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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Nodes and community concerns
ArchivedUser
Guest
PvP information is scarce but the control and destruction of nodes is a huge concern. If nodes can be destroyed by the "community," won't this lead to mega guilds rule the world? Example: A small community takes months building up a node, guild hall, player housing within a node, etc. just to have a mega guild walk in randomly one day and say "we want this" and destroys all the work of the smaller community. How is this fun for anyone but the mega large guilds? This mechanic leads to being forced into a mega guild to enjoy the game or living in constant fear that all your hard work can be taken away on a whim of a mega guild. It should be realized that as soon as a small community's hard work is destroyed and taken from them it's a solid bet they will just quit the game. Is there protection against this scenario and for smaller communities in general?
Casual vs Hardcore will also be a major concern. For this topic let's assume casual plays roughly 2 hours a day vs hardcore playing 10 to 16 hours a day. What protection does the casual player have? How could they participate in a game controlled by the "players" when hardcore's that have no jobs and play 16 hours a day will control major nodes, resources, etc. simply because they can spend more time in the game. This is especially true if nodes can be taken over by other "players." Furthermore, what is in place to prevent hardcore players immediately spreading out over the world and buying up as much land as they can just to turn around and selling at insanely inflated prices? This would destroy the economy as well as expand the divide between hardcore and casual.
So how are you as a development team planning on protecting and including small and medium communities?
Casual vs Hardcore will also be a major concern. For this topic let's assume casual plays roughly 2 hours a day vs hardcore playing 10 to 16 hours a day. What protection does the casual player have? How could they participate in a game controlled by the "players" when hardcore's that have no jobs and play 16 hours a day will control major nodes, resources, etc. simply because they can spend more time in the game. This is especially true if nodes can be taken over by other "players." Furthermore, what is in place to prevent hardcore players immediately spreading out over the world and buying up as much land as they can just to turn around and selling at insanely inflated prices? This would destroy the economy as well as expand the divide between hardcore and casual.
So how are you as a development team planning on protecting and including small and medium communities?
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Comments
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/a-reactive-world-nodes/
"These sieges will allow players to participate in the defense or assault of a particular node. Sieges will have a declaration period, allowing for the server to prepare for the upcoming battle. This mechanic will not be an easy task for the attackers. Cities will have a considerable defensive advantage. Nor can this mechanic be used often, as there will be a cooldown on the siege mechanic reflective of the size of the node under siege."
2nd. There is a simple solution, it's called grouping together with several guilds. We are talking about citys, metropolises even. They are not built by a few people alone, not even over time.
Edit: I kind of just wanted to bring a nudge to investige yourself but I will add this, it wasn't said officially yet, but I suspect that metropolises and citys will have certain influence over smaller nodes close by, gaining money from them or whatnot. So it will be in the interest of larger guilds to protect their own territory. Sounds like something that might happen doesn't it? Big bad guilds protecting smaller ones in a game where interaction between player matter.
We don't know a lot yet, but there were repeated promises to include all sizes of guilds in the process of Nodedevelopment.
Noone said you can buy land as far as I know, you can claim it to put a farm on it, but in a wild world where we are the first to reenter i find it strange that we would "buy" it.
On the casual vs hardcore debate I won't say much, if you invest more time, you invest more time simple as that and thats coming from someone who has a 35hours studyplan and works to sustain himself.
<a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/a-reactive-world-nodes/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ashesofcreation.com/a-reactive-world-nodes/</a>
“These sieges will allow players to participate in the defense or assault of a particular node. Sieges will have a declaration period, allowing for the server to prepare for the upcoming battle. This mechanic will not be an easy task for the attackers. Cities will have a considerable defensive advantage. Nor can this mechanic be used often, as there will be a cooldown on the siege mechanic reflective of the size of the node under siege.”
2nd. There is a simple solution, it’s called grouping together with several guilds. We are talking about citys, metropolises even. They are not built by a few people alone, not even over time.
Edit: I kind of just wanted to bring a nudge to investige yourself but I will add this, it wasn’t said officially yet, but I suspect that metropolises and citys will have certain influence over smaller nodes close by, gaining money from them or whatnot. So it will be in the interest of larger guilds to protect their own territory. Sounds like something that might happen doesn’t it? Big bad guilds protecting smaller ones in a game where interaction between player matter.
We don’t know a lot yet, but there were repeated promises to include all sizes of guilds in the process of Nodedevelopment.
Noone said you can buy land as far as I know, you can claim it to put a farm on it, but in a wild world where we are the first to reenter i find it strange that we would “buy” it.
On the casual vs hardcore debate I won’t say much, if you invest more time, you invest more time simple as that and thats coming from someone who has a 35hours studyplan and works to sustain himself.
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First of all. Most " balance issues" will be hammered out during the alpha phase. Secondly. Attacking a city in itself will be hard, guilds who wish to do this, will have to complete an extremely hard time consuming quest to even begin to attack a node. And further more that guild will not only have to fight defending guilds, they will have to also fight off people who inhabit or are associated to that node. Not to mention they mayors themselves will be able to buy defenses, NPC's and the large cities even get a dragon to help defend it. Defense of nodes will be HEAVILY in the defenders favour. And EVEN if the attackers are successful in their attack, most of the time the node will be just de-leveled (as in a town could become a village again etc). The completely destruction of a node will be extremely rare, but not impossible. Infact most nodes would most likely be destroyed not through PvP,
but lack of activity. If nodes are not active, and very few people visit a village, chances are it would collapse on itself.
Once again, I wouldnt be so concerned about this, Alpha will be heavily played by alot of people over the course of a year or more before release. As a participant, and someone who knows how to dominate a server, im personally interested in making the challenge to do so, much much harder !
After all it would be boring to just do this again:
<img src="https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/113248894304919552/281141706408067073/2016-08-27_32892986.JPG" alt="null" />
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I think thats just a given, basicly the longer you have to transport goods/supplies the harder it get. + Theres no reason to attack anyone other than the adjacent node (or maybe the second adjacent node), since basicly the only reason to take over/down a city is to make your own be able to grow again. If you wanna dominate a city, you can just do it through politics, and large guild activity in the area (at least thats what it seems like right now).
@DeathsProxy I don't think the "it will be hard" is a great answer. That has never deterred anyone. And how do we know how "hard" it will be? Why do you believe it is more likely that a node will simply vanish rather than by another guild deciding to conquer? (No sarcasm was implied there, it was an honest question.) You're also talking from a stand point of "I want to dominate the server" so your perspective is completely opposite of mine, therefore, I don't think you can really grasp the concern of smaller community leaders. That is the problem with Alphas. They normally only have hardcore players closely associated with the development team. How many "casual" members do you have playing in Alpha? So many games have made this same mistake.
I guess I'll simplify this down to a simple question. It was said that PvP would be selective, so does that mean I can turn my node off from PvP? What if the community wants nothing to do with PvP? Can we simply build up our node in peace? Or is PvP forced upon us?
<div class="d4p-bbt-quote-title"><a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/forums/topic/nodes-and-community-concerns/#post-3896" rel="nofollow">WalkerNash wrote:</a></div>
I think that there could be restrictions on who can attack whom relative to how distant the assailants home Node(s) are from the target, or rather that the costs associated with attacking someone a large distance away from your base of operations could be very severe.
</blockquote>
I think thats just a given, basicly the longer you have to transport goods/supplies the harder it get. + Theres no reason to attack anyone other than the adjacent node (or maybe the second adjacent node), since basicly the only reason to take over/down a city is to make your own be able to grow again. If you wanna dominate a city, you can just do it through politics, and large guild activity in the area (at least thats what it seems like right now).
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Why do you believe resources will be needed to PvP? Did you read something I didn't? Why couldn't a bunch of PKers just up and do whatever quest is necessary to attack another node and then just go wipe it out?
And the "logical" statement that the only reason to take over another node is to expand your own is completely nonsense. Pre-teens and teens, hell even adults, will go around destroying everything just because they can. Look at Age of Conan. Level 80s going into the start area to kill new players for no particular reason other than "I thought it was funny." That logical mindset doesn't work in a virtual world. Players will destroy other people's nodes just for shits and giggles.... or because they were bored.
I am sorry if you read it differently than I intended but from my perspective I had a very valid reason to assume you might have overlooked it and I redirected you to it.
It's called alliance, just because you work with several other guilds doesn't mean you have to integrate them into your day to day play. It's called mmo, you should interact with other players. If you want to isolate yourself suit yourself but deal with the consequences.
It was said, written and whatnot several times, noone can randomly walk by and destroy your Node stop assuming it already and use it as your pounce to target. BDO is a great example, your action reflect on you and the server will respond if you overstep to much. People will go out of their way to stop shit like that.
I gave a very simple and realistic example why something like that might not even happen in the first place with wanting to protect your own area of influence.
We are in a <strong>pre-alpha state</strong>, it was said the defense will be at a great advantage, it has to be playtested obviously and balanced. Saying more than that can be missleading. Concerns should be voiced, but where there is no information yet, there is none and until we actually see defense being completly useless you should step back a bit from painting everyone and everything negative.
No you can not turn of pvp for your node, it makes no sense. You could just deadlock the progress of other nodes that way. It defeats the purpose of politics, influence and the node system itselfe.
I hope this clearifies some things, douche out. o/ <salut>
Sure someone might wanna go out an try and "pk a node to death", but once you get corrupted (basicly kill 2 persons not PvP'ing), then you slowly start building a "corruption score" which will eventually lead to full-corpse-loot, which IMO would draw alot of other players to try and kill the PK'ers. <-- And people that kill the corrupted players don't get corrupted themself.
And I agree a lot of people just wanna grief, "Cause they wanna see the world burn", but Intrepid has clearly said that they wanna stop griefing, both PK and node vice. The main point is that you can't just pull a catapult out of your pocket and start smashing someones house up (at least not as the system looks now).
[quote quote=3935]Did you read something I didn’t?
[/quote]
Maybe, things you might not have seen <em>(regarding this topic)</em>:
- <a href="http://Discord.gg/AshesofCreation">discord</a>
- <a href="http://www.mmogames.com/gamearticles/interview-ashes-of-creation-wants-bring-virtual-world-life/">an old mmogames interview</a>
(sometimes you just catch a random message/fact on discord + theres a Q/A section that steven replies to)
-
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Actually the blog post says stuff about declaration periods, harder to attack then defend, and a cool down period, etc. The point you are missing, is that all this is for ONE specific group to attack another specific group. It does not say there is a server wide cool down if one node is attacked. So just because one group has a cool down doesn't mean 14 other large guilds couldn't be taking down other nodes. This massive assumption that people are nice is ridiculous. If you give players a means to steal, kill, **** and rob other players, they will do so as much as possible. This has been proven time and time and time and time again.
And massively multiple does not mean forced to play with others. It means you can or cannot. The entire idea of forcing player's hands into alliances goes against the developers idea of “give the players choice.” What this really means is majority rule. The large guilds will control servers. This has been seen time and time again in games back to EQ. The idea that some noble soul in a video game will balance out the equation and is just naive. It has never worked in the past. Ultima Online proved that immediately upon release. By the way, BDO is a massive flop in case you didn't notice.
As a whole giving players freedom is a great idea. Freedom to quest where they want and do what they want etc is all great. But as soon as you have the potential to force PvP on players, no matter how remote the possibility, non PvP players will leave the game. B UO only succeeded after it made a PVE server. It was a massive failure before that. Age of Conan, open world PvP massive failure. The PvE servers survived while the PvP servers were filled with hatred and anger. You can see this in countless games.
Either way, I've gotten my answer. I was hoping a developer would show up and talk about the way they plan on protecting small and medium communities, but instead I got the same tired, typical elitist bs you always see. I'm out. No point in sticking around. Toxic community right from the get go.
Either way, I’ve gotten my answer. I was hoping a developer would show up and talk about the way they plan on protecting small and medium communities, but instead I got the same tired, typical elitist bs you always see.
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They might answer they might not, but you gotta give the devs some more time, if you wanted answers faster the discord is a great option.
[quote quote=3942]
I’m out. No point in sticking around. Toxic community right from the get go.
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Well um okay bye, hopefully you don't leave completely :(
Both your concerns where covered in the Quote i pulled from the developers blog. The node can't be declared under siege again for a certain period of time. That's how I read it. Not from one group, but the node itselfe is immune to another declaration.
You have a choice, if you decide to isolate yourself, it's your choice and you should deal with the consequence.
It is beside the point that BDO is a flop in your eyes. I used it as an example where a large guild that grieved intensly was bashed down for their behaviour to the point that the guild had no influence at all anymore a few weeks later. People went out of their way to punish them for their negative influence.
You could always go into the discord and ask Steven directly, he answers questions regularily and will gladly unravel missunderstandings as he has done before.
You seriously underestimate people if you think they wont do it if there is no progression incentive for it XD The main reason why i love mmos is drama and politics around pvp.
[quote quote=3933]I guess I’ll simplify this down to a simple question. It was said that PvP would be selective, so does that mean I can turn my node off from PvP? What if the community wants nothing to do with PvP? Can we simply build up our node in peace? Or is PvP forced upon us?[/quote]
You can inhabit a big city and rely on other people or just keep low profile with ur casuall guild somewhere not relevant and people wont bother you.
[quote quote=3940]Sure someone might wanna go out an try and “pk a node to death”, but once you get corrupted (basicly kill 2 persons not PvP’ing), then you slowly start building a “corruption score” which will eventually lead to full-corpse-loot, which IMO would draw alot of other players to try and kill the PK’ers. <– And people that kill the corrupted players don’t get corrupted themself.[/quote]
Do we know this actually happens in siege? Cause i havent seen confirmation and i doubt you get the penalties during siege.
[quote quote=3942]Actually the blog post says stuff about declaration periods, harder to attack then defend, and a cool down period, etc. The point you are missing, is that all this is for ONE specific group to attack another specific group. It does not say there is a server wide cool down if one node is attacked. So just because one group has a cool down doesn’t mean 14 other large guilds couldn’t be taking down other nodes. This massive assumption that people are nice is ridiculous. If you give players a means to steal, kill, **** and rob other players, they will do so as much as possible. This has been proven time and time and time and time again.[/quote]
They sayd sieges are open world so i think its safe to come to the conclusion that the cooldown on sieging a node is server wide.
[quote quote=3942]Either way, I’ve gotten my answer. I was hoping a developer would show up and talk about the way they plan on protecting small and medium communities, but instead I got the same tired, typical elitist bs you always see. I’m out. No point in sticking around. Toxic community right from the get go.[/quote]
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXQkXXBqj_U"><img src="https://i.imgflip.com/wrf5b.jpg" alt="" /></a>
I suspect you won't build corruption durin the siege, no matter what. I mean you don't build corruption against pvp participants in the first place, but I dare say that if you go in with corruption already on you the penalties remain.
I don't know how far your question extends, full corpse loot wasn't said specifically, but with a high enough corruption score you will drop loot and possibly gear. I kind of doubt you can get a high enough corruption score that everything frops at once.
<div class="d4p-bbt-quote-title"><a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/forums/topic/nodes-and-community-concerns/#post-3994" rel="nofollow">Shinigamiqt wrote:</a></div>
Do we know this actually happens in siege? Cause i havent seen confirmation and i doubt you get the penalties during siege.
</blockquote>
I suspect you won’t build corruption durin the siege, no matter what. I mean you don’t build corruption against pvp participants in the first place, but I dare say that if you go in with corruption already on you the penalties remain.
I don’t know how far your question extends, full corpse loot wasn’t said specifically, but with a high enough corruption score you will drop loot and possibly gear. I kind of doubt you can get a high enough corruption score that everything frops at once.
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No i just ment that its pretty hard to imagine you would get corruption from killing people during sieges cause its mass pvp and i cant see how it would be viable if it gave the penalties.
No i just ment that its pretty hard to imagine you would get corruption from killing people during sieges cause its mass pvp and i cant see how it would be viable if it gave the penalties.
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PvP in "warzones" won't give you a corruption score, basicly cause everyone is a PvP'er :)
(Your post was btw #4000 ;) )
Casual vs Hardcore will also be a major concern. For this topic let’s assume casual plays roughly 2 hours a day vs hardcore playing 10 to 16 hours a day. What protection does the casual player have? How could they participate in a game controlled by the “players” when hardcore’s that have no jobs and play 16 hours a day will control major nodes, resources, etc. simply because they can spend more time in the game. This is especially true if nodes can be taken over by other “players.” Furthermore, what is in place to prevent hardcore players immediately spreading out over the world and buying up as much land as they can just to turn around and selling at insanely inflated prices? This would destroy the economy as well as expand the divide between hardcore and casual.
So how are you as a development team planning on protecting and including small and medium communities?
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Sprinkles,
I am a Casual player myself. I have about 2 hours each night during the week, more time on weekends to play. ArcheAge drove me off mainly because of the P2W but also the time needed to be involved. So I can somewhat relate to what you are looking to do. So let me throw some ideas out there that might work for the casual players , BUT also will still require a you to make sure you be a part of the community.
What I think should be done is there should be far more NODES than like ArcheAge had. It had what 4 or 5 places you could put a castle first of all. They should have at least 25 if not more nodes that could be built into a castle. Second there should be early phases of building the node up where it cannot be attacked and taken, however it will not have but a small fraction of the benefits of a castle. You shouldnt get them benefits of these groups that put the effort in when you didn't right its only fair. Now if your small 4 guild alliance that has 80 people in it are happy at an early stage cool, if we want to put in a system where these nodes do need to go into PVP situation no large guild should be able to just wipe the floor with you. It should be set that the smaller nodes need a balanced number of attackers to defenses and others can come to help you keep your node because your alliances.
If there are a Large amount of Nodes because the world is Vast than it will not be hard for smaller guilds to get along just fine as long as they dont expect the same rewards as a larger guild. If you want more then you need to work on the social aspect of the game and recruit people to help out.
Myself I am now in Grievance I been for a year now and I am personally use to running small to medium size guilds since I first started in MMORPGs in 1998. I am in Grievance now because I dont want to do all that work. If our castle was being attacked this Saturday for example I would help my guild prep for it if I couldnt be online. If I could be I would help out fight off the attackers. I also think players should have a safety net where they can have a house in a non PVP Node where they can store some stuff so they dont lose all but maybe time on their nice house. I also do feel that the times should be allowed to be pick by the defenders for the castle to go vulnerable. You cant pick the day but you can pick the time. Something like that.
If balanced the right way yes small guilds can have an impact, but to have more than your small little piece of the world you need to engage socially.