good points, but i would like to discuss some of the reasons you brought up.
first, about trust.
i see the scenario you mentioned, you join a faction, put down your stuff and then you get kickt and loose all you have.
well, that can happen even now.
furthermore, its verry likely a group of players have stuff in the faction base, and a new recruit can efforthlesly steal everything and render the base useless from then on.
bothways trust is needed, but if a bad judgement takes place, a single player will suffer the costs, not a whole faction.
witch i think is a better option.
allso, if you get rid of a memebr for any reason, you allso have to abbandon the base now.
most dismissed players will utilise the sethome they have, and invite all your enemys asap.
for them it takes nothing from then on to make a huge profit on your faction's stuff.
about faction economy.
i think i should describe faction economy better.
it would not allow to purchase F power at all.
it should allow to -> issue tax to faction members. so if they want to stay, they have to pay.
it should allso mean the server issues tax to every faction. so if the faction does not want to get disbanded, then it has to pay its tax. done from a faction balance, that is where player taxes end up at.
the tax should be based on maximum faction power, and it should be not linear. for example, a single player faction with 10 as maximum faction power would pay say.. (just a random number for example) 1000 money every 24 hours. an other faction with 2 members should pay more than 2000 for f power tax.
now, the amount of claimed land should work the same, the more you claim, the more you pay, and allso growth is not linear.
this is faction economy.
and shop prices..
well, i would change some of them, you see a stack of cobble costs 128. a single item of coal costs 35.
to smelt 64 cobble, you need 8 coal. so 128+ 8*35 = 408 money what it costs to make smooth stone.
then again smooth stone can be bought for 256/ stack. and sells for 192.
it should sell for at least 408, and if you want to purchase it, that price should be even higher.
and now comes the real pain, smooth stones can be turned into bricks. pretty nice i must say, but this item can be sold for 320/ stack now. it should be the same as smooth stone. exactly the same price.
and there is the real headache, if you smelt this, into cracked bricks.. you can sell that to the shop for 64/ stack.
meanwhile it should be smoothstone price + 280 for a stack.
and, mcmmo smelting skill does not work at all. you don't get the fuel efficiency multiplier at all.
all these smelting operations should yield some income, the shop prices are simply goofy.
the onyl way to make worthy cash is blaze spawners, nothing else.
there is no other way.
and here comes the raiding costs toomutch problem.
actually, you should take into account the price of building a proper base with just a 3x3 chunk footprint, 1 layer of regen wall, 1 layer of anti- glitch wall, 1 layer of obby. and all this to sky limit, so on avarage 128 block high. and add the price of spawners and stuff you have in a base, and loose on raid. tnt and cregg prices are nt high compared to the income you can make by raiding a base. allso you can just see who is online in the target faction, and do you raiding when they are not online.
no retaliation or what so ever. it may take hours to catapult your self in, but its not a high risk investment.
allso at the moment a base is mostly pointless to make. 1 single tiny mistake, and all you built for a really lot of money, has to be abbandoned.
i plan to re-do the shop prices and post them, as a suggestion to change them accordingly. the ecenomy is really wierd on factions. it literally makes no sense to produce anything, only to farm blazez. and no point in doing trading. the spawn shop sells stuff for cheaper than they can be menufactured for, so you are better of to purchase there. if that was not the case, it would be viable to make smelters and actually produce goods. and sell them to other people.