When a game is on a down slide of players, it’s a ghost town.
Wars to keep control of a given town are not filled because of lack of players.
Unchallenged town owners have to make tough decisions in deciding if they just want to let the town die because the upkeep is just too much.
On the flip side, town owners made some players extremely rich and non-town owners poorer. Making the divide between players very unhealthy for the overall longevity of the game. Both sides just got bored because one got all they needed really fast and other just got bored out of frustration.
With the many mergers happening in the short life span of New World, it is kind of tough to keep the motivation going in players. Get a town, lose a town in the next server merge. Rinse repeat.
I am sure others can come up with other drawbacks to player run towns.
Even when a game is on a down slide of players quitting or just taking a break, the towns would not feel dead if it were NPC run. Again, on paper the idea sounded great to some, but I knew from the start this was a terrible idea that would never work.
I wonder if you can think of some ways to adjust the current system to help fix some of the issues? I think it’s just a central part of the game and the developer’s vision that I don’t see it going away, but perhaps there is a way to make it feel better?
I know one suggestion people have been making is to prevent players from removing gold from towns and making it so you can only use the gold on upgrades. They would need to add more options to dump gold into and perhaps balance things a bit (such as making it so EF and WW are not always the biggest earners).
People are concentrating on limited number of cities because they are forced to due to needing the higher level station to craft refine. This is why I want to keep posting this suggestion I made last week so that people can spread out more and there is less of a problem for players to continue playing and growing even if cities are left alone.
cities that are not managed well should also have their taxes dropped to minimum automatically. In my server some companies never bothered to even upgrade a single station. They just call it gold farm city for their company and set taxes all to high and very high.
I think your suggestion of not letting people get gold from cities would be nice. Change the benefit to owning cities to giving buff to their players instead like bigger storage or something. This way people who occupies cities might do so for a more responsible intentions instead of just making it a “gold farm”
ALL of your 5 points SHOULD have been anticipated by a dev team with experience in mmo development. Hell, many of us in the cheap seats saw this coming in beta, (Experience with a dying server/game is a hell of a teacher.)
Agreed. Taxes rates should be based on several factors and heavily weighted on the tier of the crafting stations. If the mean tier of crafting stations is Tier 1, the max tax rate should be like 0.1%. If the mean tier is Tier 5, then max tax rate.
Its too easy to hold cities and just let the gold roll in. There must be a cost to owning a city.