Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
With the system the way it is right now, what is going to happen is people will put alts in various places that others will want ports to. This will include all metropolis nodes, and potentially other out of the way areas as per the game worlds design.
From there, people will offer to port people to these places for a price.
People wanting these ports are not going to have to wait days, if they want a port to a common location, someone will be able to sell it to them.
When the buyer finds a seller, the buyer invites the sellers alt to their family, the seller ports the buyer, leaves the family and then that cooldown that used to be only about how long it takes to be able to join another family is not a cooldown on how soon that alt can sell a port. If you want to share something with that other player you are going to play with, then the only way to do that is to set access to those things (housing, storage etc) to "family".
As such, anyone else that you are in a family with will need to be someone you trust with access to all of that.
You are probably not just going to join a family with every random player you meet in game - chances are, they won't want to join a family with you.
The most likely thing for you is that your family will only ever consist of you, that other person, and your alts.
I was wondering about this workaround to help balance the issue.
1) Only allowing the head of the family to summon (whoever starts the family would be the head of the family)
2) Use a blanket summon (summon the entire family at the same time, NOT one player at a time)
3) Use a Four-hour cooldown
I know a lot of people don't agree with the system but Steven is doing it for the right reasons. I feel that having a family leader with a blanket summon on a 4hr CD would drastically cut down on exploiting while still allowing it to be used how Steven wants it to be used.
I believe "Perfect World" has a family teleport system along these lines. Don't quote me on that.
However i would increase the cooldown to 12 hour and add a max range.
Lets say 10 level 0 nodes worth of distance max.
That should be about 2 hour travel time.
No one would be able to jump from one end of the map to the other using alts.
Here we go with people throwing out the word exploit again. Then suggesting people "make better plans". What MMO worlds have you played that during a leveling process you could just know a day or two in advance "yo dawg i'm going to be at xyz coordinates make sure you log out near by so we can play together tomorrow, oh and on friday i'm going to be in xyz zone turning in some quests peep that yo".
It might work more like that at max level OR when you know there is an event on the horizon like a siege, caravan or other planned activity such as a dungeon. However when you're level 15 trying to figure out the game and you log on and see your friends 45 minutes away on foot, I guess that's just bad planning because who doesn't already know all the quest lines and the zone requirements.
Now back to the exploit. A guild should be able to summon each other to the desired location of their choice IF they want to AND they are disciplined enough to group in a family summon structure capable of doing this (which means anyone's friends not in the guild, or random people they meet and like in game couldn't be in anyone's family) - think about it how many large guilds are going to be able to enforce this amongst their members? Do you not know anyone who you've played with in the past that one of you were not int he same guild? Now they've all got one or multiple alts in the same family, this also shrinks their summon party in addition that person has to be logged in playing for the strategy to work. So unless someone can play 24/7 having alts in a family doesn't do much for that escape plan. If it's a shared account then that will be a terms of service item.
Lastly, why don't you all just wait and see how testing goes before the making all of us suffer through the water works about every 36 hours on these forums with the same complaints and nonsense.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
When join a family, your account joins the family. So this includes alts. It has its own chat tab.
The summon has no cool down, but taking the summon dose. Your account gets a debuff and your whole account can't take another summon for 6-8 hours.
So anybody in the family can summon, but once summoned can't be summoned again for multiple hours.
Obviously you can only belong to one family per account.
They could also make it so the summon simply dose not work in certain areas. (I.e. the flag room of a castle during siege)
Transportation if siege weapons should have the same/simaler rules as a caravan. Except it would be called a convoy. So no backpack Trebuchets.
Boats should only be able to deploy from docks.
Bigger ships should require a harbors. (Tier 3/4 coastal node) and go into that nodes storage. So no teleporting ships around.
Conditions that prevent being summoned:
Having a donkey/mule deployed
Actively participating in a convoy/caravan
Having a ship/boat deployed
Being mounted
Being in water
Being corrupted over a certain threshold
There is going to be massive travel time in this game. The legitimate scenario when I would use this is getting home from work 2 hours after my friend who just spent that time travelling somewhere. He would either wait for that long for me to get there or we would just be anti-social and do something different. That would suck.
It would not work for just one of us to be able to summon with the "head of household" concept someone wrote above because when I wake up early on a Sunday and my friend sleeps until noon, then I would have to summon his lazy arse.
One solution to prevent "summon as a service" is to require family membership for a couple days or a hefty quest before you are tight enough to do summoning. That would work for my scenario.
The dual cooldown thing mentioned above would prevent the chain summoning problem but it definitely should stay at 30 minutes. A huge 8 hour cooldown would mean friend number 3 is screwed when he gets off work an hour after me.
"Oh, daveywavey, you're here. I meant to summon the next name down in the list. Got to wait hours now for the cooldown..... crap."
Is it not easier for us to summon ourselves to somebody else, rather than to have them summon us?
1 person casting summon = 1 hour cast
2 people = 30 mins
3 people = 15 mins
etc.
the entire feature is for people who have little time.
giving it a cast time over 1 min is contraproductive to that goal.
Just leave it as it is and test it during Alpha 1 and 2.
If there are exploids, then people will find and report them and then we can have discussions regarding possible fixes.
Trying to fix a system that nobody fully knows is just silly.
I get that people want sonething tangible to show for when their characters get married but maybe that's not the way to ago about it.
A costly elaborate ceremony at a city church/cathedral based on how much the couple is willing to spend and how many people they want to invite, could be all that marriege should offer, just like inrl...
gear isn't location bound. You can't drop gear either unless you are corrupted. So it diesn't really matter
Gonna have to agree with you there. If you think about it, the design has well meaning but could cause damage to the social aspect of the game.
Why find more friends to play with when you can just teleport your core group to you anytime you want?
If your core group is always online to teleport a full group why would you find more friends anyway? The teleport is there to help promote play with friends/family/guild on a relatively limited basis. There will likely be some loopholes with the system but that in itself doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. Also putting things in perspective how much does anyone here really care if a crafter gets summoned with his item(equiped) to trade/sell/give to another player? This doesn't take any skill or level requirements into consideration for the item(s). It's possible the blacksmith (or other crafter) would be unable to equip a lot of what they make. Also if you're willing and able to sacrifice one of your family summon slots for a random crafter and the crafter can do the same (since he would have to leave his family) and of course go out of his way to get back through what ever kind of family add/delays may be present or hoof it.
To me it seems more likely that crafters are going to give people the big FU in this scenario, why should they go so far out of their way as a delivery service? I know if it was me i'm not getting summoned and possibly stranded across the map to give someone their item(s). It's more likely the buyer/giftee would have to travel/summon to the crafter IMO.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
are you sure about that. There must be so many examples of things having to be changed in a game, because a gamer thought of it, that a creator and tester didn't
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/45939/marry-me-and-my-family
Teleporting was fine in ESO. I used it to play with loads of other players, and if anyone needed help, I could jump to them and help out. I've nothing against it as a function.
My only issue with the way AoC is doing it is that they're saying: "Nope, no teleporting, cos we want the map to feel big", and then suddenly there's Family Teleporting. Either include teleporting or don't!
I get that, but if that's the reason for it, why restrict it to only a few players? In other games I've played, I've played with more than just a handful of players. Why restrict it here?
many people enjoy leveling a toon with a couple friends, family, guildies, whatever. If you don't have some sort of fast travel mechanic this becomes a huge chore because you either can a.) only play the game when the other person is on so you don't end up in different places or b.)walk long distances everytime you log on together just to be ablet to start playing the game (this map is going to be HUGE). Meanwhile if you make fast travel/teleportation available to everyone everywhere the world feels small no matter how much content and space you put in it. I think the family system is a good compromise which is exactly what a game is supposed to be, a compromise between enabling you to do things you can't do IRL while presenting challenges, rules and realism that makes those things interesting and fun
Absolutely. And that's fine, assuming you that you have no more than 7 family, friends, guildies, etc, that you enjoy playing with regularly.
How many family, friends, guildies, etc, have you wanted to play with in your previous games? Would a family of 8 (you and 7 others) be big enough for that?
The second thing would be guilds setting up families across the guild so that only 5 people need to head to a location and summon the other 32. Now scale this up and you have the mass zerg rush teleportation that they had issues with as a main reason for no fast travel. Unfortunately I have no idea what to do currently to alleviate either case...
Last I heard your family could be up to 8 people, which amounts to a basic dungeons worth. I'm guessing it's for a mild convenience with people you are really close to which still makes the world feel big. Imagine if it was available to all guild members. I look at it as a QoL improvement. Aside from people trying to exploit it, it might see most use when leveling or starting dungeons/raids. I'm not a dev but that seems to be the angle they are taking with the info they've given.
Long duration cast (30 seconds to a minute) with an approximate 30 minute cooldown that slowly summons each of your family members to your location (up to eight members).
Players cannot be summoned in the following cases:
While in combat, if they are corrupted, or if they are engaged in an event, such as node wars, guild wars, sieges, arenas or participation in the caravan system.
|If they have mats, gatherables or certs in their inventory.
This will be tested in Alpha-2.
ya even just 5 would be enough for my purposes. I'm just one person though, I'm not sure what the average opinion is on this. I see the current family size limitation as enabling co-op/small-group leveling but still requiring most members of a randomly thrown together guild group to have to walk to a given dungeon/raid location. So when I say 5 suits my purposes, I'm saying there are only that many people that I would try to level with for long periods of time. Other guildies and friends just play the game independently and group up for group content sometimes. In those cases I think always having instant travel to group up is not necessary and could hurt the play experience.
There's definitely some room for abuse that people have pointed out in this thread, such as organizing your guild/raid team to be able to mobilize large amounts of players (zergs) via the family teleports. I think since this is not the intended design Intrepid will look to add mechanics in to prevent such actions (either anticipatory or reactionary to growing "meta" trends). things like cooldowns on the teleport ability, level limitations to prevent lvl 1 summoner characters, long cast times for the teleport, a combat debuff immediatley after teleporting, etc. I have confidence that Intrepid is considering many different options and if it comes down to it, Steven has expressed that preserving his vision of the top-end competitive play of the game is a priority, so I think they would just remove a QOL feature like the family teleport alltogether before they let it become an abusable "meta-defining" system among the hardcore guilds.
As for the issue of family teleport being used to shuttle crafted goods, that's definitely a tough one to solve with the current system of no bound items. I'm fresh out of ideas for that other than putting a limit on the number of crafted items you can have in your inventory upon teleporting.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts