My alliance was discussing possible improvements, and wanting some way to help our alliance mates. We realized that this had to be done in such a way as to (1) not unbalance the game, (2) not be susceptible to alt account abuse and (3) not cut significantly into the game’s revenue stream. (The devs like to eat, too). This idea (and “Infrastructure work”, which I will post later) was the result.
Alliance Hall
Every alliance gets a “hall” (a semi-static image) that is publicly viewable. Initially, this hall looks like a generic medieval throne room.
Alliance members may donate resources in order to purchase “upgrades” for the hall. (Bigger throne, chandelier, wall tapestries, titan’s head trophy, things of that nature.) Upgrades may be “tiered” (i.e. “level 4 titan’s head”), may unlock other upgrades, or both.
Resources can be any game resource – food, iron, arrows, scrolls, potions, banners, recruits, perhaps even troops and/or Heroes. Every upgrade (or every tier of an upgrade) should require a different mix: food and iron and cheap potions/arrows for the low tiers, progressively better “stuff” at higher tiers.
Upgrades start at “OMGexpensive” and go up from there. They can go a long way up from there. The idea is to have alliance members work together towards a common goal, and to make alt abuse prohibitively time consuming.
(Yes, yes, I see you going “why should we bother?”. I’m getting there.)
Each upgrade grants a small but permanent bonus to alliance members – as long as they’re in the alliance, of course. For example: +1% to food production, or +2% to iron production, or -1% to training time, or +0.005% chance to get a Rare in the Daily Summon, or -2% to Alliance Energy timer… you get the idea. (Numbers are examples only, they will obviously need to be balanced.) Each upgrade type grants a different bonus, which gets larger with every tier.
Leaders should be able to indicate which upgrade they want members to focus on, but should not be able to “lock” it (as that would potentially block low-level members from contributing).
The idea here is to give members a way to permanently improve their alliance and to work towards a common goal. This would ALSO give alliances “bragging rights” and a way to distinguish themselves when recruiting from every other alliance out there. (Funky font colors only get you so far.)
Concerning the example you gave shortly after this, the increased chance for a rare from daily summons… I think your recommendation should come with a “be in the alliance for 24 hours” clause. Members work to build up these bonuses, it shouldn’t benefit those that merc titans - which makes it more aligned with the developers position on the matter anyways.
I think the idea overall is great, but would also recommend that the alliance hall has a location on the world map. I considered recommending it be on the quest page, but that’s not accessible by lower level players. Perhaps even an alliance galley in a cove at the southern end of the map would be neat. I’m just not a fan of extra buttons on the side of the stronghold screen - we already have a lot when they throw epic deals there too.
This idea is really cool but should be well thought through to eliminate not so fair usage of it. There should be some conditions for players who want to benefit from upgrading the hall. Without this, you could join an alliance with fully build hall, contribute nothing to it and still get benefits. For example you can only get bonuses from the things you helped to build.
There could be also a feature that would “spoil” the hall over time. To repair it you would constantly need to donate some resources. For example, one thing gives alliance members - 5% to training time, when the thing gets spoiled the bonus drops to -2%. This would be a good feature for alliances with maxed hall - when new members join in, they can still contribute something to the hall by helping to repair it (and get benefits from it).
I agree the alliance hall would be a neat feature. I also agree with @suntanglory that the hall should only provide benefits to those who work on it. That being said there is a bit of a red flag here. My concern is that the players who are more active may block out players who are not as so. For example someone in my alliance can only log in once or twice a day while I spend a decent chunk of time on the game. While I wouldn’t block out someone else it is well established on these forums and from general economics that players may rush the benefits not realizing others may be left in the cold. This may be something to regulate at a leadership level.
Alternatively a caveat that a player may only donate to one item/upgrade per day may be in order.
As a final point I believe we still need to acknowledge that this is another of those “Not just yet” features. There are at least two changes needed prior to this namely Season 2 and AW matchmaking improvement. I also personally think a third change of War cheats may be on the list, but I would truly prefer Alliance halls over war chests as long as Season 2 and Matchmaking are priority.
… which rather neatly destroys the secondary purpose of the hall, which is for alliances to attract members
with benefits of membership.
As written, an alliance would advertise “We have a level 7 titan crank hanging in our great hall”. People would think “wow, that gives me a huge bonus to $whatever” and – if they value $whatever – rush to join.
With your alteration, people would think “wow, that gives them a huge bonus to $whatever, but it does not benefit ME, and a level 8 titan crank would take forever to fund”. So a well-funded alliance hall becomes a DIS-incentive for new members to join, which is the absolute opposite of what we want.
Yes, freeloaders would be a problem. But I think they are best handled through social means rather than through code. There’s a reason the Kick button is there.
EDIT: I don’t think “maxed hall” is a huge concern. Maxing out everything in the hall would be something that would take years because the costs rise geometrically (or even exponentially). And the devs can (and certainly will) “move the goalposts” by releasing another upgrade or upgrade tier: that would be a trivial bit of coding.
I think that as long as people stay in a particular alliance for 24 hours before getting any bonus from the hall they don’t need to contribute to get ‘any’ benefit… In that amount of time an alliance should be able to tell if the person is a good match for them or not. The leadership level can kick those not participating/contributing with regard to their expectations.
I do think a time gage of sorts makes sense though. If you can contribute to the alliance hall more than twice a day it might appeal more to make a second account just to feed into your hall. I’d suggest twice a day, because when I look at how obnoxiously long the war prep phase is and think about having to wait that long just to donate again… I’m a bit put off honestly.
And with regards to ‘bonus decay’… I think it should be more interactive than just mirroring titan score decay. Make a monthly event around the first week of the month where over a three day period you need to spend red flags to fight off attackers. It can be scored and tiered by the level of the hall (so a small/weak alliance isn’t fighting the same type of waves as a strong alliance) where how well you fight off the enemy determines how much of your bonuses are negatively impacted. If you aren’t able to work together to protect your investment it is ruins the point in making it for more causal alliances - this gives it more equal footing.
I’ll necro this thread, because it’s a good idea that hasn’t picked up the steam it deserved.
Especially relevant now that many of us have full strongholds.
Sounds great. It is a way to help players as well.
Would love if at a certain level you could generate a titan hit for the alliance with a month cool down. Watching beasties get away is hard and there are less mercs.
