Hello all (fp for me),
I was thinking about the benefits of being part of a guild, apart from the intrinsic social interaction.
These days there are many war guilds out there, so for the fighters having the necessary backup in pk areas is an obvious benefit. Most peaceful guilds (or sometimes even just groups of players that trust eachother well enough) organize harvesting parties where a group of players do the harvesting and another carry stuff to their storage. More recently i've found it really fun to do group manufacturing (alch, potions, crafting, manu) where the coordination is even more important, as harvesting and production are combined in one effort. This last aspect is what I want to discuss more, especially since I think the intended effect of the cooldown is to lead players towards combining harvesting and production.
The following concerns popepd up in my mind so far:
collaborating is fun; accounting for all the ingredients and which players brought which elements is not;
bagsitting is dangerous because of grues and the danger of hitting teleport nexae; a single player doing harv/manu can manage using mostly only inventory space, but this is practically impossible when collaborating.
sharing harvested resources either by bagtrading or by normal trading is disruptive and distracting; usually one of the peers is doing smth and needs to stop the activity.
Enter forts; or whatever u wanna call them. I'll just use the term "fort" for simplicity (i like 4 letter words )
A fort is basically a secure bag. A temporary storage point with strict access rules and a different lifetime algorithm and have some form of accounting integrated. They would be specifically designed for such harv/manu parties. What follows is a possible set of properties for such objects that imho would put the least strain on the server, offer least possibilities for abuse and yet offer solutions for all the concerns i've isted above.
A fort is tied to a guild. In theory u can have guildless forts but i think that would make them too complex to program and/or to use; If only people in a guild can benefit this only enhances the value of guilds. This also adds more accountability -- if a guild abuses in some way of this facility u can hold the guild masters accountable for it.
There should be a limitation on what rank a guild member needs in order to create a fort; for obvious reasons;
Forts should be heavily limited in number; e.g. a guild should not be able to have more than n active forts where n is very small number (most guilds would not mind being limited to 1 only). This immediately limits the impact this has on server load.
A fort would not occupy space like a player or npc does. This way u dont have the risk of forts blocking pathways. There is even the possiblity that forts are entirely invisible for people outside the guild (there's pros and cons for this).
Unlike a bag, u dont have to be directly above the coords of the fort to access the contents. I am thinking rather they would behave like the storage or NPCs, i.e. there's a radius of interaction.
Access to the fort should either be available for any member of the guild or can be based on a blacklisting/whitelisting algorithm; maybe have both models available, because im sure the needs of small guilds are different from the needs of larger guilds
The fort's lifetime should either be at the discretion of the player that initiated the fort or possibly based on an expiration period; in the latter case, the expiration period should be much higher than for bags (say 1hr or more). One could even devise rules where high ranking guild members can have the power to terminate forts even if created by another members.
Accounting -- the fort should keep track of total number of items added/removed by each player; only totals need be remembered. The accounting information would be available to any of the players that have access to the fort.
The visual representation of the fort (or the object that, when clicked, opens up the window for accessing the fort) is of small importance; but i have in mind something similar to a very small tent or maybe campfire.
The window for accessing the fort's contents would be similar to either the bag window or the storage window. I think the bag window is good enough. Concurrent access to the contents of the fort is quite important, but can be limited if necessary (say, no more than 5 players can open the fort window at the same time).
Yes, it would be a huge change that would require quite a lot of coding im sure; but hey, I had the idea, so why not put it on paper, maybe someone else likes it too... imho it would immensly ehnance the value of guilds and make large teamwork projects possible.
