The territory influence system has since day 1 been a pretty terrible design. It’s boring, there’s no visibility at the UI level for where things are at, and has only been going south since launch:
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Guilds resetting influence (ie through name change) renders hours of farming completely useless with a “stroke of a pen”, and with absolutely no consequence in sight. Literally all sorts of large guilds have done this – repeatedly – and there’s yet to be any fashion of consequence, ie permanent ban governors in question.
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The new quests have made a bad system horrible. The intent of adding quest variety is great, but the implementation is so disastrous as to make it even more frustrating to launch an attack on a territory. Whereas before you’d get 3 quests that you could do in bulk for the most part, plus or minus some territories where spawn rates did not really help, now you get a random assortment of quests that may or may not make any sense. For example, yesterday farming influence in Morningdale, I had a quest to kill players (of which there were none), a quest to conquer a fort (which was locked due to an invasion), and a quest to walk for 40 min or so to gather intelligence at the north edge of the zone…
Exploits aside, this nets to some zones only allowing a player to turn in an average of a quest per 30-60min…
It would be truly amazing if you could simply do away with this ridiculous system, and instead leveraged the siege time mechanics we already have. For example, why not allow guilds to declare on a territory with a cap of 1-2 attacks per week? While that would remove some incentive to do open world pvp, it’s not like this is being a good incentive to begin with. The fundamental flaw of new world’s lack of true open world pvp goes far beyond this specific mechanic – there’s just no real reason to do it, unlike games such as Albion Online.
Should AGS choose not to remove this mechanic, can we – at the very minimum – make it so that players can pick any of the pvp quests at their choosing, such that they can self-select which are doable and which aren’t doable for them? Worst case players can do all 6 which will lead to territories more easily being put into conflict, which adds content to a game that desperately needs it. And, again, if needed a cap should come under the form of how many times a territory can be in conflict per week; not this broken farming mechanic.
AGS, I’m fully aware that people use this mechanic today and therefore that we could point to some evidence of its success. Make no mistake, this is falls squarely into the same category of “you’ll enjoy the game after 100h”. It’s a bad design, get over it and move on. As is there’s an incentive to keep losing players, and zero evidence that game developers actually know how to design a game – supposed to be fun.