A bit of World PvP advice from a veteran MMO player
Kroaker
Member
I love world PvP in games. It lets player's make their own stories and rivalries rather than relying on some piece of generic lore to justify their actions. Over the years I've played alot of games with world pvp; GW2, WoW, Warhammer Online, and EVE to name a few. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, but out of all of them I think the game that implemented world pvp the best had to be Warhammer online.
From Warhammer's launch World PvP was considered the core content of the game with PvE being an important but minor and ultimately optional part of the game. The game delivered on that end. The PvP was fun, the classes were interesting and diverse, and the PvE took what was then a radical shift by having many of the quests be open world public quests, which people seemed to enjoy.
In many ways Warhammer online was set to be the next big MMO but after a few months over half the initial players quit the game and it led to a slow and ultimately irreversible death spiral. The problem, from the point of view of someone experiencing it, was two fold; lag and lack of end game content.
Warhammer online was released early with much of the end game content still under development. A major feature of it's world PvP system was the ability to capture castles and besiege the enemies home fortress, but therein lied the problem. With hundreds, sometimes thousands of people fighting and casting spells on both sides of the battle in a tight cramped space like a fortress hallway a single action sometimes took minutes to register in the game. It became impossible to capture a fortress in the early months simply because the attacking side would lag too much to kill the defenders.
On the other side of that problem was the content. After you managed to besiege a fortress the hypothetical goal would be to attack the enemy factions capital in an instanced raid vs raid mixed PvE/PvP battle that often pitted guilds on opposing factions against each other. This was great fun, gave great loot, and lead to alot of forum drama. The only problem was it was implemented months after the vast majority of the player base had already left. To make matters worse alot of guilds would push city raids at 3 in the morning to avoid competition from the other side and collect the rewards uncontested.
Alot of these problems seem to be known to the ashes of creation development team and I'm glad that they're taking them seriously. You can't have a game with mass world pvp, or even instanced mass pvp, and have it turn into a slideshow. It will kill the game before it even starts. I'm glad that they're making city captures only happen during prime times, this fixes the problem of guilds pushing content at 3 in the morning to avoid competition.
However, there is at least one suggestion I'd like to make that could help improve world PvP in this game. World PvP is inherently asymmetrical. One side could bring 8 players and the other 20. One side can be a close group of friends all in voice chat, the other a pick up group loosely tied together for a single goal. This is part of the fun of it. However, another flaw in warhammer online was unfortunately how asymmetrical it was. After a while servers would develop faction majorities wherein one side was 70% of the total population and the other side 30%. When this happened that differential would increase over time. Eventually the skew was so bad that the remaining players on the minority faction would just quit the game or move to a different server rather than fight 10 vs 1 any time they walked into a world pvp zone. It was demotivating and would kill servers as once the minority faction was effectively wiped out the majority faction would have nothing to do and quit as well.
The fix to this is incentivizing the minority faction to play when they're out numbered. In ashes of creation you don't seem to have real factions but you do have guilds which will control castles. Eventually there will be situations wherein a large guild with many players will be at war with a small guild that has less than half their number. It could well turn out that in these cases the smaller guild will simply be too demotivated to put up a defense. Fighting 150 players vs 500 will lead to a loss 99% of the time. Motivate them to fight even if they'll lose. Give the outnumbered guild a special bonus for fighting against the odds whether it's a scalable exp buff while in the instance, an extra item reward for fighting 2x or 3x their numbers, protection from looting on their ingame house, just something tangible that will motivate people to play even if they'll lose.
Imagine corralling 500 players to siege a city and when you show up it has 10 defenders. That's not fun for either side. Incentivizing defense of a city either by the guild that owns it or by random players unconnected to the conflict will vastly improve city sieges and help stop them from being a one sided stomp.
From Warhammer's launch World PvP was considered the core content of the game with PvE being an important but minor and ultimately optional part of the game. The game delivered on that end. The PvP was fun, the classes were interesting and diverse, and the PvE took what was then a radical shift by having many of the quests be open world public quests, which people seemed to enjoy.
In many ways Warhammer online was set to be the next big MMO but after a few months over half the initial players quit the game and it led to a slow and ultimately irreversible death spiral. The problem, from the point of view of someone experiencing it, was two fold; lag and lack of end game content.
Warhammer online was released early with much of the end game content still under development. A major feature of it's world PvP system was the ability to capture castles and besiege the enemies home fortress, but therein lied the problem. With hundreds, sometimes thousands of people fighting and casting spells on both sides of the battle in a tight cramped space like a fortress hallway a single action sometimes took minutes to register in the game. It became impossible to capture a fortress in the early months simply because the attacking side would lag too much to kill the defenders.
On the other side of that problem was the content. After you managed to besiege a fortress the hypothetical goal would be to attack the enemy factions capital in an instanced raid vs raid mixed PvE/PvP battle that often pitted guilds on opposing factions against each other. This was great fun, gave great loot, and lead to alot of forum drama. The only problem was it was implemented months after the vast majority of the player base had already left. To make matters worse alot of guilds would push city raids at 3 in the morning to avoid competition from the other side and collect the rewards uncontested.
Alot of these problems seem to be known to the ashes of creation development team and I'm glad that they're taking them seriously. You can't have a game with mass world pvp, or even instanced mass pvp, and have it turn into a slideshow. It will kill the game before it even starts. I'm glad that they're making city captures only happen during prime times, this fixes the problem of guilds pushing content at 3 in the morning to avoid competition.
However, there is at least one suggestion I'd like to make that could help improve world PvP in this game. World PvP is inherently asymmetrical. One side could bring 8 players and the other 20. One side can be a close group of friends all in voice chat, the other a pick up group loosely tied together for a single goal. This is part of the fun of it. However, another flaw in warhammer online was unfortunately how asymmetrical it was. After a while servers would develop faction majorities wherein one side was 70% of the total population and the other side 30%. When this happened that differential would increase over time. Eventually the skew was so bad that the remaining players on the minority faction would just quit the game or move to a different server rather than fight 10 vs 1 any time they walked into a world pvp zone. It was demotivating and would kill servers as once the minority faction was effectively wiped out the majority faction would have nothing to do and quit as well.
The fix to this is incentivizing the minority faction to play when they're out numbered. In ashes of creation you don't seem to have real factions but you do have guilds which will control castles. Eventually there will be situations wherein a large guild with many players will be at war with a small guild that has less than half their number. It could well turn out that in these cases the smaller guild will simply be too demotivated to put up a defense. Fighting 150 players vs 500 will lead to a loss 99% of the time. Motivate them to fight even if they'll lose. Give the outnumbered guild a special bonus for fighting against the odds whether it's a scalable exp buff while in the instance, an extra item reward for fighting 2x or 3x their numbers, protection from looting on their ingame house, just something tangible that will motivate people to play even if they'll lose.
Imagine corralling 500 players to siege a city and when you show up it has 10 defenders. That's not fun for either side. Incentivizing defense of a city either by the guild that owns it or by random players unconnected to the conflict will vastly improve city sieges and help stop them from being a one sided stomp.
1
Comments
PvE is necessary, it's where you level and get resources.
People are incentivized to defend their cities. They want to build them up because it gives them access to many features in the game. If it falls, not only do they lose those features and the work they put into the node, they lose any resources they haven't moved out of their bank.
I'm sorry but have you read a wiki or anything? wiki
Aye, but if you're fighting 150 people vs 500 you will lose. At that point the 150 defenders turns into 70 and then down to 10 after the first wipe. Did you read my post at all? If people dont think they have a chance a majority of them will not even participate leading to one sided sieges.
There will be small groups that wreak havoc on these large guilds, where they also burn members. Time to let the game play out and enjoy the ride.
I agree with this so much. All I'm asking for is to give these small groups a reward for fighting outnumbered. If the game can release with an incentive to make fighting outnumbered as appealing as, if not more appealing, than fighting as the majority with a guaranteed victory the city siege dynamics will be in a much better place.
Dont have any information on those buffs though.
I read your post, did you read mine? They have a strong incentive to defend as they can lose a lot.
I don't remember a lot from WAR so correct me if I'm wrong but losing a fort didn't mean much for your character, you didn't really lose anything, you just didn't gain. This is why it was more productive for people to abandon and do something more productive.
In ashes, you will lose stuff so there is more of a reason to stick around. Even after you lose, you will want to stick around to see if you can ward off random parties from destroying and looting your freehold.
There is also the fact that node sieges will probably be relatively rare and not something you will do daily. There might be months that a server goes without seeing a node siege. With it being rarer, there is a natural incentive to participate when it happens.
We also don't know how the siege objectives will be layed out and how a small defending force can play to it.
I think we just don't understand each other. I'm talking about a decently sized guild that can put out about 150 people to defend a city against 500 attackers. The 150 player guild will lose even if they're motivated to not lose. Even if you offer each defending player the best gear in the game if they win the siege, they will still lose due to the number difference. Rewards for winning a siege only matter if you have a chance at winning the siege. Knowing this many of the defenders will choose not to participate in the fighting to not get "farmed" by the enemy guild. That's not how people want to spend their game time. I'm suggesting the developers implement a reward to players who stick around to defend a city siege instance even if they're outnumbered 2x or 3x by the attackers.
I agree, I think we are coming at this from different angles.
I think one thing worth mentioning is how rare sieges will be and their purpose, Node sieges aren't supposed to be common events. It's not like WAR or other games where it's a common form of gameplay. I bring this up because it means there is less reason to try to balance it for numbers, especially when numbers is part of the game. I understand trying to balance something if every day they are being outnumbered and not having fun but node sieges are a rare occurrence and not something people will spend the majority of their time doing.
That said, I do think it would be good if objectives were designed in a way to go give defenders an advantage.
Secondly, getting numbers for these events is part of the game. I understand wanting to help the underdog but I'm not sure you are considering why they are outnumbered. Why can't the 150 guild get any allies to help them or hire mercenaries? I don't think a guild should be rewarded for fighting outnumbered if they pissed off the server and are having the node they live out of attacked for it. In some cases, i'd want them to have a path to victory but not a direct reward.
Bringing that many players to a siege sounds like chaos for the attacking side, you'll have people body blocking eachother due to player collisions and will probably lead to being decimated and I'm assuming you can only fit so many siege weapons side by side so DPS will be bottle-necked at a certain point.
Space really matters and they already said that smaller guilds have certain bonuses for various things in the world to incentivise creating smaller 'Elite' groups rather than zerg groups. Steven mentioned this in his interview/discussion with Asmongold although I'm not sure if he specifically mentioned what the bonuses are.
In the unlikely case that there is such a large disparity in numbers and guilds like that are present on the server and this group is powerful and coordinated enough to plan an attack that large then I doubt there would be many people with smaller groups wanting to contest that solely with their numbers, so perhaps it'll make a dynamic where smaller guilds band together to destroy their node/castle.
I think keeping in mind the actual scaling difficulty of raiding these larger and larger nodes is a good idea when comparing AoC to other large scale PvP in other games also.
Secondly i completely agree with the central point of kroaker.
There are many examples such as Warhammer online, where the population imbalance basically ruined the game and snowballed to a state where the core systems did not work anymore properly.
Now intrepid is fully aware of that and they communicated some of the planned measures to tackle the issue.
I‘ll list the some of those i can still remember.
The first one would be alliances to diminish the number differences between the 2 factions involved.
Smaller guilds are able to band together against bigger enemies and benefit from victories together even if they are not in the same node.
The second one would be proximity based stats debuff for big zergs so that clumping together to overwhelm the enemy won’t be efficient.
The third one was some kind of warboard feature, where guilds can designate groups of players to specific tasks in the upcoming battle. Those groups will get some buffs according to their goals, such as increased damage on siege weaponry for a saboteur task group. Smaller guilds can succeed with very specific objectives during sieges and battles which may suffice to deffend the node if they are planned out good.
Intrepid considers those options and will observe if that works out during their development phases.
Since Steven played ArcheAge, he'll probably go the route of capping the numbers or evening them out. I'm thinking it will probably be capped at 250 attackers vs. 250 defenders or something similar. I assume there will also be some reserves set up too, where maybe it's only 150 v 150 and you get 100 reserves that can come in throughout the battle. We'll have to see when they do the siege testing.
It seems like every patch Albion Online is trying to penalize the zerg mentality, without much success. Every pvp game I have played ends up the same. Large guilds get bigger and small guilds get smaller. It's a real problem and I don't know what the solution is.
Enticement for the underwhelmed? Yeah. That seems cool. Maybe something like a small scaling % buff to the overwhelmed group based on how many people they are overwhelmed by. Something like "Against Overwhelming Odds' or 'Final Stand' and it.. I don't know, helps in some way, can't say how because the systems don't exist yet.
I'd gladly defend for pay.