Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-28117764-20170803175255

In general, it's on unofficial official rule that when joining a server (or a singleplayer world), you pick a faction that is *yours*. While you likely have high alignments with other factions, there's one faction that you consider *yours*; you likely live there, roleplay as if you're from there, use their equipment, etc. At the moment, there is nothing concrete about this. You know what faction a player *is* based on them telling you. My proposal changes this: focused factions.

Premise:

The player can choose one faction to focus on that they deem to be *theirs*. For example, a Gondorian player can choose to focus on Gondor, and for this, they gain neat stuff/features, and other players will be able to see (with more than just titles, which servers like mine with forge essentials can't see anyway) that that's their faction.

How it'd work:

On the faction tab of the Middle-earth menu would be located a button (for example: the same as the button to show spheres of influence but green) that when hovered over, would say something along the lines of "Focus on this Faction". Clicking that would add "(Focused)" somewhere on the Faction page (such as next to where mine says "Easterling Warlord") or next to the faction name on the alignment bar (so mine would say "Rhúdel (Focused)").

Other players would be able to see this if they have the player's faction selected in with the arrow keys, where "Focused" would hover above their head like alignment currently does (there could be a seperate option to hide this in the options tab, or it could be hidden along with alignment).

As the whole purpose of having a focused faction is to embrace a particular faction, there would need to be a limit to how often a player can change their focused faction (example: Gondorian player decides to switch to Rohan because they really, really like horses). I would suggest making it so upon choosing a focused faction, the player must wait either an IRL amount of time (hours, days, whatever) or a specified number of days in game (ex. seven in-game days) before they are able to change it.

What are the benefits of having a faction focused?

Having a faction focused would give the player access to faction specific stuffs. Examples are:

- Focus-specific titles

- Better prices with merchants (it would have to be a small amount to maintain balance)

- Ability to buy/sell more items to the faction's merchants than usual (ex. being able to buy 48 pearls from a merchant before the cooldown instead of the usual 32)

- Cheaper units (again, it would have to be a small amount to maintain balance)

- The player could potentially act as a banner-bearer would near the focused faction's units, only with less range so banner-bearers aren't made obsolete

- Access to potentially new waypoints (ex. Rangers of Ithilien would be hesitant to let you into Henneth Annûn if you were not one of them, as would Mordor be hesitant to let you into Barad-dûr)

- Friendlier NPC interactions

The last (Friendlier NPCs) would potentially solve something often suggested: being able to choose races. Instead of changing your race to an elf, you would be able to focus on a faction such as Lothlórien and all elves (or just Lothlórien) would acknowledge you as such. The main premise is that the focused faction would acknowledge you as one of them, not just someone that's friendly. I don't know how exactly dialogue would change through this, but I'd be happy to take suggestions. 