Handled Make Factions Bigger By Making Them Smaller.

I completely agree

 

Interesting idea...

If you think about it, a faction of 20 people would be considered enormous on most faction servers, but I think that's because Massivecraft plays more like a towny server than a traditional faction server (ironic, I know) so factions over 30 people are quite common.

Like you said, we'd see a lot more factions being built if this change was made, and if empires ever become a thing, we might even see some realistic-ish government structures between different factions. But I have to admit, I'm really worried this might render the cities of the faction worlds pointless. You'll see a lot of new hamlets and bunkers being built, but most people aren't crazy enough to build a city just to house a handful of people.

Maybe the pros would outweigh the cons, I don't know. Definitely a topic worth discussing though, good post.

 

cap must be 1 member

 

The cap would be around 50 members, if the faction is good then people will want to be in it, hence they try to prove their worth by being active and helping out around the faction.

 

I definitely think it's an interesting idea. It's been discussed in Game meetings before, and I'm sure it's something we could pick back up on again.

 

Perhaps not a hardcap on member count but on faction power?

 

Faction power is directly related to player count though.

 

The thing i mean would be that after you reach 50 members, additional members would not contribute to faction power.

 

Not a bad idea...

That way, if a faction wants to keep growing they can, but it will become more and more difficult to house and facilitate those extra players as the member count expands. Good idea!

 

It just feels super untrue to the play style MassiveCraft has allowed to exist since the start: that the server/staff aren't going to tell you how to run your faction or what to do with your faction.

This next part is a question to you @MokeDuck , because I don't want to make assumptions without understanding exactly what you were trying to remedy with this thread: Are you unhappy with the current state of factions on MassiveCraft? Specifically, are you unhappy with factions being too big, too small, not active enough, not engaging enough, not fun enough, etc? What problems were you trying to fix with this idea?

 

Alright, so at this moment I think it's safe to say you're barely content with the current factions environment, and just want factions to be fun overall. Trust me when I say I want the same thing, we just differ on how to achieve it. I don't think that decreasing the amount of people you can have in a faction will achieve this. With as many unique logins to the server as MassiveCraft gets, I personally feel like a lot of good talent would get lost to new players leaving because their only options would be the good factions that are already capped or really mediocre factions that aren't good enough to grab their interest, and then they leave.

I personally think you can break the experience, or life of a faction up into three very distinct phases in their existence; early development, mid game/reaching maturity, end-game/maturity. Every one of those phases needs to be strong, and if they are strong, I believe that would be the way to keep people from logging on and leaving just a few days later.

In the early development, for both factions and players, information on how to succeed on the server needs to be abundant and easy accessible. If the overall environment of factions could become better, which means members of factions always have stuff to do, don't feel left out, and essentially find whatever faction they join enticing, they won't leave. That makes the faction stronger and lets it progress to the next phase.

In the mid-game/reaching maturity phase, factions are established enough and have enough members to not go completely inactive the next day if some of them leave, but they are still growing and recruiting/building their city(s). What separates them at this point from the early game is that the faction is established and should feel like a community to its members. They feel part of something bigger than themselves.

In the late game/maturity phase, the faction is well established, full of active members and leadership, and might even be relevant and known in the server wide environment. Members log on with a clear goal in mind every time they play, and the faction actively engages in endgame content. Endgame content needs to be good and constantly released on MassiveCraft for factions to continue being the best they can be, or they reach the endgame and then stagnate because they is nothing to do. Players can only motivate themselves so much before they want the server to give them things to achieve.

If each phase of factions can at least be improved from what it is right now, I think you'd see a lot of factions improve their quality overall as they work towards their goals and goals set out by the server. Crisis of Kings is good endgame content, but it needs to be paired with additional endgame content that appeals to more than just PVPers. Content that appeals to faction players that want to focus on creating factions that are strong in politics, economics, building, etc. Give factions more content and they participate in it.

Built it and they will come.

In conclusion, I think capping faction populations will stunt a lot of faction growth and what factions can achieve, and a lot of active factions will cap out quickly, leaving new players to either face joining a very poor faction in terms of quality and engagement, or just not playing on the server.

 

It would be interesting as large factions resort to more slum like housing to have room for all their members

 

All factions of any size start small. Growing to any size requires reaching out to many players on the server and convincing them that your faction is the best use of their time. Some do this better than others, and reap the rewards as a result. Nothing will improve player retention more effectively than maintaining their freedom to choose the faction players want to join, regardless of its size.

Grouping large factions together as some ominous collective force is an uneducated and misguided thing to do. Just because Asteria might have a competitive history with Insani, Tyberia, Enigma, among other large factions, doesn't mean that Asteria operates like they do. Going off my personal observations that the overwhelming majority of experienced players on Massivecraft would prefer to see my faction wiped off the face of Aloria, its safe for me to say that if a player likes Asteria, there's probably a pretty good reason for it.

Just as people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin or the size of their waist, factions should not be determined to be good or bad based on the number of members they have. I have never made this judgement about other factions, and I hope that you will reconsider too. Players should always have the right to join a faction that provides or supports things they like to do. They should not be forbidden to join that faction just because a certain number of other people have already joined.

Players are people. People have lives. Not everyone wants to be online every day. Some people are semi-active. Still others are server wanderers that simply enjoy trying out different servers on a regular basis. I cite Price's Law here to make a comparison. In a business, probability provides that 50% of the productivity will come from the square root of the total number of workers in the business. The other 50% will come from the remaining workers. Translate Price's Law to faction activity.

In any faction, probability may provide the following for population sizes:

Population of 50 → √50 active people (about 7)

Population of 100 → √100 active people (10)

Population of 200 → √200 active people (about 14)

In conclusion, I firmly maintain my position that the size of a faction does not affect player retention, and holding factions accountable for their size will reduce the motivation of these intelligent leaders who have put in the effort of making their factions into what they are now. Rather, we should always be looking to offer the best content that we can for our players. Every faction does this in a different way, and the server staff have their own plans as well. In all reasonable cases, more freedom of choice and fewer ceilings on success will make Massivecraft a better place to play.

Footnote: my position is congruent for faction power ceilings.

Footnote: @Alj23 has experience working with me in Asteria, so he's well tuned to the dynamics of player activity in an example large faction.

@MokeDuck

 

As Zac said, I do not think player retention is caused by faction size, I believe it is a mix of confusion on first joining the server and also lack of interest. I've recruited many people into Enigma, I was there when it was at 200 and I'm here when it's only at like 28. Enigma lost its players due to a lack of interest - partly my fault and partly the fault of the other officers and leaders in Enigma. I believe a strong and active officer team that provide fun activities and jobs for members to work on will increase player retention.

I am a firm believer that if you give a player a GOOD orientation when they join the server, they will stay unless they are a "traveller", the type of player who does not intend on staying long with the server, these players normally join and never come back because they never intended on staying and were just checking Massive out.

You said that players would be valued more, MokeDuck, I believe all large factions value their players much. I do not see recruitment as a grind, I see it as a enjoyable activity that benefits my faction more than anything. Good recruitment is a pillar that keeps all factions alive and running.

I just don't think restricting faction sizes is a good thing. Factions should scale up/down as the server grows. Your point on diplomacy is something I agree with, except I would only like it if the long forgotten Empires update was ever implemented. Sub factions are very messy unless you actually have an alt controlling them.

I really do think this is one of the best suggestions I have read, not necessarily because I agree with it but because you actually are willing to provide XYZ solution and also you address the disadvantages of the solution.

 

Hey @MokeDuck

What @ZACGAMR7 @CnocBride are saying is very very true, as seen by myself, someone who has played on this server for a long time. Making sure new players to the server understand everything in front of them is super important, considering MassiveCraft is one of the most extensive servers I've ever played on, content wise. It's a lot for new players to grasp on their first login, and I've seen countless new players log off simply because they're overwhelmed or can't figure out something that should be so simple across all servers as to how to use the server chat (which ours is vastly different from most servers.)

If people took creating a faction more seriously, and when they did, had a plan in mind of what they want to achieve, the quality of factions overall would go up. Right now we have factions that get created for the lols, and when they recruit people but don't teach them how factions and survival and the server works, it really turns new players off from engaging with the server. Which is where the player retention issue stems from.

You're right that there is a player retention issue. In the 5 years I've played on this server, MassiveCraft still hasn't gotten introducing new players to how the server works right. I don't really know if it ever will. But it should always strive to be better, which it can be.

 

I try to keep myself disconnected from the trends Massivecraft has in order to better build a society within my faction that I like. If you believe that factions should focus on different things, my biggest piece of advice to you is to use your own faction as a testing ground for your ideas. Trying to convince people to support a server-wide change is a lot harder than implementing a change of focus in your own faction. If you find that your member retention improves to an acceptable standard, share your ideas with your friends and other leaders who you believe would appreciate your findings.

If your argument is reasonable and can be supported with evidence, it doesn't require forcing all the players on the server to accept the change with staff power. It only requires your success to show that adopting your focuses will bring success to the rest of the server too.

@MokeDuck

 

Oh god no. @Sephite STOP HIM!

 

Yeah... don't do what ZACGAMR said.

 

I do disagree with your statement on the isolation of factions. Asteria is known for being very isolated and rarely involved within its own community. I believe faction interaction needs to be encouraged more and it is being encouraged more through this world move. Without faction interaction there would be no war, trade or diplomacy, key elements of factions.

 

That first statement was advising him to go against the grain, not isolate his faction. People who want things to change at large should go against the grain within their own spheres of influence instead of trying to cause a server-wide change all at once. Ideas that prove successful can be shared and spread while those that prove to fail can be thrown out without causing server-wide damage from the latter. People should put their eggs into their little faction baskets instead of using staff power to put all the eggs into one big server-sized basket.

Asteria's relative isolation has nothing to do with my advice to him. It's just a reflection of my personal choices and what I think is best for the faction.

 

The behavior of your members reflects their opinion about your ideas and what you have to show for them in your faction. If what you do does improve the faction experience for your members, then if the other leaders on the server don't adopt your ideas after you share them, that's their loss. The players will go to the factions that give them the best experience.

I will tell you right now. Kicking half the members who wanted to be in your faction isn't going to improve their experience. Of course they would join a larger faction. That's the most obvious evidence that those factions don't kick their members.

 

Cap members but increase power back to 60, instead of 30, would allow for great and majestic city’s and towns to be built once again! Something which is now a rarity

 

A smaller player base within a faction, will help to achieve this, but also increase faction integrity and identity, instead of mrdgfddblue who logged on, joined, left and is one of 150 inactive members in a 299 person fac, now there is ALLOT more I could add, but I’m on my phone, so please don’t jump down my throat plz

 

But upon implementation of your idea, it affects every faction on the server no matter what. If you go ahead and attempt this with your personal faction, you get to see if it succeeds or fails which would determine whether or not other factions should be forced to adhere to the cap.

I mean, you said it, so I think it's safe to say this idea wouldn't accomplish what you think it would.

 

Players who can't join a faction they want to be in because the faction has already reached the member cap will have a worse game experience.

Faction leaders who can't recruit the number of members they want to work with because they already reached the cap will have a worse game experience.

Semi-active players who want casual play that end up kicked from factions for not being active enough to be worth a space in the now limited number of members a faction can have will have a worse game experience.

If keeping your faction small helps your diplomacy and engagement, that's great. Give that good faction experience to as many of your members as you can. But I see no reason why this should be something forced on all the other leaders that want to run their factions their way. Instead of appealing for the staff to make everyone play a certain way because you personally think it's a good idea, prove that your ideas improve the game experience for your own faction members. Here's something I can suggest for you to try.

1. Recruit until you reach fifty members.
2. Gather ten or so of those members and have them branch off into their own faction. You can use your faction's balance to finance their faction creation and land upkeep for a while.
3. Repeat steps one and two until you have the number of factions you would desire for an enhanced diplomatic playing field.
4. Advertise your confederation/union/empire to other players who don't have factions to provide them with a great game experience.

No forcing everyone on the server to do this is required. The above four steps should give you the power to compete with the rest of the server's ideas in order to see how yours stacks up against theirs. Clearly you should win over many of the potential recruits if this is truly a good way of playing factions.

 

While I refuse to speak on behalf of "large factions", I can speak from my own experience. Both strategies of recruitment have their benefits and downsides. There's no one, right way to run your faction. I adamantly defend the right of faction leaders to operate their faction with the size and structure they want.

I choose to recruit a large number of members because I accept the fact that everyone's lives are different. Some people can play a lot. Some people only want to play a little while. Still others are once and done, or maybe just don't like Massivecraft since it does Factions way differently than other servers do. Accepting everyone who wants to join Asteria means I'm going to get a bunch of every demographic. It's not an even split between each player type, and anyone who tries to tell you they know exactly how many of each there is or should be is lying to you or an idiot. Since I want Asteria to be an available option for as many player types as possible, my expectations are bottom line.

Many factions look for a specific type of player -- like a regularly active one, a roleplayer, a PvPer, or a good worker. It helps to be more exclusive in their cases. There's nothing wrong with that.

Most other factions don't do what I do, obviously. Not every faction aims to have a lot of members. But the idea that having many members is a bad thing or needs to be sanctioned is wrong. No one can predict how people's lives are and how it affects their gameplay, nor should they have the right to use staff power to force other leaders to do what they want, regardless of how it affects the server at large. I don't tell the staff to sanction PvP because it causes some of my non-PvPer members to rage-quit the server. That's just a fact of life and videogames.

If improving server engagement is the goal here, forcing change to the way factions operate is not the way to go. The focus should on baseline features. I saw there's a new department of staff for survival content. That's a great move in my opinion. Perhaps they could add some dungeons to explore or continue their work on the Empires extension (minus features I've already denounced here).

 

I really like this idea, I’ve been telling my friends and enemies we should all
Split up into factions of 4-5 and enemy everyone else, creating a bunch of PvP.

My only concern is this seems to hurt large factions as of now with a lot of land.

Besides that, I think staff should really look into this. 20-40 would be my ideal number, it’d also stop factions from putting like 30 alts into one faction as some do. @Tokuu i would really look into this, it is something that would generate a lot more as he said. A bunch of new factions.