(Note: I have copy and pasted this from another one of my idea documents. There may be formatting errors.)
Why?
As it stands for guilds from what we’ve heard about them, guilds will be a bit of a background feature that essentially acts as a more special form of a party that all your friends can join up into. They aren’t necessarily the most useful, but they allow your friends to gauge their AO progress through PVE, build a huge base, and passively gain resources. However, an issue has been raised (Thanks to Fern on Discord) of the potential of players farming a guild item for very extended periods of time through the usage of an auto clicker program to keep one or even more accounts holding an island uncontested. This could hypothetically lead to the issue of players accumulating large swathes of resources which might eventually cause issues with reagents being too inflated, causing their perceived value to decrease. However, removing or nerfing reagent pots for guilds would likely cause many players to become upset because this hypothetical group of players who might AFK farm on one or more accounts is quite little. So to alleviate the potential of afk farmers hurting the AO economy without upsetting PVE players and even creating a stronger sense of parity between clans and guilds without having them become the same thing, I believe that putting more of the “E” in “PvE clans” as they were initially called by the community would help, and this would be done through a new system: Pirate raids.
The Big Picture
Without getting into exact numbers, pirate raids as a concept would act like an interesting combination between fort castrum raids and players raiding your guild base, without actually involving real players. It would essentially act as the inverse of Fort Castrum: Rather than destroying and taking on large swathes of ravenna guards, you would have to keep your guild base in its best condition while beating back waves of pirates, eventually resulting in the reward of reputation, and sealed chests.
Finer details of how it would function
Pirate raids would be easier or harder depending on a few factors. Instead of having difficulty increase depending on the amount of defenders, difficulty would actually increase based on the sea you are currently in, the amount of reputation your guild has, and finally, the amount of time you’ve had your current island captured. So, being some 10-25k rep guild that’s had an island captured for an hour in the bronze sea would not be nearly as threatening as something like being in a 1 million rep guild that’s had the island for 6 hours in nimbus. Of course, this would be balanced to still be fair, but it would passively increase in potential difficulty due to the possibility of players keeping an extremely tanky base through the means of potential platinum mortars, and max tier walls.
If a ship is completely destroyed before it reaches the island, it should not summon all the pirates: only summoning either a few of the remaining pirates rather than the full force of each ship, or the pirates being heavily weakened from cannon fire. However at the same time, your guild island should be attacked via cannons and mortars.
Each “raid” should have a randomized fleet name similar to how pirate ships have randomized names currently. So for example, you might see something like “The Sunken Soul’s Fleet” mentioned in the chat at the island when a wave is complete.
Before a raid occurs, the player should receive a notification that a raid will occur to give them time to prepare, or quickly return to their guild island.
Losing the raid could potentially lose the guild a small chunk of reputation (Basically the same amount you’d lose to a player stealing a clan island of your equivalent rep/infamy level). It would also make sense to lose drachma as you’re being “raided” by pirates, however, I’m not as sure about that just because it could potentially make building painful for newer guilds. Because of this, if anything, the amount of gold lost would be a small percent-based amount: perhaps around 10-15% randomized.
Less importantly yet still interesting, it would be cool if the raid fleet captain (essentially the “boss” of the raid) would drop rare armor that could have similar point efficiency to that of current boss armors. The boss would always have a randomized name (as if you’re just fighting a really strong npc) but it could have randomized moves from a select amount of attacks that really make it feel like a boss fight rather than a really strong npc, alongside having possible introduction and loss dialogue (similar to general valerii, just with more potential things the raid fleet captain could say after spawning, and after dying or even winning)
Logistics and Reasonability
Ideally, this wouldn’t have to be an entirely “from scratch” feature. If at all possible, this as a feature should try to reuse as much of the “fort raid” code as possible, at least with how waves spawn. While it’s a big idea for guilds, I hope that a lot of code would be recycled from primarily the fort castrum code, and possibly with how notoriety spawns ships around the player. Of course, I don’t know jack about coding, that shits basically magic to me, but this is purely hypothetical: if it’s possible to recycle any code on that part, then ideally the implementation of a pirate raid system would be less of an arduous task even though its seemingly a large feature.
Final Notes
Pirate raids aren’t necessarily the most unique idea in arcane odyssey, but I still decided to go in depth on how the best implementation could be done (at least in my eyes) to fix a potentially problematic part of the game. I’ve heard previous ideas that I enjoy (For instance, as I wrote this, I discovered the previously written idea of pirates raiding towns written in 2023), but I felt the urge to update this concept for the upcoming guilds alongside introducing the idea of utilizing stuff like fort castrums wave system, and the notoriety ship spawning system.
Do feel free to tell me exactly how you feel though, as I always love feedback in these idea posts I do.
That’s all the yapping for now!