In particular, I'm keen to revise our player and guild progression system, to stop new players getting stuck, and prevent older players flying away from game content by gaining excessive levels.

The intention is to make items useful for a much wider range of levels, instead of rapidly becoming ineffective as you gain levels. This requires a slight decoupling of item power and player level.

I'm planning item mod slots, tuning ("optimise" your item for maximum performance), weapon skill (power bonuses from player training with particular weapon cla**es), and durability (items degrade through usage, and require maintenance to stay in top condition).

Items will also be more varied, with no two items being identical. The innate "build quality" of items will be randomised slightly in item drops, so that players have to strive to find the absolute best instance of a particular weapon, instead of them all being the same.

Items will be more powerful in general, and player base attributes will take a back seat. Currently, a lot of our problems stem from the fact that levelling boosts base attributes, and base attributes account for a large portion of a player's power during attacks. This should be lessened significantly, and there'll be trials on a test server to find the best balance.

Guilds will gain a level system of their own, and gain experience when they win raids, and when their players gain experience for themselves. When you level up, certain things will be unlocked (more on this later).

Guilds will also acquire a daily/weekly/monthly "pot", which must be filled by member activity (such as raiding/attacking). If you fill the pot for that time frame, there'll be a reward. This will also help with levelling up the guild.

There is also some talk of drastically changing how raiding works, particularly guild vs guild raids. We want more interaction, more to risk, and more rewards. We don't want raids to happen against guilds that are significantly mismatched in power, because that's not fair. This could be partially remedied by inst*tuting an "raiding range" for guilds, in a similar vein to the "attack range" we have between players.

I'm going to slowly post the design documents to this thread, as I get through them. I have a number of them already, but I'd like to clean them up a little first.

I think we'll need a much better system for discussing each design document, so I may make a separate forum entirely, and add a thread for each design.

I'm intent on getting this game into the state it should be in, with a fresh user interface, better notification system, in-page chat, game content unlocked properly, in discrete increments, a proper set of weapons, a proper backstory, and playable races with distinct pros/cons. I want a better skill system, better raiding, more leader boards, and lots of things to do.