Posted by The_Fox 2 years ago

Hey!
Well it's no secret (anymore) that faction standing deteriorates and people are pissed. Can you blame them though? Really? Of course not. It's pretty clear this 'feature' was not explicit enough, and taking away progression in an RPG is controversial enough... whatever. Let's look forward, I think we can still make this work.

So the idea here from a game design perspective is clearly to wall off higher ranks behind a certain degree of dedication and to encourage continued play (also perhaps so people don't rush out to the 1.4m rank and then poop out elite mounts forever).
There's also a certain lore component, in that when you fight for a group but all of a sudden stop they will eventually forget about you.
Regardless of whether or not anyone agrees with these design goals, I think there's a better way to implement this.

Primarily: losing progress isn't fun. This is a game, despite what anyone might think. Even if it's a job for some, the primary focus of game design should be to make mechanics fun.
Secondly: the current system is tedious. Making the standing drop by a percent of total basically means people have to dedicate themselves specifically to factions to really get anywhere. If the rest of the game didn't require so much grinding that might be fine, but you really should have seen this outrage coming with how time intensive this game already is.


I'd like to propose a solution that I think fixes both of these issues and preserves the original design goals with one fell swoop: you create a point (or standing) threshold that prevents standing deterioration.
Make it like 30k standing a week. Enough that you have to spend a bit of time to punch it out, but not so much that you can't knock it out in one day if you're willing to really go at it. This means that people who are actively participating don't have to worry about losing ranks, and ensures they can't just sit on their hands. This also means the people losing standing are people who go entire weeks without flagging up, and likely won't complain about their rank dropping a bit.


Let's get some community discussion going, I want to hear from you guys. Would this kind of change make you less mad about standing deterioration? If not, what kinds of solutions would you propose? Is there any theoretical form deterioration could take you'd accept?
We all have a right to be mad, let's do something productive with it and be heard.