I was watching a large zerg trying to take a castle when the commander called for a couple of rams and balista to be built. You could have heard a pin drop. This got me thinking a bit about the mechanics of siege weaponry.
For new players, siege weapons are too expensive to waste money / honor on as they don’t have enough resources. For ‘older’ players, this tends not to be the case as much, but even then they tend to hoard gear and often its a balance between dropping a balista in location A knowing that in a few minutes that that balista/treb is going to be effectively worthless as the keep will be taken. And the players that drop a lot of blueprints tend to be broke anyway
I actually really like this aspect of the game. There are forces the player has to take into consideration (greed vs helping-the-team vs always-being-the-one-to-drop-blueprints etc) make for an interesting dynamic, which in many ways greatly affects the outcome of the sieges etc.
However, I personally feel that this mechanic disadvantages the players who are more team oriented as they are more likely to use their blueprints/money/honor to pony up and help the team succeed. Rather than just grief on this, I’m suggesting the following solution:
When a player uses a blueprint, or contributes to building a siege engine, they are allocated a percentage of any kills from that piece of equipment. Something like:
Person in siege equipment gets 90% of kill XP.
Owner gets 5% of kill XP.
Last 5% is allocated to the supply contributors based on amount supplied.
e.g. an arrow cart takes 30 supply to build, so the owner drops the blueprint and contributes 10 supply to building, player A contributes a further 10 and player B the last 10.
Lets say the owner then goes off to do something else and another player (player C) jumps in and starts pwning. For every 100xp generated:
player C gets 90XP,
the owner gets (5% + 1 third of the last 5% => 5% + 1 2/3 % ==> 6%) so gets 6XP
player A gets (1 third of 5% => 1 2/3%) so gets 1XP
player B gets 1XP as well
IF the owner had stayed and jumped into the cart him/her self:
player C gets 0 as they did squat
the owner gets (5% + 1 third of the last 5% => 6% + 90% of the kill) so gets 96XP
player A gets (1 third of 5% => 1 1/3%) so gets 1XP
player B gets 1XP as well
It would be even better if loot drops worked the same way too. But I can’t really see how this could be worked into the same paradigm as loot is a little harder to just divvy up.