Settlement Claims System Theory Crafting (Warning TL;DR for many)

For the following (long) text do you have Comments? Questions? Opinions of your own you'd like to share?

EDIT: I realize this is a repost. It was reposted as its own thread on the suggestion of another member involved in the other thread. I agreed with his assessment.

Please do and in a respectful tone!
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Here are the subjects/wishlist that I as an outpost/settlement claimer find important to me:
Critical = Things I view this as essential for a successful first cut.
Highly Desirable = Something I believe that I, or my settlement members will use with some regularity.
Would be nice = Things that sound nice on the surface.

1. Critical: (Semi)automated settlement land claim and land claim extension process. (Well documented on the wiki or elsewhere, and as always, kept up to date, including costs.)
2. Critical: A "Settlement Map" or some other ability to easily determine my own claimed land extent. (i.e. am I on my own property? Additional questions to answer but which are "would be nice" include: Is it unclaimed and unclaimable? Is it unclaimed and claimable? Is it claimed/pending by someone else, no names needed?) I consider warning messages such as we get when entering the wastes "easy" (e.g. "You have entered land claimed by another party" ...etc. Or something like entering a command such as "/settlement claim status." )
3. Critical: Membership management. That is provide some way, a command, a UI, a webpage... for me to say who is or is not a member of NS. For example: "/settlement member add Perry_Stahlsis"
4. Critical: Town to Settlement and vice versa Fast Travel / teleporting. At least to a well designated area of the settlement.
5. Critical: The ability to grant rights to members and non-members, similar to residence flags.
   1. Minimally we should be able to assign these flags/permissions on a per player basis. (For example: "/settlement flag add Perry_Stahlsis teleport" would allow me to teleport within a specific settlement)
   2. Ideally (i.e. read as highly desirable) this would include the ability to create named groups to which I assign members and then rights.
      1. Example 1: Why I want it. Let's say Alex and Robin are in the "trusted longtimers" group. I would like to give them carte-blanc access to the settlement, they can do everything but eject me or edit my permissions. Later Bill joins their ranks. I only want to add Bill to the group in order to alter his rights. Even later I decide that the ability grant membership is being abused and revoke it from the trusted "longtimers group." At this point none of the members within it can grant membership.
      2. Example 2. How it might work.
         1. "/settlement group create Trusted" -- creates a group named trusted.
         2. "/settlement group add player Alex Trusted" -- adds Alex to Trusted.
         3. "/settlement group remove player Alex Trusted" -- removes Alex from Trusted.
         4. "/settlement group add flag Trusted membership" -- allows all members of trusted to add or remove settlement members.
         5. "/settlement group remove flag Trusted membership" -- removes the permission from all members of trusted for adding or removing settlement members.
   3. But only pick one of the two methods! Explaining exceptions gets tricky later on down the road when a permission/flag is removed from a group but was granted to an individual and the membership admin forgot! I've been in the position of explaining then having to do behind the scenes fixing. It's never pleasant.
6. Highly Desirable/Borderline Critical: A settlement specific members only (sub)forum where all EMC staff and outpost members can post and create threads. If the current rate of growth continues (2+ per month) NS will soon have more full members than can be included at once in the current forum PM/conversation system.
7. Highly Desirable: Intra-settlement fast travel/teleporting, if not named coordinates, I'm thinking of something similar to the "/home my_named_location" command that can be attached to a teleport sign as well as used directly by those with the teleport or settlement equivalent permission/flag.
8. Would be nice: I want to grant my members some level of autonomy and their own sub-claims. Further discussion to flesh this out is needed, probably in a separate thread.
9. Would Be Nice: "Settlement Coffers" a way to aggregate rupees (and possibly tokens) from those who want to contribute and/or settlement taxes. The expenditure and management of these would be governed by one or more flags/permissions.
10. Would Be Nice: "Settlement Taxes". Allow settlements to, should they choose, impose a sales tax on their members for sales conducted on settlement premises. (I'm borrowing this concept, loosely, from EVE Online's corporation taxes. I'm sure other games have it as well.)
11. Would Be Nice: An automated treaty system where one settlement implicitly trusts another... or distrusts. Permissions would be granted based on membership in the other settlement and their "standing"/permissions...etc.
12. Would Be Nice: Membership in multiple settlements. For example at least one of my members is creating his own settlement for purposes that will be mutually beneficial; another is engaged in an effort which could be considered, loosely, a settlement; while yet another frequently helps out a friend of the settlement with his own settlement tasks.

Why post a thread while you have this: http://empireminecraft.com/threads/land-claiming-do-it-right.50453/page-2#post-905223 ? I thought that thread was for the discussion of it?

Also; lets get land claiming done before we move into settlements or any form of 'advanced' group creation.

I like your ideas a lot. If I understand you correctly, your system would work a lot like the town res system. There would be various flags that you could give to outpost members. I also really like the idea of being able to fast travel and to be able to see your claim/outpost on the map.

As I pointed out in the other thread (and as is clearly stated in the OP), that thread is more focused on an appeal to staff to openly discuss land claiming (and other major features) with the community. It's less about the particulars of land claiming and more about getting the EMC honchos to talk with us.

OT: Actually, I think setting permission "groups" would be a key feature to include from the start. This could easily be expanded to residences in town as well - along with supporter perks like "Able to set +X permission groups" for various ranks.
For smaller outposts, setting individual permissions wouldn't be a big deal, but for large ones, being able to manage several users' permission flags at once would be a huge time-saver.

The Groups feature seems to be done but hasn't been released yet: http://track.emc.gs/issue/EMC-343

At least I think that's what "Pending" means.


Also, I think this feature: http://track.emc.gs/issue/EMC-105
demonstrates that they can arbitrarily select a location (in Town) and apply separate permissions to it, which is kind of what I expect will be happening when it is applied to whatever sort of system we have in the Frontier.

I think this is more designed for the wild rather than town.

There's no reason it can't be adapted for wilderness / settlement use though.

What? Do you mean town use?

It says Residence right in the title which suggests Town at least initially. I expect that its use will go beyond that. I was mainly trying to point out that they are working towards some features that approximately satisfy Perry's list.

P.S. You probably shouldn't quote me for about five minutes after I post as I am always finding things wrong afterwards and editing like crazy.

I may have confused your statement a bit.
-The feature Pab10S pointed out very clearly says /res as a command, implying it is already geared for town use.
-I thought you were pointing out that this thread is focused on frontier use.
-Ergo my statement than the above feature could easily be adapted to frontier use.

Oh right! Yeah. I thought Pab meant those features were in relation to this. Gotcha now.

I was kind of implying it. I don't think it would be unrealistic for them to release this in Town, let us beat it up for a while to get the bugs out, then adapt the code for use in Empires or whatever we're calling it.

Why? Because Kephras indicated a new thread would gain proper visibility for this post.

As for your objection to the word settlements being used. You've drawn a false distinction. Land claims are the basis of all settlement activities.

Furthermore, "Who can do what and where?" is the core question at play when discussing claims/settlements for settlements to have any value to any code written around it. Otherwise it's automated associating a name with something that's already been posted about in a forum. From the standpoint of a settlement founder, and I am one, I guarantee you that brings zero value to me.

The only way to start adding value is to start having rights management as a part of a claim/settlement.

As for your objection to the advanced portion of rights management, the group management aspect, I'm thinking ahead based off of professional software systems I've written. Group membership and rights assignments via groups is an often requested feature.

Why is it requested so often? That is because it's oh so very useful as illustrated in my examples. In fact planning for an advanced feature now, even if it's not going to be released until the second release, or later, of the claims/settlement system follows commonly accepted, often practiced, highly successful ways of designing, planning and architecting software changes for any software system, not just for EMC.

Now, I would also like to address the tone of your post. Please, in future replies keep it positive and supportive. Your choice of words seemed dismissive.

Good to know!

Understood. I've not read all available public posts. So perhaps I missed the post or just plain forgot this point.

A release cycle policy I greatly appreciate!

Good to hear! I look forward to seeing more on this as it happens!

I hope you do make time for yourself amid all this business you're conducting!