Best Of

Currently, Dynasties are in a unique place that is created due to the conflict between a unique atmospheric roleplay environment and taking every Joe, Dick, and Jane that get off the nearest transporter. Neither style is innately wrong from a character standpoint however the current Dynasty mechanics only reward one style of play despite the large upfront cost to have one.

It is very difficult in most cases to reward groups of differing sizes but give no clear advantage to the larger group. So after doing vigorous testing of many classic games from all genres I have settled on a potential solution, is this solution without bias, no. But it is a good starting point. Rewarding Dynasties with one unit of a meta currency for each IC month that the majority of their members log in. At first, I thought this was good enough, but then I realized people could just pad inactive Dynasties with level 1 alts and just go down a list of log-ins once a month to keep grinding currency single-handedly.

Therefore implementation should instead be in the form of a quest that you can only get while you are in a Dynasty. This quest should not give experience and at most some marks that scale based on level. So 1-9 would be 100, 10-19 would be 200, etc. A secondary option would reward them exactly the amount of marks that they would pay when they die. Because they can only do it once a month there won’t be any major economical impact either way. While I personally don’t really care how said quest is implemented, I did consider some interesting options that could be used, but before going too far down the rabbit hole let’s wind it back and address what the meta currency would be used for.

The membership numbers for perks can stay but some of them should also be optional to purchase instead with the meta currency. Some perks, like leadership announce and Dynasty feature, should never be purchasable. But for many smaller roleplay focused groups, having a repository, organization designs, a marks account, etc are quality of life options that there aren’t many in character reasons why they shouldn’t be able to just buy them.

By the same token, it is easy to ask, “Why not just allow people to buy it with marks?” Because spending marks do not encourage player participation, it does not stimulate the player economy, it also just rewards people that have been stockpiling. Spending marks for Dynasty Perks does not address the most important issue of rewarding players who consistently take part while not awarding large numbers. Therefore, meta-currency 'perk’ purchasing is the safest way to go while being the hardest for players to abuse AND starting everyone off on the same footing.

Next up, possible expansion of Dynasty Perks. Most of these are self-explanatory: Ships, Auxiliary Stations, Factories/Refineries, Shops, Ranks/Positions, Repositories, and Salaries.

• We should be able to have Dynasty owned ships that members with permissions can borrow and fly. This makes it easier for testing and teaching to be done on an organization-wide scale rather than on an individual scale with no return.

• Auxiliary Stations, when an organization owns a majority of the refineries or auto factories at a location said organization should receive some sort of benefit, right now there isn’t a good way to balance this. In the meantime, allowing Dynasties to set a station or planet as their ‘base’ should offer reduced costs after a flat payment is paid. This right should be gained either through membership numbers or a high perk cost. This would ideally operate using already existing stations and planets, but should not be implemented any time soon as it will throw off the economy especially if there is no sort of Dynasty storage ability for ‘finished’ products or a way for Factions and other organizations to purchase things like batteries, metals, repair kits, whatever. Either way, this is technically one of the least important things on the list.

• As an extension of the previous point, being able to set the prices/ownership of auto factories and refineries to Factions and Dynasties, this should have permissions so that only specific people in those groups can approve org spending so that the profits then go into that org. It can be attached to the ACCOUNTS power to make it relevant.

• A nice option would be Dynasty shops since the framework already exists as shown with the trade terminal artifact, it would be amazing if Dynasties could have an internal shop where the profits could be directed to the Dynasty accounts. Better yet if there could be a cut system where people in the Dynasty could sell items in it and people in the Dynasty can buy those items with a slight mark up being taken to make funds for the Dynasty itself. Or, best option, have the designs sold to the faction and those designs can be created any time someone purchases the item, therefore, paying the base crafting fee and making a profit for the Dynasty. This would also keep the tradeskills relevant due to the need to have them in order to give/sell the design to the Dynasty.

• For the price of 200,000 marks, the amount of flexibility available is very limited and restricts our ability to create an infrastructure that is unique to our creative needs. If we have to start off restricted could we possibly be allowed to earn additional position slots? If not, how about a rank system within Dynasties where we can name the ranks within the Org and have them show up the same way Founder and Second Founder do in DWHO. This will help especially since we cannot give suffixes or titles in a Dynasty, so internal structure representation would be helpful.

• Repositories, this should be earned as they are such an important and integral part of developing and tracking the birth of so many new and unique roleplay environments that Dynasties give us a chance to create. Due to how expensive they are, almost prohibitively so, instead of just dictating time they can be held, we should also be able to set price for that time. And perhaps different pricing depending on Dynasty Rank. Yes, this can be done manually through discussion, however, with our population in constant flux it goes without saying that no singular person is going to be on 24/7 to negotiate datashard permissions. This would go a long way with validating their current pricing.

• As a further expansion of ranks/positions, being able to automatically pay people in the Dynasty for work. Based on the numbers required for getting perms, I cannot imagine larger Dynasties in the future being able to manually handle any sort of business set up consistently. This is my pie in the sky toss in.