Sometimes on the forums, people will have cool ideas for AoC that require a top down perspective of the world with the nodes behaving like individuals for it to work. These ideas often don't take into account that individuals in the MMO will have no way of meaningfully engaging with these systems as they require the organization of entire node populations in a hive-mind manner where they all know what everyone else is doing and behave not necessarily in their personal best interest, but in the best interest of the node. The land management system is one of these systems and is better fit for a 4x game.
Edit: adding to the TLDR based on the conversation in the thread
TLDR:
- For players to engage with the land management system, they require too much information about what everyone is always doing in the area
- The decisions of individual players does not matter here and requires some hive-mind organized behavior to push the outcome in the desired direction
- Most players are not going to be online enough to see or interact with this system because it is ALWAYS 'on' and observing to determine the consequence (as opposed to for example a single siege event that is scheduled in advance)
- It may be best to exploit resources aggressively and early to cause land-management issues for the resources that you have hoarded locally and can then sell at a premium.
Alternatively, for it to be viable...
- good land management needs to be rewarding for both the node (xp) and individual players with rewards as impactful as the consequences (e.g. resource depletion). Over-gathering provides node with a burst of xp that good land management forgoes on, and makes eco-warfare strange since you provide the target node with a big burst of xp to prevent long term xp potential
- individual players should have their contribution to land management somehow tracked for better reward or more severe consequences (if individuals don't have an incentive for land management, it will be mostly ignored I believe) to close some of the exploitation loop holes and provide a better sense of actions -> consequences
- it could have its consequences enacted in the next season during the season transition where resource availabilities and locations are expected to change by the player-base already
There is no level of individual player engagement that is meaningful with this system. What I mean by that, is the choices of you as an individual player are not real choices as they do not reliably lead to the outcome you'd expect. First of all, engaging with this system requires you to have knowledge of what other players are doing. You need to know how much resources are being gathered at all times, their exact identity (exact resources available are not supposed to be always known like what rocks contain what minerals) and with this information you need to compute the re-spawn rates vs consumption rate which means we either lose the mystery of the re-spawn rates or it will never even be possible to predict this system with all reasonable information available. Now, predictability is important here because if you are meant to interact with this system to reach a desired outcome, you need to know what actions to take in order to achieve said outcome.
This leads us into problem number 2: there is no way for an individual player to organize the actions of other players en masse in order to manipulate the outcome. Simply put, the choices of you as an individual is likely insufficient to change the outcome of this system. You could argue the mayor can put out a quest to manipulate this somehow, and assuming the mayor has sufficient knowledge required to do this (which as described above would not be good for that much information to be available), it still requires adherence from the playerbase. This point cannot be over-emphasized, I think many many players will simply not be able to play the game enough to give too many shits about the mayor as their few hours online will be committed to what they want to do for their personal growth, I know I will be one of these 'fuck the king' players, I will do what I want not what the mayor tells me to do. Players are also going to move around and explore and can't be bothered to understand the local eco-system of every part of the world they pass through. So to expect adherence from a passerby is ridiculous and just like how yes there can be cool situations where players from one node go to a neighboring one to deplete their resources incentivizing friction and OWPvP, you will also have times where you get killed for picking up a flower on your journey because you're in the wrong neighborhood without having any freaking idea why.
Lastly, the consequences of this system may go unnoticed, or worse, may not make sense and be punishing independent of your actions. The reward for great land management is ... nothing, no change, the maintenance of the status quo. Your ability to organize large player numbers and fend off other hypothetical organized groups is to maintain your resources. This on its own is not exciting and requires interaction with the economy or other things to be at all rewarding. Now, if there is a drastic change in the resources, let's say something is depleted despite your best efforts, you will feel punished and any positive change may be unpredictable and will have you scrambling on the hamster wheel to exploit it first. But generally speaking, for a player who is not omnipresent in one part of the world, observing all the gathering and collective decisions of the players in that region (like you know, a 4x game), these changes will go unnoticed and will feel like they are randomly changing. With all of the other agents of change in the world (e.g. seasons), layering the land management system on top seems to be pushing things more towards chaos than actions -> consequences.
You may reasonably argue that the destruction of a node also has the problem of maybe feeling punishing as a consequence of actions that you may or may not have been a part of, despite your best efforts. Yes, but with the major difference that node sieges and other game altering processes are temporally predictable. A node siege is scheduled, the changing of the seasons is scheduled, the land management system observes the actions of all players at ALL TIMES.
This brings me to my proposed change in the implementation of the land management system that could salvage it without having to scrap it. Make at least the consequences of this system, occur simultaneously with all of the changes of seasonal change. We already know seasons change resource availabilities and locations with migrations, seasonal resources etc. Players should and will be ready for shifts in the supply chain during seasonal change. If you over-forest in the spring, then have lower tree spawn rates in the summer. If the wolf+rabbit population was kept in check in one season, prevent the migration of the wolves or something. If a node was never mined during winter, give it bonus respawn times or something in spring. This way, resource exploitation vs preservation will be computed over a season (so short term exploits for wood in preparation for a siege for example won't screw people) and won't blindside players of a node, while any consequences will be met with a prepared player-base that will need to adapt to the changing season anyways.
