[var1ety]

It would be neat to have a no-combat bazaar zone for commerce, maybe gambling ala EQ's casino also? Although it would diverge from the all fighting nature of the game, it would be a nice respite from fighting, and a place to spend gold for something other than guards.

A zone like Kerra Island would be perfect for this, I think. Make it no pvp, and create a npc that would handle leaving it..hand your guild token to him and it will return your token then teleport you to your guild's central city, otherwise say a keyword and it will teleport you to some central place like East Commons. To prevent ganking maybe have it send you to a random spot within the zone.

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I was thinking about the desire to hold cities, and maybe we could remove the necessity to "take" a city to get your epic, and put that elsewhere, whether it be a ring, or various mobs, or what. Instead, assign an inherant value to every city.

That is, Felwithe is renowned for it's spellcrafting and high end weapons, so having control of the city gives you access to deployable vendors that sell high end spells and weapons.

Oggok is known for it's strong and durable armor, so it has some armor vendors.

A city like Freeport has only known war, and is home to many races, so there is affordable mid-range gear for all people in high supply, so that a downed person can get a new suit of midrange stuff there easily.

Kelethin is known for bows and elvish armor, Kaladim is known for axes, etc.

Something along those lines, so controlling a city means controlling access to some gear, and gives the guild easy / relatively cheap access to it, and maybe access to a percentage of the merchant's profits.

Maybe you could create a hierarchy of gear, say on a 1-10 scale in terms of how good a piece is. Steel would get an 8, banded would get a 4, etc. Each city could produce up to a given number in a category - maybe Felwithe had 8 magic, 8 small/med armor, 3 large armor, 6 swords, so controlling the city would mean control of vendors that could craft this kind of armor.

It would bring back the feeling of travelling to a distant town to purchase some armor they're renowned for.

Of course, to make a system like this workable you'd want death to cost the person dying more than experience, maybe a portion of their gear - have the server tuned so that the majority of the people are in storebought gear, and only a low percentage have access to magical items.