Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
With the family summoning I think it's kind of silly that you could summon a family member to an actual dungeon. At the very least people should only be able to be summoned to a family freehold or a node. And then they set off on their adventure from there.
Traffic to and from dungeons and points of interest should be visible to everyone so that watchful observers can make decisions like lets avoid that area for now or lets go there and ambush them for their mats. If one guy gets to the dungeon area, ducks off in a corner, summons a family member, who then summons another, who then summons another, etc, that circumvents the ability of other rival groups to monitor traffic and make decisions.
There should never be a situation where 1 guy slips through an area that a group of players is tactically holding down and 4-8 minutes later that 1 guy has turned into 8 guys. Or that 2 guys has turned into 16. Absolute garbage game play. If the 1 guy slips through, great, good for him, now the group holding the area down has to be mindful that one guy is loose behind them. But it shouldn't magically turn into 8 guys 4 minutes later. If 8 guys want to slip through then let them all slip through the old fashioned way.
I'm sorry but this is a ridiculous answer. OFC you will have to factor in travel time. This has always been the case unless the game sucks and you can just teleport everywhere. With AoC, the opposite is too drastic. Even a 30 minute travel time turns into an hour reduced from actually raiding assuming you don't meet any opposition. So if I am running a raid night of 4 hours, 25% of our time is travel. People have obligations and with how many players already have negative emotions about guilds, this just amplifies how negative organized raiding is going to be. Two nights a week at 4 hours a night turns into only 5-6 hours of raiding and this is assuming it's even in your area, no water travel, player delays, finding enemy players. The math just doesn't add up to keep large groups of players engaged to play long term. People will get bored of the travel as they did when mounts didn't exist in games.
This game is going to end up being roaming to only local areas or zerging while numbers just diminish as the day goes on. This is a hot mess in terms of organizing. Handing off materials to another party member is a great idea. Allowing them to then hearth back and deal with their emergency would be fantastic. Shame on any player having an emergency! They deserve to be punished by logging out and traveling back alone at a later date!
Who cares about their risk of not losing much after trading their top end loot off before logging, it's that waste of time playing alone and traveling back that they don't deserve to deal with.
Unfortunately the fact of the matter is (with few exceptions) any fixes for "emergencies" is something that can be exploited.
If you have an emergency which causes you to lose something, it's extremely unfortunate, but occasional emergency loss is a better alternative than exploits running rampant.
Either way, they had to log out at a very non ideal time. It sucks. But the average person is not going to just have emergencies all the time. It's something that's pretty rare per individual player. Might happen every raid, or every other raid, but not always to the same person. Unless you just have that type of people in your guild that are in a state of emergency on a daily basis.
The typical raid night is going to be much different than raids in WoW or other games. Other than the small amount that's supposed to be instanced, raid guilds are going to be dealing with a whole bunch of other issues like the things you talked about. Player interference, enemy guilds, enemy nodes, competition over the spot. You might show up to the raid and it's already all cleared, and there's a group or groups that have been waiting longer than you for the respawns and they're not just going to let you take it because Bob in your guild has kids and work in the morning.
Guilds that know what they're doing will have multiple plans for "raid night." If we can't get access to dungeon A, we try dungeon B, if not dungeon B, then maybe we turn this into a fishing expedition night or a caravan run, we got everyone here for it. And if none of that is optimal at the time, maybe we just go raise hell with one of our enemies. Fluid plans.
Intrepid has to design the raids to account for all of this. 4 hour raids may be untenable for the average player when there's 2 hours of potential interferences at all times. Might have to reduce the length of individual raids, or any number of other ideas they come up with to suit the game and its circumstances.
Or he might log in to a full blown war going on in that dungeon. People flagged, bodies dropping, maybe he kills someone who's flagged and gets a lil loot for himself if he manages to get out of there alive. Does loot from dead players drop to the ground and is it lootable by anyone? I don't think we know yet, but maybe he scoops up a bunch of loot and takes off. Maybe he gets away, maybe he doesn't but its frickin hilarious and exciting. CONTENT. Maybe he picks a side and gets your guild a new ally, an ally that will cooperate with your guild to complete dungeons in the future.
That's the beauty of the game, the variety of content, the fact that you can't just teleport away from content you didn't even know would happen. Smart guilds will have scouts across the map, learning the politics of areas, who wars who, who hates who, who are potential allies, how hostile to passersby are the people in this area of the map or that area. How often do caravans run in this area, who's running them, who's attacking them. Almost nothing is a waste of time. Intel will be important. Diplomacy will be important.
That one guy logging back in from an emergency conceivably could find out some valuable info about the goings on of the area. Or he might just have fun with whatever happens. Or he might get screwed in some kind of way. Won't be the first or the last time.
Nobody wants to stop and smell the roses in the many fields of flowers along the way, they rush towards the store-bought bouquets at the end of the road.
It's a standard enough feature that the Daybreak/Ashes devs should not have a problem implementing a Hearthstone if they decide -after testing- that they wish to implement one.
Cool.
We are still going to talk about what we think about it though.
If you don't want to participate in that discussion, don't.
Hmm. I think some of those concerns are valid. However, it is possible to design the 'call' zones to be in wide open areas to handle that particular aspect.
I think I see what concern you are getting at here. I don't think family summon working on people in zones of interest is a requirement for it's intended design purpose.
I think were going to wind up with teleportation mechanics of some sort. A hearthstone to freehold on a long timer, unable to be used while holding lootable items in inventory just makes too much sense, in that it won't do a ton of damage to the open world but provides a lot of convenience.
But even that barebones teleportation will do some damage to the open world. My opinions on teleportation are not based in sadism (or masochism, since I'd be subject to it too) or "punishing" people like Khronus said. There is a direct inverse relationship between how lively, active, engaging and content filled a world feels and teleportation. You give to one side of the equation, you take from the other.