Suggestion [Township] - Citizen Limits/Allies

[JJent]

As far as I know towns don't currently have a citizen limit. And I don't think there is much drive to forge alliances or rank up/upgrade your towns other than space and a tier 2 gets 30 chunks which is plenty without much need to go further. I have a few suggestions.

Citizen Limits Based on Town Tier
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My first suggestion is placing a citizen limit based on what rank the town is currently at, something like a Hamlet may only have 10 (random numbers of the top of my head) people and as the ranks grow so does the citizenship limit, of course those numbers would have to be discussed and tweaked of course.

At the time of writing this there are 35 towns created. The top 8 towns having the following number of citizens; 59, 30, 25, 19, 14, 14, 13, 12. The remaining ones ALL have less than 10 members with most of them being less than 5. I myself an a mayor of a small town (Ivalice) and I will probably never be able to capture any of the points on the map simply because I lack the numbers. And as soon as someone asks to join a town the largest towns post their links. What new player wants to join a small town with less than 5 or 10 members when they can join one that controls the points all the time and has almost 60? Making the towns cheaper to create is kind of a moot point if no one wants to join the smaller towns. It's nice for a few friends but it sets them up to have a bad time if they are competing against towns that have 5-10 times their numbers.

I feel like this could really help the server. Say the leading town which has almost 60 people suddenly only has a citizen limit of 25 or 30? They will have to do something at that point if they want to keep their numbers: Create a new town, strive to rank up the current one or maybe even forge an alliance with an existing one.

Encouraging Alliances

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I remember when I played on one of the previous maps on of the coolest things was how many alliances there were, and were pretty well stuck by. I don't feel that on this map, which I know it's new and things are still working themselves out. But if you take my first suggestion it would help with this too. If you wanted to have numbers then it would be way easier to forge an alliance with another tier 2+ town that is at their citizen limit than it would be to make another town and manage two.

Second suggestion: It would be neat as well if the boost from controlling points were shared between allies.The would encourage smaller towns to WANT to be allies with larger ones. Something like allies get 25-50% of the boost as well. You could restrict number of allied towns as well if needed.

@Admins

 

[RegularHumanMode]

Citizen limits are already a thing, alliances are up to towns, that boost for allies who controls points is too much (maybe could be something small like 10% for nation members?)

 

[JJent]

Citizen limits are already a thing, alliances are up to towns, that boost for allies who controls points is too much (maybe could be something small like 10% for nation members?)

My bad, I asked a few times in help chat and no one answered about the citizenship limit like most questions.

Yeah 10% or something sounds reasonable, just something for being an ally of a bigger town. But there should be a bigger drive for a larger town to have allies too. Right now I can't think of a reason the big town would want to ally with a small town at all.

If citizen limits are already a thing I feel like they are too high then. I think the town with 60 members is a tier 3? 60 members is well over what the server has online at a time so that's kind of crazy for just a tier 3. In order for the suggestion to work the numbers should have some effect based on average amount of players online. Which I know it isn't likely that every person on isn't gonna be just the people in those large towns, but odds are most of them will be.

 

[RegularHumanMode]

My bad, I asked a few times in help chat and no one answered about the citizenship limit like most questions.

Yeah 10% or something sounds reasonable, just something for being an ally of a bigger town. But there should be a bigger drive for a larger town to have allies too. Right now I can't think of a reason the big town would want to ally with a small town at all.

If citizen limits are already a thing I feel like they are too high then. I think the town with 60 members is a tier 3? 60 members is well over what the server has online at a time so that's kind of crazy for just a tier 3. In order for the suggestion to work the numbers should have some effect based on average amount of players online. Which I know it isn't likely that every person on isn't gonna be just the people in those large towns, but odds are most of them will be.

I remember there was some talk about scaling the numbers/tier back from Kain, but nothing solid.

 

[radicater11]

My bad, I asked a few times in help chat and no one answered about the citizenship limit like most questions.

Yeah 10% or something sounds reasonable, just something for being an ally of a bigger town. But there should be a bigger drive for a larger town to have allies too. Right now I can't think of a reason the big town would want to ally with a small town at all.

If citizen limits are already a thing I feel like they are too high then. I think the town with 60 members is a tier 3? 60 members is well over what the server has online at a time so that's kind of crazy for just a tier 3. In order for the suggestion to work the numbers should have some effect based on average amount of players online. Which I know it isn't likely that every person on isn't gonna be just the people in those large towns, but odds are most of them will be.

If you were ever part of a large town, you would know that almost 90% of the players are noobs, and they rarely get on. To add to this fact, allies in general have been on the decline for a lot longer than the new townships system has been out. This is mainly because party sizes being too small forces large groups to break into multiple parties, which is a HUGE detriment to PvP in groups. We've already experienced this as a force, and it's REALLY annoying.

 

[Haxnn]

Even if there is a citizen limit in game currently, our town (with 62 players now I believe) hasn't encountered it. With that said, as a town wishing to support new players, there are a few issues with implementing a citizen limit. As radicater mentioned above, the majority of the town is new players.

Managing new players, getting them accustom with the server and making them feel welcome in the community is a lot of work. Teaching them how towns and the server in general works, answering questions, helping them level and solving internal problems that arise within the town add to the workload the town council has to manage in order for both the town and new players to be successful. This in itself is a reason towns don't accept new players.

In addition, one of the biggest issues when recruiting new players is that you are going in blind. We have no idea how well they will mesh with us and our players, or whether or not they will cause issues and conflicts in town. If a restrictive citizen limit is implemented why would a town want to risk one of their limited town slots on a new player? Chances are they will only be accepting players that they have encountered in game and have gotten a feel for, or players with extraordinary town applications. Unfortunately that doesn't help 90% of the new players that won't write an essay of an application and won't stick around long enough to give you a chance to evaluate them. While most players are great and just want to enjoy the server, but occasionally bad players get through and not every town is willing to take that chance.

Something that I feel is important to address is why our town, Newerth Prime, is so large. We aren't poaching new players from other towns, nor are we actively competing with other towns to snag all of the new players. Other towns simply aren't actively recruiting. In the first week or so of the server when we were not in a position to recruit, the number of players desperately looking in recruitment chat only to be met with silence was heartbreaking. And guess what? I don't remember the names of those players because they I never saw them again after that. They got bored and left because no one would play with them. Even now towns still aren't actively recruiting in recruitment chat. We try to run an ad every time a new players asks for a town, but we wait a minute or two to give other towns the opportunity to pick them up. I've said it in game and I'll say it again here, if other towns want new players they are welcome to recruit them. We won't get in your way because having more than one large "noob friendly" town is good for the server. With that being said however, we won't stop recruiting just because we're already a big town.

This leads me to wonder what the most likely scenario is should a more restrictive citizen limit be implemented. Will our town be forced to stop recruiting unless we upgrade our town? That might sound fair until you realized that despite our size there is still only a small group of core members that can be expected to actively work on upgrading the town. Will other towns start recruiting new members? I would like to think so, but I'm not entirely convinced. I think the most likely scenario is that all of the smaller towns grow a little bit, but a significant portion of new players end up alone and eventually leaving the server.

I understand why players want a more restrictive citizen limit, I'm just not convinced it's going to be helpful in the long run.

 

[Symbolite]

Basically all I wanted to say is what Haxnn already typed out there. We need other towns to step up recruiting and take in some of the new players. At least 1 or 2 other towns recruiting at the level we have been would be extremely beneficial to the server.