Stevens reply on family summoning at Ashes Pathfinders #84

Sounds great how he explained its "anti-cheat" mechanic. 30sec-1min cast time for the summon and a 30min CD on the ability. But, anyone else concerned how easy its to chain it? For 10 people it still means 5 people needs to travel, but if everyone has chained their summon to 1 more player, its still only 5 needing traveling. Boosting your raid/gank/war party from 5 to 10 in 1min, they can then summon 5 more people and so on. Adding a 30min CD on the ability for the person being summoned aswell, would solve this no? Or add a reagent cost to the summon. Or some kind of PvP debuff on whoever is summoned. Just abit worried about shock PvP partys with this mechanic.

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Bardtic

I personally kind of like the idea of adding the cooldown to both parties. Allowing your family to summon the odd people out, not spam it to summon 7 more people.

I also like the idea of potentially making it a daily cooldown. And also making it so you drop certain base materials when you take it. Meaning if you're out farming or crafting, there is a cost to dropping everything(pun intended) to go help your family to attack or defend something. However, if you were just late to the party, you can get a quick summon from town or your freehold.

This would also prevent the abuse of transporting goods free of cost, although from what I understand the amount of goods a single character can carry isn't that large. With only a 30 minute cooldown I could see people either running multiple accounts or logging onto alts every 30 minutes to do a quick teleport run.

From what I've heard Steven say, they will be keeping a very close on this mechanic throughout the Alphas, Betas, and even on launch. I am sure they will find systems to put in place to prevent any abuse, just throwing some of my ideas out there.

StevenSharif

Reign118 wrote: »

From what I've heard Steven say, they will be keeping a very close on this mechanic throughout the Alphas, Betas, and even on launch. I am sure they will find systems to put in place to prevent any abuse, just throwing some of my ideas out there.

Yup. This one will be closely watched during testing. Dual cool down is another idea I’ve had as well

Lazyactor

StevenSharif wrote: »

Reign118 wrote: »

From what I've heard Steven say, they will be keeping a very close on this mechanic throughout the Alphas, Betas, and even on launch. I am sure they will find systems to put in place to prevent any abuse, just throwing some of my ideas out there.

Yup. This one will be closely watched during testing. Dual cool down is another idea I’ve had as well

I am confused as to how the system as I understand it could be abused.

If you can only have eight family members then how would you chain it into a zerg? 1 person summons the others but to turn a group from 10 to 100 you would at least need 1 person from each family already being in the same spot... I dont understand how that would be abused.

Bardtic

@Lazyactor Keep a few family members in certain locations. Maybe alts that don't need to move so you have easy summons. This could easily become a zerg situation when a 100 person raid coordinates into a bunch of families of 8 with 5 person strike teams and the other 3 coordinating summons to strategic locations.

Using it to abuse the goods transportation system is another possibility.

Given more time I personally could think of a few more and you know others will find even more. Also doesn't mean there aren't potential systems available to prevent a lot of these.

Current

If you have a scouting party of 5. They could quickly turn into 40.
The scouting party summons 1 each, scouting party now has 30min CD, the summoned people does not.
The summoned people, summons 5 new people and so on.
A scouting party of 10 would turn into 80 in 7mins, if cast time is 1min.
It wouldn't be abusing the system, if it is the system. But a game without fast traveling, it
seems to be a quick way of moving people around.
Another issue that comes to mind is alts + multi accounting. Group them as family members, and have them logged out around the world for fast and easy travel.
Looking forward to see the end result tho, after all the testing.

Lazyactor

Current wrote: »

If you have a scouting party of 5. They could quickly turn into 40.
The scouting party summons 1 each, scouting party now has 30min CD, the summoned people does not.
The summoned people, summons 5 new people and so on.
A scouting party of 10 would turn into 80 in 7mins, if cast time is 1min.
It wouldn't be abusing the system, if it is the system. But a game without fast traveling, it
seems to be a quick way of moving people around.
Another issue that comes to mind is alts + multi accounting. Group them as family members, and have them logged out around the world for fast and easy travel.
Looking forward to see the end result tho, after all the testing.

Reign118 wrote: »

@Lazyactor Keep a few family members in certain locations. Maybe alts that don't need to move so you have easy summons. This could easily become a zerg situation when a 100 person raid coordinates into a bunch of families of 8 with 5 person strike teams and the other 3 coordinating summons to strategic locations.

Using it to abuse the goods transportation system is another possibility.

Given more time I personally could think of a few more and you know others will find even more. Also doesn't mean there aren't potential systems available to prevent a lot of these.

I appreciate that guys. I get it now. Yeah now that you spell it out for my dumbass I can see the slippery slope the system presents. That being said I suppose it will get changed or removed as a feature if and when it presents issues. As far as transporting resources between nodes with no risk simply dont allow people to port with resources in the inventory.

Noaani

StevenSharif wrote: »

Yup. This one will be closely watched during testing. Dual cool down is another idea I’ve had as well

By dual cooldown, I am hoping you mean there is a cooldown on how often it can be cast, but also a cooldown on how often players can be summoned in this manner.

Assuming this is what you have in mind, anything less than an 18 hour cooldown on being summoned is ripe for actual full on abuse - though sadly not the kind of abuse that will manifest in alpha or beta.

18 hours or more should see the potential avenues for abuse that I already have in mind minimized - though honestly not entierly neutralized - you can't have an instant teleport system like this in a game like Ashes without there being some abuse happen.

As an aside, one of the avenues of abuse I can see happening is guilds will have a designated looter, and as soon as the guild has finished what ever content they are on, that looter will be summoned to somewhere safe to deposit the material drops from the evenings content. This will mean that crafting materials that drop from boss encounters will either rarely or actually never be on the line in PvP.

I can't see a possible way to have this system and keep the notion of PvP battles over PvE encounter dropped materials short of actually cheesing the entire game (creating items that players can't be summoned with, as an example - pure cheese).

Boy

Dual cooldown is a great idea, but people forget the other aspect of hot-dropping a guild all the way across the map. Sure you can get a lot of people there, but how do you get them back quickly, and what's to say everyone in families are going to be online at the same time?

Noaani

Boy wrote: »

Sure you can get a lot of people there, but how do you get them back quickly

Have someone in the family in the "home" node cluster.

Hence a part of the need for a long cooldown.

Boy

noaani wrote: »

Boy wrote: »

Sure you can get a lot of people there, but how do you get them back quickly

Have someone in the family in the "home" node cluster.

Hence a part of the need for a long cooldown.

I see. What about the idea of distance related cooldown?

BloodNog

noaani wrote: »

Boy wrote: »

Sure you can get a lot of people there, but how do you get them back quickly

Have someone in the family in the "home" node cluster.

Hence a part of the need for a long cooldown.

That family member would have to be online or filled by an alt to guarantee an escape. If part of your strategy is weakening your party in order to have a teleport back I think you should be able to do that. I also find an 18 hour timer too restrictive, but would prefer something like a combat timer that requires you to get away to a safe space or kill the enemies to teleport out.

Boy

bloodmeridian wrote: »

noaani wrote: »

Boy wrote: »

Sure you can get a lot of people there, but how do you get them back quickly

Have someone in the family in the "home" node cluster.

Hence a part of the need for a long cooldown.

That family member would have to be online or filled by an alt to guarantee an escape. If part of your strategy is weakening your party in order to have a teleport back I think you should be able to do that. I also find an 18 hour timer too restrictive, but would prefer something like a combat timer that requires you to get away to a safe space or kill the enemies to teleport out.

The base argument I believe noaani is trying to make is that try-hard players are going to meta-game the mechanics and try to make it become something unintended, which is why Steven stated earlier that it is a point that will be closely watched.

Noaani

bloodmeridian wrote: »

noaani wrote: »

Boy wrote: »

Sure you can get a lot of people there, but how do you get them back quickly

Have someone in the family in the "home" node cluster.

Hence a part of the need for a long cooldown.

That family member would have to be online or filled by an alt to guarantee an escape. If part of your strategy is weakening your party in order to have a teleport back I think you should be able to do that. I also find an 18 hour timer too restrictive, but would prefer something like a combat timer that requires you to get away to a safe space or kill the enemies to teleport out.

18 hours is the minimum timer needed to not make this system a de facto replacement for caravans.

The idea of this teleport is to assist people with limited time being able to join their friends that are already out running content, all the talk about using it for teleporting guilds and such is people pointing out the obvious avenues of abuse of this system that will be common.

With the idea of the teleport being to get people that may have logged in late to join their friends - the notion of an 18 hour cooldown should prove more than enough to meet this.

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Noaani

Tsukasa wrote: »

Just get rid of the family system or any utility it provides!!!! I don't want a family but also don't want to mess out on its utilities... There are too many social systems in this game!

Make them completely optional without utilities.

I actually agree.

I can't see a why to add the summon ability to the game in a way that won't be easily exploited in some manner.

BloodNog

I don't think 18 is enough to meet that. Maybe if you are on for a few hours on a weekday it would be fine, but if say you played in the morning, got summoned and then had to get off for a few hours, you may not be able to participate when you come back on if they are too far away.

I think there are other means ensure that caravans are more efficient than teleporting than one large timer preventing you from being summoned.

Noaani

bloodmeridian wrote: »

I don't think 18 is enough to meet that. Maybe if you are on for a few hours on a weekday it would be fine, but if say you played in the morning, got summoned and then had to get off for a few hours, you may not be able to participate when you come back on if they are too far away.

I think there are other means ensure that caravans are more efficient than teleporting than one large timer preventing you from being summoned.

If you have to be ported to your group every time you log on to play, you should organize yourself better.

A system like this shouldn't be relied on as always being there. It should be something that is there to use if - as an example - you are held up after work.

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BloodNog

Boy wrote: »

I see. What about the idea of distance related cooldown?

I see this as a viable solution for the caravan problem. A variable timer based on how far the players are from each other. In the same town the cooldown may only be a couple of minutes but if they are on opposites sides for the map it could be several hours.

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