I hope you guys can hear me out here and like the thread so we can garner the attention of Nathan and the EC team. This is a viable way to add a more open world feel, without really being open world and giving the game an MMO feel in a similar way to how Guild Wars 1 (which wasnt a 'true' mmorpg yet often felt like one), and more significantly, Global Agenda did. Global Agenda was a really good game back in 2009/2010 which sadly fizzled out around the time that Tribes Ascension and then Planetside 2 came out. It syled itself an MMO Shooter, in reality it wasn't but it had many interesting aspects that did indeed give it an MMO feel. Of particular interest was the hex based world map made of interconnected zones that each supported up to 32 players, we would top that by running up to 60, perhaps even one day, 100 player battles for some hexes. Owning particularl hexes gave bonuses to the faction. Choosing which hex to attack was organised by the heads of clans/guilds. Which leads me to my second point. In order to promote a sense of community in real time and comradeship with the faction, we need to have a fortress type building for players of the faction to hang out between battles. This would be similar to the training grounds up to a point, but based inside a fortress. The training ground would still exist but be outside the fortress and players would still come here to access the progression abilities. Requisitions would be done inside the fortress, it would also serve as a chat room with /ooc and RP modes. It would be broken into instances of 100. Seeing that there is no combat as such to be calculated inside the fortress, it will be easier to stop things from lagging with that high number of players due to ballistics not being calculated. It will also host codexes where players can learn of their faction and chapters lore etc. The inside of the fortress would also host the facility to queue for PVE quests (which i hope can be expanded on and improved) and there would be a command room where only clan leaders or acting clan leader can access which is where the faction decides what hex to attack next which is effectively done by a vote. The size of clan would be relative to vote points but there would be a cap and minimum entry level. Obviously this would still take a fair amount of work to implement but the beauty of it is that it is workable within the existing engine and with a long term goal of adding 100 player battles. It would greatly improve the experience a user gets from the game and encourage the enthusiasm amongst gamers and 40k fans that the game will need if it is to grow and remain popular so please heed these words!
So some dude desides what map to play? Where is the additional fun in that? This is going to be at best WoW open world raiding, when a hoard of screaming people attack the city just to get past the guards and some noobs.
That's supposedly how the world map is going to work once it's done. Making a fortress with all this stuff will take too much time and efforts, though. It's something that can be looked into when the game is on a more stable footing(provided it even survives that long), but for now there are more pressing concerns.
Well there was a plan to have a war council made out of voted players that choose where to attack. No idea if we will get it ever.
Also Kengur, the hex based grid part of the map could be made to run as an alternative to the lobby based maps that already exist, a system of rounds, akin to a turn based could stop people just taking over empty, unguarded hexes. Once optimisation and balance is pretty much reached that is the time to invest in such a direction i think.
