So on my main server, a single faction split across 4 companies owns most of the territories.
They exploited their way to the top and now that the gap has closed in gear score/levelling and theyre at risk of losing their territories they have rotated out of the server.
As a final f*** you to everyone, 1 person from each of their sub companies has remained on the world and raised all the taxes to maximum to horde as much gold before they rotate out to join the rest of their faction.
We should be able to report players for sabotaging servers like this. We’re hoping to capture at least a couple of these territories in the following days to bring these back down to try and recover the worlds economy, but its sad that this sort of thing can happen.
This is why the game design of giving guilds so much influence is generally bad for the wider game. Many guilds care only about themselves, not the server, not the health of the game, not other players. And stuff like this happens. It allows one group of self-centered … people to have a huge negative impact on a whole server.
Well, from one perspective the issue is understandable, since 1) they had been upgrading these towns that they “have to” leave behind. Of course it is not forced to leaving the server, but lets pretend, it is out of their will. 2) leaving a server where you upgraded the crofting stations to tier 5 is quite stupid, so somehow this frustrated feeling should be compensated.
I believe that it is up to the player base to constantly watching the actual taxing setups and once they see tax rising they should spam global chat with it. It is easy to not realizing at all that the town where you are refining, crafting, or converting 1000 and 1000 t4, t5 mats / hour is running under max taxes.
Whoever thought putting taxes into player hands in an mmo was a good idea is an idiot! Same as station upkeep. Give people the tools to act like morons and morons you will create.
But whoever thought giving everyone a transfer token without any guidance or even suggestions on where to go would somehow work it’s self out is an even bigger idiot.
Seriously, what are they putting into the water at AGS?
There was approx 400 of them and they all just transferred to one of the biggest servers in our region. There perhaps needs to be a flow control mechanism with transfers from one single world to another. Perhaps transferring world you should be forced to rejoin a faction. The world they transferred to is already dominated by the same faction. There is a mechanic that stops you changing to the dominant faction, but if youre already that faction you can just transfer straight in. Bit of a hole there.
I agree though, taxes should be for the most part auto calculated by how upgraded your city is. Perhaps the company can sway that tax rate a little bit with company influence, but it should be determined by trade activity, craft activity, tier of the facilities, etc…to stop this kind of game abuse.
I think this same thing happened on the server I’m on. One company had 3 areas and things were good. Then I noticed all 3 had max taxes. Chat seemed to imply they had left the server. 2 days later the company name changed to We Left. The only positive was the taxes went back down but it didn’t matter, I think they’d already gotten their money and left. They’ve been taken over as soon as a war could be had but the damage was already done.
I agree that taxes should be auto set and territory fees auto paid from that, with small bonuses paid out to the controlling company. This currently feels like a bad economics experiment. I feel even though I’m not in company that they should get something for ruling well but with no recourse for player’s to hold them accountable we shouldn’t be left at their mercy like this.
The issue with taxes being in players hands is that you cannot easily just “move house”
If you add a feature for players to move thier home to a comparable home in another town. Then when taxes get to high. Everyone can just leave.
This would incentivise fair taxes. As anyone pushing them to high would have no one staying.
Simple.
For example;
Star Wars galaxies had player made towns and home taxes too.
But if the governor set them too high. Simple. Pack up. Move house out of settlement or to another player town. Or into the wilds alone.
Add instanced “shacks” or “cabins” into the wilderness for those who don’t want houses in the towns and don’t want taxes. Add a sustainment system to them. Like firewood and food store.
Didn’t one of the game directors say the tax system was a social experiment and he was keen to see what people would do with it? Well there you go, greed is a vice and it comes to the fore. I guess 25% is high but still ‘reasonable’ given that during medieval times, families were taxed up to 90% in the feudal system to keep the peasantry downtrodden and royal coffers full. These were ‘protection fees’ against invaders; not so different today (for some) if you have a small business.
Problem is, we have only one free transfer so I guess you’d need an alt to scope out taxes and dominance before transferring.
we ended up fixing it the only way we could, by our faction Syndicate taking all of the territories affected…dropped all the tax rates, now we need the remaining Marauders & Covenant to take them from us to give them some territory control back. Thankfully Cutlass Keys the last remaining member, did hand the company over to another company who were staying. They renamed it and dropped the tax rates for Marauders so we didnt need to end up taking that one.
I’ve spent the morning creating a 2nd character on different realms looking at tax rates for either a transfer for my main or a perm 2nd character; things have gotten out of hand. I have no problem starting from zero but to have the deck stacked against you in every endeavor.
I enjoy a 2nd character to mix things up but not now. I’ll check back now and then but for now have better things to fill my time. I may be retired but that just means I don’t waste my time.
