The Eviction/Refugee system ( Residential area solution for city takeovers )
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Hey all,
With the recent changes to the city, each city now has a residential area in which nothing changes to the residents even when a city changes hands.
Take note that this means that when a new guild takes over an established city, the new guild may not have enough residential spots to take, and will be forced to settle elsewhere ( unless they choose to reduce their already small city size by building new housing plots, which could involve removing existing city buildings already upgraded by the previous owners ).
What this means is that essentially a new guild would be owning a city where their previous owners have a base of operations much closer to the city than they do, which is pretty weird, and not optimal at all for a game where travel time matters.
So we have two problems here that we need to address :
i) Guilds that take over a city have no place in the city to stay
ii) We don't want to have a system that forces all residents to lose everything they have in their residential plot every time a city gets taken over, this will be a huge loss to players, and is not conducive at all.This is where our proposal system comes in, to address both of these problems.
Basically whenever a city gets taken over, the new governor can choose selected residents to evict at a cost. The residents chosen have to move out, and when they are evicted out, they will get a "refugee" status.
The Eviction System :
Governors need to pay a cost for every resident they want to evict. The cost can be higher the more resources spent to build up the plot of land that the governor is evicting the resident from. This allows new guildies to move in - but at a cost, but due to the high cost, they will not choose to evict random neutral players that were not part of the conflict, they would most likely only choose to evict the enemy guild members that they took the city from.Governor can then have an approval system on who gets to live in the evicted plots, that last for a certain amount of time, if nobody new comes to live in the plot, than anybody can live there, even the evicted person. ( Logically if you evict someone out of the plot, it would be for a guild member to take it, if your guild members or friends dont come and apply to live there, then anyone can live there, even the previously evicted person. )
This then solves both the problems where, the conquerors have no place to live in, and also random and casual players not part of the conflict will most likely not be evicted and can continue living in the residential area as usual.
This would of course increase the cost of sieging, but that's fine, there should always be a cost to sieging anyway.
The Refugee System :
Players who get evicted out of their plots get a "refugee" status. The refugee status means that they cannot be attacked or attack other players. This means no players can cast spells/skills/attack them, and they cannot cast skills/spells/attack anyone else.If a player wants to remove their refugee status, they can either manually choose to do so, or wait for the refugee timer status to run out.
The refugee system is there to protect players who get evicted. We don't want to run into a situation where an evicted person gets paid their compensation, and grabs all their items to move, only to get ganked by the guild who paid them in the first place.
And there you have it folks, many thanks to @spoletta and @LonelyCookie for coming up with the solution together.
TL;DR
When a guild conquers a city, it can evict existing residents for a price, evicted residents have a "refugee immunity" status for a time period to be protected so that they can move their stuff.
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@Rife you rise a very good point here, and the solution is not bad.
I would extend that even more maybe, making the governor able to evict people even after city capture, maybe at higher cost the longer the person has been living there, so that if the guild grows more room can be made for new guildies, always at a cost, a rising cost.
The refugee status system is not bad actually, but something in the back of my mind calls out "exploitable!", but I just can't figure out how right now.
All in all nice job, a good point to start from!
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+1 (good solution atleast in theory, hard to say about 'in practice' would need to try and test it, because as we all know, people ruin everything
)
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There was a reason the devs made those spots untouchable to city sieges. There will be players that do not care who runs the city and merely reside there to use the city's buildings. I don't see how your system does anything to address the second problem you list. Players will still be forced from their houses and lose everything. How is the social player protected under your system? Those taking over will still have the right to evict anyone without the evicted player having any say in it.
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@Farlander They won't lose everything, as they will have time to move all their items from their plot to safe's in cities, and also have enough money from getting evicted, to buy a new plot. All in all, it's actually a very well-rounded solution.
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@Farlander you make a fair point, but that would make conquering cities really inconvenient.
If a guild has a city and all the residential area around, it will be more efficient than a guild that conquered a city and can house its guildies only in the city center.
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@Farlander The point is to also make it costly to evict people. A casual player who owns a residential plot in a city is most likely not going to get evicted because the conquering guild is already going to pay a large amount of money to evict the previous guild members who stay in the city.
Also, evicting cost gets more expensive the more stuff you have built on your plot, so if the casual player has a lot of stuff on his plot, the cost will just not be worth it.
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The Devs have said that the Residential Area outside of a city is not under a city's governance. The city gets a small 'tax' from those plots when they are bought, but that's it. It is purposefully set up so that if you take a Residential Spot, you are completely safe from Sieges and their outcomes, as if to say you are opting out of the Siege subgame.
Although the concerns of the new Guild taking a city may be valid in that they need enough spaces for their guild to call home, such comes at a cost. The new guild must decide how much in-city land to devote to guild residential housing and how much to more utilitarian buildings. That's the breaks, as it were, as the outer area is not owned by the city, merely taxed as a little bonus, that means the Governors have absolutely no say in who gets to squat there. Again, I point out that this is by intent of the Devs. There are far fewer wilderness plots available unattached to cities, and those should get snatched up rather quickly. Next, the plots around the Cities will all get acquired, then, refugee status or not, someone evicted from their home (a place supposedly immune to the aftermath of sieges) may never even have a plot out there available to start over in. This is why they choose to build outside of town instead of inside of town. They may even choose to build close to the city only because its the only plots left available for them to purchase when they go to build...regardless, they have opted out of Siege aftermath consequences, and should be allowed to enjoy their autonomy.
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@GamerSeuss said in The Eviction/Refugee system ( Residential area solution for city takeovers ):
The Devs have said that the Residential Area outside of a city is not under a city's governance. The city gets a small 'tax' from those plots when they are bought, but that's it. It is purposefully set up so that if you take a Residential Spot, you are completely safe from Sieges and their outcomes, as if to say you are opting out of the Siege subgame.
Except that this will definitely not be the case. Most of the residents of a city is going to be the players who first own the city as well as their friends and allies. This means that when a new guild comes in and takes over, they are going to be in a weird position, mainly due to the fact that the previous occupants actually live closer to the city than they do. This will definitely lead to undesirable behaviour where taking a city is going to make it hard for you to keep it since the previous owner can launch attacks from areas near your city while you struggle since you cant build near your own city anymore.
This is also why there is a cost to evict someone. This means that new city owners will not evict people for no reason, and would primarily only evict the previous city members to take over their houses so that they can establish a proper base in their city.
Existing players in cities should be aware of the political climate of the city, and they can always make contact with the new owners to establish good relationships. ( Residents would want to have close relationships with the city owner anyway, so that they can use crafting stations of the city and to also let the city owners know which crafting stations they'd like to see upgraded/built ).
I don't agree that residents should have no contact with the city owners at all, this is an mmorpg, so social interaction in this game should be a key, if you do not want to have relationships with any city, then it's better to live in the wilderness ( although not sure if that's still going to be a thing with the residential areas now )
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@Rife Except wilderness plots, if any, are going to be very few.
I'm not saying Residents never deal with the city. When they go into the City itself, they are interacting with the City. As I've repeated on MANY MANY occasions, MMORPG doesn't mandate group play. Sometimes you simply want to play within an environment where you can directly compare your progress with other players, but prefer to solo through most of the game. You want a living environment, BUT you want the option to opt out of or into certain activities based on your mood as a player. Want to take on larger than life monsters never meant to be solo'd, then you group in Raid Groups of convenience for that purpose, but otherwise, you want to mostly stick to your own thing, feel free to do so. MMORPGs are different things for different people, and I know a lot of serious gamers who solo through most of their gaming career.
Yes, there is a good chance that many of the Residential spots will be taken up by Guildies of the first guild running the town, and their Allies, but several spots will also be taken by Solo'ists looking for a plot of their own, free from the fallout of Sieges. They are still affected, because when the new 'Owners' of a City come in, they may end up tearing down the one crafting station you mainly used the town for, necessitating you taking your goods further afield to get them finished. That's the breaks, you take that bad with the good of not having to lose your house when a Siege is decided. The Governors don't control the Residential district, period. They get a passive tax on building/upgrading, and that's it. They can't say who gets to stay or go, that was made quite clear by the Devs, and thus no amount of money should change that. The city is owned by the Governor and his Guild, the Residential plots are not, so if there aren't enough plots for a new Guild who takes over, they get to decide what City buildings stay and which ones must go to make room for residences.
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This really sounds like a tricky topic, having no reliable way to tell true soloists apart from old guild supporters when a city gets captured.
I agree with @Rife that you can really end up in a situation where the first guild owning a city can in fact hold it by leaving its members around the now enemy city, exploiting resources and having a permanent untouchable base of operation against the city itself.
On the other hand I also agree with @GamerSeuss on the fact that soloists taking home in residential areas should not be damaged by city change of head.
Devs have already said their position, but of course positions can change if reality shows that the system is ending up being damaging the game core mechanics.
In the end if the whole guild war system will be damaged too much by that, probably the soloists will end up paying for it by seeing the introduction of eviction system, who knows.
I'm often a soloist, but I understand that the game style of few can't destroy the main mechanic of most.
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I'd say that's one of these systems and situations where you can't please everybody and where you have to find a way 'between'. But that's best determined by testing, so, wait for how things develop during this test when we first have sieges. Try to play these 'game weakness' the best you can, because that is what the developers need to see in order to make an informed decision. And then, you can talk about it again when the 'results are in' and it's going into the next iteration of design?
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@Logain Problem with "test and see" is that during alpha (and maybe even beta) we will never reach the limits of city capacity to test it. There has to be over 300 residential plots ( Myr is for 10k ppl max, 10k / 35cities => 300 give or take some). You will not encounter the problem Rife is describing until we either hit late beta "ultra-hype" with free-keys-galore or on release. And thats way too late.
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@Logain indeed we're making speculations without knowing how the game will evolve.
I for one am used to try and see possible exploits in everything, so I see some here, in one way or another.
But maybe in the end the losing guild will prefer to leave the city altogether and move to the next place, who knows.
It's good to rise the point though, food for thoughts.
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@GamerSeuss said in The Eviction/Refugee system ( Residential area solution for city takeovers ):
Yes, there is a good chance that many of the Residential spots will be taken up by Guildies of the first guild running the town, and their Allies, but several spots will also be taken by Solo'ists looking for a plot of their own, free from the fallout of Sieges. They are still affected, because when the new 'Owners' of a City come in, they may end up tearing down the one crafting station you mainly used the town for, necessitating you taking your goods further afield to get them finished. That's the breaks, you take that bad with the good of not having to lose your house when a Siege is decided. The Governors don't control the Residential district, period. They get a passive tax on building/upgrading, and that's it. They can't say who gets to stay or go, that was made quite clear by the Devs, and thus no amount of money should change that. The city is owned by the Governor and his Guild, the Residential plots are not, so if there aren't enough plots for a new Guild who takes over, they get to decide what City buildings stay and which ones must go to make room for residences.
The city area is much smaller now, so wanting to move a bunch of your guildies and allies in is going to severely weaken your city's productiveness.
The current system is not going to appease to new players 1-2 years after Fractured is release. A potential new guild would look at the systems in the game, realize they cant move in to a city which is already well established, and simply choose to move on to a different game where they can actually move in to a city that they essentially take over.
The Fractured system right now is just plain weird. You can take over a city, but you may not necessarily be able to live there. That line itself has so many things wrong with it, I'm really not sure how people seem to be okay with that.
A good portion of Fractured's gameplay loop is going to be about cities. Sieges are a big part of that. Preventing people from being able to live in the cities they take over is a huge turn off to the whole mechanic. People will not want to go through such a hassle to take over a city if they cant even live in the city they've taken over without destroying your cities productivity and efficiency, while having the previous city owners all live in comfort in your city's residence. It just does not make sense period.
The system that I propose is basically the fine line that balances solo play and group play. Solo players wont be affected by city take overs still because it's costly to remove neutral players out of your residence ( you also want solo players to be in your residence to be able to rank up ), but you are able to evict enemy players from your city so that you can move in. This system is basically the "between" that @Logain mentioned.
But yes, like what @LonelyCookie mentioned, this system is hard to test, the scenarios that I describe would only come about after cities are fully developed and lived in after all.
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Scenario: New Guild Takes over the 2nd City of a current Guild. Most of their Guild that don't live in the City Limits of this city have residences @ the guild's main city. In fact, they probably only hold maybe 10 Residential Plots in their #2 city (and even less in #3+)
New Guild comes in, they are 100 strong so need to free up 100 residential spaces to accommodate their guild. In town they get say a round dozen, and then they go to evictions, they only have about 10 confirmed enemy guildies in the residential area, and they still need 78 more houses to house everyone....now, suddenly the Soloist are being evicted, not because their an enemy guildy, but because they are inconvenient to the new Guild, even though the Devs have said that to facilitate the Solo'ist play style, they are divorcing the Residential area from the Governors' control.
What happens now?
Most of the compromises in the game are leaning towards the PvP/Guild/Large group side of things, and the Devs have indicated that they wish to give the Solo'ists equal treatment as best they can, so this is a compromise that I think needs to go to the Solo'ist side of things.
Let's just face facts, when you take over an existing, established city with a full residential area, you may not get housing for your entire guild out of it. There is the shared housing option, where a single house can have multiple co-owners and the benefits there-in, so the new guild may just find themselves having to do that to accommodate everyone given the land available to them.
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@GamerSeuss I agree with soloists getting their cut out of it, but in this case the point is that there is an optimal case with all the residential in the hands of the governing guild, and suboptimal cases with the majority of the population in and around the city not belonging to the guild.
So ok, I'm a soloist so I can only cheer at that, but I don't want my soloist fun to spoil what will really move the game at high levels.
Maybe when the game is established enough, all cities will have changed hands enough times for all the residential areas to be meltin' pots and not really under guilds' control, so we'll have an equality in the fact that no guild is owning their whole surrounding area, and in that case it would be fair.
As we said it's hard to tell for real until we play it enough to see when it'll go, but I'd say the eviction system could be a good fallback, should things not work out well with the current state of art.
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@GamerSeuss In your example, then yes, some of the solo's will get evicted to make space for the new city's guild members, but I think in certain cases like the example you put out, this just cannot be avoided to maintain a functional system.
A functional system is one where in residential plots change hands depending on who owns the city, and not a static system where residential plots are based on first come first serve.
Which system do you think promotes a better health of the game? A game where residential plots are not static - where new players have a chance to fight for spots ( even casual players who want to own a residential plot can then join a guild and then work together to fight for plots in an existing city ) And most importantly - evicted players get a safe period to safely remove their stuff so none of their items get lost.
Or a static system where once a plot gets claimed, it's claimed forever. No new players have a chance to fight for it, city takeovers dont get a chance to fight for it, nobody can fight over plots, leading well established cities to hold it's dominance forever and putting off any new players from trying to join in the gameplay loop.
Think about all the emergent gameplay systems that can arise from a healthy eviction system, versus how much restrictions are created due to a static system like the one currently.
The eviction system is not a deterrent to the solo'ist playstyle. It is only promoting the solo-ist to be more inclusive in it's gameplay loop systems. We cannot exclude anyone who lives in the residential area from entering the political system of a city take over because the residential area is so tightly coupled into the fight for the city.
And sure, in your scenario solo's have to move, but they are paid compensation, and they can move safely. In short, they lose little. But a scenario where a guild cannot move in to the residential area of their city will hurt the guild a lot more than a solo needing to leave the city to settle elsewhere safely and with little to no loss.
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@Rife said in The Eviction/Refugee system ( Residential area solution for city takeovers ):
And sure, in your scenario solo's have to move, but they are paid compensation, and they can move safely. In short, they lose little.
But later game, the Solo'ist, who fought to earn enough to get a plot early and claimed a spot, now may not have any spots available as a solo'ist and must join a Guild in order to own property again as all solo plots are taken. This is completely unacceptable. Nothing should force a solo'ist into joining a guild. Late game joiners may not get any plots at all, and that's true of Guild members as well as solo'ists, which only encourages the Devs to create new continents and new Residential/City areas late game during expansions periodically, which IS a good growth system. The game starts with 3 planets and 3 continents per planet, and a fixed number of cities per continent, but as new releases come out, that can be expanded upon. 'Lost Continents' and even Underground Cities can be discovered and claimed.
Joining a game early has always had the benefit of giving a few advantages to the early birds, just like the first colonists got the choice plantation spreads in the new world. Keep Residential areas divorced from direct City interference and let the solo'ists shine. Taking over a city after siege should necessitate some rebuilding within the City, that's part of the aftermaths of war. Instead of rebuilding that 3rd Tannery, make that plot a Housing plot, that area previously cleared for farming land might no longer be viable as a source of food farming, make it housing and buy your food from neighboring cities. Rebuild and Restructure when you take a new city, but realize there are no guarantees of availability for your entire guild.
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@GamerSeuss said in The Eviction/Refugee system ( Residential area solution for city takeovers ):
But later game, the Solo'ist, who fought to earn enough to get a plot early and claimed a spot, now may not have any spots available as a solo'ist and must join a Guild in order to own property again as all solo plots are taken. This is completely unacceptable. Nothing should force a solo'ist into joining a guild. Late game joiners may not get any plots at all, and that's true of Guild members as well as solo'ists, which only encourages the Devs to create new continents and new Residential/City areas late game during expansions periodically, which IS a good growth system. The game starts with 3 planets and 3 continents per planet, and a fixed number of cities per continent, but as new releases come out, that can be expanded upon. 'Lost Continents' and even Underground Cities can be discovered and claimed.
I think we are going to have to agree to disagree with this. Early players already get loads of advantage with city, equipment, skills, etc etc. They definitely do not need a free permanent spot that can never be taken as well, this makes large guilds who come first have well established cities that people have almost 0 incentives to take over.
Creating 10-20 homes in your city by destroying existing buildings is not going to be feasible anyhow, so the argument to make homes in the buildable area of your city is a pretty bad one. Why play a game which has you taking over a city only to need to massively lose it's efficiency and productivity to have an even standing with people you've already beaten who get to freely live near your city and continue to harass you with ease, while you have to sacrifice your city buildings to be able to live there. Makes zero gameplay sense. This system is a huge detriment to the city siege gameplay loop and has to change, hence my suggestion.
