We've had proposals regarding fight mechanics, in order to forcefully even an outpost fight. They were met with some enthusiasm and some criticism, I'm not going to rehash that debate.
A good point that was made during those debates was that "numbers count very much"; skill will obviously help reduce a party's handicap, but not to large extents. I'll draw a line in the sand and say 2:1 is already too much if the skill disparity is not huge (like 20 f2ps against 10 masters).
Let's consider the current situation: there are excessively many OP mats going around. The average guild has 5-10 active members in a week (again, it's a line in the sand, some have more, some less), and an item lasts certainly more than a week. What if OP mats were enough for just the owning guild, then? Let's say .. 7 q250 rubbarn per month, or 10 q200, 13 q150 and so on.
This suddenly slashes the motives behind the bigger alliance (whichever it is at the moment), because the more you grow the more difficult it is to share fairly or effectively. Doesn't matter if you have 4 guilds x 20 players or 8 guilds x 10 players, you can only make 7 masters happy; everyone else would be doing it as a business (helping to get help in return) or out of altruism. Anyone pondering to join the bigger side will have to think how they're new and how they're going to be at the bottom of the priority list. By contrast, anyone joining the weakest side will have a good position to negotiate from: "if I join you, you put me on a priority list for awesome gear".
In short, what I'm proposing is to apply economic pressure, the only thing that's proven to work. People might seem to be happy and disinterested when they grow fat on the spoils of war. In a famine, it's suddenly more efficient to adopt a homin-eat-homin attitude. Stockpiling works only to an extent, and if you're saving your best gear for tomorrow you are putting yourself at a slight disadvantage today.. which is exploitable in battle.
Of course, all this works on the assumption the prize is rewarding enough ... maybe the OP mats could use an even bigger boost to make them *really* desirable, but that's another topic.
A good point that was made during those debates was that "numbers count very much"; skill will obviously help reduce a party's handicap, but not to large extents. I'll draw a line in the sand and say 2:1 is already too much if the skill disparity is not huge (like 20 f2ps against 10 masters).
Let's consider the current situation: there are excessively many OP mats going around. The average guild has 5-10 active members in a week (again, it's a line in the sand, some have more, some less), and an item lasts certainly more than a week. What if OP mats were enough for just the owning guild, then? Let's say .. 7 q250 rubbarn per month, or 10 q200, 13 q150 and so on.
This suddenly slashes the motives behind the bigger alliance (whichever it is at the moment), because the more you grow the more difficult it is to share fairly or effectively. Doesn't matter if you have 4 guilds x 20 players or 8 guilds x 10 players, you can only make 7 masters happy; everyone else would be doing it as a business (helping to get help in return) or out of altruism. Anyone pondering to join the bigger side will have to think how they're new and how they're going to be at the bottom of the priority list. By contrast, anyone joining the weakest side will have a good position to negotiate from: "if I join you, you put me on a priority list for awesome gear".
In short, what I'm proposing is to apply economic pressure, the only thing that's proven to work. People might seem to be happy and disinterested when they grow fat on the spoils of war. In a famine, it's suddenly more efficient to adopt a homin-eat-homin attitude. Stockpiling works only to an extent, and if you're saving your best gear for tomorrow you are putting yourself at a slight disadvantage today.. which is exploitable in battle.
Of course, all this works on the assumption the prize is rewarding enough ... maybe the OP mats could use an even bigger boost to make them *really* desirable, but that's another topic.
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