Improvement: Add a faction score board

[coconut]

It has been said before that the game lacks a victory condition, which is part of what some people mean when they say the metagame is lacking.

As the recent Ultimate Empire Showdown has shown, it's possible to set up a few challenges and rules to designate a winner in a time-limited competition.

My suggestion is to have a continuously running competition on each server. Each empire would be awarded points every minute depending on the amount of territory they control. I'll leave the details of scoring to a later discussion, the only important point is that all players clearly understand why their empire is doing well/badly, and what to do to improve the situation.

The game should have a score board showing the standings of each faction on the current server, and it should also be available on the web and the upcoming phone app. It might be a good idea to give it very good visibility, for instance by showing it while loading, including it in the board that comes up when tab is pressed.

A few additional related ideas.

The competition could be running at fixed intervals, meaning e.g. that scores are reset every sunday at 2 AM, or once a month... whatever period people will see is most appropriate.

The competition could be going on continuously, i.e. the score shows the accumulated points for the last X days. In other words, every new day, points from X+1 days ago are subtracted from the score, and points for the new day are added. This gives an ongoing, never-ending, continuously running competition, and people are free to pick any day they like as their own deadline. I would guess the end of the week-end would be a natural choice, other people with other schedules could pick another day that fits them better.

To help steer people away from Indar, it could be interesting to add a few objectives that give extra bonus points for limited time periods, e.g. holding the tech plant on Esamir in February, some other base on Amerish in March...

Summary:
Give us a faction score board, and make it prominently visible in the game. That will help outfits select objectives, and help steer players away from the Crown.