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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Worries about mayoral system being monthly and singular
Jam21
Member
So, on latest devstream, there were some details about mayoral system.
It confirmed that it will be 1 person per city, not council or something (like it was in Rising Force Online for example), and elections/competition for mayor would be held only once per month.
This really concerns me, as I know too well how these systems WILL fail if implemented in that way, based on my experiences in MMOs of the past:
1) A month is A LOT. One person getting basically free reign over territory and its taxes for entire month is big. Ye, it sounds cool on paper, but in fact it means for a month the node will be completely at the mercy of 1 (one) person.
2) ...So if something goes wrong, for a month ONE person will have all the fun, while all others people in the node will suffer. Do I really need to explain how bad this will be for population (people just plain leaving game because of this)
Trading possible fun and great RMT option for 1 (one) person for frustration and disspointment of hundreds, possibly thousands other players on node? Do you really wanna go that way, Interpid?
The possible solutions I see:
1) Instead of one singular mayor, let players elect/compete for a council. Same rules as mayoral election, but instead of one, like top 5 or top 11 best gets elected. So if mayor leaves game/misbehaves/etc other council members can block his decisions by majority voting against it and/or act in his stead.
This would mean that even if elected major immediately go RMTh is acc, or just do nothing but afk and collect exorbitant tax, or intentionally grief people living on node by abusing his powers - there is still council to do keep things more or less organized until the next election or competition.
2) Simply reduce mayoral term to 1 or 2 weeks. Better to 1. In most games major events that shape the world and politics, such as sieges/elections and the like, are held either weekly or bi-weekly. This allow for more dynamic world, so even if at some times something goes wrong, next week the landscape and personalities change. One or even two weeks of afk major would still do much harm, but will not be critical or make people leave game. One month? Sure will.
This is one thing that really keeps concerning me much about the game as of now. Combat can be fixed, story & quests can be improved. But this system, giving 1 (one) person insane powers and income for an entire month at the expense of everyone else on the node, if implemented this way, will eventually be this game's doom.
It confirmed that it will be 1 person per city, not council or something (like it was in Rising Force Online for example), and elections/competition for mayor would be held only once per month.
This really concerns me, as I know too well how these systems WILL fail if implemented in that way, based on my experiences in MMOs of the past:
1) A month is A LOT. One person getting basically free reign over territory and its taxes for entire month is big. Ye, it sounds cool on paper, but in fact it means for a month the node will be completely at the mercy of 1 (one) person.
2) ...So if something goes wrong, for a month ONE person will have all the fun, while all others people in the node will suffer. Do I really need to explain how bad this will be for population (people just plain leaving game because of this)
Trading possible fun and great RMT option for 1 (one) person for frustration and disspointment of hundreds, possibly thousands other players on node? Do you really wanna go that way, Interpid?
The possible solutions I see:
1) Instead of one singular mayor, let players elect/compete for a council. Same rules as mayoral election, but instead of one, like top 5 or top 11 best gets elected. So if mayor leaves game/misbehaves/etc other council members can block his decisions by majority voting against it and/or act in his stead.
This would mean that even if elected major immediately go RMTh is acc, or just do nothing but afk and collect exorbitant tax, or intentionally grief people living on node by abusing his powers - there is still council to do keep things more or less organized until the next election or competition.
2) Simply reduce mayoral term to 1 or 2 weeks. Better to 1. In most games major events that shape the world and politics, such as sieges/elections and the like, are held either weekly or bi-weekly. This allow for more dynamic world, so even if at some times something goes wrong, next week the landscape and personalities change. One or even two weeks of afk major would still do much harm, but will not be critical or make people leave game. One month? Sure will.
This is one thing that really keeps concerning me much about the game as of now. Combat can be fixed, story & quests can be improved. But this system, giving 1 (one) person insane powers and income for an entire month at the expense of everyone else on the node, if implemented this way, will eventually be this game's doom.
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Comments
I might almost argue that it should be two months, then it would really be long enough for the mayor's economic plans, diplomatic efforts, taxation policies and so forth to either obviously work or not work.
I don't think that the arguments made in the post above are valid. The mayor neither has "free reign" nor "all the fun". They have limited decision making power that influences node life: tax rate, building decisions, and military defense decisions are example. A higher tax rate implies more buildings, more defenses. But the mayor cannot take the money for personal use.
A competent mayor should get reelected in a Scientific node and would be less likely to have serious competition in an economic node (if the mayor does a good job, everyone gets rich so no reason to spend money to outbid him) or a religious node (if the mayor does a good job, why bother spending time to run against him)? An incompetent mayor will attract opposition in those nodes.
The military nodes, the ones which attract the PvPers? Well, they will probably be a sh*tshow regardless of the competency of the mayor, simply because of the type of player attracted to that kind of node, right?
I had the worst possible leaders in other games for years and did not leave the guild/corporation/aliance just because my friends were there too and it is also a social event talking behind the leader's back and watch closely him fail.
The drama, the backstabbing, ganking your mayor with alts and friends, the protests, these are all content, whatever comes is all content
A month seems like a reasonable amount of time to me. Personally, I wouldn't want to be mayor for any less than a month because if things start to pick up, it wouldn't be fair to have to leave so soon. There's many contacts, diplomacy and intrigue to be made
One week would be a joke of time, in one week the mayor could be in maybe one siege, then he starts to learn his job and he has to leave? No way
That's the mount I want if I become mayor, a sedan chair!
And give me all that sweet power too!
Anyway, everybody can have power in a game, guild leaders, alliance leaders, people from secret ingame groups, economical power, spying, ganking, etc. Those are the people who have true power, they can move wars and their reign doesn't expire in 30 days
If you want true power, create a player run cassino and take bets in sieges
The action keys on my keyboard should be switched to trumpet notes, so I can announce when I am passing by and my subjects can applaud me
Maybe, is in order having a small fanfare too
Problem is the gaming community is nothing like it was back then, its a completely different beast these days!
That being said, there should be measures to replace a mayor in the event they chose to step out of game/absent for a period of time or step down from the position
If its Divine, the mayor did most contributions to the growth of the node, se he is capable.
Mayor elected from economy node will prob. be guild leader that got together moneypool, so basically you will have best guild in that node as leaders, and they will try their best to grow that zone.
Scientific nodes which should use votes will prob be "worst" because of streamers etc. Unknown players will have disadvantage in beginnings, until they make name for themselves.
Either way, month is perfectly fine. If capable people take top position, later in game, you wont see too much change in leadership anyway. If you won because you have most gold as guild, you will accumulate that wealth again, and again. Some cities will just be like that.
The same old players have grown older. I can't speak for the newest generation or state how many new generation will outnumber us by but even those players will be held to account by the experienced players and guilds.
More importantly, they’ll be held accountable by their own actions by dealing with whoever they allow to be put in office! Imagine that. And if a tyrant comes to power through non-Democratic means, they can be given the means to form a rebellion by joining another node that wants to take over the area or by disrupting trade in their node system.
Reference: https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx3yaEc6v_kK2AxwxPwEOFaS_pL3o_IsFK
But yeah, generally speaking, if real world politicians are able to hold their positions for actual years at a time and still not see all their economic / political plans come to fruition, what exactly do you expect mayors to do in 1-2 weeks?
With that being said, one month is fine. Having new elections every week or every other week sounds exhausting,
If a mayor is banned, it should trigger a new election immediately. If they are offline for 2 weeks, I think the same. Arguably even after one week. If players want the power and responsibility ingame, RL vacations etc. will have to be put on hold. If they get hospitalized I wish them a speedy recovery, and they can try for mayorship again once they are well.
Two weeks it's too much
If you are offline for 4 days you should be booted if there's no deputy mayor
But if there's a deputy mayor, we could go with 1-2 weeks
We know real life is important, but if your real life doesn't let you be there, then there's no reason to be mayor
I am pretty sure the mayor can appoint officials to help handle some of the day to day business.
I have vague memories about this, also the wiki doesn't have the small details about stuff in general
I'm more worried about the guild run castles. Those also last a month, but govern 1/5th of the whole map and supposedly guild leaders can withdraw funds for personal use. That means it only takes 2 people on a power trip to screw over 40% of the server for a whole month. These people are also the guild leaders of big PvP guilds... so I kind of expect them to be power tripping pricks. That sounds like a recipe for depopulating a server.
Here's to hoping they rethink that design. I would much prefer if the benefit of owning a castle is primarily the amenities of the castle and its castle towns themselves. Let the big PvP guilds fight among themselves without punishing everyone else.
Thats what I was talking about, mayors have no real power, just because the mayor is a glorified public servant with a few buttons to click doesn't make him powerful.
Real power is behind guilds, alliances, secret clubs, scheeming, spying, etc; this kind of power lasts, while mayorship lasts for 30 days
For example:
Mayor
Priests, bishops, or acolytes in certain temples
Patron guild leader
Chief bounty hunter.
I encourage you to check out the wiki on mayors, node governments, and leadership powers, if you haven't already! ^_^
You might think you know something will fail or succeed, but saying it doesn't make it true.
1) Sure, one month might be too long, but I'd imagine that many secondary systems/node features also depend on that amount of time. So, in other words, one month long mayor terms mean that decisions matter a lot more than if a mayor could be replaced every two weeks.
2) Why do you think being mayor is fun? Screw that, it must be annoying af. Why do you think other people in the node will suffer? First of all, most likely mayors will be guild leaders of the larger guilds, that's the easiest way to get enough votes. If you're a citizen of node X (if you aren't, it makes no difference to you), you'll either want to help node X because you like the mayor i.e. their guild or you want node X hurt because you dislike the mayor and/or want to replace him. If nothing works, there's around 81 different nodes for you to move to and be happier: you're not changing servers, you're just moving to a different place.
When you mentioned RMT, sure, that's a real problem. Mayors might purposefully hurt their own Node because someone transferred $100 to them. However, it doesn't matter if they're mayors for 2 weeks or 2 months, if they want to hurt it, the damage they'd able to deal should scale with how long a mayor's term is. Last but not least, that's not a game design problem, that's a rule being broken. So you shouldn't ask the design to be changed, but instead for rule breakers to be banned. Which, in this case, will probably be next to impossible to detect unless someone rats them out.
Woo! New data!
Before posting i would recommend to actually check how some systems work. TAX does not go to the player(s) in charge, Tax goes to the node, or castle that governs the region, and is used to pay for upkeep and start new projects to develop the town. With node sieges having a cooldown between them, as well as projects having a significant ammount of time and effort, a single month will accomodate for a maximum of 1 siege, and 1 to 3 projects. Note that as of yet, there are no deprimental projects known.
In addition, leadership roles are something that only a select few have the time, resources or skill to obtain.
In addition, election rigging, is going to incentivice gameplay, so thats all good.
Sorry, but I actually read the wiki. So far, it states that only one ruler per node.
Whether they are called majors, bishops, bounty hunters etc, is based of the type of the node - e.g. Religious have bishops, Military - champions or whatever etc. Wiki does not states anything about them being in one node all.
It would be great if you can as a community manager shed some light on the details of governments of nodes, within ONE node. The current information in wiki is confusing and is in conflict with recent interviews of your devs regarding these systems implementation.
All I ask is 2 questions:
1) Can you confirm or deny that there are plans for multiple electible/competitive(=NOT appointed by singular major/bishop etc) roles within ONE node?
2) What are the Interpid team's thoughts about time intervals between elections/major changes? My thought is that if they will be too slow-going, people will just will not be interested in them as much.
I believe for many here would be very interesting to hear at least your team's thoughts on it. Or you can address it in the next Q/A. Or just give it some thought.
Because I know all too well from experience that "devil is in the details" - and with such a complex labyrinth of systems that you have announced - it is even more important than usual.
P.S. I do hope to see these systems in next Alpha, so we can actually try them out and see them in whatever for they'll be at that stage.
Hahaha. You clearly never played serious MMO's with complex political and/or guild systems. Or, at least not on a competitive/leadership level.
Its will not be as in Runescape where a couple of dudes chill out and everyone just accepts their role for the sake of it.
Of recent games, recent Albion Asia launch is the closest to what will be at the start of AoC, with all those planned systems in place.
Other example - New World launch. Especially outside the top 3 servers.
"only a select few", good joke pal. I wish it was like you imagine it sometimes, but alas - people always gonna people.
Election rigging is always a thing in games like this, yes. What I'm saying is that if there is only 1 real winner in the end (even if there is guild behind them), this means, the fun will be only during the election.
When there are multiple positions to win, it actually allows for competition not only in election, but also during terms - now THAT is the thing that will actually ignite the competition and thus the fun in the long term.
If after elections the losing teams won't get anything and only 1 winners gets undisputed rulership for whole month - it will only "incentify" leaving the game for losers, and may actually cause breakups in winning guild as well (with singular leader of node position being extremely valuable in case of "only 1 per month", high chance of newly elected rulers just straight go RMT after gaining the position, since it is not bound to guild).
Could you perhaps share how exactly they'd rmt their mayorship? I'm just curious.
Disagree. Funds are attached to the node and not free to go to the mayor's pocket, and allowing only one mayor without checks and balances will allow for tasty drama.
I am not going to attempt to correct you, I will simply point out to you that you very clearly read through the wiki page with a pre existing assumption (probably from another game), and that assumption clouded your perception of what you were reading.
There is no point in trying to correct your misunderstanding until you have rid yourself of that pre conceived notion.
Sell the account, that simple.
If that would be possible to do that without losing any progress or stuff, then yes that may solve the issue in part, but then another will arise - if it will be too easy to "just move" people will have no motivation to fight for their node or participate in its development.
And that about with every choice when implementing complex systems like this. It is a very ambitions undertaking, to build such systems.
So, as you can see, my general concern right now, and by chatting here it is only confirmed - is that these systems, while may sound very "cool" on paper - and maybe they will also be super fun when tried on Alpha with dedicated community members who are willing to "play by the book" - but to make them work in actual game on release and not ruin it - is not a trivial task.
Literally any other rmt method would be way more profitable and would also be repeatable. This is a very weak argument against the system.