Posted - 2011.01.16 01:39:00 - [1]

 

Edited by: Janos Saal on 16/01/2011 01:41:19
A simple idea - allow players to establish and join "groups". Groups could be formed for any purpose, and would act as a kind of second corp, but with no physical presence in the world. They would be purely ideological organisations - so you could found a group based on some political, economic, philosophical or religious idea and group with other people who share that idea, despite them being in different corps or alliances.
So you may be thinking "what's the point of this?" The answer: drama. Imagine you have one corp which has its member split 50/50 between Marxist and Libertarian groups.
Imagine a situation in which two corps at war both have large numbers of members from the same ideological group - would those people put their ideological loyalty above their corp loyalty?

It needn't just be a feature for causing trouble however - corporations which currently have no particular reason to like or dislike each other could find new ideas of identity from this - imagine alliances based around not mere geography, but some shared ideological principle, and inter-alliance warfare that is sparked by some deep ideological difference.
This already happens to some extent of course, but this would be a way of making these ideologies more visible in the game world.

I'm not a programmer of any kind, but I would imagine the technical implementation of this idea wouldbe very, very simple. It would require no "new" features - the existing corp-creation resources could be used to some extent. It would also require no balancing or further development down the line. All the interesting content - the squabbling, bickering and fighting would be generated by the players doing what we do.