Community

The first question that I will address is:
How do you promote communities? Stickiness comes from friendship and loyalty to OTHER PEOPLE, not to the game (good comms, filtered comms, mutual dependencies[varying scale], teleport to friend, communal activities[storytelling], shared stuff[website/game property], jargon dictionary, play instruments (locked to same tempo), ways to relax, stake-holding[things they create - homes. stake is bigger the more control they have], encourage friendship, discourage oppression/miserymaking/griefing)
Community is probably the biggest challenge for any multiplayer game.  I admit that I am hoping that the simplicity of them game play and straightforward goal of fighting will bring players.  After all games like Halo, Unreal Tournament, and almost every other multiplayer FPS game has more or less the same theme, kill the other guys.  I hope that the added aspect of necessary teamwork in order to accomplish the larger design will promote community as well.


I know from personal experience that there is a special bond between brothers at arms.  This is especially true of those who go through a situation where they are relying on one another for their survival.  Band of Brothers was a television miniseries that shows how the relationships created through times of war can be extremely close.  In video games people often feel a similar bond, and MMO's often can see the effects of alienating even a small number of players.  In the Daeldalus Project it was noted that " While it may seem strange that strong relationships can develop in these worlds where everyone is pretending to be someone else, the architecture of these environments actually facilitates these relationships." I played Aion until the elder game portion, and I enjoyed the feeling of camaraderie and sense of purpose when participating in the large scale battles.  I also was a part of the faction leadership on my server for many months, and I experienced firsthand the difficulty in managing confrontations between hundreds of players.  Communication was a serious problem which became very elaborate and extended well beyond the game itself.  Ventrilo servers were set up for faster communications, then consolidation of servers into one giant (and very expensive) server that worked well until people from the other faction started listening in.  To make a long story short great lengths were made in order for effective communication to occur.


And so I find that communications will be very important, and will preferably be voice codecs.  There will be a command and control room for each faction where officers of the faction will meet together and discuss strategy.  During battles this will also be the place where main commands will be issued.  I would prefer to utilize the echelon structure found in the military.  This will mean that groups of 8 people will be a squad, 4 squads will make a platoon, 4 platoons will make a company.  We'll just go to that point for now, though it is possible to continue all the way up the chain.  What is important is that people will be able to group and apply whatever name they want to the group.  Really community is something that occurs outside of any given game already, it will simply be necessary to convince players that this is a place they wish to play together.


As far as punishment for misbehaving I have already mentioned how those players who don't comply will have field privileges revoked.  Along with field privileges could be the ability to communicate with the whole server.  In game chat is really important for people to be able to get to know each other, but it is also where those people trying to make trouble have the biggest audience.  If the ability to communicate has to be earned, people will hopefully think twice before losing that privilege.