I think the ability to invest excess resources into building a homestead is a great idea to give people something to invest in and leave their mark on the world.
One thing that stuck out to me in the discussion today was the idea of allowing people who are prolific crafters and base builders to contribute content to the game for everyone else to enjoy.
I think that's the one place where the idea of creating your personal homestead could be improved really significantly by leveraging the sites that people create as battlegrounds against invasions.
Instead of simply building by yourself and for yourself somewhere you could set your claimstake to essentially enter a rotation of defense missions where other people are brought to your homestead via a matchmaking tool, and then fight off hordes of Tsi-Hu.
That would leverage the fact that players are filling procedurally generated terrain with unique constructions as a vast amount of unique "levels" that people can dip into for a defensive action.
Of course there would be some kind of reward for setting your claim to active, maybe some resources that are awarded every time a defense mission takes place there. The people who defend it also get rewarded when they successfully hold off the invasion of course.
If the areas that players populate can be leveraged in the combat gameplay loop the game will very quickly have more levels than really any other game can boast.
Give people the ability to rate a homestead after a defense mission for additional rewards and you give additional incentives to people to get creative and really try to create an awesome environment to battle in.
This. It's about leveraging player content to drive the world and benefit the community at large. It only takes a handful of good creators to provide benefit to everyone else.
How do we leverage this and make it an amazing content machine? That's the correct path.
