There is quite some high quality discussion going on about this topic currently on Discord.I invested quite some time over the last days thinking about this and also looked at server files.
First, let's get some topics cleared out.
1. As it currently is, declaring war on another faction doesn't require any actual reason, faction leaders can do what they want.
There is no rule against using war declarations for whatever reason people want to (trolling, annoying, competition,etc.)
2. Since nobody has broken community rules, there won't be any bans. We don't ban people without violation of rules.
3. We see the necessity to adjust the war declaration system for the greater good of the server.
We believe that the war declaration system has multiple purposes, namely the following: PVE and PVP competition.
We don't want to change anything about the system that would take players possibilities to use this for actual competition.
Yet we also believe that the war declaration system doesn't serve any purpose for killing players from enemy factions for fun or to annoy them.
The best example for this would be the middleground where players just want to AFK farm for a couple of hours. Killing such a player doesn't serve any competitive purpose.
As stated by players before, players who get killed in a repetitive manner could evade this problem by being factionless or stop AFK leveling/farming.
The server population doesn't allow such a luxury though, factions are a major factor for the community and keep players invested into the game.
It is true that killing other players just for fun is another aspect of "freedom of choice" and we believe that freedom of choice is important.
Yet this freedom of choice can also have a negative impact on other players to an extent where they leave the server out of frustration.
Now for the actual solutions to this issue.
1. Decreasing the duration of faction wars (14 days) isn't possible, the function is hardcoded and can't be configured.
Furthermore this would cause actual issues between factions that use this function for competitive aspects.
2. Adding a delay after the war declaration has ended isn't possible for the same reasons as point 1.
3. Decreasing the count of war declarations from 10 to lower isn't possible, we would have to end current declarations for all factions.
Furthermore this wouldn't solve the issue as players could simply create 2 factions instead of 1 (1 with main account, 2 with alt account).
4. Increasing amount of war declaration points required to declare war isn't possible, the function is hardcoded and can't be configured.
5. Solution: Decrease the amount of war declaration points that can be obtained. This can be configured, doesn't require any changes in database and could be implemented within 1 hour of work for any upcoming maintenance.
This requires factions to actually do activities like Faction Missions to obtain war declaration points and to household with them.
Yet it won't have much influence on factions that consist of multiple players. It will only make it harder for factions that are made up of mainly/purely alt account which declare war without the competitive aspect.
We welcome players to keep discussing this matter, especially what you think about the possible change (point 5).
There have been strong arguments why point 5 does have negative effects I didn't account for, so it won't be viable any further.
What hasn't been taken into consideration enough so far is the fact that there are are neutral Factions, which can't get a war declaration upon them.
Neutral factions do have the full social aspect of a faction, you can do Faction Missions, Clique Battle.
Since they can't get a war declaration, they are suited for players that like the AFK-playstyle (upside) yet miss out on the faction buffs and Tierra de la Sed (downside).
The compromise for players who want to avoid PVP trough war declarations is to create/join a neutral Faction.
To close the gap between neutral and normal Factions slightly, the buff "Ancient Blessing" (Ancient Blessing Statue outside of towns) could be improved slightly.
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