The Guild Registry of Outposts: Who, What and Where

[jwenting]

Such was originally planned. Guilds would do missions/quests to attain outposts if there were fallow outposts available, then have to do more missions/quests at a regular basis in order to maintain them.
Outposts that did not receive regular maintenance would over time fall into disrepair and get taken over by wildlife or bandits, at which point they'd be returned to the pool of available outposts to be gained by guild missions.

Of course the guild mission system was never implemented, and neither was the full set of outposts (all the ruined outposts you see travelling Atys were originally intended to be available for guilds to own).

Mind none of this would have involved the current system of pvp battles over outposts, but I think it could still be given a place in the mechanics (have an outpost fall fallow if successfully attacked, as if the owning guild had failed to maintain it, with the attacking guild getting 24 hours to do the required missions to gain ownership before other guilds can do so for example).

This would not only make it easier for guilds to gain outposts that don't want to get involved in pvp, but also make it harder for guilds to retain outposts when inactive (and for any guild to own multiple outposts, especially multiple high level outposts as the missions could be designed to get progressively harder and more time consuming depending on both the level of the outpost and the number of outposts owned so that for example a guild owning 1 q150 outpost might have to spend say 2 man hours a week to keep it, when a guild owning 2 q250 outposts has to spend say 50 man hours a week to keep both of theirs).

Of course this would likely take a quite substantial coding effort, but it would I think be a better way to spend available resources than things like jumping or miniscule improvements in the textures of mobs).