Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:
- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.
That's fair enough, though I do at least thing it would be nice if you could a) write a description for your estate (which would be displayed on the region page) and b) spend gold to build a purely flavour Building which would be displayed on the region page in the same way as monuments are.
It wouldn't change gameplay at all but it would give knights something to do with their estates and give them a way to contribute fluff to the game as well as perhaps making them more emotionally attached to their region. I know that the goal of a knight should be to become a lord but the fact is that lots of realms have long-established region lords so vacancies are few and far between - a new player in particular might have to wait a while to become a region lord and at least having several actions available to a knight character immediately would give them something to do even in a quiet realm.
In terms of armies it may well be that you should just have a link to an automatically generated wiki page with a section for recording medals and what-not. The key thing should be that the flavour is automatically put in front of players in-game so that they at least have a reason to know it exists without relying on another player to point it out to them.
Things I like and could possible be investigated more:
A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)
A. It should also periodically remind everyone in the realm of what it actually says - otherwise someone could write one, it gets forgotten about and then becomes massively out of date and misleading a year later.
B. I think one of the key metrics put in front of players here and massively highlighted should be
activity, especially for new players. More than anything else, an active realm is the key factor in making sure you have fun in the first realm you end up in. But the most important thing is that new players should be given realistic expectations of what will happen in their first few days of the game and the things they'll be able to do. If you're expecting hectic action and then find yourself unable to do much more than travel and waiting hours to get a reply to your welcome message then you'll give up but if you're given a realistic idea of what the game will be like and what you should do to begin with then you'll be less likely to be unhappy with the gameplay.
C. I remember back when newspapers were a thing. Pretty much every realm had its own newspaper and they were full of propaganda. It was great! You had your realm's version of the truth and your enemy's version with the truth somewhere in between. You had wars of words and realms without newspapers would be motivated to set up their own to counter the propaganda of their enemy. And you had some which deliberately tried to be impartial and cross-realm instead. It was a whole mess of activity that made the game feel really alive and if we saw that happening again then I'd be just as happy about it as if we only got a couple of staid, impartial, collaborative, continent-wide newspapers.
E. I can easily imagine that viewing the wiki inline might be impractical. So perhaps the easiest workaround, as you say, is to have auto-generated pages on the wiki for the Realm Description and Realm History which are then linked to from the Information screen (and the Realm List).
F. If this could be done then perhaps it could be used by the semantic wiki to help auto-populate the Realm History via a template?
Finally, I know that the above are all likely to take a significant amount of time and effort to implement. If it helps, I'd be happy to assist on some of the simpler tasks since I'm a lot more experienced as a dev now than I was the first time I tried to assist with BM development
