Well, its common sense that factions are not worth it the trouble here. Back then, you could make a temporarily blessed a weapon (better than looted weapons) if you were in a faction (imagine that when there was no item insurance). You could control the economy of the ONLY facet of the game (which was huge), and, of course, freely attack people on different scenarios, earn titles, become a known PvPer.
This kinda lost its sense when the new UO came up, and later OSI tried to fix that by adding an incentive that was a little too much, in my opinion (faction artifacts)
So, to improve that, we would need to go in a new direction, contrary to OSI. Do I believe that demise will take this path? Oh, hell no! But I really think that faction fights are better than regular fights and because of that, despite all my disbelief, I'm gonna give a few suggestions:
1. Diminish the skill loss time. There's a reason for skill loss. Faction fights were all about objectives. So if the objective was to take the stolen sigils on enemy's base, with lots of players in a very defensive position, you had to find a way to slowly remove the dead players of the fight and that's why skill loss is arround.
Well, let's analyse that. In a shard where instant-ress, instant-loot your corpse is a HUGE thing in how people PvP, I think its really difficult to believe that people will join factions if they don't receive some other good incentives. So, IMO skill loss still an essential part of how faction fights work, but disputes are faster now, therefore 20 minutes or so skill-loss has no sense here in Demise, something close to 5 minutes would be enough to assure that objectives are being achieved.
2. Rides! Removing the Taming exploit / Improving faction horses. No more people riding cu sidhes and nightmares, and other similar strong pets with ZERO taming on their characters. That apparently innocent thing, if removed would force people to look for non-exploited alternatives of a strong ride. What is left? Lesser hiryus (only for players with bushido), Swamp Dragons (not that strong), Grizzled Mare (expensive, not that strong, bad resists, slayer vulnerability) and
War Horses. But there's a thing, trained war horses used to be meaningful in battles back in the day, something similar to what grizzled mare damage represents in fights nowadays, so I think it had to be improved in hit points and in damage. It looks cool, people in factions would have a FAIR advantage compared the non-faction ones, but nothing that makes inviable to fight outside a faction.
--------- BEGGINING of some ideas that need some work from the community.
3. Perks achieved by killing enemies (NOT ITEMS!) . Well, we still need to make a use for the
Silver Coins. How about if silver coins could only be achieved by killing enemies, and with those coins the highly skilled faction player could buy him some
temporary perks? Nothing damage related, something like receiving the hability to know how many enemy factioners are in a area? Stronger War Horse? Possibility of a different title (apart from the standard faction ones?). That would make killing an enemy have a whole new flavor. People don't need to be rewarded in items, they can be rewarded by being recognized as a good player as well.
4. Controllable Towns. Felluca towns are not populated anymore, people don't hang arround in Yew or Vesper, not even in Britain. Going in those towns to take the sigils seems rather pointless. We would need to recreate the main reason why factions exists, because that lost its meaning throughout the years. My suggestion is to make people fight for spawns. Maybe the tracking enemies idea of the 3rd suggestion would only work if the faction controlled that dungeon?
Well, those are the ideas I can think of. It's a hell of a lot of work, I don't expect to receive reasonable suggestions / critics from this community, but if all of that makes sense to some of you, maybe wasn't worthless.
(edited to remove passive aggressive references, so people can express their opinions in a civilized way)