Overview
Instead of building damage being permanently disabled on PVE-C servers, add a placeable that keeps a building invulnerable. Balance it carefully so that it makes it easier to counter griefers and trolls, without making it impossible for normal players to protect at least one of their bases.
Motivation
On PVE and PVE-C servers, building damage is always disabled. This allows certain players to harass and grief others, and their victims have no recourse whatsoever. Funcom might intervene if the griefers block off obelisks or new player spawn points, but that’s it.
Since Funcom’s position is that there will be no moderators for official servers, there should be an in-game mechanism to allow players to at least attempt to deal with these cases.
This proposal intentionally makes this a PVE-C placeable, with the idea of keeping PVE servers for those players who value the invulnerability of their bases above all else and PVP servers for those players who don’t mind being forced to start from scratch.
Details
This section lists the properties of the PVE-C claim totem, with an explanation of motivation for each property (where necessary):
- The claim totem has to be placed on a building piece owned by the player’s clan.
- The purpose of the claim totem is to make all connected building pieces invulnerable to damage from other players, as long as it has fuel.
- The claim totem requires fuel to provide invulnerability. The fuel cost is an exponential function of the number of connected building pieces.
- Motivation: many official PVE-C servers have massive buildings whose owners aren’t active players, but only log in to refresh their structures. Official servers are shared and public, and players should be encouraged to play actively if they’re occupying server resources.
- The base fuel cost is higher for buildings that have a certain number (or fraction) of pieces within a certain radius of “protected” spots like obelisks.
- Motivation: make it hard for griefers to wall off certain points. If they build close enough to make the structure small, the cost is high due to escalation of base fuel cost. If they build far enough to avoid escalated base cost, the number of interconnected building pieces itself should make the cost prohibitive.
- The claim totem has limited fuel capacity.
- Motivation: make it hard to fill the claim totem with huge amounts of fuel and forget about it.
- Each player (not clan) can only place one claim totem, similar to the way bedrolls work.
- Motivation: make it impossible to avoid exponential costs by building many small disconnected bases.
- Motivation: offer additional incentive for PVE-C players to form clans.
Disclaimer
I know this has been proposed before, but since there’s an official thread asking what we want added to the game, I’d like to be able to link to this proposal from there 