CAMELOT UNCHAINED FACTIONS UPDATE

They are hindered by 'demonic greed' a stacking debuff they receive from every demon nearby. While they can form small guilds, they can't unite their forces. Demons, the killers: lore-wise they are lone demons.The swarm either dies at once, or dissolves as more and more members run away to save themselves. Having the 'shoot nearest enemy' spell on autocycle, and just chatting with friends while watching the combat visuals is completely accepted 'competitive' play for swarmlings. Similarly, there is no reason for a swarmling to be anti-social with another: every +1 swarmling makes you stronger by adding to your HP pool. When the swarm is on half HP, it does half damage, so damaging the swarm weakens them, but no individual member is suffering for his bad luck or incompetent play. Nobody in the swarm can die as long as the swarm itself is alive, as the swarm (swarmlings within range of each other) have shared HP. They fight in large groups (zerging), but they don't have to care about UI management as their strength is automatically gained from the swarm. There is no specialization among them, a more advanced swarmling is just bigger and stronger in everything.

They don't have many abilities and the mechanics are simple. Swarmlings, the socializers: lore-wise they are beasts, fighting with fangs and naturally attained spells.Tanks have abilities to keep the enemy in place at the cost of them being locked to them, healers heal them up, CC-ers keep other enemies than the target away from combat, while glass cannons deal most of the damage at the cost of being one-two-shottable if the tank and CC fails or they position wrongly. Adding more teams (zerging) doesn't add synergies, two teams are just two teams next to each other. While individual performance matters, even the best of the best is nothing alone, while a team with good synergy is strong. There are distinct classes with min-maxed specialization: tanks, healers, glass cannons and crowd controllers. Knights, the achievers: the knight gameplay is most similar to (old) WoW gameplay.Territory control give the faction access to resources and buffs in PvP in that territory. The basic setting is simple: the factions fight for territories that become vulnerable according to some timetable. The factions have completely different gameplay and philosophy, that lock the players to the faction: they simply love to play this way and would hate to play the other ways, so they are this faction, for better or worse. You can design any kind of combat mechanics and graphics on top of it, from cartoon superhero FPS to dark fantasy turn based card game. Please note that the idea itself is about factions, not game mechanics. It doesn't mean that developers can't balance the game in a way to avoid a faction being exterminated, typically with rewards for joining the one behind, but it means that you can't care less if your side is winning or losing. There is nothing that keeps them in one faction when it is losing or can offer lesser rewards than others. They mean nothing to the players who openly talk about 'mobs', 'content', 'l33t', 'pwning n00bs', 'ilvl' and other meta-gaming terms, showing that they are rather interested in the social or competitive aspect of the game than in roleplaying in its World. In the games I've know of (and Camelot isn't an exception), the factions are mirrors of each other with only lore differences. In WoW, while Wintergrasp or Tol Barad had any relevance, they were often dominated by one side, because the other gave up on the optional feature.

It's most visible in EVE faction war where most players have alts in opposing militias, playing the one with the most rewards. Especially because currently I have little faith in Camelot, for the same reason why every faction based PvP game failed: players aren't loyal to their factions.

CAMELOT UNCHAINED FACTIONS UPDATE

After writing the classification of massively multiplayer games and reading about 6 hours about Camelot Unchained I realized that I need to collect and update my ideas about my dream game.

Camelot unchained factions