Possible abuse of the Family Summon

Polish Mikey

If a group of players have 2nd accounts with alts in a families with their main characters. A farming or grinding group could stay deep in a dungeon or some far away farming spot and fill up their inventories, Summon their respective family alts, have a party member initiate combat with those family alts (combatants suffer half the death penalty of non combatants) and send them back to a safe zone. With Stevens current idea of summoning your whole family one by one, this allows for 7 inventory clearing trips. If planned correctly those summoned alts could also carry replenishment like food, pots and even repaired armor and weapons.

A way to fix this issue without scrapping family summons would be to only allow summoning to a tavern. While simultaneously bolstering the social factors of Taverns, a family summon could also cost a modest fee, part of which could be collected by the regions tax collector (mayor, monarch, etc.)

Songcaller

Some of us are against taxes in real life and taxes in game. I would not want taxes to be linked in with a magical teleport.

You wont be able to be summoned with a full inventory so I'm not sure what your solution relates to. I dont see how the flagging system can be abused in conjunction with family summons.

Polish Mikey

Neurath wrote: »

You wont be able to be summoned with a full inventory so I'm not sure what your solution relates too. I dont see how the flagging system can be abused in conjunction with family summons.

No but a mule alt can be summoned to you, loaded up with goods, killed by your party member and sent out of the location carrying the majority of your stuff so you can keep farming the spot without leaving.

Tres

I could be wrong but you cannot teleport someone that's carrying any gastherables, processed goods, or redeemable tickets. Basically if you have anything that requires a caravan to be moved your character is not elegible for summon.

And in the off chance that I am wrong and those characters can be summoned, well that's an incredibly easy fix that I highly doubt intrepid will hesitate to implement the very moment anyone abuses this system.

in other words not concerned about this at all.

source: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Family_summon

Polish Mikey

I guess I'm not wording this right.
The way things are written. Nothing stops me from having a 2nd account with alts, all of whom I can add to my family for a total of 1 main character and 7 alts.
All those alts can be summoned to me (without any mats, gatherables, or certs on their person) filled up with the inventory I have farmed, and killed by a friend that I am farming with. Sending my now filled mule alt to a safer location. Saving me a trip to town.

Noaani

So, the tactic of summoning an alt to your group, loading them with items, killing them while they are combatants, picking up the stuff they drop, respawning the alt and then running them back home may work.

It would, however, have drawbacks.

The first is that this alt will need to still get from the respawning point (that is likely to be inside the dungeon) back to safety, by themselves. They may also still be a combatant at this stage (we do not know if this state persists through death).

Either way, this is a risky proposition, even if the respawning point is at the start of the dungeon (dungeons will likely have several). I'm not sure I would consider this an exploit though, as it will not really reduce the time needed to be spent to get materials back to safety, and it won't really lower the risk either.

Tyrantor

Well I think if enough people have multiple computers at home and want to pay for a 2nd account there isn't much Intrepid is going to be able to do for policing this without prohibiting multiple accounts from the same IP. I doubt enough people would consider doing this to make it a real issue it also doesn't solve the reality that said farming group(s) could be killed inside of the dungeon in the first place. It's more likely they would get killed in the dungeon than on the run back to a city/freehold (IMO)

Leiloni

Polish Mikey wrote: »

If a group of players have 2nd accounts with alts in a families with their main characters. A farming or grinding group could stay deep in a dungeon or some far away farming spot and fill up their inventories, Summon their respective family alts, have a party member initiate combat with those family alts (combatants suffer half the death penalty of non combatants) and send them back to a safe zone. With Stevens current idea of summoning your whole family one by one, this allows for 7 inventory clearing trips. If planned correctly those summoned alts could also carry replenishment like food, pots and even repaired armor and weapons.

A way to fix this issue without scrapping family summons would be to only allow summoning to a tavern. While simultaneously bolstering the social factors of Taverns, a family summon could also cost a modest fee, part of which could be collected by the regions tax collector (mayor, monarch, etc.)

Well for one thing you'd need a separate machine in order to have your alt online at the same time, and obviously a second account. Then once you killed them, you'd lose a portion of the gatherables/mats in the inventory. I'm sorry but it sounds like a lot of work just to lose a portion of your grinding anyway. Why even bother?

apmax

At the most absolute extreme you can imagine players building their own pseudo-fast travel networks instead of actual families of their friends.
Fill your family with alts and plonk your 7 alts down across the world wherever you feel like, and then you have your own kinda workable fast travel network. If all of your friends do something similar, you have a bunch of players each with their own fast travel network in total defiance of the goal of having a large game world where distance matters. Instead of teleporting to eachother you can just agree on a place to meet and go from there.

loghan

Right, what Noaani said above, I think in your story you're imagining that the respawn point will be back at your home town that is perhaps a hour's walk away and so death is a quick way to return for that alt loot mule. But from what we have gathered from the devs (all subject to change in testing of course) is that the respawn points will be near your hunting spot and in the dungeons. So after you kill the alt they may spawn not but 5 minutes away. It basically gave no short cut, no fast travel. But good idea though, it would work and be overly helpful IF we could pick our respawn point and IF you could set that alt's respawn point at some far away metropolis that is going to buy your loot for top price. But we do not seem to be able to set a respawn point, we are forced to use the one nearest to us.

Xenotor

The Family Summoning is meant so groups of 8 can meet up quickly once they are online rather then run for hours just to meet up.
The Cooldown on the Family Summoning would be on the high site. Potetialy even as much as 20 hours.
Its not like you need it more then 1 per day.
You will not be able to leave your Familiy and join another right away. A cooldown of Real life Days will be aplied.


People allready pointed out that you wont respawn back at the Town.


Sure there will be Ways to abuse it but in so far the system is so well desinged that using it as intedet far outweights the potential abuse gain.
That beeing said. Keep looking for potential abuses. We have Alpha 1 to Beta 2 to Iron them out so that at launch we can go smooth sailing.