Guilds/Clans/Groups for screeps players
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I'd like to suggest a group feature, which could add some more dynamic to the game, use group efforts to reach certain goals. It might also solve a few issues the game currently has regarding new players.
Currently there are quite a few players and the userbase is growing every week.These new players currently spawn inside the novice area, a secluded area "away" from the real world. As soon as the walls of these area's fall it's bound to happen that the new players get attacked by outsiders. The new players simply have no place to go to, or must overcome a large "feature gap" compared to well established players.
My idea is to unite new and old players more in the form of a guild/clan/group.
Currently the center room and source keepers around it are pretty much untouched due to the expensive operations needed.
It would be fun to use these rooms to be able to "hold" these 9 area's by different players. It requires the users to work together like a group. The middle room of a sector would hold. As soon as these 9 tiles are claimed by a group of players the sector would become marked as "clan X territory". Obviously opposing clans can still spawn/claim rooms inside this area.
The 8 rooms with source-keepers should be fortified, and a special building should have continuous creeps working on it, pretty much like upgrading a controller.
The center room must have at least 4 different players working on a free-standing building, as soon as there are 4 people working on this building the clan feature should become available for the players.
Holding the 9 rooms should benefit the sector, awarding more resources to existing sources (4k energy in stead of 3k, something like that), source keepers spawn less often. Also giving the opportunity to upgrade those center rooms for more perks could be included. The clan could also feature "shared memory" on which all those players of the clan can read/write.
I think this will benefit the new players as well, as they can be part of these clans as well, and helping them out would help your joint effort to defend a sector against enemy clans.Obviously implementing this will take time, but it will also make it easier to write code which copes with friends, and friends of friends, for example:
Now you got a friend list ["player1","player2"] and you have to iterate through all those players to see if they pose a threat, the new system could potentially make this a lot easier by creating a "creep.owner.clan" variable and checking if that's the same as your clan.
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I like this idea. At the same time, I'd kind of like to see some sort of communal clan memory, and a message bus. Message bus might act like IRC- Tick 5 message is broadcast, tick 6 it's received by anyone in the clan listening, tick 7 it's gone. Memory could be a good place to store a collection of who has what resource nodes, highway details, etc.
There wouldn't be any CPU for the clan, and the memory overhead would be rather low, I think. It'd be interesting to see how players managed shared memory between them, especially if we didn't give them any sort of access control.
EDIT: I want to call it a "Cluster".
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Adding even a dead simple means of sharing information between players would go a long way I think. The exponential difference between established and new players makes it cheap for pros to helps noobs. It's also probably a better ROI to boost a low-level clan mate's GCL (so he can take another room), so finding and helping new allies has a lot of incentives.
Having cohesive groups opens up potential for more awesome battles, treachery, and all the other political stuff (which feels very lacking to me, coming from a traditional persistent survival game). It also helps noobs come up to speed faster, meaning competition increases in both quantity and quality.
I think this is probably the easiest win in terms of engagement improvement vs cost to implement.
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Too amend my story,
I'd like to propose to these "Clans" to be called "Colonies" or "Clusters" to fit the game atmosphere.
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We do have inter-scripts comm channels feature in our roadmap. Two or more players will be able to subscribe to a channel (optionally using a password) and send messages to it from their scripts, which will be available for every other listener in the channel. You will be able to create any cooperative systems based on this channels, including something like clans.
As to sector-wide activities, we are not going to do something in this direction yet. For the moment, it is more important to implement mineral resources mechanics, and thus create incentives for trading between players. This new feature will be announced very soon.
