2. There's going to inherently be a certain amount of sitting around because that's how the game plays, but you can be creative to mix things up. For example, the second stage in my example is more mobile as raiders are attempting to push back against guards to reach the objective. I wouldn't hold so hard to 3 stages, either, so you could mix it up more. Like City Obelisk Raid Stage 1 - Raiders fight from the horizon to get their siege to the gates Stage 2 - Raiders are assaulting gates Stage 3 - Raiders are progressing through waves of guards to get to objective Stage 4 - Raiders attempt to move obelisk past the gates so it can be teleported. You'll have some 'standing around', but you're not going too far from something like this without greatly abstracting the raid from expectations of 'smash into city'. One possible thing (tying into my response to 6 later) would be a towne raid bonus that lets the raid start from the sewers or a secret entrance. Defenders could possibly spend shards/energy from the generator for defensive moves at each stage (trebuchet barrage in stage 1, gate shield in 2, etc.)
I'm not sure how this would play out for a multi-objective scenario, though. If the layouts were free to modify, I'd just say put in branching points where the raiders can go towards the different objective representations with varying defensibility on each one, scaling to reward? Something like that.
3. The tribute thing is weird to me, especially if you're going to lean towards positive buffs for raiding cities rather than negative impacts to defenders. I'd rather there just be gold generated for the raiders and defenders + a tithe to the city. If bashing can generate gold, there's no reason you should be afraid of adding gold income to a more involved PvP activity that drives more credit purchases.
6. You're going to have to bite the bullet and include townes in some part of the 'war system' eventually. If you don't want them to be the focus, then pull something like Zarim's idea of having them offer a raiding buff on the next city raid within X time, like perhaps kidnapping a towne guard captain to get an inside man to open the gates. If townes just get left behind again, I'm gonna be disappointed.
Re: Off-hours raiding - No one likes losing to the RL clock, but you have to balance that with letting the system play out in an engaging and natural way. I'd probably be okay with a raid window opening every 8 hours, but some people wold find that heinous. Cities would need a panic room button that they can use to shift the time of the fight around, charging up to X hours every day with the ability to push one raid back significantly or a few back by smaller increments. This seems to be the best way of handling it for shorter fights. If each raid was expected to be a 3-4 hour ordeal, you could switch to something like a raid initiation that lets defenders pick a breaching time some 20-28 hours from then.
After that, defender-sided force multipliers will help with other off-hours situations.
A possible roleplay-friendly version would be that each city maintains a shield of some sort pushing back large troop and siege movements. The raid would be initiated by breaching the shield, and the defending city could spend some emergency energy to plug the hole until backup arrives.
---- Have you decided between 'one life per raid' or the more normal death situation? I'm leaning more towards a raid timer with respawns, but one-life towne raids or raid modifiers that bypass some stages at the cost of only one life for the raid would be interesting.
6. You're going to have to bite the bullet and include townes in some part of the 'war system' eventually. If you don't want them to be the focus, then pull something like Zarim's idea of having them offer a raiding buff on the next city raid within X time, like perhaps kidnapping a towne guard captain to get an inside man to open the gates. If townes just get left behind again, I'm gonna be disappointed.
This is part of the reason that I want to see townes included in some fashion. Not the focus, but some part of the system. Townes are very much the ragged orphan child of game mechanics right now, that no one seems to want. If we're developing new systems for the cities such as this raid system, I think we should make an effort to include townes in some sort of manner.
You could probably curb off hours raiding quite a bit by making the cooldown period a bit more than 24 hours. Like 30 or 36. Forces you to either reduce the number of times you can raid at non-peak hours, or cycle when raiding can happen to different times.
As far as townes, I think using them as the opening move in a raid would provide a lot of raidy goodness and towne relevance. For example, one towne for Khandava can be designated as The Food Towne, providing Khandava with much of its food. Hitting TFT would be all about burning the silos, which would draw out guards and open the city for a full scale raid, but also disrupt the food supply. Practical effect is to weaken the remaining guards slightly and maybe open a specific raiding objective.
@Jeremy Nothing is currently stopping anyone from raiding right now. It isn't happening because with the guard changes, you cannot off hours bleed an org dry like you could before.
Honest talk here.
With full defensive shard research and shieldmen+healers in the stack, I am 100% sure that if the entire population of Imperian tried to kill an Antioch guardstack they'd all die horribly and end up with a grand total of zero guard kills for their work. Guards are that untouchable.
And this is just my brain, but having a ridiculously impossible objective with major rewards would be kind of awesome.
eg, raiding ALL the townes before hitting a city and hitting all the major objectives opened by the townes gives the raiders the ability to divert comm generation to their own city until the cooldown period ends.
@Jeremy: Thanks for inviting us to be part of this conversation.
I have quite a few more thoughts but nothing resembling coherence. I do want to say a few quick things:
@Etienne, I don't disagree with the gist of your post. I do note, however, that your post is written as someone who is purely a defender. An improved raiding system could and should be passably engaging, or at least not-onerous, for someone who isn't a PVPer to engage in as an attacker.
@others: re: splitting/staging of raids - the specific implementation is best left to the administration, as they best understand the code-base. It is easy for us to spitball ideas, but each idea can add in another layer of coding/recoding complexity. The key point I was trying to raise was to smoothen out the risk/reward yield, and to decrease the aftertaste of defeat.
finally, one other critical idea/thought: Etienne mentions gagging CT messages, and the driving force behind such a decision would be (relative) permanency. Permanent defeat will make me write that trigger.
If these messages/events/flags/conditions/defeats/wins were made quasi-temporary, in the sense that they would lapse after a finite amount of time and be unavailable for a sufficiently long period after, it would reduce the sense of irritation. It is perhaps critical to include in the design because it means that no organisation can simply exist, indefinitely, without interacting with the 'outside' world.
This is what one should call 'a hook' for novices. It gives meaning to the existence of the organisation, not solely by self-reference ("we are devoted to the idea of such and such"), but in relation to other entities (guilds, organisations, what have you) and gives new players the chance to contextualise the group that they now belong to.
many other thoughts include increasing the relevance of shops, guildhalls, houses by removing them from the raid equation altogether, but i don't have the time to write concisely.
I don't have enough ideas about the actual raiding part of the new system (objectives, channeled actions, etc), so I'm not going to comment on that right now. What I do think is important is making sure that there are indeed risks for the people raiding to suit whatever reward they get, in addition to maybe tying up some loose ends with other conflict systems currently in the game.
To that end, I'd suggest going a similar route as current obelisks and requiring some sort of power that would need to be accumulated in order to raid/counter-raid. We could still use the generator energy system like we do now, or we could just directly use x amount of shards to do y action, pulled from the generator's own pool. This would probably require wiping everyone's present generator stores to make sure everyone's on relatively even footing to start, and possibly introduce a yearly or even monthly drain/decay to further re-invigorate the whole shardfall/shard hunting scene. Caravans could probably eventually be reworked to tie into this, too, if desired.
The main thing here is that if you want to have the resources to beat up someone's org for their lunch money or properly defend against a would-be bully, you should have to fight for that right or at the very least skulk around for it. What better way than with one of the game's usually most fun conflict mechanics (and caravans)? It could also make all those little skirmishes in shardfalls/caravans more relevant as far as being a testing ground for new strategies and new players, because those same tactics and people will eventually be needed to attack or defend in the battles that truly matter.
Again, I haven't thought out specifics on what those actual 'raid' or 'counter-raid' abilities would do, but their source is something to consider. I also don't honestly know how/if you can prevent people from off-hours raiding. No, it's not really fun for anyone involved when it happens, but if it means winning some sort of objective, no matter how big or small, it's going to happen.
The city energy aspect of obelisks intentionally enforces fairly long cooldowns (several days minimum, I think?) between EACH attack. So "long cooldowns" is really, really baked into the whole thinking behind city energy storage/usage, and admin seems to be going more in the direction of a ~24 hour cooldown per set of raider/defender cities (realistically it will almost always be quite a bit longer than that I bet). It might work for townes, but I am not really that excited about townes or obelisks right now and they should either maybe just go away or get their own love down the road.
I am also leery of "shock" costs in general (like say, you must burn a very large amount of shards to even attempt a single raid). Those tend to operate very much as a deterrent. If it's a pretty nominal cost just to burn some shards I guess that is probably okay? But we really would need to have some kind of ballpark number to even talk about that. Regular maintenance costs (within reason) are good because then it's just the cost of doing business and stuff gets used and is relevant but is not something that makes people hesitate about starting a fight - and that seems to be the direction we have generally been moving towards.
It should be pretty easy to start a raid - you just shouldn't be able to do it all the time (and that's been/being discussed).
That said, I am not keen on dangling too many shinies in front of people for city raiding either, and I get why people don't want their guards auto-bitching on CT. It would be funny - once or twice. I am all for stuff like largely cosmetic damage to rooms that fades with time though. And I will (probably) be on the defensive end of raids plenty myself because my entire circle has ~4 people who fight right now. So when that hour comes (and right now admin's proposed hour is only 20-30 minutes, at most once a RL day per city - so potentially 5 times per day total if the entire world really really hates you) I guess I will just give it a go...
The biggest problem i have from this is off-hour raiding. Coming online to see that you were raided at 3am when nobody else is online is really annoying. I would like to see these raids being only available near 0:00 gmt time. Or at the very least prevent certain objectives from being on offhours.
Things like stealing the guard's gold could be fun on low population times. If set up right in a good objective scenario. Sneaking past guard packs and breaking into the treasury. Once found(or upon blowing up the treasury chest to get the gold) the defending city is then notified. Time is given to prepare in which nobody can leave the room and then the attackers must drag the gold out of the city while protecting themselves from small waves of guards (1-2 guards every couple minutes) giving the defenders a slight advantage.
Also on the point of townes. Since these changes will probably require a bit of remodel of Cities. I'd like to see city all houses moved into townes. Making townes the places people live while cities are more of the places people shop etc. This would help cleanup city maps and make townes a bit more useful.
@Jeremy Nothing is currently stopping anyone from raiding right now. It isn't happening because with the guard changes, you cannot off hours bleed an org dry like you could before.
Honest talk here.
With full defensive shard research and shieldmen+healers in the stack, I am 100% sure that if the entire population of Imperian tried to kill an Antioch guardstack they'd all die horribly and end up with a grand total of zero guard kills for their work. Guards are that untouchable.
man, i tried figuring out how to do those guards in ithaqua.. could only get singles left by "ithaqua is where you go to die" no care. guard rotations and walls dropping rng was tough, concluded that you would need population that imperian doesn't have to do anything.
Any sort of raiding under this system should not be a "daily occurrence" or something that can be done that frequently. One of the best things about the current obelisk system is the lead up and planning that is required to pull it off, in succession. Meaning, if you want to make a concerted effort at a real "run" and not just a "hey we're bored let's go hit an outpost/obelisk" thing, you need to put in some careful planning on how you're going to manage energy requirements, organizing forces, etc. I hope that whatever "new" system comes out of these changes preserves that technical level of mechanics, because figuring out how that all works is pretty interesting.
Putting that all aside, I agree with the comments that there needs to be something worth fighting for if you want people to "raid" under this new system. Aside from maybe not having to pay the 100k every 12 RL days for guard upkeep, the objectives don't really seem that interesting. Especially the ones tied to houses/shops, since as others have pointed out, token houses/shops have made city-shops/houses pretty irrelevant. (Where's that forthcoming post on CaanaeMart?)
I think @Lartus' topical example of a similar system in Midkemia is something we can "steal" ideas from. The idea of needing to accumulate "resource" to launch a raid (and thus wasting it if you half-arse it) combined with the reward being perhaps affected by how much "resource" the defenders expend to repel you, would go a long way in this regard, especially if, like MKO, it rewarded raider and defender alike according to their performance.
MKO allowed raiding every 24 hours though - the only consequences to horking up the raid was pretty much that, well, you died (possibly a lot, to guards), and you couldn't try again for at least 24 hours. I don't think the other games have even a 24 hour restriction (mechanically), and I don't think anyone has a fiddly energy system - which also makes objectives into incredibly hardened/multi-layered targets once a Shou/Ultrix team sorts things.
I bet we can keep the city energy/outpost/chargebomb stuff if people really want it, but it's pretty stalled out right now, and I sure don't want it attached to city raiding. I think it's more important that people have a way to shut down a raid (or, the mechanical aspects of the raid) if they're just not up to defending. I have some faith that if my Achaean city of Cyrene can survive such a system, hopefully we can too.
Yeah the thing with Mko was there was only once that a faction actually accomplished a Mayhem raid and even then it was against limited defenders. I led the raid and will say the group I led never wanted to do such a raid again. Generally speaking the raiding mechanical side was never utilized and was a poor form of coding to put a bandaid on a larger problem.
The truth is MKO raiding system was sad, and we shouldn't be looking there for solutions. The non mechanical sides of raiding were more popular than the actual raiding tools. Those raids as I see being mentioned were usually carried out off hour peak times while other raids done during peak hours led to issues and a bunch of unneeded ooc hate.
So while they did have various raiding options, these were never used because you could usually do the same without having to actually use siege status and most cities just abused that.
I wish I could sit here and say city raiding is a solution, but sadly I can't. My raid experience usually has equated to a lot of OOC abuse and realization it isn't worth it. I don't see how that will be any different here.
I'd personally like to see battlefields to fight over versus raiding each other.
Yeah, MKO was of course TINY, and had some of the most rabidly anti-conflict/anti-PK people I have ever seen - alongside some of the most rabidly hard core PK-er types I have ever seen (the sort of guys I can almost imagine playing perma-death MUDs). It was this tiny land full of of extremes, and also desperately needed a lot of focused, competent admin love. I am not super shocked raiding was a trainwreck there, because it seems like so, so many things were.
Raiding has been a pretty successful mechanic in Achaea, though, for example, despite having some cities that are downright pacifist (or, most accurately, have large and vocal pacifist populations along with a few people who are at least open to the idea of say, city defense). Which is amazing, really, and I think it is because a lot of thought was put into "we want raiding to be a thing, and to feel real and meaningful, but we also have to build things in to prevent even the weakest city from becoming a totally demoralized whipping boy because the big bullies beat them up for hours every day and then shove them in their lockers". I get why some people are edgy about this, and are sort of planting their feet on the whole thing, but I think it can work - just because I have seen that it does seem to work if done well.
I had a lot of fun with the raiding mechanic back in Midkemia. Sure, it needed a lot of work but we made do with it; I personally have no real solutions to offer about what Imperian should do with their own obelisk/war thing. Obviously whatever they do come up with is not going to please everyone. All I know is that this game's playerbase could use a boost to their numbers so that it isn't city a just running over city b with a massive group of bashers.
MKO allowed raiding every 24 hours though - the only consequences to horking up the raid was pretty much that, well, you died (possibly a lot, to guards), and you couldn't try again for at least 24 hours. I don't think the other games have even a 24 hour restriction (mechanically), and I don't think anyone has a fiddly energy system - which also makes objectives into incredibly hardened/multi-layered targets once a Shou/Ultrix team sorts things.
Most MUDs don't have mechanics about this at all. Raiding in Aetolia when I played it was basically getting a web going and bashing guards until the defenders came out. I like the idea of there being mechanical limits though, because otherwise if you do re-ignite city raiding and make it viable again, without limitations, you're going to have scenarios like when Acino and gang would leave a city completely devoid of guards like the Bloodloch crew used to do with Enorian. Or used to happen to Khandava when they fought with Stavenn.
I had a lot of fun with the raiding mechanic back in Midkemia. Sure, it needed a lot of work but we made do with it; I personally have no real solutions to offer about what Imperian should do with their own obelisk/war thing. Obviously whatever they do come up with is not going to please everyone. All I know is that this game's playerbase could use a boost to their numbers so that it isn't city a just running over city b with a massive group of bashers.
I did too, though I was more of a moredhel tag along to SSG's parties than the main event.
@Anette I think what made raiding in midkemia possible was the fact that you couldn't create a giant clot of guards in one room. You had to be strategic about placements because you could only place up to five in a single room. Of course anything past that caused them to start missing the attackers which I had mixed feelings about. Another thing was each particular guard type had a unique role e.g. revealing black wind/phase/masked players, resurrecting dead guards, blocking exits, etc. and that was part of the fun in playing defense.
I feel that in Imperian, a lot of the people that were interested in raids either moved to another mud or have taken a break. Maybe there is a solution we could come up with that would entice players, who may not necessarily be interested in pk 24/7 but would like to get their feet wet once in awhile.
@Anette I think what made raiding in midkemia possible was the fact that you couldn't create a giant clot of guards in one room. You had to be strategic about placements because you could only place up to five in a single room. Of course anything past that caused them to start missing the attackers which I had mixed feelings about. Another thing was each particular guard type had a unique role e.g. revealing black wind/phase/masked players, resurrecting dead guards, blocking exits, etc. and that was part of the fun in playing defense.
Being able to just stick all the guards in a clot definitely stymies any possible current offensive, that's for sure.
Can you imagine if the rewards for participating were points that you can save up to buy a pet or cosmetic rewards such as racial descriptions, enter and leave animations, etc. ? Now this is just me throwing out ideas.
Can you imagine if the rewards for participating were points that you can save up to buy a pet or cosmetic rewards such as racial descriptions, enter and leave animations, etc. ? Now this is just me throwing out ideas.
Well those are sadly moot points while people remain adamant against giving up their safe havens.
Hey admin - the last few posts are pretty harmless, and I'd much rather have people feel like they can discuss things. So, this is one of those golden opportunities to rein in snide jerkitude, and I don't exactly see you jumping on it (like, just delete it, along with this one, is fine - I wouldn't even follow up with an angry red post in this case, just make it disappear). And that's why people (eventually) react very, very strongly in kind.
Not sure where the 'People want their safe havens' thing is coming from, but it's not this thread. Seems to me like people are mostly worried about time windows, which is entirely valid.
Regards to rewards: So, obviously the obelisks are the main reward. Are the powers going to remain the same? Will there be multiples? Can a city hold more than one? I'd say 1/2 pieces + 1 obelisk per city would need some buffs to the benefit. 2 pieces + multiple obelisks is pretty close to current, so they could maybe get power tweaks but not as necessary. 3+ pieces and multiple obelisks would be a bit odd, but I suppose you could do it that way to flood the warzone with objectives if you wanted to.
We need a firmer grasp on the raid frequency to hit a comfortable reward level for both obelisks and any other objectives. Assuming 1 raid a day is probably the best bet here since that was the original suggestion and seems to have an adequate support level. With that and the assumption of positive reinforcement, the options are <=24 hour buffs of high strength or longer duration buffs with low to moderate strength. The original post's other rewards seem like they have the latter in mind.
The next big thing is this objective point bit. What do these actually do? Stroke the ego? Effect city morale based on comparison to other cities'? Give those who participated a reward for their efforts based on objective points earned? I'd say it should work with attackers gaining points for defender mob kills (low), defender player kills (upper lower), breaking through defense stages (mid-tier), and a major bonus for objective completion with a modifier for time remaining. Defenders should get points for kills n the same way as attackers (in case we get some attacking mobs), remaining defense stages, and a reward scaling to time passed in the raid up to a major reward for repelling the raid from their objective.
I am in the "just save obelisks for another day" or even "just ditch obelisks entirely" camp (both mentioned in Jeremy's OP as things they are considering). Even if you just keep them as objectives and ditch the rest of the system, I think they're still problematic. The biggest, strongest city is constantly going to have all of the best ones (or just all of them period) and if you try to limit it, they're still just going to have all of the best ones and there's going to tend to be this static situation like there is now. If off hours raiding is possible at all, it's going to encourage the hell out of it, too, though.
Objectives need to be something that encourages attacking another city when they're pretty much at full strength and wiping the floor with them anyway - so things that are all about pride without being super obnoxious (like the guards on CT thing is definitely kind of obnoxious). If you attack my city when we definitely have a weaker team, and I engage you anyway, and you wipe the floor with us, I am not going to feel too ashamed of that rubble in my city. If I had every advantage and it still happened, I am going to go hide under a rock for a little bit.
I agree with a lot of the rest of your post btw.
All of that said, this definitely feels like one of those times where admin is going to listen to what we all say, take it under consideration, and very, very likely do something that a lot of people would NEVER agree to if any player dared suggest it (and this is hopefully, probably, going to be a good thing).
Any proposed "cooldown" on this type of raiding should be randomized alongside a resource cost that is achievable by a group of individuals within the cooldown period (but difficult to impossible for 1-3 people to pull off). Raiding every day should be possible but not predictable or guaranteed, and involve a precluding effort on the part of the team.
Comments
2. There's going to inherently be a certain amount of sitting around because that's how the game plays, but you can be creative to mix things up. For example, the second stage in my example is more mobile as raiders are attempting to push back against guards to reach the objective. I wouldn't hold so hard to 3 stages, either, so you could mix it up more. Like
City Obelisk Raid
Stage 1 - Raiders fight from the horizon to get their siege to the gates
Stage 2 - Raiders are assaulting gates
Stage 3 - Raiders are progressing through waves of guards to get to objective
Stage 4 - Raiders attempt to move obelisk past the gates so it can be teleported.
You'll have some 'standing around', but you're not going too far from something like this without greatly abstracting the raid from expectations of 'smash into city'. One possible thing (tying into my response to 6 later) would be a towne raid bonus that lets the raid start from the sewers or a secret entrance. Defenders could possibly spend shards/energy from the generator for defensive moves at each stage (trebuchet barrage in stage 1, gate shield in 2, etc.)
I'm not sure how this would play out for a multi-objective scenario, though. If the layouts were free to modify, I'd just say put in branching points where the raiders can go towards the different objective representations with varying defensibility on each one, scaling to reward? Something like that.
3. The tribute thing is weird to me, especially if you're going to lean towards positive buffs for raiding cities rather than negative impacts to defenders. I'd rather there just be gold generated for the raiders and defenders + a tithe to the city. If bashing can generate gold, there's no reason you should be afraid of adding gold income to a more involved PvP activity that drives more credit purchases.
6. You're going to have to bite the bullet and include townes in some part of the 'war system' eventually. If you don't want them to be the focus, then pull something like Zarim's idea of having them offer a raiding buff on the next city raid within X time, like perhaps kidnapping a towne guard captain to get an inside man to open the gates. If townes just get left behind again, I'm gonna be disappointed.
Re: Off-hours raiding - No one likes losing to the RL clock, but you have to balance that with letting the system play out in an engaging and natural way. I'd probably be okay with a raid window opening every 8 hours, but some people wold find that heinous. Cities would need a panic room button that they can use to shift the time of the fight around, charging up to X hours every day with the ability to push one raid back significantly or a few back by smaller increments. This seems to be the best way of handling it for shorter fights. If each raid was expected to be a 3-4 hour ordeal, you could switch to something like a raid initiation that lets defenders pick a breaching time some 20-28 hours from then.
After that, defender-sided force multipliers will help with other off-hours situations.
A possible roleplay-friendly version would be that each city maintains a shield of some sort pushing back large troop and siege movements. The raid would be initiated by breaching the shield, and the defending city could spend some emergency energy to plug the hole until backup arrives.
----
Have you decided between 'one life per raid' or the more normal death situation? I'm leaning more towards a raid timer with respawns, but one-life towne raids or raid modifiers that bypass some stages at the cost of only one life for the raid would be interesting.
As far as townes, I think using them as the opening move in a raid would provide a lot of raidy goodness and towne relevance. For example, one towne for Khandava can be designated as The Food Towne, providing Khandava with much of its food. Hitting TFT would be all about burning the silos, which would draw out guards and open the city for a full scale raid, but also disrupt the food supply. Practical effect is to weaken the remaining guards slightly and maybe open a specific raiding objective.
Something like that, anyway.
With full defensive shard research and shieldmen+healers in the stack, I am 100% sure that if the entire population of Imperian tried to kill an Antioch guardstack they'd all die horribly and end up with a grand total of zero guard kills for their work. Guards are that untouchable.
eg, raiding ALL the townes before hitting a city and hitting all the major objectives opened by the townes gives the raiders the ability to divert comm generation to their own city until the cooldown period ends.
I have quite a few more thoughts but nothing resembling coherence. I do want to say a few quick things:
@Etienne, I don't disagree with the gist of your post. I do note, however, that your post is written as someone who is purely a defender. An improved raiding system could and should be passably engaging, or at least not-onerous, for someone who isn't a PVPer to engage in as an attacker.
@others: re: splitting/staging of raids - the specific implementation is best left to the administration, as they best understand the code-base. It is easy for us to spitball ideas, but each idea can add in another layer of coding/recoding complexity. The key point I was trying to raise was to smoothen out the risk/reward yield, and to decrease the aftertaste of defeat.
finally, one other critical idea/thought:
Etienne mentions gagging CT messages, and the driving force behind such a decision would be (relative) permanency. Permanent defeat will make me write that trigger.
If these messages/events/flags/conditions/defeats/wins were made quasi-temporary, in the sense that they would lapse after a finite amount of time and be unavailable for a sufficiently long period after, it would reduce the sense of irritation. It is perhaps critical to include in the design because it means that no organisation can simply exist, indefinitely, without interacting with the 'outside' world.
This is what one should call 'a hook' for novices. It gives meaning to the existence of the organisation, not solely by self-reference ("we are devoted to the idea of such and such"), but in relation to other entities (guilds, organisations, what have you) and gives new players the chance to contextualise the group that they now belong to.
many other thoughts include increasing the relevance of shops, guildhalls, houses by removing them from the raid equation altogether, but i don't have the time to write concisely.
To that end, I'd suggest going a similar route as current obelisks and requiring some sort of power that would need to be accumulated in order to raid/counter-raid. We could still use the generator energy system like we do now, or we could just directly use x amount of shards to do y action, pulled from the generator's own pool. This would probably require wiping everyone's present generator stores to make sure everyone's on relatively even footing to start, and possibly introduce a yearly or even monthly drain/decay to further re-invigorate the whole shardfall/shard hunting scene. Caravans could probably eventually be reworked to tie into this, too, if desired.
The main thing here is that if you want to have the resources to beat up someone's org for their lunch money or properly defend against a would-be bully, you should have to fight for that right or at the very least skulk around for it. What better way than with one of the game's usually most fun conflict mechanics (and caravans)? It could also make all those little skirmishes in shardfalls/caravans more relevant as far as being a testing ground for new strategies and new players, because those same tactics and people will eventually be needed to attack or defend in the battles that truly matter.
Again, I haven't thought out specifics on what those actual 'raid' or 'counter-raid' abilities would do, but their source is something to consider. I also don't honestly know how/if you can prevent people from off-hours raiding. No, it's not really fun for anyone involved when it happens, but if it means winning some sort of objective, no matter how big or small, it's going to happen.
I am also leery of "shock" costs in general (like say, you must burn a very large amount of shards to even attempt a single raid). Those tend to operate very much as a deterrent. If it's a pretty nominal cost just to burn some shards I guess that is probably okay? But we really would need to have some kind of ballpark number to even talk about that. Regular maintenance costs (within reason) are good because then it's just the cost of doing business and stuff gets used and is relevant but is not something that makes people hesitate about starting a fight - and that seems to be the direction we have generally been moving towards.
It should be pretty easy to start a raid - you just shouldn't be able to do it all the time (and that's been/being discussed).
That said, I am not keen on dangling too many shinies in front of people for city raiding either, and I get why people don't want their guards auto-bitching on CT. It would be funny - once or twice. I am all for stuff like largely cosmetic damage to rooms that fades with time though. And I will (probably) be on the defensive end of raids plenty myself because my entire circle has ~4 people who fight right now. So when that hour comes (and right now admin's proposed hour is only 20-30 minutes, at most once a RL day per city - so potentially 5 times per day total if the entire world really really hates you) I guess I will just give it a go...
(Ring): Lartus says, "Then it exploded."
(Ring): Zsetsu says, "Everyone's playing checkers, but Theophilus is playing chess."
Things like stealing the guard's gold could be fun on low population times. If set up right in a good objective scenario. Sneaking past guard packs and breaking into the treasury. Once found(or upon blowing up the treasury chest to get the gold) the defending city is then notified. Time is given to prepare in which nobody can leave the room and then the attackers must drag the gold out of the city while protecting themselves from small waves of guards (1-2 guards every couple minutes) giving the defenders a slight advantage.
Putting that all aside, I agree with the comments that there needs to be something worth fighting for if you want people to "raid" under this new system. Aside from maybe not having to pay the 100k every 12 RL days for guard upkeep, the objectives don't really seem that interesting. Especially the ones tied to houses/shops, since as others have pointed out, token houses/shops have made city-shops/houses pretty irrelevant. (Where's that forthcoming post on CaanaeMart?)
I bet we can keep the city energy/outpost/chargebomb stuff if people really want it, but it's pretty stalled out right now, and I sure don't want it attached to city raiding. I think it's more important that people have a way to shut down a raid (or, the mechanical aspects of the raid) if they're just not up to defending. I have some faith that if my Achaean city of Cyrene can survive such a system, hopefully we can too.
The truth is MKO raiding system was sad, and we shouldn't be looking there for solutions. The non mechanical sides of raiding were more popular than the actual raiding tools. Those raids as I see being mentioned were usually carried out off hour peak times while other raids done during peak hours led to issues and a bunch of unneeded ooc hate.
So while they did have various raiding options, these were never used because you could usually do the same without having to actually use siege status and most cities just abused that.
I wish I could sit here and say city raiding is a solution, but sadly I can't. My raid experience usually has equated to a lot of OOC abuse and realization it isn't worth it. I don't see how that will be any different here.
I'd personally like to see battlefields to fight over versus raiding each other.
Raiding has been a pretty successful mechanic in Achaea, though, for example, despite having some cities that are downright pacifist (or, most accurately, have large and vocal pacifist populations along with a few people who are at least open to the idea of say, city defense). Which is amazing, really, and I think it is because a lot of thought was put into "we want raiding to be a thing, and to feel real and meaningful, but we also have to build things in to prevent even the weakest city from becoming a totally demoralized whipping boy because the big bullies beat them up for hours every day and then shove them in their lockers". I get why some people are edgy about this, and are sort of planting their feet on the whole thing, but I think it can work - just because I have seen that it does seem to work if done well.
I think what made raiding in midkemia possible was the fact that you couldn't create a giant clot of guards in one room. You had to be strategic about placements because you could only place up to five in a single room. Of course anything past that caused them to start missing the attackers which I had mixed feelings about. Another thing was each particular guard type had a unique role e.g. revealing black wind/phase/masked players, resurrecting dead guards, blocking exits, etc. and that was part of the fun in playing defense.
I feel that in Imperian, a lot of the people that were interested in raids either moved to another mud or have taken a break. Maybe there is a solution we could come up with that would entice players, who may not necessarily be interested in pk 24/7 but would like to get their feet wet once in awhile.
Regards to rewards:
So, obviously the obelisks are the main reward. Are the powers going to remain the same? Will there be multiples? Can a city hold more than one? I'd say 1/2 pieces + 1 obelisk per city would need some buffs to the benefit. 2 pieces + multiple obelisks is pretty close to current, so they could maybe get power tweaks but not as necessary. 3+ pieces and multiple obelisks would be a bit odd, but I suppose you could do it that way to flood the warzone with objectives if you wanted to.
We need a firmer grasp on the raid frequency to hit a comfortable reward level for both obelisks and any other objectives. Assuming 1 raid a day is probably the best bet here since that was the original suggestion and seems to have an adequate support level. With that and the assumption of positive reinforcement, the options are <=24 hour buffs of high strength or longer duration buffs with low to moderate strength. The original post's other rewards seem like they have the latter in mind.
The next big thing is this objective point bit. What do these actually do? Stroke the ego? Effect city morale based on comparison to other cities'? Give those who participated a reward for their efforts based on objective points earned? I'd say it should work with attackers gaining points for defender mob kills (low), defender player kills (upper lower), breaking through defense stages (mid-tier), and a major bonus for objective completion with a modifier for time remaining. Defenders should get points for kills n the same way as attackers (in case we get some attacking mobs), remaining defense stages, and a reward scaling to time passed in the raid up to a major reward for repelling the raid from their objective.
Objectives need to be something that encourages attacking another city when they're pretty much at full strength and wiping the floor with them anyway - so things that are all about pride without being super obnoxious (like the guards on CT thing is definitely kind of obnoxious). If you attack my city when we definitely have a weaker team, and I engage you anyway, and you wipe the floor with us, I am not going to feel too ashamed of that rubble in my city. If I had every advantage and it still happened, I am going to go hide under a rock for a little bit.
I agree with a lot of the rest of your post btw.
All of that said, this definitely feels like one of those times where admin is going to listen to what we all say, take it under consideration, and very, very likely do something that a lot of people would NEVER agree to if any player dared suggest it (and this is hopefully, probably, going to be a good thing).