We've had some discussion on the Live Chat about Houses and tenure bonuses (check out
@nezuja's
House Preview on the Subreddit). To review, when you join a House in the game, you receive access to that House's features and receive a bonus that is either gameplay (like +1 STR) or economic (like 2% Gold drop) or both. Each week that you stay in that House, you will receive a Tenure bonus for sticking around, again either gameplay or economic.
When you leave your House to go to another one (which you can do), you lose all those bonuses and start fresh at another House. This is the "soft" barrier we've put in place to both encourage loyalty and to give players flexibility. Since you also have Standing within your House (which gains you Seasonal bonuses), which is gained via play and victory in both PVP and PVE, you start over if you leave and go to another House.
But some of you have been throwing out other ideas, so let's hear 'em!
TheWizard
Posts: 838 Wizard
Comments
-Timetable for defecting (set amount of time when you drop that prohibits you from immediately joining another house).
-A larger reward/penalty the higher your standing is with your current house when you Betray.
-Added to bounty list in previous house. Symbol by name or something to show they defected.
When you receive your houses bonus it stacks to a cap. (eg +0.5 STR each week for 5 weeks)
If you leave your current house and join another you will lose your 2.5 STR buff (house bonus) and will receive -5 STR immediately (penalty) which will slowly vanish after 5 weeks (eg -5 STR week 1, -4 STR week 2, -3 STR week 3, -2 STR week 4).
When you join a house it plays a crowd cheering sfx.
When you leave a house it plays a crowd booing sfx.
And what about if it's kind of like having an ex, in that before you used to get all the updates and know everything that was going on in the house. But after you leave, you still occasionally get updates but they are all along the lines of:
"We're doing very well, the house members who joined after you left are all very nice. I think it's good that we're seeing other houses, hopefully you will find one that makes you happy. In other news, little Timmy died of turburcluosis, but we will struggle on, fighting the good fight. Without you."
What if in order to leave a House you had to beat some form of challenge? Specifically we discussed some sort of brawl. The difficulty of the brawl would depend on Your characters Tenure and House rank.
I have a couple of thoughts on this:
1. It should not scale up with your character. A level 50 maxed armor character who joins a guild and decides to leave the next day should effectively be able to walk out. Lore wise I would justify this as the upper echelons of the House are smarter than to try and stop them. It should be able to scale down though, in order to prevent a low level character being prevented from leaving through some form promotion abuse.
2. Winning the fight would allow a character to leave with minimal punishment (They beat their way out of the house with all their gear and 'earned' their freedom from responsibilities). While losing the fight, a character is still let out of the House, but their penalty for doing so is much more severe.
Additionally, I think it would be good to have multiple forms of leave challenge, a brawl would be the most direct, but perhaps their could be challenges of lore (Give the house some Knowledge you possess before you leave as a token of goodwill). Or perhaps a special quest chain. Etc.
Two ideas I thought of while typing this are:
1. Having a voting system for members in the house. If someone is caught as being a spy for another house, then a vote (with say 63% approval) would kick them out of the house. Not sure how penalties would work with this though.
2. Allow a house to fight in order to steal a player (with the players blessing of course). Not sure where I'm going with this yet, or what the restrictions would be, just throwing it out there!
"When you leave a House, it would be cool for the current House Leader to acknowledge it in either a positive or negative way. (This idea is operating under the assumption that each House will have an npc acting as the true House Leader). So when players of a certain tenure level and House reputation decide to leave they get asked why they are leaving, if they chose an honorable reason the leader blesses there departure, if it's neutral the leader barely mentions them, if it's treasonous the leader puts them as such and puts a bounty on their head!"
I'll SMITE you
It would probably make more sense for a player to be anointed that ability (much like a normal player run guild) - I don't know if this would be tenure based or player voted.
I'll SMITE you
If you guys are keeping track of statistics like house reputation, and contributions to a house. It would be a major thing for one of the largest contributors to a house, to change houses. So it may impact side-stories going on.
I'll SMITE you
If a player during the middle of the season left a house would the points that they had gathered within that house stay there? or would those accumulated points follow them to the new house (This would break the game really)
Might sound like a stupid question but its just something I wanted cleared up.
It leaves room room for people to have Alts in other houses to leave and bomb tournaments for their mains house.
I'll SMITE you