Hello, I'm in the process of designing the upcoming Guild Territories feature. I'll quickly outline what I'm referring to, after which I have some requests for feedback.

Guild Territories
There will be areas on maps that can be annexed by guilds. While owned, they'll give benefits - perhaps access to secret areas, merchants, buffs to every guild member, etc.

• An unoccupied territory can be claimed for the by any member on behalf of their guild.
• An occupied territory, however, must be raided.
• Upon acquiring a territory, there's a cooldown period, during which it's impervious to attack by other guilds.
• Owned territories will be shown on guild profiles (though perhaps there's a case for being able to obscure some from view, to avoid unwanted attention )
• Guild members must visit a territory occasionally to maintain a presence there. The entire power of the guild does not fully protect it, only those who actively patrol it.

The hope is that this will give guild members something to work together on and encourage more activity.

Which leads on to the next aspect...

Raiding Mechanics
At the moment, I feel like raiding isn't quite right. While not wishing to make things too involved, I think the current system is too hands-off entirely.

Current situation:

• Only one person has to run about forming new raids (costing Turns), and their fellow guild members only have to click Join Raid (for zero Turns...?!), and they often can't be bothered to even do that, though that might be an incentive/reward issue.
• You can only participate in one raid at a time, so big raids stall you from having lots of smaller, easier raids for fear of ruining the big one.
• We also have a bit of a weak point with Guild vs Guild raids, in that the activity is entirely one-sided. It should take a little more effort from both sides, and there has to be something at stake (territories may help here).
• There isn't much map-based interaction going on except for the one player starting the raids, and none at all for direct Guild vs Guild.

My Thoughts On New Raiding Mechanics
I think we need to tie this all into the map a lot more, and I think territorial ownership is the key.

• We need to move away from the notion of joining/leaving a single raid. Instead, we could have a concept of active and pa**ive participants.
  
  • Active participants are guild members that have visited the location of the Boss NPC or Territory on the map and have "checked in" to that location for a small turn cost. Their check-in pledges 100% of their power to the raid, but only for a certain time window (this window could be increased by player/guild upgrades, skill buffs, spending more turns, etc.).
    
    The good thing about this is, you can pledge yourself to several raids simultaneously. It also introduces extra mechanics into the raiding process. For one, you would no longer form a raid that auto-starts at 6 hrs. Instead, you have a sliding window where you have X amount of members joining the raid, and you have have to consider that if you wait too long, some of their pledges will expire, so you need to strike while the iron's hot.
  • Inactive participants are guild members that haven't bothered to visit the raid location on the map, but they're active in the guild. I'm not sure how this would work, but I envisage some sort of pa**ive support in the raid, just for being active. It would amount to a percentage of their total power, rather than 100% (again, something that guild upgrades could influence - % impact of pa**ive raid participants).
• Guild vs Guild raids need to be more interactive. I'd like to treat them as raids against territories, but the sticking point at the moment is that there's no map presence for them. I was thinking:
  
  • We could have a special Hall of Guilds map where you go to form a guild raid.
  • OR, we could give each guild their own map that const*tutes their HQ (in future, they could be allowed to expand from it, add new rooms, etc.)
  I'd prefer to keep it simple for now though, so the first option of a shared guild raid map sounds simplest.

Obviously there are a lot of dials to turn to get something like this working fairly. For instance, how long does a check-in last? Are we talking 30 minutes, or 3 hours? We can probably have players decide for themselves by giving a slider that increases check-in time, but also increases turn cost.

Other issues are harder to solve, like the balance between keeping the game casual, and keeping players working together and being active. I like the idea that the guild could have 100 members, but 10 of them go off and raid Boss NPCs like they're pretty much in a 10 member guild. We should decouple the total member count from the actual guild power rating, because why should a guild be #1 if only half of its members are defending it?

This is exactly what the game needs!

Raiding mechanics as they are aren't the best & the proposal to have people run around the maps checking in to areas isn't good either! Its not going to make people more active if, as you say they are barely active as it is.

However I don't disagree with the ability to join more raids than one (this was an idea in the long lost forums), you should be able to join a number of raids at the same time, but maybe there should be a time limit in starting them. 60 seconds or, if you want to encourage activity, every member that joins the raids reduces the launch cooldown by 1 sec (based on the max guild size of 30 members), so even at 30 active members joined there would still be a launch delay

Using they active/inactive mechanics as they are now could also be factored into raids.

eg active you have a chance to be included in a raid (at full power maybe) earning a percentage of the take
once you turn inactive a sliding scale of chance, power & percentage of the take decreases till zero

This game need such changes to make it more active. So yes. Good idea

I'm thinking that maybe having too many different types of squares or whatever the first picture was might be way to much for people to understand or get used to right off the bat.  But, I wonder whether raiding specific squares or possibly people could just attack specific squares, then maybe once a portion of the map is controlled by a guild then the whole thing becomes theirs.

I think maybe the whole territories thing might be best used as a specific map type, and maybe to start out with, they could have resource nodes and bank squares.  The main draw of conquering these maps would be that you could mine or wc without being disturbed for a while.  The idea for this would be that the only places people can place the resource nodes and bank nodes would be on a pvp(territory) map.  Possibly it could be a thing that every square would have a power value at first, and then people that want to conquer it can attack, but if their power level is not high enough they could start a raid on it.

Possibly I think to add to the whole takes more turns to have more time in a raid might be that you could spend more turns to be able to amplify your power in a raid.  These would be two different sliders/drop boxes.  Maybe a check box on the same start raid screen could be to spend another portion of turns on something like "if there is not enough power then cancel the raid instead of auto starting when there is not enough".

I think also there should be a middle ground, because some guilds will have people that have private maps and can just hide thier territory specific map behind a whitelist door.  There should be some neutral owned maps that everyone can fight over.  Dunno what the draw for that would be, but maybe exp to how long you hold it or credits or maybe something else entirely.

Possibly guilds could spend their hard earned cash from raiding on some kind of castle or weapons to fight in other territory wars with.  Maybe these weapons can give more power to each person or just add to the power of raiding specific territories.

Idk if the territories thing was meant to mean you attack specific squares or not, but I guess that was just the idea I got from it.

I agree with DJ. Having to check-in to an area to raid it would make raiding a nightmare and would inherently decrease activity. I've had a lot going on but I'm willing to do a group of raids with someone. If that in included me running around the maps to check-in, I would not.

I like the territories idea though I'm with Jrady being against guilds using their pa**word protected/ whitelisted maps. As it stands, we have a bunch of different maps. What if we made one for the "FRP world?" One large map with different territories that control different aspects of the game. For instance, one territory could be the bank, so the guild that has that territory gets a .5% cut out of every other guild's raiding winnings as they happen. An Armory territory that gets a percentage of the revenue from repairing items in the future.

Maybe even have that translated into credits the actual members get. You could also have a research territory where members get a small percentage cut from the EXP gained by other members in attacks. A trading territory where members get a cut of the revenue from the armory. That's a bit counter-intuitive to the armory territory but I'm trying to come up with different types that have different advantages.

The problem with this idea is, historically there's usually been one guild that's outcla**ed them all. There have been short times of equality during times of flux, but even then it's usually a max of three contending guilds. I think it should be impossible for a guild to own more than two, at least of these territories that come with perks. It's almost too bad people can make their own maps. It would be awesome if holding a territory meant the guild members got a cut of all exp and credits gained from other players attacking there.

The percentages earned from these territories could also be in flux, constantly changing to give smaller guilds a higher cut to entice new players over. The issue with that would be maintaining a balance between enticing new players over, and enticing guilds to stop recruiting because they get a higher cut. I don't know - that's a complicated one.