The Conflict
Please excuse me if this idea has been presented before.
I am writing this letter because of several problems that I have noticed during my one and one half months stay in the world of Anarchy Online. As my character has gotten stronger and progressed in levels I've come into contact with many people of the same level or higher who feel that they have reached a brick wall in what the can do within the game. The way that missions are set up, and they way in which characters are able to interact within their environment doesn't seem to allow characters to have much impact in the direction of the game. What is going to happen, happens, and the participants of the game get to, essentially, sit back and watch, take a backseat role in the game they are investing countless hours in. The conflict between Omnitek and the Clans needs to be accentuated more. The creation of the amnesties, and the Clans' acceptance of them, seems to suggest that Funcom may be moving towards eliminating the conflict that is so central to this game. I have not heard many players that are in favor of this. My suggestion is as follows. Take the areas directly surrounding the cities and divide them up into zones. These zones would be political areas, and open to attack and possible take-over by opposing forces. The format of the zones could be set up in layers, so that if one layer fell, the next in line would be open to attack. Then distribute these zones to the different clans and guilds. This could be done with the zones that are the most important or at risk of attack being given to the more powerful guilds and the areas of minor importance given to less powerful guilds. Another way to do this would be to sell the zones, so that only guilds with money, therefore power, could access the important zones. Once all these zones had fell, the city or base they were surrounding would fall into enemy hands.
What I see this accomplishing:
This would create a greater interest in the events of the world of Anarchy Online. Players would be more affected, and have a greater abilty to affect, the world around them, therefore they would have a greater interest and stake in the game. Guilds would become much more important, and being the leader of a guild would be something to strive for. Also the zones, and the clans who control them, could be made into smaller, more personal markets, in which a person might be able to pay to initiate a search for an item instead of having to chance upon it. Pacifist guilds could still exist, and have a stake in the game, because their goal could be to convert hostile zones into pacifist zones, and to use politics and debate to convince people to change their ways. They could also use economic power to simply take control of hostile zones. Either way, they would still be able to take part in this new format, and they would be challenged by it and hopefully piqued by the challenge of taking the alternate route.
I know my ideas would require some difficult, perhaps impossible, changes to Anarchy Online, but I see them, or some radical change, imperitive to preventing the world of Rubi-ka from becoming stagnant.
Thanks for your time.
