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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.
Dungeon Camping - Guild style
DracoKalen
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
So, this was brought up on Discord and the mods asked we move it away from "questions".
Guild camping a dungeon.
I see someone say it's realistic. My answer....not really.
If a guild camps a dungeon that closes that dungeon off to small groups and guild.
BUT more then that, if you want actual realism then once a guild clears a dungeon, mobs should stop popping. A dungeon cleared and populated with guild members should cease functioning as a dungeon and become a base of operations for the guild.
Maybe after the guild has cleared out and away from the dungeon it would revert to being a dungeon again, maybe give it a random amount of time, say up to 7 days and if someone from that guild enters the entrance of the dungeon the timer resets.
Alternatively maybe more functionality.
For instance, say it was a bandit stronghold. Well higher level bandit groups find out their people have been ousted and plot revenge. Not stupidly throw waves at the guild, but scout them, watch when they are weakest and attack. Maybe even attack from passages the guild did not find.
Guild camping a dungeon.
I see someone say it's realistic. My answer....not really.
If a guild camps a dungeon that closes that dungeon off to small groups and guild.
BUT more then that, if you want actual realism then once a guild clears a dungeon, mobs should stop popping. A dungeon cleared and populated with guild members should cease functioning as a dungeon and become a base of operations for the guild.
Maybe after the guild has cleared out and away from the dungeon it would revert to being a dungeon again, maybe give it a random amount of time, say up to 7 days and if someone from that guild enters the entrance of the dungeon the timer resets.
Alternatively maybe more functionality.
For instance, say it was a bandit stronghold. Well higher level bandit groups find out their people have been ousted and plot revenge. Not stupidly throw waves at the guild, but scout them, watch when they are weakest and attack. Maybe even attack from passages the guild did not find.
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Comments
By bandits do you mean npcs?
Bandits as in NPC bandits.
The functionality will already be available for other guilds to attack the occupying guild. But there should be a natural challenge by the displaced occupants. Sure it will take extra coding but really if they're going to allow occupation the usual wait....kill, loot, wait kill loot should be an increasing challenge to the occupying force.
Chill. No need to be rude.
I don't think it would be worth the effort to code myself because I don't think they could make it work like you want. I'd imagine it would just be clunky and like any other pve interaction. If only we could use AI to make it work.
Guild [Campers] decides this is their dungeon and nobody else gets to run it. Ok, that's great. But mechanically how does that play out?
Guild [A] comes along and enters the dungeon. Campers decides to war dec them to keep them out of the dungeon. Now, everywhere in the world Campers has to face Guild A.
Guild comes along and enters the dungeon. Campers decides to war dec them to keep them out. Now everywhere in the world Campers has to face Guilds A and B.
Guild C comes along. Campers can't afford another war, so they decide to flag on Guild C to keep them out. Guild C doesn't fight back, so Campers get saddled with a ton of corruption.
Guild D comes along because they heard about Campers. Guild D Guild Wars Campers for the PVP.
Now, Campers are trying to fight 3 Guild Wars all while earning back XP from having been corruption bombed.
Now looking at this for a minute, does this make much sense? Do you think Campers is going to be able to actually camp the dungeon very long?
Well that's assuming a lot of guilds. But under the given scenario you would be correct.
Well given a guild size is 300, and there are 10,000 concurrent players, I don't think a single guild is going to get away with camping a dungeon
a) without someone trying to run it anyway
b) without a PvP guild coming from the fights
A guild size of 300. Is that the largest a guild can be?
Not sure what you're trying to say at "b)"
Guild size is 300 but you can just make multiple guilds for a single group. Also there could be alliances.
With the known player cap on guilds, how long do you propose it would be until every dungeon was claimed by one guild or another?
How do you propose players complete quests that require dungeons?
How much would it cost Intrepid to design all of these unique dungeons, populate them many times over to account for different node configurations, and then have all of that time, effort and money for naught because some guild decided to make that dungeon their guild hall rather than using the already known guild halls?
How many players will leave the game due to there being no dungeon content?
What Jahlon is saying is that if a guild did attempt to hold a dungeon, they would have trouble holding it when a PvP guild came along for a fight.
Either the system would need to be designed around it not being something that guilds would hold, in which case, why would they bother? Leading then to - why should intrepid bother?
Or - Intrepid would need to develop a system whereby guilds can fortify these dungeons in order to hold off attacks. This means that now Intrepid need to develop each dungeon for a multitude of node states, but also for a multitude of player defense states.
This is untenable as a design paradigm if Ashes is to be released before 2030 (that is neither a joke nor an exaggeration), or if the intention is for Ashes to make a profit.
Lineage 2 Veteran
I was just thinking, if you get a series of guilds banding together like your speaking of other guilds would also have to band together and while you couldn't make one huge guild you certainly could put together a huge multi-guild monstrosity
You're kind of making my argument for me with guilds camping dungeons. Small groups and guilds would end up pretty much giving up and moving on as the dungeon would still be unavailable.
You make some invalid assumptions. No one said anyone "wanted the world". I'm speaking of equal opportunity access.
There aren't equal opportunities, you fight and make your opportunities.
Lineage 2 Veteran
Lineage 2 Veteran
And that's where you're wrong. If you have large guild groups keeping smaller groups/guilds from experiencing the game that keeps people from enjoying the game. The dungeon should be the challenge.
But you haven't given a reason as to why guilds would WANT to camp a dungeon. Instead, you gave suggestions as to potential incentives that make no sense to implement from a business or game design perspective.
Getting 300 people together to perform an activity that takes them many hours and has no benefit other than the lol's doesn't happen that often. Even if a guild on a server did decide to do this one day, that would be one dungeon, and players will have other dungeons they can go to on that one specific day.
The only time this would become an issue is if guilds are given an incentive to camp a dungeon. There is none inherent in the game, and so if none are given, then this whole thing is a non-issue.
Why can't both be the challenge? There are plenty of games out there where you can just open up a tab and click the "Enter" button and do the dungeon so many times it becomes a boring habit that means nothing, completing it is not special in anyway. no matter how hard the dungeon it becomes easy after awhile, its no longer special.
Lineage 2 Veteran
There might be a bit of pvp. A bit of corruption but at the end of the d.. hour everything returns back to normal and the game isnt rly affected by such guild shenanigans
High end raids will be effected as guilds will want the reward for them selves, if its done similar to L2 with drop system. Normal dungeons will not be affected. For me that is a part of the experience.
Lineage 2 Veteran
Not only that but as soon as the word spreads out that xXx guild is camping a certain area, not letting anyone in, do you know how quickly their enemy guild shows up?
As the two guilds fight everybody else is PvEing, worries free.
That is why this topic shouldnt be used to spread panic.
There may well be a point to camping a specific mob spawn point if the mob is on a known timed spawn (I hope Intrepid add in enough variation to spawn timers to make this not worth it). However, that is camping one spawn point, not a dungeon.
If for some abstract reason there is a guild camping an entire dungeon (and it would have to be an abstract reason), then as soon as someone comes to challenge them, they are no longer camping, but are now defending. As you say, this leaves the dungeon free to those that want to run the PvE content within.
Since Ashes won't have a lack of players keen for PvP, it won't take long before there is a challenger.
I'm guessing that by 'realistic' they mean 'feasible', not how it mimics cause and effect in reality.
How many different and how often are they really change the Dungeons and Raid Boss mechanics? Is that something they will continuesly work on? Or will there simply be few different encounters of the same fight? if so eventually people will get all of them down. However i don't think that is an issue really.
Lineage 2 Veteran
My assumption with this is that encounters will have a basic structure to them, but details and specifics (such as the damage type, size and footprint of AoEs) will change.
The reason this is what I am assuming here is because Intrepid have said that they want guilds to be able to organize things like raid build and such before a raid were to begin. In order to know what you need in terms of tanks, healers, DPS and such heading in to a raid, you need to know the basics of the encounter - which means those basics can't change.
So, in order for the comments made that Intrepid want guilds to be able to be organized and plan effectively for a raid, there needs to be a limit to how much of an encounter can be randomized.
Nothing new, just not the same old kill, loot, camp....wait for it.....POP....kill,loot, camp
It's your other suggestion I am mostly claiming is not feasable.
That said, EQ and EQ2 did both have a mechanic where you would kill one wave of specific mobs (often four individual groups around a campsite or some such), then a new wave would spawn that was slightly harder, then anither, and another. This would result in the boss spawning.
These events were refereed to by players as "ring events", as the most well known early one in EQ was used to acquire a specific, desired ring. This the event to obtain that ring was called the ring event.
I can't speak to EQ, but EQ2 stopped having ring events outside of either quest or raid content after the DoF expansion. As a content mechanic, it only worked if players knew it was there and were specifically after the end encounter of the ring event. Also, the fact that eaach wave of the event spawned much faster than encounters around it (and it kind of has to be this way), means that it is not suitable at all to be placed in a corridor.
It straight up wasn't suitable for general content, and so was relegated to quest and raid mechanic only content 15 years ago.
They can make it fun without AI.
What they can't do, AI or not, is make it fit as content.
Ring events in the open world are almost always ignored. People just move past them before they even realize they are there.
In enclosed spaces, the spawn timer on them means players are in trouble if they don't know about them, as it is common practice to pull mobs back to where you are in an enclosed space, and if you pull mobs back to where a ring event is that you just killed the first wave of, the second wave will spawn right on top of you while you are busy with your next pull.
The only time ring events work is if they are the goal - the end of what you and your group are trying to do. This means either the last boss in a zone or wing of a zone - usually tied to a quest - or an encounter mechanic on a raid.
Ring events are enjoyable in general, if done right. However, AI is not some magical process that makes a piece of content suddenly fit where it doesn't belong.