I personally don’t believe the current system in which a territory’s taxes can be used as the owning company’s personal piggy bank is any good.
I’m sure we are all aware of the snowball effect this has of creating a huge gap in wealth and power level between regular players and territory owners.
If government officials just took all the taxes levied on the people, there would surely be riots resulting in the officials being removed.
Instead, there should be a town fund from taxes. The owning company governor, officers, and members should then get a reasonable salary for running the town that comes from the town fund. Perhaps for every hour they are online, they should get paid a certain amount. This could be doubled if they are spending that time in the actual territory they own.
The rest of the town fund should be spent on enabling temporary buffs to all members of the owning faction. This can be combat buffs like health, mana, armor, damage and resistance bonuses. It could also be economy buffs such as gathering yield, gathering luck, loot luck, weight, out of combat speed and crafting bonuses.
For each hour a buff is active, some of the town tax fund is depleted accordingly. If the fund is completely depleted, all buffs stop working until more funds become available. This will also disable the salary for the company owners while the fund is depleted.
Stacking buffs is possible but stacking more and more of them gets exponentially more expensive. Thus having two or three active buffs should be easily maintained but having more than that should quickly get prohibitively expensive.
Also localized buffs active only in the owned territory should be much cheaper than buffs that work universally anywhere in the World. Universal buffs from different towns should not stack on top of each other. This will encourage owners of different territories to coordinate their universal buffs to not overlap with each other as that would be an inefficient waste of funds.
This should have the effect of faction members preferentially giving their business to towns which are owned by their faction as the taxes they pay go directly into maintaining buffs that they enjoy.
Finally, it would probably also be a good idea for tax collections to become more and more inefficient the more a territory a single faction owns. Thus if a faction only owns a single territory, they might get a huge bonus to the amount that goes into the town coffers from taxes. Perhaps doubling or even tripling the taxes they receive would be ideal. However, if a factions owns almost the entire map the taxes that they receive in their town fund might only be 10% of what is actually being paid by players.
You could call this the graft penalty but basically it’s just to make sure that a single faction does not end up dominating the entire map for more than a short period of time.
Overall I believe this would be a much better system than just giving territory owners untethered ownership of all the taxes paid by players to the territory they own.
Please give any feedback you might have for this kind of system and I would like to hear what you think can be added or adjusted to improve it.