Ideas for a Better Tomorrow

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Albion Online

1) 3 Faction System
Current Guild v Guild system caters to a very select few. It basically boils down to communist guild systems fielding their 5 best players, while the rest of the guild gathers and crafts for them. 99% of the player base never experience GvG. In a faction system, more people can participate in the effort.

Territories would need a rework: Major territory; ie Castle, City, and 4 support territories that feed the Major territory; 1 x high in fiber, 1 x high in ore, 1 x high in lumber, 1 x high in hide. The major territory is attacked / defended by factions. These battles would be 20v20 or higher. The support territories are controlled by guilds in 10v10s or higher. In order for a major territory to be taken, its support territories would need to be taken first (in essence weakening the major territory and making it susceptible to attack). A single faction must control all 4 support territories before making the assault on the major territory.

Once you join a faction, all characters on your account are automatically added to the faction. This eliminates spies and people rolling alternates to be murderers.

2) 2 Zone Types – Black and Green
Black zones would allow full pvp / loot for factions and murderers and resources and terrtories up to tier VIII.
Green zones would be safe areas up to tier IV.
Yellow and red zones will become obsolete with the other changes recommended.

3) Reputation – Return of the Dread Lords.
Some people have no desire to pvp, or be forced into pvp all the time. With a faction and reputation system in place, you would eliminate much of the forced pvp. If someone is not in a faction, then the only pvp they would get is by being murdered. Murderers would have to be non-faction characters (they can be in a non-faction guild however). There would be stiffer penalties for murderers, such as loss of fame on death, larger silver drops (bounty rewards?), etc.

Why would someone want to be in a faction? Faction control of territories would give safer harvesting options and possibly zone buffs such as speed boosts, health boosts, etc.

Why would someone want to be a murderer? Instead of getting just fame, murderers would also get infamy. Infamy would unlock a separate destiny board with abilities that would help them to survive in a world where they would be hunted, ie better stealthing options, access to zones that cater to murderers only (a guardless town?), etc.

4) Travel Changes
The plans for travel changes sound great, but would would be made better if the gallop mode only worked on roads. You open up more pvp encounters when people know that the roads will be the most heavily traversed.

5) Crafting, Gear, and The Destiny Board
Rework the destiny board and remove specializations. For example, a bow user should be able to use all bow types with the same level of efficacy. A leather wearer should be able to wear all the leather types with the same level of efficacy. A bow crafter should be able to craft all the bow types and the same for all the leather types, etc. The different “styles” would be just that…cosmetic only. All spells would then be consolidated into the pieces.

Grimfest’s Feedback for CB2

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Albion Online

Lets get this game back on the tracks.

Progression
Currently people are asking for you to slow down progression because some your game design is flawed and with the current design I’d have to agree with them. I would prefer you make some changes and leave the current, easy to learn, hard to master progression philosophy in place. We all can agree that balancing is needed with your current destiny board and I feel that the time investment between gathering, crafting and gear usage unlocks is way out of whack. These three areas should take equal amounts of effort to reach the same destination. They should be balanced to where tools are now, which is a meaningful amount of effort to get to a competitive level, but not months or years.

GVG’S
GvG Design is Flawed; I and I am sure many others entered this game with aspirations of being a great GvG’ers. But over the course of my 2 years in this game I have realised that GvGing is not for me and It also comes to my realization that GvGing is a very exclusive activity for those that have the excessive amounts of time or lots of flexibility in their schedules and in most cases are fed gear and in some cases accounts that others have leveled for them to play.. I feel like there should be a disclosure to this feature in its current state with all the criteria that goes into this in game activity.

Problems

• Way to exclusive, from time restrictions, to resource demands and even limited slots and even skill restrictions.
• Promotes formation of large guilds and/or alliances aka Zergs because the more people you have the more resources you can bring in as well as farm safer.
• Promotes Communism which in most cases leads to abuse and waste. Some people mistake this as teamwork but often times they are the ones being fooled.
• At the end of the day they are pretty much meaningless fights.. Sure people(GvGers and Developers) try to build it up as if they are something amazing but again, less than 5% of your population does GvG’s and I bet over 50% would like to. In addition to this, I would bet 30% of this final beta population is only playing because they are GvGing or trying to support GvG’ers and the masses that have quit the test, quit because there really isn’t anything to do other then Gather for GvG’ers and GvG. My numbers are for perspective purposes, not factual statistics.
• Over a Half a dozen tests later and still too easy for a single guild to own vast numbers of territories? Stahp. At the time of me typing this Finstack has 25 territories themselves. How is this healthy? You got 1 guild controlling a huge area on the map, if you had say 20 different guilds in the same area the world would feel alive. Your GvG system is killing the game.
• GvG’s have a choke hold on your game.

Possible Fixes

• Limit number of territories a guild can hold through steep scaling upkeep costs(food and/or silver). This has been a problem from day 1 and you have still failed to see the issue with it or lack the Give a F to fix it.
• Make each fight more meaningful by not having so damn many of them so often. Think about how you have your city plots set up? Why not have an auction everyday? Because you want someone to get a value out of it before they can lose it. That is how Territories should be. 1 fight a week winner takes all like the resource territories. If your guild members has stuff in their bank, to the victor goes the spoils and the victorious guild can take everything out of the bank from the losing guild if they left anything inside. This also works towards combating zerg guilds. Who cares how many resources they can bring in, in their zerg/communism guild. Even a small guild can set up for a fight once a week and the better team gets the territory, not the one with more time, players, resources.
• Bring on a WoW style arena system (I’ll be putting up a post for debate here shortly, but having looked at the facts, I am ever more convinced that this system would benefit your game far more than It would hurt your game and would love to have a healthy debate on it.)

Mounts and Seed Vendor

This vendor needs to go. Things offered by this vendor need to be found and collected in the open world.
Farming and everything related In its current state sucks and it benefits the ones who can tolerate suffering more and those that have more alts/accounts. It lacks excitement, it’s dull and it’s boring.

Problems

• To available because of the vendor.
• Promotes Multi-Accounts
• Diminishes Rewards for your average player.

Possible Fixes

• Beyond T3 mounts, We could see Wild horses/oxen spawning in random locations throughout the world of all tiers depending on their zone. These horses could be killed like a Direwolf and would have a higher drop rate of dropping foals to be sold or traded to mount crafters. You already have the assets, and probably the animations. It would be a pretty easy task to add this. Even drops from NPC’s would be better, anything you can do to get people out hunting for stuff rather then handing it to them.
• Seeds need to drop off of NPC’s again. I bet many don’t even know they used to drop off of NPC’s. Bring it back.
• In addition to this, plants should once again offer a low chance of returning a seed when harvesting not a guaranteed return.

Note: This also plays into the fact that guilds wanting to control vast numbers of territories can, but will have to work a lot harder to get it and this is going to force guilds and players to get out and farm NPC’s.

Additional Thoughts for the State of the Open World…..
I want to reason to farm a dungeon or hellgates even if my gear is at max tier and I want to come back with 20 different types of things for 15 different trades, from common materials to “holy shit, if I make it back to town with this, I am RICH kind of loot!.” PvE should feel more like a Diablo series game where you are hunting for something cool and rare. You guys did an amazing job adding in new NPC’s and all that but you give us 0 reason to experience any of that cool content you created for us.

Changes for an exciting launch

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Albion Online

I’ve been hopping around the forums since this beta started, been over a year since I last played prior.

Here’s my thoughts as an old UO player, who kickstarted albion and hasn’t played since very early beta’s (and has played pretty much nonstop since this beta launched to prep for release). I get that I haven’t been keeping in touch during whole ride like some people have, so maybe there’s good reason why some of these things are the way they are.

So, if anyone thinks any of these changes would be bad design choices, please persuade me, so I can in turn persuade others. I have a lot of friends, especially old UO players who I would love to get into Albion, but there’s some red flags preventing many from pulling the trigger when I talk about the game.

Remove Alts

• There’s no reason for alts in a game where you can learn everything. In its current form it is abused with the current LP system and multiple private islands. There’s also plenty of other ways to easily abuse alts, from spying to scouting, that hurt PvP. If people want to abuse these things, at least force them to buy an additional account, 1 character per account makes far more sense in this game.

Remove LP

• Just give players a rested fame bonus based on how much time offline up to a cap, and lower overall fame requirements (especially in certain categories that are painfully slow atm). LP seems like such a strange way to help casuals when versions of rested experience date all the way back to UO with power hour. The current system is just abused by non-casuals for faster progression through alts. The LP build up also causes players to bypass lower tiers of the game, hurting meaningful progression and making me question why those lower tier zones exist at all.

Customize Islands

• Other than their main house, let players decide what goes on their island. For example, if someone wanted to focus on farming, he’d probably rather have 1 more farm plot vs 2 more building plots, or however you want to balance plot/building ratio. That could and should be an option if farming was more involved and required effort, discussed next.

Change Farming

• Make it a viable profession and way to play the game, rather than a daily 24h chore/income generator. Make it more active rather than time gated, and add more buildings + interactions and professions associated with it. Some people just wanna play mmo harvest moon/farmville/whatever on their island and supply their friends with food/mounts/pets/rares. That should be an option, but require effort and feel rewarding for time invested. Right now it’s a “wait x amount of time for free money” mechanic that requires no effort, a daily chore. It’s not fun gameplay. Also see Laborers below.

Change Laborers

• Buying and filling up books, boring. I have a stockpile of a ton of filled ones, it’s now a once a day click chore like farming is. Also highly abused, especially with alt islands, just like current farms. After initial investment I now make a crazy profits sending a small army of npc’s out to collect silver for me in what’s the equivalent of a couple slave islands.
• Instead of slave camps, replace laborers with a personal companion/lackey you can customize in your home. Assign them chores to speed up things around the island (farm growth/yield buff) or give minor buffs to the buildings output (small resource return), or really anything other than free income slave camps.

Hotzones

• In Shadowbane there was a fun mechanic called hotzones, where all drops were doubled in that zone for a couple hours. This brought zones to life with fun PvP and higher rewards. In safe zones it might be too much, put them in red/black zones to encourage risk/reward/pvp. Since the zones are pretty void of enemies outside the dungeons, have temporary camps pop up when the hotzone goes live. Can make it an event like so-and-so bad guys took over x area, clear em out!

Rare Mob Spawn

• Dungeons being this static are reaaaaaal boring for the dungeoneer, outside of the occasional ganking or being ganked. Easiest thing would be to add a chance for rare mob packs to spawn like in Diablo. Give them random modifiers to give players a challenge and yield better rewards and chance of artifact drop.

Artifact rework

• Maybe missing something here, but I HATE how artifacts work right now. All these little fragments are just annoying, it makes me skip looting most the time cause it’s a pain and feels unrewarding. Get rid of fragment drop, keep rare whole artifact drops so when you see a bag you know it’s something good, and increase whole artifact drops in Hotzones (if implemented), Hellgates, and other heavily contested areas. If it has to have some sorta silver sink or whatever, make them unidentified or something and pay silver to ID them.

Please add more territories, and bring back multiple territories/villages per region

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Albion Online

Hi,

BAKA didn’t own our territory for long in this beta and we didn’t really contest, so I guess disclaimer this bit is predominantly going to be speculation based off past experiences.

Last beta it was possible for a single zone to have as many as 8 territories, those territories could be any kind including a village territory. Last beta I was in a small guild of about 40 people at best, most of which were gatherers and crafters. We lived out of a Red Zone that had 6 territories, 2 of which were villages, called Tatterwash. When we inevitably ended up going to war with the group that held the village on the opposite side of the zone, I remember there being constant fights flashing up all across the zone of all sizes. I remember a caravan ambush turning into a 20v20 brawl which we were the victors, I remember just minding my own business picking some flax and 1v1ing a roamer from the enemy side and having to hold my ground. The war in Tatterwash wasn’t exactly earth shattering, but it was a small group against a small group confined to a little, albeit a not valuable, zone where PvP was an almost constant option. Fighting against who we were fighting against truly felt like a war both in the open world and in the GvG’s and finally taking the whole of Tatterwash really felt like an accomplishment that the entire guild felt.

Looking at the map now, I see nothing but 300-500 man guilds if not 800 man alliances dominating entire portions of the map. The smallest village owning guild that I see on the map right now is Finstack with 81 members and an impressive 26 territories. Aside from that, no other small scale guild really owns any villages that I can see at a glance and if there are they’re probably so deep into the black that the logistics of moving through the blob owned zones in between must be an absolute nightmare. Even the larger and zerg guilds have to travel for almost hours just to entertain the prospect of MAYBE finding a gank, and even farther to find an actual fight if they don’t live near a city.

The current layout of territories plays far too much into massive zerg guilds being able to spread their influence much too far. Even Aegis last beta was contained relatively well in 2-3 zones. It makes it nearly impossible for smaller groups to even think about competing, and very little reason to even try. As it stands, my guild of just a few active members have three options if we ever want to consider owning a village within our timezone; the quickest being using one of the 2 mercenary camps in our entire timezone in which we must win a farm, and then follow it up with 3 consecutive wins against this

My guild has maybe 30 active people. Maybe.
If not this, we are forced to go on a campaign across several zones, only taking useless and hardly worth keeping forest zones or w/e those are, just to get a shot at attacking a farm, then the village, during which we have to support logistics against blob level gate camps which can’t ever hope to fight at our size. With zones being as ridiculously large as they are now, I think having multiple village zones and more territories to tarpit the zerg guilds so smaller groups can thrive and have zone become active warzones for awesome PvP content would be a pretty sick deal.

It’s currently just not worth the effort that we would have to go through, against the odds we would be against, just to more then likely get blobbed so hard we couldn’t even reach our territories to actually do anything. Why would I want to drag my face through the 3-4 laughably useless forest territories just for the prospect of maybe being able to attack a village belonging to a guild 6 times our size? It’s just not worth the time.

idk I’m just a small gang PvPer, I miss this game focusing on smaller groups like it was advertising for, so maybe I’m a bit bias. vOv

Albion Is Losing Its touch

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Albion Online

Just a small preface for the beginning, I started playing Albion online at the start of closed Beta 1 and I know I haven’t played as long as some of you veterans. (Pls go easy on my guys). Because of this I can only speak from my experience with the past 2 betas.

The first thing I wanted to talk about was the switch from fame grinding to gathering grinding, last beta it was obvious that the progression block for most players was with combat fame and not with the ability to gather resources. This worked well because it was fun to grind dungeons/hellgates/portals with friends and encounter some small group pvp (with the occasional zerg). This beta the roles seemed to have flip flopped and now I have to spend most of my time gathering resources. I don’t know about most players but I’d rather grind dungeons with friends than run around with my horse hitting rocks.

The second thing that I wanted to talk about was the push from the developers towards zerging. While I understand that the blackzones are supposed to be dangerous and filled with fights I don’t see why you have to be rolling with 30+ to even have a chance at some fair open world pvp. Some of the most fun memory’s that I have in Albion online were small openworld fights with 3-10 players. Even with the new gathering changes these “hot spots” will just be a competition of which guild can pull the most numbers at the time to control it.

My third bone to pick is the map size. I know that SBI has stated that the map was built for a larger population but that still doesn’t explain why they couldn’t scale it down for the number of players that would be in the beta. We can’t truly test the game if the environment is completely different from what the final result will be.

My last piece is about GVG’s. So far GVG’s this beta have been pretty fun even with the balancing problems (Claymore!). But there is still much that needs to be changed such as respite periods for defenders. At the start of beta we were defending the same territory twice a day and winning both matches up until we couldn’t make one of the gvg’s because our members had to attend to irl stuff. There is much more that I could say in this category but I think Vortech mentioned most of them in his thread.

Lower tier items about Albion

I’ll state that I know the developers are limited to what they can do given that they want this game to be playable on handheld devices, that being said I just can’t get over how tedious much of the game mechanics feel. Doing anything in this game is just a long boring grind to get to the top tier gear / weapon wise, and once there it’s a matter of placing yourself in a guild situation where you can hold onto what you need / want to be able to maintain building gear for. I can somewhat get into the whole free market economy thing they have going on + the potential to own a shop in a populated city… but beyond that the combat in general lacks any sort of skill due to gear being the determining factor in the majority of conflicts.

• Collect “X” / “Y” / “Z” resources to make “V” gear.

Collecting resources is boring, more so when you take into account all the safe zones at the start of the game + end game zones being dominated by zerg guilds that if worth their weight can protect their zones of interest. Just walk around and click on things to collect.

• Full Loot PvP in a game where player skill is at an all time low

No matter what these developers do there will always be the “cookie cutter” builds of the patch that people follow for making a PvP character due to certain weapons / armour abilities having an upper hand. In Darkfall it was possible to 1v”X” due to player skill being a huge factor at end game… this game just doesn’t have that due to how it was / is designed. When you have countless topics complaining about how most of the PvP they encounter is 1v10+ guys there is a HUGE problem with how the system works. Darkfall you could at least escape if you were skilled enough… the key word being SKILLED.

• Levelling up tiers by means of kill “X” amount of creatures of the tier you are at…

Do I really need to explain why this is a boring method of levelling up tiers? It’s mostly mindless and feels like a chore.

• Lower tier items 1 – 3 month after launch will be worthless to any dedicated players that have gotten to using higher tier gear…

Crafting gear in this game is all about getting up to that maximum tier. Lower tier items are only made for levelling purposes and after “X” amount of time those lower tier items will serve no purpose other than to supply players that just started playing the game. I would again like to mention Darkfall, while it is true much of the higher end crafted gear is used more often… much of the lower grade gear is used because it provides certain benefits to certain playstyles.

———————————–

I’ll still be playing at launch because I bought into the game, but as a hardcore PvP fan I feel a little dirty saying that if I do play this game long term it’ll be due to the economy features and the idea of owning a shop somewhere that I can maintain. I really don’t know what they can do to make the game more interesting… but right now I’m just not feeling it.

Albion Online: Let the mount speed buff change

Let the mount speed buff only apply to characters with no gear on their character with the exception of bags, food and potions. And be unable to swap gear while mounted several seconds after dismounting.

Scrap the rest of the proposed changes and fire the people whoever came up with them. It kills localization for a large part of the map and will make the game worse for everyone who isn’t a zergling. The faster mounts means that you are killing solo and small group pvp even more, because the aggressors will be even less likely to kill the land-pillagers and loot them before the swarm arrive.

Being able to refine resources and make them weigh less for transport is a desirable skill to have on any character, and you negate that by making raw materials weight the same.

Also, on a side note, please remove the ability to add learning points to all crafting/farming abilities. It is utter crap that dedicated crafters are being outdone and left in the dust by dedicated crafting mules, often shared between players, that spend all their learning points on one part of an item making process. That, or add diminishing returns on learning points for lack of complimentary skills like other games have done IE: you would need more learning points to advance smelting if you lacked mining. And it also allows a rush to tier 7 that learning points and soon, faster mount travel will provide has players spread all over the map instead of being concentrated in the same areas.

The game of alts is super lame and gives your game a shitty rep that most people won’t want to touch after they hear about it. Especially considering that alts are arguably more powerful in AO than any other full loot pvpmmorpg that has been.

1 character per account and remove ability to add learning points to all crafting/farming skills

The only point of view in Albion Online

As all the people gave their opinion, I think I am going to give mine to some changes on Albion Online Gold I think would help to make Albion a better game. I come from Lineage 2, so if someone come from it they will find it “familiar”.

#1 Create some random drop on some monsters. Dont misslead me, I dont want to see how a wolf or a bear is dropping weapons, armors or silver, I would find that stupid. Include these “surprise” drops at Morgana fellows, skeletons, etc. Give them a very low chance, for example 0.1 – 1% and give them some use in the game. Prevent the players to craft these items until they are some tiers above the monsters that drop them. Include for example gold drop (some coins, 3-4, with chance of 0.1%)

#2 Instead of crafting 20 times a tier X to reach the ability of crafting tier X+1, introduce the recipes. To craft an item you must to learn the recipe. To learn the recipe you have to (1) be able of manage that weapon tier with Cheap Albion Online Gold, or (2) be able to obtain all the resources to craft it by yourself. If you dont like to hunt monsters, you will craft through (2). If you dont like to search resources and mats, you will do it through (1). The fame in crafting would be to craft better items (will give a little bit better stats). Finally, to obtain the recipe you must to kill some raidboss with a low/very low chance to drop it (5~20%).

#3 Change ratios for craft mats. For example I need 1 branch to craft 1 table. I find it would be better for the economy a ratio 3/1 o 5/1 instead 1/1 (and they return you some resources!!).

#4 Introduce more levels in the weapons. I dont know if the dificult is okey to Buy Albion Online Gold, but you can introduce more levels between the existents without change it. More rewards will do the people to stay more time in the server.

The only point of view I know is mine, so I would like to read what thinks the community.Finally, sorry about my english.

Go roam on those islands in Albion Online

The problem with this scenario is that 50% of the land mass is now black zones. The problem is that the highest content and resources are only in these black zones. The problem with this is that only territories, which are meant for 5 man GvG, are only in these black zones.

The black zones are indeed the playgrounds for the zergs. However, they didn’t quite think this map through entirely.

p.s. nothing is stopping the zergs from zerging us on the royal islands either. How’s that for fun?

You missed the part where I literally said AND EVEN fights…

The black zones FIT this in the previous version of the game, the map completely changed so the rules should add more safe albion online silver too. Majority of the map is black zone, that has not been the case at all in previous tests. They also moved guild territories out of the other zones and only in black zones, again this is new to this test.

I’m not surprised to see you defending zerging though…
I don’t want to eliminate LARGE scale fights. I want to eliminate the fights where a zerg engages on a group of lesser numbers that doesn’t stand a chance against them because they are simply bringing more people.

The thing is no top end guild is going to go roam on those islands. Remember you don’t always have to fight. There are so many escapes now you shouldn’t get caught by a big group. Maybe try to get your guild into a bigger alliance or get into a bigger guild.

50% more mostly because the core of the playerbase is into larger scale PvP and there is the need for lots of room. The more land there is to travel the more the zergs have to spread out. Also I assume when you mention the highest Albion Online Gold you are talking about Tier 8 because Tier’s 2-7 are all located in the royal lands and don’t forget too that there is no tier 2 resources at all anywhere in the black zones aside from what you can earn via a laborer once every 22 hours.

I will however say that when it comes to the 5 man GvG’s only being available in the black zones that is a problem that has been discussed a lot. The devs I think have been trying to come up with other options whether its arenas, maybe another continentent or something to help give other guilds who cannot substain in the black zones a chance to practice and engage in 5v5 battles. So far though I have no idea what they may decide on but I do agree that is an issue.

Also it would be nice to have more PvE content in the green zones like better raid bosses or something.

Rep system in Alion Online

I’ve been the biggest proponent of this argument from day 1 of the first alpha. Most of the dark fall community and other hardcore pvp gamers agree. Sadly the zerg culture is so engrained and such a vast majority of the playerbase relishes in it’s simplicity and how easy it makes the game that I don’t know what can be done about it.

I proposed refuting the proposed changes to quality of life for guild leaders with stuff like chest/bank permissions and roles/rights/access etc. The reality is that the cumbersome guild management UI/permissions setup is the only actual anti-zerg mechanic thats ever been in the game and the only reason these guilds have to not just enroll mass numbers off the forums.

I think the topdown/moba/camera stuff is a lot of the reason albion hasn’t adopted that df mentality of “hey it’s only 1 guy let me 1v1”, you simply don’t have the reaction time to stay on people for such long distances with no Albion Online Silver. If you don’t engage/chain cc immediately they will be gone for good.

Ya I mean, you chase one guy, and 30 are on your screen in one second and there is zero counter play. Maybe increase the zoom out, or better yet, Add a UO mechanic, names pop at edge of screen BEFORE they are on your screen to give you a buffer. That might be the best idea.

Most discouraging thing for me is being out doing whatever and seeing one guy in some monster alliance that I can’t chase cause it’s 99.9% likely i’ll just plow into 30 of them.

I like that a lot. I also liked the idea of mulitple party members slowing each other in close quarter or even blocking each other. Friendly fire would also be a nice add on to test with.

Rep system hasn’t helped with ‘yellow’ zone ganking in the slightest.

Another idea. Healing a KO’ed player should make it quicker for them to get more Albion Online Gold.
Being ‘high honor’ should allow you to get out of KO faster.

I’d like to play a ‘nice and helpful’ healer when walking around. Not see someone on there knee’s and run because I know there’s going to be a ambush. I’d love to be able to help them get up and keep alive, scareing off the bandits just outside the city gates.

If you see a zerg in redzone next to the city, tell every single player with reputation that they should get naked and charge at them.
Keep doing it!
Either you punch them to dead, or they wont be able to enter the zone for a long time.

Keep up the good fight.