The one thing that is sorely lacking from a large number of systems introduced is a window of opportunity or fluctuation from a static power base. When a system is predictable, static and permanent, you have a system/mechanic that is bound to become boring/tedious/unused/biased.
I would hope that you would take this opportunity to seriously look at the driving events for conflict, and the way they are generated. Fluctuating benefits for defiling different shrines based on interactions of environment/lunar cycle/distance from altar and a healthy random component would not be remiss. Also consider a swap routine that allows for relics to be used offensively during select windows of opportunity, which could definitely ramp up competition.
The further a shrine is from the altar the easier it should be to defile, imo.
We are considering this actually. Also, increasing the upkeep on shrines further from the altar.
I am pretty leery about going that direction. Leechwood's shrine is in the middle of god damn nowhere due to roleplay. We're going to have to build an amazingly extensive web to even have anything remotely useful anywhere near pertinent areas in the world.
So, thus far, I do appreciate the intent behind this system. Sects have really been lackluster replacements for orders so far, and there have been a lot of growing pains associated with figuring out how to make it work. But right now, the shrine system is honestly pretty terrible to me. I know I'm probably missing a lot of details and that the system is likely unfinished, but there are some big gaps in logic and cohesiveness here that are making it difficult for me to stay excited. Right now I would honestly prefer the old shrine system, and I didn't exactly enjoy that.
The major issue is having to build networks of shrines. Again, I understand the intent here - sects shouldn't be able to branch into every area of contention to use their super-powerful-cooldowns at will. But right now it's going to take my sect dozens of shrines to even leave my area. Al'drym is tightly woven into the roleplay of the Leechwood sect, and it would not make much sense for us to move the altar out of the area.
However, the entirety of the shrine system seems to be based around using specific powers in specific places. There's no value in expanding a shrine network over an area that will never see any contention. Shards rarely fall there (if they even do, I'm not positive they do), and there are no caravan networks that pass through there. So on top of requiring our sect to spend months of bashing in order to have the option of leaving the area, until we do, there's absolutely no value in collecting and placing relics - because we will never encounter fights where they're usable.
Right now, sects are at varying levels of innate advantages because of choices made when sects/cults were first introduced, where altars are placed in areas that have roleplay value to the sect. The closer this chosen area is to caravan paths or shardfall paths, the sooner they can actually begin to even use the system as assembled. This is an advantage conferred on a seemingly arbitrary basis, because it was never previously important that your holiest location (altar, temple) be well-trafficked.
We have some steam going right now to try and participate in the system, because as a sect, we want to have shrines and we want to have some visible amount of strength and influence. But frankly, this is going to be very difficult to sustain over time, as it becomes evident that we aren't going to benefit from participating at all. The rewards for participation are skewed in a way that could be completely avoided by not tying the perks to extending a network from your 'home' location. This seems like a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed before people start to become deeply invested in the current scheme.
I'm not enthusiastic about the utility of the powers even if shrine networks were more manageable, however. I think there needs to be some other way to use these cooldowns - look how often the 'altar only' sect rituals are used, and these are even more restrictive due to cooldowns vs. resource management.
TL;DR: Shrine networks are a terrible way of setting up the benefits for participation, because they unfairly skew the value of shrines towards sects that place their altars in high traffic areas. This is a critical problem that devalues the entirity of the mechanic. This would be exacerbated by penalizing sects for building shrines further away from their altar when altars are not uniformly distant to begin with.
My altar is in a terrible place. When will I ever use those shrines for any of the combat-related skills? Teleport may be nice, but that's it.
I want to see it possible to build shrines one area away from altar, and then expand to areas adjacent to altars built. And the effects are area wide instead of one room.
(Ring): Lartus says, "I heard Theophilus once threw a grenade and killed ten people." (Ring): Lartus says, "Then it exploded."
(Ring): Zsetsu says, "Everyone's playing checkers, but Theophilus is playing chess."
To be honest, we could really make a new sect called The Sect of Geography and drop our altar on the spring and pray to culture, freedom, and a central location from which to dominate from. Our entity can just be whoever, because we're like free and stuff.
-Allows for use of relics (cooldown associated with swapping out relics)
-Must be maintained and leveled by the owner alone. (can use commodities, shards (red likely), gold, experience)
the cost of levelling the shrine will be higher than the shrine system due to balance issues.
-When the owner dies do another player while the is shrine active (using relic) that relic is destroyed (for the sake of balance)
You could also increase cooldowns and costs for relic use to balance this out. It'd likely make a ton of money and hopefully increase el conflicto in imperian
--More serious idea:
Where are the PVE benefits of this system? It seems 100% badly pk oriented. PVE benefits would get more people involved faster and accidentally get them involved in combat.
Where are the PVE benefits of this system? It seems 100% badly pk oriented. PVE benefits would get more people involved faster and accidentally get them involved in combat.
There are PVE benefits that all org members receive with shrines, but as we're just starting off and haven't built many shrines these may not be apparent. There is one benefit that applies game wide based on the number of shrine levels the org has and two more that are based on the number of shrine levels in the immediate area. These includes bonuses to both criticals and base damage.
So, Imperian has a problem with gold faucet existing and being turned on high with no really effective widely used sinks. Problem is now everyone is bashing. Even more gold is flowing into the system.
So here's what I'm thinking. Lets steal a bit from WoW.
In WoW there is an island called the Timeless Isle. One of the factions lets you buy something when you pk people on said isle and in battlegrounds for a currency to buy stuff, as long as you using a specific item (censer of something or other).
What I'm suggesting is in Imperian we do something similar. To get stuff for the shrine system, you need to activate an item (Chalice of X or whatever name). This item would cost a small amount, say 20k gold. It would last 10 months. As long as that item was activated, relic and shrine system stuff dropped for you on kills. However, gold wouldn't drop.
If you bashed normally without activating it, then gold would drop, but stuff for the new system wouldn't drop.
Maybe that would stop a huge gold influx while the shrine system is in its infancy? Or maybe its less of a problem than I think it is, but I somehow gotta imagine that we've only seen the start of people trying to expand their shrine webs and thus the bashing train will continue for a while.
Does the beasts ritual ONLY pull from the stone giant horn? That's kind of Could we have it possibly summon some epic world bosses or a more varied list of mobs?
Does the beasts ritual ONLY pull from the stone giant horn? That's kind of Could we have it possibly summon some epic world bosses or a more varied list of mobs?
I'm not against spicing it up. Give me some mob numbers (within reason, it's not going to summon Legion) and I'll look at what makes sense to add.
Is there any more discussion to be had about the utility of relics? Right now, there's virtually zero - there are all of these neat, likely overpowered cooldowns that nobody will ever see, because the shrine system is set up such that it's going to take some sects months and months to even leave their home area (see my previous post). Essence drops greatly outpace belief generation even if you don't commit entirely to doing so.
It feels like there are ideas to build from, but this system is incomplete and not particularly functional to me.
Food for thought (douple post because of time limit on editing):
I understand why shrines cost 75% belief, because the intention is for this system to be long-term, but sects/cults are going to lose interest in general long before they can reach the point where even using relics is possible. It's nice that shrines confer a general benefit to the area you build them in, but I have absolutely no use for bonus PvE damage in Al'drym. I do not bash there, I wouldn't want to bash there, it's kind of an obnoxious area.
The other problem with the high cost to building a network is that it turns what is presumably supposed to be a dynamic inter-sect conflict system into something very static and entrenched. A sect that has numerous high volume bashers is going to build shrines exponentially more quickly than smaller cults/sects, and once dominance has been established, there's largely no way to counter it. Combine this with some sects having to expand much, much farther than others to reach conflict zones, and you're essentially setting up a system that will confer a huge advantage to early investors and shut out anyone else without the time/energy to build up their sect right now.
Maybe shrine costs could scale with placement distance/control over an area? Instead, have shrines scale proportional to distance, and allow the presence of other shrines to modify this negatively. For instance, the further away you place a shrine from another level 3/4 shrine, the more belief this costs: this would introduce a hard cap on the distance between shrines by virtue of maximum belief. Shrines for other cults/sects would have the opposite effect, and cause subsequent placements to cost additional belief, to encourage sects to remove the shrines of orgs that would contest an area they want control over.
Example math:
A shrine placed 3 rooms away from another level 3/4 shrine would cost, say, 40% belief. Each additional room would add increasing amounts of belief to this cost, until a hard cap of 100% belief would occur at, say, 15 rooms. This adds an area of decision making because each shrine would increase the total benefit in that area (the bonus to PvE damage), but more shrines means more upkeep, more total belief cost, and less distance covered with each. Each shrine in an area that is not controlled by the sect in question would add a penalty equivalent to one additional room of distance: so if there are 12 opposing shrines in an area, the hard cap would drop from 15 rooms to 3 rooms.
Obviously these numbers don't match up with how the system would actually play out, but I think conceptually there needs to be another layer of complexity beyond "one shrine every 3 rooms, 75% belief cost".
Alternative/extra ideas:
- Allow spirit/blood/virtue drops to be consumed in the production of temporary shrines. These shrines could activate (some) shrine powers after being placed in a location, and would be destroyed either by a relatively easy action performed by an enemy, or at the end of the current month. This way, drops have another function other than stockpiling beneath belief, and relic powers might actually see some use.
- Allow cities/townes to be used as starting points for shrine networks. Allow sects/orgs to claim dominance over townes, add an upkeep cost to this (a big one, since this is basically a second altar), and let shrines be built from there. Limit sects/cults to one towne under their influence at a time, or introduce a scaling penalty to the cost that makes it unrealistic to keep multiple under your control.
Does the beasts ritual ONLY pull from the stone giant horn? That's kind of Could we have it possibly summon some epic world bosses or a more varied list of mobs?
I'm not against spicing it up. Give me some mob numbers (within reason, it's not going to summon Legion) and I'll look at what makes sense to add.
Since sects and cults are supposed to be all rp oriented could we possibly be given the option to write our own mobs? Giants dont make sense for Leechwood but shadow and mist abominations would.
A shrine placed 3 rooms away from another level 3/4 shrine would cost, say, 40% belief. Each additional room would add increasing amounts of belief to this cost, until a hard cap of 100% belief would occur at, say, 15 rooms. This adds an area of decision making because each shrine would increase the total benefit in that area (the bonus to PvE damage), but more shrines means more upkeep, more total belief cost, and less distance covered with each. Each shrine in an area that is not controlled by the sect in question would add a penalty equivalent to one additional room of distance: so if there are 12 opposing shrines in an area, the hard cap would drop from 15 rooms to 3 rooms.
Obviously these numbers don't match up with how the system would actually play out, but I think conceptually there needs to be another layer of complexity beyond "one shrine every 3 rooms, 75% belief cost".
Screaming out a warcry of pure strength, you bring your sabre crashing straight down on Baasche's head. With a power that seems to come from on high, you cleave asunder his entire body, from head to groin, splitting him in two and killing him instantly.
Your faith increases as Baasche falls by your hand.
You have slain Baasche.
You gain 2 blood commodities from your efforts.
You put 918,300 xp towards a drop of blood. You need 357,983 more for the next comm.
Screaming out a warcry of pure strength, Ahkan brings his sabre crashing straight down on the head
of Baasche. With unbelievable power, Ahkan's sabre rips through Baasche's entire body, cleaving it
asunder and killing him instantly.
Ahkan has slain Baasche.
You gain 6 blood commodities from your efforts.
You put 2,779,000 xp towards a drop of blood. You need 447,976 more for the next comm.
What the duece? Wysrias just stood there while he was afk doing science. Why did he get more xp? Am I getting some weird pk malus for pk xp above and beyond level 100 or something? Or am I being penalized for having killed Baasche like a lot.
I've thought about this system a lot lately, and I have come to the following conclusion: I don't care about this system and won't really be participating in it as it is now, because I do not care enough to put in the bashing time required.
That's really my problem with the entire Sect system. Want to change sects? Bash up rituals again. Want to build a temple? Bash. Want to build shrines? Bash. Try a new miracle group? Bash up the miracle group and then bash up the rituals for it. Don't like them after all? Repeat.
It's like you're looking for ways to keep us online and in the game and developed a list that looks like:
1) Bashing 2) ???
Let's be honest here. Your PvE sucks. It's uninteresting. It's boring. It's completely lacking in challenge. It is tedious beyond measure. It is so bad that you have given up on your no autobashing stance and just ask that people don't go completely AFK while they let their basher churn out bodies.
So why is it the only feasible way to build shrines and temples and sect rituals? Why do you insist on gating every cool system you make behind hours and hours and hours and hours of monotonous bashing? I want to be able to log on and have fun and do cool things, but if I want to do sect things I've got to log on and jump on my hamster wheel. This pretty effectively discourages me from doing sect things.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
@jeremy Tinkering with it in the beta (few hours ago). We tested it because I noticed that I killed more people than Kanthari, but he got more blood drops. I was doing all the work and he was reaping all the benefits.
I've thought about this system a lot lately, and I have come to the following conclusion: I don't care about this system and won't really be participating in it as it is now, because I do not care enough to put in the bashing time required.
That's really my problem with the entire Sect system. Want to change sects? Bash up rituals again. Want to build a temple? Bash. Want to build shrines? Bash.
Is there something other than bashing that people want to use to gain belief? You can already exchange gold and player corpses for belief, and you get belief for killing a rival sect member. Some people hate bashing, some people like it, but I am curious to know what people think could replace it.
I've played games that have actually engaging/interesting questing and mini-games/puzzles which none of the IRE games, to my knowledge, have -ever- mastered.
It'd be awesome if there was a way to make actually engaging in RP a mechanically beneficial thing, since that seems to be the central and primary encouraging factor in Imperian these days, but I can't think of a single one that doesn't involve a ton of monitoring we don't have the staff to support (woe, woe, the Docent program) or won't turn into tedious, boring nonsense.
The problem with PvP is that PvP isn't reliable enough to be a mainstay generator. If the enemy is feeling feisty at the shardfalls/caravans and we've got a good group around, it can be pretty awesome for it and you can generate a crapload of faith very quickly.
There are two problems with PvP as a method of faith genration, however:
If they aren't feeling feisty there's no PvP and thusly no faith generation via PvP.. The solution to this is that we need lots more things to fight over. I would even be okay with something like towne objectives where the defenders have an inherent bonus so that people like Septus and I would have hard targets to go for while the defenders would have enough of a bonus that they might bother to show up.
I admit that this is basically me saying that I want a bell I can ring to force Kinsarmarians to come die in glorious battle and thusly that it is unlikely, but I don't think that it's an inherently bad idea to have some lopsided circle-based objectives. I hate 'not fighting at all' a lot more than I hate 'fighting against the odds'.
The other problem is that you get +20k for a kill but -20k for a death. This means that the only fights that generate significant faith are one-sided blowouts because you need to maintain a positive KDR to actually gain faith.
When Septus and I go thrash Team Terrible at the entity mining statue in a couple of horribly onesided 2v8s, we come out of it with like +100k faith each for a few minutes of actual work.
When Risca and I feed our 10 man teams into a giant 2 hour meatgrinder of an outpost fight, and end up racking up a combined 140ish kills in 120 minutes, we can easily end up with magick getting 68 kills and AM getting 73 kills and winding up making an amazing 100k faith for 2 hours of grueling battle.
Those are approximations, of course; not every kill grants/costs faith and the kills/deaths are spread unevenly across multiple sects, but it is fairly common for me to end up roughly faith-neutral over the course of a long battle. This is a problem for faith generation from PvP; the larger the battles, the more likely it is that you break even.
The best solution for this, imo, is to make kills gain more faith than a death costs. This could open up the problem of kill trading, but it would help mitigate the problem of PvP only being worthwhile for belief generation if you're able to sustain a positive KDR. A giant all-hands-on-deck brawl could very well be a net gain for both sides, which would help encourage more people to get out there and fight.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Is there something other than bashing that people want to use to gain belief? You can already exchange gold and player corpses for belief, and you get belief for killing a rival sect member. Some people hate bashing, some people like it, but I am curious to know what people think could replace it.
Also, my problem isn't specifically "this system requires me to bash" so much as it is "this system requires me to bash so goddamn much". It's "this system requires me to spend hours upon hours upon hours bashing to get anywhere". It's "There's like 2 people in the sect who go bashing frequently and a shrine costs us 7,500,000 belief". It's "I don't want my playtime to look like 'Log on, bash three hours, go to bed'".
Like so many other things in this game, the problem with this system is largely a problem of scale; it feels like this is yet another situation where a system is causing problems because Jeremy designs systems like we've got Achaea's population and it ends up spreading people too thin.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
So apparently liturgical symbols impact the cost of shrine erection. Can we not have the success of an org dependent on an artifact purchase? That's pretty crap.
57% vs 75% is kinda ridiculous in an already timesinky system.
Edit: Because I'm just frustrated in general. I could afford to buy one. I think someone in our sect has one. But frankly this system has sucked some of my soul out at this point and I'm not getting it back.
Our master shrine was set in a craptastic area that is basically anti-fun because we had no clue the system was going to ever be in place. If we were smart and willing to ignore RP we'd have put the master shrine in the Areish mountains or Khandava. Instead we're trapped in Al'Drym and we have to bash our way out. 75% at a time. And you're telling me we could have done at at 57% at a time weeks after the system goes live? I'm sorry but no. That is crap plain and simple.
We're already working at a deficit. And now a couple weeks in it turns out we've been working at a deficit and a quarter.
Comments
I would hope that you would take this opportunity to seriously look at the driving events for conflict, and the way they are generated. Fluctuating benefits for defiling different shrines based on interactions of environment/lunar cycle/distance from altar and a healthy random component would not be remiss. Also consider a swap routine that allows for relics to be used offensively during select windows of opportunity, which could definitely ramp up competition.
The major issue is having to build networks of shrines. Again, I understand the intent here - sects shouldn't be able to branch into every area of contention to use their super-powerful-cooldowns at will. But right now it's going to take my sect dozens of shrines to even leave my area. Al'drym is tightly woven into the roleplay of the Leechwood sect, and it would not make much sense for us to move the altar out of the area.
However, the entirety of the shrine system seems to be based around using specific powers in specific places. There's no value in expanding a shrine network over an area that will never see any contention. Shards rarely fall there (if they even do, I'm not positive they do), and there are no caravan networks that pass through there. So on top of requiring our sect to spend months of bashing in order to have the option of leaving the area, until we do, there's absolutely no value in collecting and placing relics - because we will never encounter fights where they're usable.
Right now, sects are at varying levels of innate advantages because of choices made when sects/cults were first introduced, where altars are placed in areas that have roleplay value to the sect. The closer this chosen area is to caravan paths or shardfall paths, the sooner they can actually begin to even use the system as assembled. This is an advantage conferred on a seemingly arbitrary basis, because it was never previously important that your holiest location (altar, temple) be well-trafficked.
We have some steam going right now to try and participate in the system, because as a sect, we want to have shrines and we want to have some visible amount of strength and influence. But frankly, this is going to be very difficult to sustain over time, as it becomes evident that we aren't going to benefit from participating at all. The rewards for participation are skewed in a way that could be completely avoided by not tying the perks to extending a network from your 'home' location. This seems like a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed before people start to become deeply invested in the current scheme.
I'm not enthusiastic about the utility of the powers even if shrine networks were more manageable, however. I think there needs to be some other way to use these cooldowns - look how often the 'altar only' sect rituals are used, and these are even more restrictive due to cooldowns vs. resource management.
TL;DR: Shrine networks are a terrible way of setting up the benefits for participation, because they unfairly skew the value of shrines towards sects that place their altars in high traffic areas. This is a critical problem that devalues the entirity of the mechanic. This would be exacerbated by penalizing sects for building shrines further away from their altar when altars are not uniformly distant to begin with.
(Ring): Lartus says, "Then it exploded."
(Ring): Zsetsu says, "Everyone's playing checkers, but Theophilus is playing chess."
Where are the PVE benefits of this system? It seems 100% badly pk oriented. PVE benefits would get more people involved faster and accidentally get them involved in combat.
It feels like there are ideas to build from, but this system is incomplete and not particularly functional to me.
I understand why shrines cost 75% belief, because the intention is for this system to be long-term, but sects/cults are going to lose interest in general long before they can reach the point where even using relics is possible. It's nice that shrines confer a general benefit to the area you build them in, but I have absolutely no use for bonus PvE damage in Al'drym. I do not bash there, I wouldn't want to bash there, it's kind of an obnoxious area.
The other problem with the high cost to building a network is that it turns what is presumably supposed to be a dynamic inter-sect conflict system into something very static and entrenched. A sect that has numerous high volume bashers is going to build shrines exponentially more quickly than smaller cults/sects, and once dominance has been established, there's largely no way to counter it. Combine this with some sects having to expand much, much farther than others to reach conflict zones, and you're essentially setting up a system that will confer a huge advantage to early investors and shut out anyone else without the time/energy to build up their sect right now.
Maybe shrine costs could scale with placement distance/control over an area? Instead, have shrines scale proportional to distance, and allow the presence of other shrines to modify this negatively. For instance, the further away you place a shrine from another level 3/4 shrine, the more belief this costs: this would introduce a hard cap on the distance between shrines by virtue of maximum belief. Shrines for other cults/sects would have the opposite effect, and cause subsequent placements to cost additional belief, to encourage sects to remove the shrines of orgs that would contest an area they want control over.
Example math:
A shrine placed 3 rooms away from another level 3/4 shrine would cost, say, 40% belief. Each additional room would add increasing amounts of belief to this cost, until a hard cap of 100% belief would occur at, say, 15 rooms. This adds an area of decision making because each shrine would increase the total benefit in that area (the bonus to PvE damage), but more shrines means more upkeep, more total belief cost, and less distance covered with each. Each shrine in an area that is not controlled by the sect in question would add a penalty equivalent to one additional room of distance: so if there are 12 opposing shrines in an area, the hard cap would drop from 15 rooms to 3 rooms.
Obviously these numbers don't match up with how the system would actually play out, but I think conceptually there needs to be another layer of complexity beyond "one shrine every 3 rooms, 75% belief cost".
Alternative/extra ideas:
- Allow spirit/blood/virtue drops to be consumed in the production of temporary shrines. These shrines could activate (some) shrine powers after being placed in a location, and would be destroyed either by a relatively easy action performed by an enemy, or at the end of the current month. This way, drops have another function other than stockpiling beneath belief, and relic powers might actually see some use.
- Allow cities/townes to be used as starting points for shrine networks. Allow sects/orgs to claim dominance over townes, add an upkeep cost to this (a big one, since this is basically a second altar), and let shrines be built from there. Limit sects/cults to one towne under their influence at a time, or introduce a scaling penalty to the cost that makes it unrealistic to keep multiple under your control.
I've thought about this system a lot lately, and I have come to the following conclusion: I don't care about this system and won't really be participating in it as it is now, because I do not care enough to put in the bashing time required.
That's really my problem with the entire Sect system. Want to change sects? Bash up rituals again. Want to build a temple? Bash. Want to build shrines? Bash. Try a new miracle group? Bash up the miracle group and then bash up the rituals for it. Don't like them after all? Repeat.
It's like you're looking for ways to keep us online and in the game and developed a list that looks like:
1) Bashing
2) ???
Let's be honest here. Your PvE sucks. It's uninteresting. It's boring. It's completely lacking in challenge. It is tedious beyond measure. It is so bad that you have given up on your no autobashing stance and just ask that people don't go completely AFK while they let their basher churn out bodies.
So why is it the only feasible way to build shrines and temples and sect rituals? Why do you insist on gating every cool system you make behind hours and hours and hours and hours of monotonous bashing? I want to be able to log on and have fun and do cool things, but if I want to do sect things I've got to log on and jump on my hamster wheel. This pretty effectively discourages me from doing sect things.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
It'd be awesome if there was a way to make actually engaging in RP a mechanically beneficial thing, since that seems to be the central and primary encouraging factor in Imperian these days, but I can't think of a single one that doesn't involve a ton of monitoring we don't have the staff to support (woe, woe, the Docent program) or won't turn into tedious, boring nonsense.
I admit that this is basically me saying that I want a bell I can ring to force Kinsarmarians to come die in glorious battle and thusly that it is unlikely, but I don't think that it's an inherently bad idea to have some lopsided circle-based objectives. I hate 'not fighting at all' a lot more than I hate 'fighting against the odds'.
When Septus and I go thrash Team Terrible at the entity mining statue in a couple of horribly onesided 2v8s, we come out of it with like +100k faith each for a few minutes of actual work.
When Risca and I feed our 10 man teams into a giant 2 hour meatgrinder of an outpost fight, and end up racking up a combined 140ish kills in 120 minutes, we can easily end up with magick getting 68 kills and AM getting 73 kills and winding up making an amazing 100k faith for 2 hours of grueling battle.
Those are approximations, of course; not every kill grants/costs faith and the kills/deaths are spread unevenly across multiple sects, but it is fairly common for me to end up roughly faith-neutral over the course of a long battle. This is a problem for faith generation from PvP; the larger the battles, the more likely it is that you break even.
The best solution for this, imo, is to make kills gain more faith than a death costs. This could open up the problem of kill trading, but it would help mitigate the problem of PvP only being worthwhile for belief generation if you're able to sustain a positive KDR. A giant all-hands-on-deck brawl could very well be a net gain for both sides, which would help encourage more people to get out there and fight.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."