Guild based vs faction based

[Snowreap]

Ideally, you want everybody to be able to attack everybody. in practice, this isn't really workable because it leads to complete anarchy.

guilds and factions are a mechanism to avoid anarchy by forcing players to declare an alignment. but the problem with these is that they're very static.

what players need is a way to declare alignments that's dynamic.

start with the idea that a player has a reputation with every faction in the game. some 'default' factions would be hardcoded as part of the game, but most factions would be player organizations.

a player may also join a guild. the guild as a whole also has a reputation with every faction in the game. what happens when your reputation is different from your guild's? there are multiple possibilities. one simple one is to always use the reputation of the highest-level organization you belong to (so NPC's react to you according to your guild's reputation). another option is to use the worst reputation in the chain (so NPC's react to you according to your reputation, or your guild's, whichever is lower). a third option is to base it on how you 'flag' yourself (if you're wearing a guild tabard, or using a particular squawk code or IFF code (whatever is appropriate for the universe), NPC's react to you according to your guild's reputation, but if not they react to you according to your personal reputation).

your guild leader may also join a guild, without disbanding his own guild. and that guild may join another, and so on, to form a mega-alliance of hundreds of guilds. entire subtrees may split off from the alliance, so there's lots of room for EVE-style political intrigue.

that's all well and good for NPC interaction, but for player interaction more tools would be needed. guild leaders would probably need the ability to modify reputation levels directly (making other factions friendly, neutral or KOS as desired). guild leaders would probably also need to choose for themselves whether their selections were enforced on the members, or merely advised (the difference being, an enforced alignment prevents you from killing friendly-faction players, no matter how much of an asshat they are, while an advised alignment flags that asshat as 'green', but allows your members to kill them anyway if they really need it).

and having guilds as members of guilds means that higher-level guilds need to be able to make non-overridable alignment choices that affect everyone below (which means that joining certain alliances may mean giving up your own ability to declare war).

-ken