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Icons and Free PK areas - perpetuating conflict that includes the occasional noncombatant
After some great battles, the dust on icons seems to have largely settled, and the only people bothering with them are cities/houses that are pretty sure they won't be messed with any time soon, and that can pretty handily defend them if anyone tried. I absolutely loved the free PK aspect of Nish as a noncombatant when I was in Mhaldor. It was a way for someone like me to dabble in real conflict with a built-in eject button.
1) Would having bashing in Nish be a problem? If so, maybe a different area could be designated free PK? This would just allow people to dabble on an individual basis, though, not encourage battles. Still, would be nice.
2) Look at how icons work... maybe when one goes down it can't be empowered for a certain amount of time (RL weeks? months?), but isn't outright destroyed? Maybe make it easier to take down, too? This would allow bolder members of a house to try to go resurrect the icon later on, and hopefully encourage more skirmishes?
And if there are other (better) ideas to make "dabbling" more appealing to us noncomms, what are they?
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Mhaldor really doesn't have enough members to defend icons, so that option is completely out of question. Even for others - if Ashtan wants an icon dead, that icon will be dead. Hashan only has icons because their enemies aren't stupid enough to buy them.
For that reason, Icons being separate and far away on Nishnatoba is a good thing. (For other reasons, it is a bad thing.)
Adding bashing to Nishnatoba seems like a bad idea, as it conflicts with that clearly-implemented singular purpose Nishnatoba holds. Perhaps the bashing could be somehow tied to Icons, or remain very clearly free/open PK (whichever it is). I feel that Icons already involve far too much bashing though, as bashing is the only way to obtain a significant amount of shards.
I think the best way to encourage "dabbling" would be to revamp the Icon system and make it better so people participate more and fight over them more. You don't encourage dabbling by creating ways for noncoms to noncombatively participate in Icon battles - you do it by making it easier to stop being a noncom, gradually, by degrees, without having to dive off the deep end.
Right now Icons suck and are boring. Unfortunately Icons are the only major conflict system in the game other than city raids. CTFs, shrines, piracy, and PK egghunts/arena games all exist, but do not hit the mark for different reasons.
Edit: oh and to be on topic for once, I like the idea of using Nish, maybe even briefly - for those who think it should just remain an ancient battleground. Sounds like things can rise up from there disturbed by the recent events.
But yeah, rebuilding icons for Mhaldor is just out of the question. Even during the last icon conflict, we held the icons for a bit, but Ashtan just tried every so often until it worked. I believe it ended with Ashtan entrenched at our icons for like an hour beforehand. (I wasn't present)
I still feel that icons need an adjustment, however, because there are many houses which will never raise one because they know they won't be able to properly defend an icon and the loss of an icon is too punitive to have one unless you're certain you can keep it from falling. An adjustment which would grant the victors a temporary boon when they destroy an icon, without punishing the house losing the icon too harshly, would see more houses having a go at keeping an icon and fewer shards discarded as worthless trash.
Have them deactivate (you can call it "destroyed" or whatever you want) for the next cycle if they fall.
Stick a multiplier on the bonus of the victor's icon according to the number of icons their alchemists have deactivated.
Right now, it's structured such that the cost of rebuilding is very high because that's the only way to incentivize destruction. If you took the current system and just had icons reset a week later, no one would bother fighting over them because the benefit of taking out an enemy icon would be very small. But getting a bonus is a much better incentive.
Also, eliminate shard upkeep and have shards used to repair damage to partially-damaged icons and perhaps required to reactivate at the beginning of the next cycle after deactivation. The best way to do this would probably be just making icons reactivate with no health. If we had a system that encouraged more common icon conflict, there would be no need for an additional shard-sink and I think people would be less frustrated by gathering shards to achieve some actual purpose rather than just to deal with upkeep costs.
In fact, I think the best system would just be to make it act as if there's a finite amount of icon "power" and every time an icon falls, all remaining icons get a multiplier on their icon's bonus (meaning no need to track who destroyed what icon). As such, the fewer icons that are left, the larger the incentive to participate in icon warfare (the hard targets that are left during a cycle become worth more after the easy targets are gone and every icon you knock down makes your own icon that much more juicy a target). That also means that less militant orgs are still sort of "participating". They might not be able to knock down someone's icon, but they get benefits for supporting and scheming to get icons knocked down. It has the problem that less militant orgs are easier targets, but the current system has that problem even worse and this mitigates it a little bit.
Changes like this would also give raiders something else to do which has a nice, tangible reward, which I think they'd welcome. And I think people who are tired of getting raided would welcome some proportion of that getting moved to Nish.
TL;DR: How I would fix the icon system:
1) Icons get deactivated rather than destroyed (can still keep it as "destroyed" flavour, but automatic rebuilding (but see #2)).
2) No more shard upkeep, but shards can repair icons and recently reactivated icons start with no "shard health".
3) The bonus from an icon is multiplied by the inverse of the number of icons remaining activated.
Edit: Oh and this would probably necessitate some change to the current icon battle schedule. I don't remember what it currently is (since icon warfare is so incredibly rare right now), but I imagine it's too long for a system like this. You'd want the cycle to be relatively quick (an IG year would not be a terrible idea).
The idea wasn't really to get rid of shard upkeep, but to make it a natural consequence of the system rather than a hard-coded thing. If you have a system that encourages frequent conflict and need shards to heal icons, then stockpiling them and using them remains a very necessary thing and those people definitely still get rewarded for hunting.
The reason you need hard-coded upkeep right now is that fights are so incredibly rare that shards otherwise see no use. But it's a pretty clunky solution that makes gathering shards seem more like a chore than an active means of helping out.
One of the other things I didn't mention was that having relatively low cost to destruction, incentivizing through bonuses rather than penalties, and having a frequent cycle is that it isn't such a big deal if noncoms don't participate. With icons as they are now, there's tremendous pressure to really press everyone into defence in orgs that wouldn't normally do that because the cost is so incredibly high. And changes like these still work well for orgs that regularly press everyone into defence for RP purposes - we're talking about an hour or two every week or something like that (presumably randomised such that most of the time you wouldn't even be online). As an additional benefit, frequent cycles with the number of houses we have right now means that there could be someone open to attack most of the time - so there's some alternate activity for raiders available a lot of the time. And that is, I think, key. Right now, the only thing that's more-or-less constantly available for raiders is city raiding. We don't need more big, infrequent things for raiders to do, we need more bread-and-butter activity for them.
As for implementing more frequent cycles with no full destruction, but without a new incentive structure - I think that would be a significant mistake. Something needs to replace the current "very high cost of replacement" incentive or people are just going to hope no one attacks their icon and gently shrug when it does get knocked out for a week.
Thinking on a potential way to incentivize more conflict (and something that would be easy to code), I wonder if you couldn't have the bonus be commensurate to the number of people the faction has killed in Nish with deactivation meaning that the bonus doesn't accrue.
The bones of the idea:
(1) While the icon is up, every kill in Nish drops an item with value equal to the normal XP worth of the kill that can be put in an icon to increase the bonus for that cycle (the bonuses should not have a cap, but diminishing returns).
(2) The bonuses persist while the icon is deactivated, but new bonuses do not accrue.
(3) Icons are always vulnerable, but may be repaired at any time (they reactivate when brought up to a fairly low threshhold level of health).
The reasoning:
This actually seems like a far more attractive option to me the more I think about it.
In terms of coding, it should be easy to make a corpse-facscimile for this purpose (it shouldn't be the actual corpse since that would restrict usage of skills that don't leave corpses or skills that require corpses and make resurrection even more powerful). It even makes a bit of IC sense since there's a lot of "spirits of warriors" stuff involved with Nish. It actually probably involves removing more code than writing new code. And, perhaps more pointedly, I don't think that extreme conservatism is a good idea when talking about icons - the system we have right now is severely broken, most players don't enjoy it (to the extend that they've ever even experienced it), and it hardly sees any use compared to the substantial degree of complexity it presents. If ever there were a place where a little bit of coding could be justified, this is it.
And it gives a really tangible way for bashers to contribute. A constant-vulnerability system would all but ensure that icons would be attacked during downtime (which is fine, since the cost of reactivating them when people show up and want to go on the offence is pretty low), so there would be strong demand for shards without needing any artificial demand inflation like upkeep.
Regarding the always-vulnerable part, the threshhold to reactivate shouldn't be a single shard, but it should be fairly low such that protracted battles involve the icon going up and down repeatedly rather than one hopeless team just having their icon down for hours. It should also be easy for a group to go into Nish with a downed icon, get it up to threshhold very quickly, and go on the offensive (note that this leaves their icon vulnerable - this proposal makes balancing offence, defence, and shard supply an actual strategic issue, which is, I think, ideal).
In terms of incentive structure, this rewards participation even if you're losing the icon fight because you have a subgoal of getting kills. Scaling it by XP value is a means of preventing people from just killing tons of newbies to farm their icon. It's also a means of keeping things balanced - the relative XP value of people is already balanced (and if we think it isn't well balanced, this at least means that relative target worth in Nish need not be independently balanced, but could benefit from any rebalancing of XP value).
It creates a number of interesting dynamics too - there's a goal of disabling icons, but also.a subgoal of getting kills (and not getting killed). It requires a balance of offence and defence and logistical support from bashers for shards. If a lot of people are in Nish, there's an incentive to go in and try to increase your icon's bonus and if there aren't, there's an incentive to go in and knock down someone's icon while there aren't a ton of defenders, which in turn puts people in Nish, which brings you back around to going in to try to get kills.
In essence, it makes Nish what it seemed to be aiming for when it was introduced (or at least what I assumed to be its aim) - a place where you can go to do group combat without the collateral damage of raids and without the same degree of dependence on the current political situation. It gives people who like group combat in the game something to do during the times when raids don't make political sense or the tanks are already empty or the teams are too stacked, without bothering people who aren't interested in that aspect of the game. Those people who are uninterested still have to contend with raids (which is a good thing), which are presently limited by tank availability (also a good thing), but there's still a place for group combatants to go after they've done that (aside from going and burning a bunch of forests I suppose). I don't have to see so many clan messages that say "tanks empty oh my god I'm so bored".
Using a corpse-like system with residue that decays in, say, five minutes, also means that endless area and LoS are discouraged compared to their oft-lamented status in the current raid system. It also opens room for mobile and sneaky people to participate without being particularly good at combat themselves, which is something that in my own entirely biased opinion the game doesn't presently cater to enough.
I really don't think the icons are fine as is, nor that they are not "iconic" enough, clever as that is linguistically. I think something like the icons would be fine for the purposes you describe of acting as a glorified scoreboard, but the current incarnation is an intricate system for conflict that doesn't generate conflict. That's what bugs me about it.
But hey, if you wanted to keep the current icons (maybe minus upkeep, which is I think a big part of resistance to putting them up) and stick something like the above in on top, that'd be fine too.
In fact, that might be kind of neat. Take the above system with activation/deactivation, kills, and bonuses and keep the current system too. So icons are normally just deactivated, but there's a window of opportunity to actually destroy them. Having an actual system of gameplay and conflict tied to them would provide a lot more incentive to put destroyed icons back up.