An idea to foster community development

[Shagsbeard]

First let me say that there is very little community development in this game, and perhaps that's a good thing. But I'm going to run with the assumption that it would be nice if there could be a stronger sense of community in GW.

The problem with GW is that the gap between guild (a handfull of people) to everyone else (practically infinite) is far too large. There needs to be an intermediate step in there. I'd like to think that I would run into the same person at least twice in this game, but the current implementation makes that so unlikely that there's no real reason to even interact with someone.

Here's my idea to make "random" interaction a bit more clumpy... to increase the chance of running into the same people and developing a connection:

Every player selects a seed number between 0 and 100. When deciding what district to assign you to, the game currently bases the choice on population of the districts only. If a weight was added to this choice that kept people together, community might have a chance to develope. Players who set their seeds high would be more likely to be be placed in higher number districts, while lower numbers would favor lower number districts. So if you set your seed at say 74, you would be more likely to run into others who had selected similar seeds.

Thus I'd have reason to believe that I might see the same people more than once. People would develope an idenity based on which seed they were playing in.

This level of segrigation is not as absolute as other games have made it. DAoC had a better sense of community because characters there are totally isolated from other people that they are playing with. It gave an us-vs-them that all communities need to develope.