running from pks. Donating meat and hides from skinned animals and other raw resources to gain perks, trophies, titles and rank in the town. It would create a more lively atmosphere in the towns as you would have to keep your membership up. Also, I think you should be a member of a town to get the welfare plat.

I think Wulver's idea is awesome. Factions isn't really for the rp type, it's more of "Hey you killed me 3 on 1 so I"m going to bitch about it on irc until I get banned to UORPVP for my raging case of the butthurts". The concept of factions is interesting but on every shard I've seen and on OSI it always devolves into irc/forum e-peen waiving moreso than ingame conflict.

I would go a step further with the militia pvp. Since town militia pvp would be geared mostly towards the roleplay community and people who don't want to get involved in the drama of factions, it would be a good idea to use only blacksmith made weaponry and no magic weapons/armor. Maybe not even allow runics. This would have to be modified from Order/Chaos where you can't equip an Order/Chaos shield if you aren't Order/Chaos. Only it would be if you sign up for a town militia, you cannot equip magic weapons/armor but only things player blacksmith made. This would make non-runic gm made armor/weapons more valuable and in demand, thereby helping the economy.

Another perk of being a militia member of a town would be the ability to place vendors in buildings in town that could be converted into a marketplace of sorts. Of course the vendors would have to be much more expensive than normal, but also base that on population as well. For example, having vendors operating in Occlo or Britain would be far more expensive than operating one in Cove or somewhere like that. I would recommend it only be for militia members, so there is a risk of being killed by enemy militia members, and not just someone joining a town just for that perk.

If done right, it could be a major attraction to the shard for people who want to play Ultima Online for the roleplay experience, and it could be heavily advertised among ultima related sites.

Okay so you are saying; joining the militia is kind of like joining an event, you are stripped of everything and provided militia gear? Only militia members can wear it, and you are unable to equip anything else unless you are removed from the militia. Then if you get captured (die in combat) you are removed from militia that way as well, you cannot equip that gear so you are essentially naked in prison. That sounds pretty cool... I would say the gear is not garbage. Maybe town members craft it and can only be sold on the town vendors? The items would be slightly better than GM and would not be able to deal damage to non-militia members... haha

Lets say the items are not too expensive and do disappear when you are captured, so you would have to buy all new gear (slight gold sink). It cannot be looted it just vanishes.

What if militia members cannot ride mounts?

I meant if you are in the militia, you'd be unable to equip magic armor/weapons at all, kind of like how a normal person cannot equip a chaos/order shield. Sort of the other way around, a militia member could not equip magic weapons/armor but player smith made items would work. It would be kind of cool to have militia only weapons/armor that cannot be equipped by anyone else outside of that particular militia. Although, if that were the case, militia members could still wear uber weapons and armor so that might kind of defeat the purpose unless they couldn't equip non-militia armor at all.

I'd be cool with no mounts for this idea since most warfare would be confined to towns.

I like the idea of gear vanishing completly when killed, and being transfported to that town's holding cell for a period of time that can be shortened by paying a fine or something.

I think discounts in the town is asking for trouble. And my first reaction is kind of like Kane's I guess, in that it seems like it's similar to factions. Maybe not overlapping perfectly in terms of content and functionality, but certainly in terms of the playerbase that might be interested in such a system.

Why not push for improvements to the faction system to accomplish this?

If you nerf the weapons it's not going to matter much, people will just run mages as usual. And saying it's geared towards role players isn't at all accurate, if role players join then real pvpers will join to kill said role players then that pvper's enemies will join to kill him etc etc. It would just end up as another way for the people already pvping to kill each other, none of which will be interested in "oh, I got ganked and now I can't pvp for x amount of hours because this system is fundamentally flawed by not allowing constant action". I feel like this was thought up without realistic expectations of who will actually participate

What is similar to factions? You aren't a member of a town in factions, you are a team that steals balls that may allow you to spam guards, a few vendors, traps and craft a few items. Factions revolves around pvp, this system does not revolve around pvp. It is separated so more people can join it, you can't update factions here without alienating a majority of the population. If factions was 100% you could have discounts, or high prices, but you could go to different towns to bypass this (so it is dumb even if it was working). I guess it is good to probably just stay with rewards for actively donating and selling/buying from your town.

It is a divided system where the RPer will be non-combatant unless they join the militia. You don't have to pvp for the system to work, pvp is just a side feature kind of like CTF is to normal play. It is not the backbone, like Factions, where you have to pvp. It isn't about constant action, you keep confusing this with factions, this is not factions. Maybe the militia feature could be more like a mini-game so people aren't so easily confused.

I see there's no reasoning with you about this and I don't understand how you could be so blind as not to see that the only people who will be interested in the militia aspect will be people already involved in factions. How many people do you think are here and interested in that system that don't already take part in a consensual pvp outlet?

I don't even know what you are trying to reason about. First you hate that there is no way to lose the items, then you hate that the weapon/equipment was nerfed, then you hate that and this... I don't really care because it isn't like you posted anything worth while. What is a good idea from Kane? Nothing because he just complains about something that doesn't even exist. If factions style combat was merged it may ease your soul, but that whole system would have to be dismantled, it is a broken system that people cant let go of.

I think you're underestimating the the amount of the current pvp crowd that would happily join this solely to pvp so they don't have to worry about losing anything when they die. People love to say they hate trammel and felucca is far superior, but these are the same people who would probably quit or throw such a massive bitchfest if even one of their trammel protections were removed.

Can you imagine the hell Telamon would bring upon himself if he made any of these trammel instanced events like the tamer quest, amibs or holiday events open world non trammel events? Or even if he left all those but removed the ability to bond pets? We would probably lose half the population of the shard or more with that single change.

I don't think we need to add to our already long list of things to do while under the protections of trammel, especially if it involves pvp.

There's no use man, this guy isn't trying to hear any constructive criticism

Not necessarily. There are plenty of people who like to pvp but don't like the idea of factions. The idea of factions is cool, but its just devolved into so much squabbling and bullshit it's not very appealing to someone who doesn't care for drama. I think An Corp does something similar with the town membership and militias, elections and such. Seems to be a pretty popular idea that UOR could perfect.

I'm pretty sure he had talked about losing everything upon death. On OSI there used to be massive rp wars, surely there are a lot of those folks out there looking for a shard to find it on again.

I dunno, I would personally be pretty surprised if there was.

CTF is currently full of people taking advantage of the fact that you don't lose items to kill everyone with valorite axes. What would be in place to ensure this wouldn't happen to the militia system?
A lot of the stuff you posted sounds cool, but I'm not in favor of any kind of item blessing.

Another low risk alternative would be to give everyone baseline militia equipment to use. That way the system won't be gobbed up by rich people with valorite axes looking for easy kills.