[Poll] YOUR View: Warclaims

[Danny 2232]

The following thread contains a proposal regarding the War-Claim System. Please ensure you read it fully before voting and then give your opinions in a post below. Be civil in your discussions. Be aware: This is in no way officially happening, however it may happen if you (the playerbase) agree it would benefit the server.

The War-Claim system was implemented to make wars fairer, easier to manage and more enjoyable for all parties. It does none of these things, instead the War-Claim system..:

• Promotes meta-gaming, by making the threads on the forums publicly.
• Removes the ability for spontaneous battles.
• Made wars in fact, a giant amount less 'roleplay-ish'.
• Causes larger OOC conflict than the old 'war when you want' system.
• Results in more ban reports during wars.
• Has caused many good players to leave the server after terrible experiences in war.

Those players who were still around in Aegis will recall the way wars previously worked, essentially wars did not have to be planned months in advance and times specifically set, with big lists of players involved, etc. Battles could be spontaneous, and people had a much more enjoyable time from it. There was less OOC conflict between the warring parties, and there was less ban reports made after wars. Overall, it was a nice kind of war.

Since the introduction of our new War-Claim System, the ‘faeces has hit the fan’. People have to make a public thread that says “We’re attacking this person at this time on this day at this location with these people for this reason with these terms”. This opens a giant space for huge amounts of metagaming - and that metagaming does occur. Let’s take a ‘case study’ as an example. The Subudai’s attack on the City of Skravia.

This battle begun with the Subudai preparing for war. A certain player (whom I shall not name) claimed he’d heard of the attack (which was in fact done via metagaming). He then alerted Skravia who called for all of it’s allies, and the battle didn’t go as it should have. There was then a second secret attack launched on Skravia to make up for the fact the Subudai did not get to participate in the battle they had aimed on making, which resulted in essentially a mass no-rp kill. After this battle we lost a giant amount of players who had been inside Skravia at the time and had lost their items and minas. Our metagamer mentioned earlier, must have taken the information from the War-Claim as he was aware of the times, locations and everything about the war.

That is just one example of a War-Claim that has resulted in a horrid player experience there have been many more, take for example: a previous Orcs vs Dwarves war, the War-Claims on Salvus and the more recent Teutonic Order/Realm of Hanseti vs Dwarf War-Claim. These all resulted horribly and left the players involved with a bad experience.

So, how can we remedy this?

We don’t want to go back to the Aegis battles where people could attack whenever, wherever for any reason. We also don’t want to keep War-Claims, because of the problems they cause. Why not make a compromise between them both?:

The Proposal
This proposal is fairly simple. We remove the War-Claim System entirely, and introduce regulations for war. The regulations are as follows: (The word party refers to the group involved in the war, whether it be a guild, organisation, city, or nation, etc.) Be aware; these rules are bendable depending on circumstances.

Before a Battle may occur:

• The ruler of the defending party must be online, and informed OOC’ly at least two hours before the conflict is due to occur.
• The attacking party must contact the GM Team and get at least one GM present for the entire battle, this ensures the war rules are sufficiently kept and that there is always support from GMs for things such as trebuchets and any rule breaks. The GM present must be neutral to both parties, and in most cases two (or more) should be present. Any GMs fighting are to be made "normal members" for the battle.
• A part may only attack another party once per week.
• A capital may not be conquered unless the land surrounding it has been conquered first.
• If land is being conquered, it must border with the attacking parties land or must be a naval assault.

Rules during battle:

• During battle no player may return to the battlefield after death until the battle is over.
• Conflict may only occur inside a specific radius, which is to be defined by the GM overseeing the battle to prevent innocent players being ‘no-rp killed’.

Rules during a siege:

• The siege must last an appropriate amount of roleplay days rather than a straight out “instant smash down the walls attack”.
• The attacking party must stop outside, and give the defenders the chance to rally, rather than simply walking in and slaying everyone.

Of course, these are just basic, example rules, if this system is to be implemented we shall have to develop these regulations and ensure that they are sufficiently enforced.

So, what happens if the defending party turns around and says “No, we don’t want to fight, so you can’t attack”.

In a case like this, the attacking party should contact a GM and ask them to try and deal with the situation. Depending on the defenders reasoning they may be permitted to decline the battle. Reasons such as having only one or two players online due to timezones, and the battle being caused by metagaming are reasons which a GM might consider valid - whereas reasons such as they don’t feel like fighting will result in a blunt “Tough luck.”.

So, how would this improve conflicts on the Lord of the Craft?:

• It returns the more fluid, enjoyable, and more roleplay-style of battle.
• It returns a system that resulted in a lot less out-of-character conflict, reports and arguments.
• It continues to allow us to moderate the conflict properly.
• It returns a system that most of the Aegis playerbase, did in fact, prefer to our new system. of War-Claims.

Now, discuss and vote - it's time for you to give your view.

[Dalek348 1962]

The sooner we get rid of them the better.

[Ever 2648]

it's time for you to give your view.

?

Players have been expressing their dislike for this system since it came out. Nice to see it's finally being changed though.

[Danny 2232]

?

Players have been expressing their dislike for this system since it came out. Nice to see it's finally being changed though.

Their view on the proposal.

[Ever 2648]

Their view on the proposal.

Kay. Well I think it's great. A good blend between the two.

[JoakimVonAnka 63]

My experience is that it doesn't really matter if you have warclaims or not, there will still be people breaking the rules either way on both sides.

It's the Skravia warclaim history, I'm refering to.

[Vekrus 396]

I agree. War claims seem to be more of a hassle and promote a lot of meta-gaming. Good work, Danny. I am all for the change.

[ek_knight 21]

Although the current system is flawed I don;t think this new system would work out particularly well. The problem is that it does not encourage having a reason behind fighting, as someone can literally just log in and decide they want to have a battle. As a compromise perhaps a PM could be sent by the attackers before the battle (not necessarily days in advance but at least a few hours). This would detail reasoning for the battle and the way they are notifying their troops of this battle. Then if GM (or two preferably to prevent OOC drama) sees that it is okay, the defenders could be notified. This would prevent meta-gaming but at least hopefully allow for some reasoning for war.

[Austin 697]

2 hours? I say atleast a day, to allow his players to be online and such. Because isn't it metagaming if not all the players can be potentially online..

Also a good example of why Warclaims were implemented in the first place is because back in Aegis when the Orcs fought the Dwarves, the dwarves came randomly EVERY day when we usually had 1 or two people online and would declare attack, that is just rediculous even with the 2 hour notice because sometimes people can't have all there players on, etc.

[Skippy 2466]

Remove them.

And fast.

[Praetor 1550]

So, I support this fully. I had made a post with about the same things written in it but I dissapeared into the void, since I was unable to find it in the archives or anywhere. Anyway, I only dissagree with this.

If land is being conquered, it must border with the attacking parties land or must be a naval assault.

This is a quote from another forum which explains what I want to say very well. The first quote if from "Charlie4vB" the Second part is mine.

Quote

Right, so here we have Blue Nation and Green Nation, some Orange Nation, but no one likes him. Because I like blue, we'll be blue nation. As Blue nation, we want to expand. Looking around there are three territories we like. One directly to the south west, marked grey for neutral, one south of us marked green and a farm nation (by a green cylinder) and another way to the east belonging to orange nation. We want that one just because we don't like that guy.

We can't have it though! Not yet. The reason why is because there is a territory between us and them. Sadly, to be fair, we can't skip territories. Not that we'd want too, any supplies we'd have would mean we'd have to cross enemy territory. No bueno. So we can still go south or south west. Since south west doesn't have a resource yet, we'll go south and take the green territory. This we can do, and it provides some benefit to us, although it would probably rub green nation the wrong way.

^^^Credits to "Charlie4vB for that post ^^^

Mainly, I have to say I dissagree with this, why? Because I think that the possibility of tramping through an enemies land to get to another piece of land you want should be a possibility. Once again, why?

Well, from a strategical point of view, doing this is suicide, because all the green have to do is ambush your army well it is marching through it's lands. Blue is unfamiliar with the hostile lands, green's army knows it well.

And if this doesn't work, one might simply let them pass, maybe Green isn't very strong, but then they could send emmisaries to Orange to talk about an alliance! Once the orange outpost falls, the Blue army there will be cut off, and it would be quite simply for Green and Orange to do a joint attack on them, and take it back, slaughtering the defenders, and leaving a weakened Blue nation ripe for attack.

Or maybe, if the Blue nation leader isn't the best of strategists, he might send to many of his troops to defend the outpost, and Green + Orange might decide to simply attack the Blue nation while it's troops are gone, judging that it's better to take all that and share it rather than the smaller part of Orange.

And all that might lead to a betrayal! Orange might turn on the weaker green, and take all of blue for itself!

You see, I think this should be left to the choice of the leaders/players, since it can bring along huge amounts of intresting RP! But then it's just an idea, so any thoughts/critics are welcome.

Here is a picture with a simple explanation of this. ((Very simple))

THanks for reading.

That is my post. I read it through and I don't think their is any mention of the server name, so if I missed one pelase feel free to remove it. Other than that I think it explains quite clearly why I don't agree with that rule.

[Groobs03 297]

I absolutely love the idea of returning war to Aegis times, and the rules seem to be more fresh and better role played than before. My favorite part has to be the idea of sieges actually lasting rp days, I feel like it would make great rp, but there should be a rule about soul-stoning out of a siege or something along those lines, because if people could just soul-stone in and out of sieges it would just take all of the rp out of it.

[lemontide331 1615]

Remove them please.

I remember the Skravia incident when the Subudai's war had got meta'd badly which caused a lot of OOC arguments.

[Danny 2232]

My experience is that it doesn't really matter if you have warclaims or not, there will still be people breaking the rules either way on both sides.

It's the Skravia warclaim history, I'm refering to.

You're are a massively lower risk of metagaming if you do not have War-Claims however, that's one of the main points here.

Although the current system is flawed I don;t think this new system would work out particularly well. The problem is that it does not encourage having a reason behind fighting, as someone can literally just log in and decide they want to have a battle. As a compromise perhaps a PM could be sent by the attackers before the battle (not necessarily days in advance but at least a few hours). This would detail reasoning for the battle and the way they are notifying their troops of this battle. Then if GM (or two preferably to prevent OOC drama) sees that it is okay, the defenders could be notified. This would prevent meta-gaming but at least hopefully allow for some reasoning for war.

Proper reason would of course be required to be given to the GM, that's part of the informing part.

2 hours? I say atleast a day, to allow his players to be online and such. Because isn't it metagaming if not all the players can be potentially online..

Also a good example of why Warclaims were implemented in the first place is because back in Aegis when the Orcs fought the Dwarves, the dwarves came randomly EVERY day when we usually had 1 or two people online and would declare attack, that is just rediculous even with the 2 hour notice because sometimes people can't have all there players on, etc.

If we made it surplus of a day then we still face the problem of meta-gaming, although making it longer could be possible. The problems with Aegis Orcs vs Dwarves wouldn't happen here, due to the one week difference between battles.

[Watyll 1104]

Yes, please.