PVE-C clan wars

[CodeMage]

Overview

On PVE-C servers, allow one clan to declare war on another, introducing a limited form of PVP.

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 mechanism, 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 rules of the PVE-C clan war, with an explanation of motivation for each rule (where necessary):

• Clan A (attacker) can unilaterally declare war on clan D (defender). This applies even to players who haven’t created or joined a clan. The exact in-game action to do so would have to be determined, but a feasible option is to long-press the action button on another clan’s building and select “declare war”.
  • Motivation: any “war” game mechanic that requires both parties to agree will not be successful as a deterrent against griefers and trolls.
• Once the war is declared, clan D receives the notification and the “preparation timer” starts counting down. The preparation time should be long enough, e.g. one or two days. During this time, there is no change to the gameplay, except that both clans will have the preparation timer visible on their screen, similar to the Purge timer.
  • Motivation: make it impossible (or at least hard) to perform a blitzkrieg attack that wipes out the target without their awareness.
• After the preparation timer has reached zero, clan D’s buildings and followers become vulnerable to damage from clan A, whereas clan A’s buildings and followers become vulnerable to damage from any clan on the server.
  • Motivation: being able to declare a war unilaterally introduces an imbalance of power. The vulnerability of clan A should compensate for that imbalance.
• Building damage from wars could further be limited to be during certain hours of day, configured in server settings.
• Clan A can end the war at any time, including the prep time.
• Any clan can enter “vacation” mode, during which no war can be declared on them. The vacation mode has limited duration and is set to whatever is the maximum decay timer for the server, minus one day. Once finished (or deactivated early), the vacation mode cannot be triggered again for the duration if was active (possibly multiplied by a multiplier). A clan cannot enter the vacation mode if the war has already been declared.
  • Motivation: non-griefers should have vacations