Hello everyone. I've been thinking of a few things I feel were missing when managing teams ingame.
I suggested this on Discord but here I can go a bit more detailed so what I think is that we could have two separated systems, one of them based in the ingame functionalities for a current party on a given server and clan features that allows to gather plenty of people in your guild with its own functionalities that could go further than just in a particular server.
What I suggest is allowing the creation of a clan that will register every player that joins the clan into some sort of "friends list" that is consistent through servers and for all the members of the clan. Let's say you open the game and you can check how many of your clan members are playing, in which servers they are and even join them straight from there showing also unlisted servers they might be playing on, also you should be able to use the chat before joining a server to arrange the teams and have this clan chat also available when you're ingame to give advice to your clannies in other servers when you need them come to defend your fortress or have a fight.
I'll list down some features and would love to have the opinions of other players about these to know which ones would work better for clan or just for the teaming system.
- Ability to transfer leadership.
- Assigning "officers" that are the only ones allowed to recruit and remove other members.
- Team Alliances to make other teams or clans visible in the map but with no other functions.
- Landclaimer and maybe also doors removal shouldn't be possible for other team members except officers.
- Door-lock bypass for team leader.
Fundamentals:
- Leadership status: Some times the leader/creator of the clan might have to leave the game for a while or we simply could want to transfer the ability to add/remove members to a player that is often more active.
- Officers: Should have some limitations over the team tag, name and doors/claimers ownership changes while being the only ones allowed to recruit new players, probably both clan and party should have their individual "officer" rank. Clan Officer / Team Officer.
- Alliances: Some teams might want to avoid fighting and help each other in PvP engagements while it could be a mess when you approach a conflict area without knowing your allies are already there. If you are going to be allies with other clans or teams, you could allow them to see your team in the map but not the landclaimers and also have a light-blue color for their names. This could work in one direction to save the need of having the other team to accept and making it easier to toggle it on and off for other purposes.
- Landclaimer/doors limitations: To avoid inside jobs, betrayers and other potential conflicts only the officers and the clan/team leader should be able to dismantle claimers and doors. Officers should be included because it could happen that the door creator or the team leader goes offline and they are recruiting new players that they might need to add to the list.
- Door-lock bypass: With this ability the Team Leader would be able to enter a room and stock up other member's private chests with anything they'd need while avoiding anyone else from taking anything.
- Larger groups: Groups of 10 doesn't really stop players from creating larger groups while medium/small groups might find trouble to retain these few extra players that might want to join when merging in example a team of 6 with another team of 5. I'm still not sure because I like the 10 members limit for teams but as we all have seen it really doesn't stop larger groups from cooperating and fight together.
- Clan Chat: Joining the game and being able to communicate with all your friends/clan mates is a must, you could be able to check in which server are each one of them, join them or simply chat with them to arrange the teams. Also while you are in game you could be able to keep track of the clan chat as we've seen many times that some groups are jumping from one server to another looking to bring some players they teamed up with.
Adding to this, the Clan Tag should be obligatory in order to register the clan and no duplicated tags should be allowed, this is to help to avoid stalkers from faking a clan name and to allow newbies to identify players that are actually part of a clan as same as other clans and teams around.
If I think of something else I'll post later, I hope to see some other ideas or opinions from the other players around here regarding this.
Later!
Sal.-