I side with the no out of nowhere reward for capturing a castle. A castle should be interesting to the castle owner. It should be precious and worth dying for.
Offering a castle capture reward would only make it interesting for the capturing faction. Hence once you got the castle, why try to keep it? Furthermore, the incentive would be to let them capture to then recapture yourself. Clearly it doesn't work.
Some people have suggested castle chests that provide a stream of gold. Coming from nowhere, just an amount of gold every X minutes.
Although this is moving more in the right direction (castles should be precious to the owner), it is still problematic. It is completely detached from every other feature of the game. Surely no one wants to reward people for sitting in their castle with the doors locked.
Hence my suggestion goes in the line of the last one but introduces an element of dependency from the exterior to castle owners. Money will flow automatically to your chest IF you manage to have goods delivered to your castle.
Now you want to keep the castle AND encourage trade to it. This opens the possibility to far more interesting interactions. For instance, Lords have an interest in providing a "safe" economic environment, since bandits directly hurt their chests. Serfs naturally flow to protected environments (see the hated / loved neutral villages with soldier classes, like Burglen or some Glunmars), meaning that an organized powerful faction has an advantage over some random dudes roaming the map.
Creating this environment is not as easy as it seems, though.
First, one needs to make sure that serfs understand that they can sell goods ONLY inside castles.
Second, factions have to be the BEST way to make money. Else, not much has changed, just some people have looted a slightly more lucrative chest. However, if the chest is not the chicken of the golden eggs, people can still rely on independent serfing for money making, coming back to the lone wolf disorganized BS that we are playing right now. They wouldn't care much about the castle, wouldn't have an incentive to obey the lord, nor to protect serfs when they are the soldiers, etc.
Third, bandits have to have a chance to disrupt the flow of money to the castle chest. Right now, being a bandit in most maps is very hard and not lucrative at all. Except if you are an organized faction devoted to banditry, but those rarely happen since people join factions to spend gold in wars. My recommendations are:
- Some selling points for bandits : else, they will never be able to sell stolen goods in castles. This should not be closer to the resources than the castles, else serfs can just go there.
- A maze of routes to the castle: if you steal a cart in the ONLY road from the castle to the mine, how the hell are you going to escape from the faction knights? One should be able to take different routes to escape from the knights, forcing them to try to find the robber. This should include "secret" hiding spots over the map.
- Relatively good classes for bandits: At least an archer class.
Fourth, achieve a good balance in prices and put a limit to bank withdrawal. Do you have the impression that it is hard to find people grinding? It is, sinc epeople grind every now and then and then safe it in the bank. This money can last for ages. Now, grinding should maybe not take as long as in some servers (depending of distance of resources it can take a LONG time), but it should happen more often. This can be achieved via relatively high prices for gear and a bank withdrawal limit. This way one can ensure that people run out of gold.
This last point might seem harsh on the player, but in my experience there is no player that cares less about the lord, factions, wars, RP, robberies and interactions with the rest in general than the filthy rich player. Those players don't give a damn about death or anything else. Hence they sort of leave outside the game environment, which makes it very annoying.
