Guard Systems - A flawed concept?

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I'm saying that the idea behind Guard Systems is that it's something for a faction to own, to give them clout, to give them something more than an un-official group.

A lot of Guard systems currently are e-peen contests, Londonderry being a shining example of it.
However that does not mean that the Guard systems are all bad because of that.

Londonderry is completely changing in 4.86. Far more like Baffin than anything really and with some actual lore that people can get into and play around with, hopefully benefiting Disco in the process.


I would say to encourage more usefulness and sensibility for Guard systems but not to remove them needlessly. They are essentially meant to be a home fortress for their faction, there's nothing wrong there, it's the silly exaggeration by the factions involved that has caused the issues.


A solution might be this:
Make a faction PAY for everything that goes into their guard system.
How could this be justified?
Well consider that the normal expansion of the faction carries on regardless of their guard system (IE Mollys expanding throughout Bretonia, while the Guard system also magically appears).
The expansion into a Guard System is done by the player faction in question, not really by the NPC faction (Look at the Corsair ones, each done by their player factions).
So, get the player faction to pay for things put into the system.

Maybe set up a point system where each object costs so many points and you start with say, 10 points for free (Enough for a couple of weapon platforms or a small outpost).

You could say this encourages people with plenty of trading characters and lots of money but frankly, it also encourages activity.


To make YOUR system better, YOU have to pay for it.
You won't be able to sit on your backside doing nothing and suddenly have a magical system full of gold and massive shipyards.
You'll have to work for it, just like a faction should.


When it comes to the actual setup of a system (Nebula etc) I would take that out of the hands of the player factions and actually put it into the hands of the Developers entirely.


You are left with this:
A host of 'undeveloped' systems that have been set up already in terms of natural solars. A faction can spend points in that system, or perhaps another one instead (There would be a scaling for the distance, difficulty etc involved in getting to the system. Nothing in the case of it being right beside your vanilla home really.)
Spending points lets you construct objects there. Nothing completely silly but allowing you to build up a system and not just have it suddenly appear.

This idea actually seems quite appealing, I'm going to fling it into another thread.

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