A Good Idea: Faction Points

This is an idea that has been floating around in my head for a little while. For lack of a better term, I will just deem it "Faction Points".


What is this?

Quite simple and probably easy to implement. Every person in the game gets ONE Faction Point (FP) PER ACCOUNT, PER SERVER, PER MONTH. It would renew on the same day and time that your account was started each month. Also, the FP would be on a use or lose basis. If you dont use your faction point for that month, it does NOT roll over. You would lose it. This would prevent accumalation of FPs and mass spending on any 1 player at any time. You would, of coarse, not be able to use this FP on yourself or any characters of yours on that account. You would not get an FP the first month of your account. Instead, you would have to wait a month before getting your first faction point. This would be to prevent mass account creation just to give yourself a positive faction and such. These FPs would also reflect on ALL characters on your account when a person "considers" you. So if someone wanted to steal something from you claiming that they are going to provide a tradeskill service, all their characters would reflect their poor decision. This person would not be able to simply log onto another character and con more poor souls.


What would this "FP" actually do?

As far as the "playability" of your character, it would do nothing positive or negative to your skill, stats, and ect... Instead, your FP count would be a reference to all players on how "good" or trustworthy you are. If you have a negative faction, it would be harder for players to trust you. Obviously, you would have to do some really bad stuff for someone to use their one and only FP for the month on you and possibly convince others to use theirs too. IE: A team of people may give the "ninja looter" on their team negative faction points. When said person would next try to get on a team, the prospective team could look at that person's faction and turn them down due to their bad faction. A "bad" person could be denied by other players for teams, services, trades, ect...


The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

First the Good things about this. There's alot to say about how this could be good so I'll just list them:

1. As said before, a decrese of "ninja looters"
2. A decrease is stealing.
3. A decrease in camping. No one likes a person continually camping a "unique" mob (except maybe that person's own guild). A known "kill stealer"/camper/line jumper would most likely earn some negative faction.
4. Easier selection of guild applicants. If a person has a good faction, obviously they are a good/active player and would be accepted over a person with a negative faction.
5. Better PVP. A ganker or group of gankers would accumulate negative faction over time. Also, arena gankers (in most cases there would be several witnesses as to an arena 'gank') would accumulate negative faction over time.
6. If someone had honestly changed and wanted to become a player who has a positive faction, they would have to pay some serious retribution. "Buying" a person's FP by giving them rare item(s), helping out low lvls with $$ problems, ect...are a few examples.


The Bad:

I've pondered several different senerios and couldnt come up with too many bad things that would come of this. I know there will probably be several others who can though. Only possible thing I could see would be 2 people spitefully WASTING their FP on each other each month.


The Ugly:

There's only one real "Ugly" scenerio i can think of. A guild decides to WASTE their FP on one person either as a joke or out of spite for that person possibly assigning a negative point to one of their members. This would be a waste of the points of coarse. The guild could have instead distributed their FPs throughout their own guild to improve their PR. An ARK or GM could likely easily handle such an extreme situation.


Misc thoughts:

-Possibly adding a guild FP to the guild leader. One guild could vote another guild good or bad depending on that guild's actions. Same rules as for the single FP.

-Also maybe a command like /faction [name of person] or /guildfaction [name of guild] to view that person's/guild's faction status.

-Possibly not knowing who assigned you the FP but FC being able to track it if needed in the extreme. This would be to prevent scenerios of retribution spending.

I dont -think- that this would be too hard to code in and I think it would greatly improve the over-all quality of any MMORPG. Please feel free to post on this or bump if you like the idea, I will add more if I remember anything I overlooked. I apologize if someone has already brought up an idea like this, I probably overlooked it. HOWEVER, PLEASE READ and UNDERSTAND this post before you add to it.

Interesting ideas, ive never thought of anything like this, cept for maybe ebay =].

Nice idea. It took me a few minutes to see what you were getting at, you didn't fully explain it at the beginning...

Questions: Would the ones placed on you disappear after a really long time?

Would we have special ones for 'Bad' and 'Good'? (Or can we just assign them in the way of our choice?)

Suggestions: If your FP gets low enough, guards of your own side will sometimes shoot at you, and your name will go onto a list on this site. :)

Great idea! Never thought it would be done quite this way.

The possibility to lose negative faction points over x amount of time would be good, however you would also lose positive faction points the same (to be fair).

There would probably be only 1 generic point per month that could be assigned as either good or bad. Having one of each would mean people could spend the negative point (if they hadnt already) on a less serious offense shortly before their month is up.

Guards attacking would be good but would probably be more than the devs would want to code in (at least at first). This did give me a good idea for future faction status. Perhaps in Shadowlands, your faction would determine your avatar. Negative faction would give you the demonic appearance.

A faction list would be nice also. Should be simple to implement that.

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

this would be really bad because there are some very nast vindictive people in this game who would slap a faction point on you every month just for the sake of it, and at the end of the month if someone had their faction point to spend they would just slap it onto someone just for the sake of it.

Ok, something I overlooked before.

You would only be able to assign a point to someone once. After you have given that person a point (negative or positive), you would never again be able to assign a point to that person.

Someone slapping a point on you just for the sake of it would only be in the extreme. Some people would actually value a point. Instead of that point being wasted, it could be "sold" to someone. If you have a generally good rep, you shouldnt have to worry about some @$$ slapping a point on you anyways. 99 / 100 times the point would have already been used, saved for usage within one's own guild, ect...so that wouldn't be a major issue anyways. Also remember EVERYONE gets a point. If you don't use your point for anything else, trade points with someone else. Some people will ALWAYS abuse anything added to the game even if it is only in an extreme situation.

Its a good idea i suppose but not worth all the problems that come with it, people make bad names for others already anyway, and good names, no need for silly flags, its jsut asking for abuse