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A plea for the live GM team
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
No game is perfect. Exploits happen, and they will in Ashes as well.
One thought I haven't been able to shake for a few weeks now is, what would happen if a metropolis is successfully sieged due to an exploit and it goes poof? You know, someone teleporting through the world and channeling the throne under the floor where nothing can hit him kinda thing.
Banning the account doesn't undo the damage. The ingame ramifications for a deleted metropolis are HUGE. Game changing. Out of game the players will rightfully be very upset and lose confidence in Intrepid. Major shit-show.
So my plea is this:
All Metropolis and Castle sieges should have at least one live GM in invisible mode monitoring ingame for any exploits at all times. If there are resources for it, do the same for level 5s and 4s and 3s in that priority order.
Also, allow for a grace period where the node can be restored as it was if an exploit is used successfully anyway.
One thought I haven't been able to shake for a few weeks now is, what would happen if a metropolis is successfully sieged due to an exploit and it goes poof? You know, someone teleporting through the world and channeling the throne under the floor where nothing can hit him kinda thing.
Banning the account doesn't undo the damage. The ingame ramifications for a deleted metropolis are HUGE. Game changing. Out of game the players will rightfully be very upset and lose confidence in Intrepid. Major shit-show.
So my plea is this:
All Metropolis and Castle sieges should have at least one live GM in invisible mode monitoring ingame for any exploits at all times. If there are resources for it, do the same for level 5s and 4s and 3s in that priority order.
Also, allow for a grace period where the node can be restored as it was if an exploit is used successfully anyway.
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And yes agree with your point. Not sure how this would scale over time, but that could be figured out.
Maybe it'd be best if there was some short delay between the fall of one Metropolis, and the rise of it's replacement? That way, if anyone used some kind of previously-unknown exploit, there'd be time to compensate and restore the wrongly-destroyed city. Metro's sound to be quite the community effort!
Nothing deflated my excitement to participate in the territory sieges more in New World than finding out almost all of the battles have sweaty nerds using bugs and exploits to win. A very shoddy guess as to how they would manage such a reversion would be to tag all participants in the siege when they load in and save a backup copy of their character, inventory, freehold, etc (Basically anything that could change from that point on in connection to said characters). Once a siege is over and if there is some sort of issue warranting a redo, you now can revert just those specific characters and inventories without affecting all the other players in the game.
If a metropolis is destroyed by exploits, I think there'd be discussion among the entire team, a public announcement and then a server rollback (once a fix is deployed for the exploit).
The issue with a server rollback is that it affects all players when it was only a part of the players that were impacted.
Since the Metropolises have RNG layouts instead of a universal standard, a rollback would still be the best answer; Just re-boosting the new level 0 Node to level 6 would likely result in an entirely different city layout - still effectively destroying what the citizens had worked so hard to establish. All the goods and warehouse contents would still be impacted, short of a rollback.
My initial idea for restoration was indeed a rollback, but only for the node and all the participants in the siege. Essentially a snapshot is taken of the node and all participants as soon as they enter the area, and the GMs can restore everything and everyone back to that moment if need be. The node 100% as it was, and all the xp and inventory and such of the players also reset back to what it was. Obviously all offending exploiters perma-banned.
Except in the game development world, there are no batshit crazy organizations that will give you awards for allowing it to happen. All you're left with is millions of dollars of losses for yourself, your investors and your customers. And the people that did it to you will celebrate and dance on your grave, along with your competitors.
100% iron fist. Zero tolerance. And live GM's. Not the kind of GM's that when they're done with their GM shift, they're hanging out in the top guild's discord either. Get the hell out of here with that shit. Hire people with integrity. Hire a bunch of grandmas if that's what it takes.
I think this delay will be the most realistic solution. However, I can also see people report bombing the GM team after a node is conquered claiming "there was an exploit".
Luckily, however, and correct me if I am wrong, these sieges are pretty spaced out, so not like NW where a War happens every 3 seconds. The fewer sieges overall, the easier it is for a team to handle disputes, exploits, and false reports.
I think it is extremely important that there will be tools for GMs to revert any part of the world change. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst!
Like we have not encountered players abusing bugs to ruin gameplay to as many people as possible before
― Plato
You have to remember that testing community is much smaller than the actual playerbase. Not to even mention that some bugs cannot sometimes be replicated on testing servers, because of some small difference from live servers.
Also any new content update holds a heavy risk in this category, so for any content update you want to roll dice for a success of finding and fixing all bugs it introduced. This is just not healthy for the playerbase, the developers and the GM team.
Imagine an unforeseen interaction between several augments and the new consumable item giving the player the ability to aoe oneshot anyone from a distance. Such a person can solo win a siege. Or that person finds a way to glitch permanent invisibility from a powerful cooldown ability.
I could continue writing of possible game breaking interactions for a long time, because the possibilities are only limited by the amount of things in the game.
You are however correct, that the older the game gets then the chances for something truly gamebreaking for large percentage of players is less likely to happen.
This also means that the highest risk for something like that happening is the highest on launch, so why not create those GM tools for solely this reason? People will be hating on the game if some griefers do big damage with some exploits and there is nothing to do about it.
― Plato
So, they'll fix it, and it won't happen again. I can't see why they'd even consider reverting the game world to before it happened. Nodes will get attacked, and sometimes they'll defend themselves, and sometimes they'll get wiped. I can understand that it'd suck to lose to a glitch that you hadn't heard of yourself, but it's just not worth resetting the game state for. You fix it, and you move on.
There is nothing worse for a game to create frustrating situation that shouldn't be possible to happen and for the players to have no defense against it.
Imagine that your guild wants to upgrade the node they play in to metropolis and a glitch allows someone to sabotage the upgrade process.
Also I don't understand why you assume that the only sollution to any exploit is rollbacking the entire server for an older backup. What even the OP suggests are GM tools to alter the game world in such a way that would allow GMs to repair the damage caused by exploiters without rollbacking the entire realm.
Explain to me please what is bad with removing items from players or auction house when the exploiters solo'd raids and got the rewards from it. Or an exploiter destroying a metropolis.
I honestly have no clue why you don't want GMs to have tools to do their job and protect the gameworld from hackers and exploiters or even resolving ingame bugs that block you from progress that have not been fixed yet
― Plato
It's the scale of it. A metropolis deleted through an exploit can mean the loss of assets for thousands of players. Months of work down the drain. Many will quit the game permanently and the reputation of IS will take a long lasting hit if they allow the fallout of such an exploit to stay. Rolling back the node and all the players involved in the siege to the beginning of the siege start is worth it for the game, the company and the players involved. It's not the entire server that gets a roll back if they prepare for it.
What if a bug/glitch/exploit would cause a node to never fall? What if defenders could hold the node indefinitely? How should this be handled?
Sounds like they'd want the GMs to wipe the metro.
Even if exploiters face full loss of their in game assets, their entire account, it can still be a victory to them if they screwed over other players. You have to make it right for all offended parties or it will only encourage the cheaters that are solely motivated by the suffering of others.
All of that said, because of the likely high number of innocent parties involved who are members of that node, I think the siege still needs to happen. The fight still needs to take place. The innocent parties should still have a chance to defend their node legitimately.
This game when it launches is going to attract a fair bit of players who are only here to destroy it. There are pver's who are very mad about the games pvp focus. There are "pvp" players who can't handle losing and as soon as they face the smallest defeat, they'll be looking to exploit. There are probably even corporations, gaming company competitors, that may look into encouraging or even sponsoring cheating in Ashes. These people have to be hit hard and fast.
Hopefully the coding is so good that none of this will be an issue. But I doubt it.
Where it IS black and white, there's usually a standard protocol for GMs.
It's the grey that gets messy.
As soon as the issue was found they should fix it and redo the most recent siege attempt. That's the best way to go about doing such a thing.
These reverts and rollbacks are about making sure the siege experience is fair to both sides within the standard designs for said content. Why should I give a crap about defending a siege if I know some bug will waste my time and get rid of my hard work? With the promise of a "do-over" there is still the most potential for a "fair" experience.
Given that there are set timings for sieges, declaration periods, peak-hours, etc, how would you imagine they'd do it? Would they wait the full declaration period again? Would they start it straight away regardless of normal siege hours? Any allegations would have to take time to look into, so it likely wouldn't be within the same siege window. Maybe those involved in it wouldn't be available the next night, etc?
They announce the issue, the fix being implemented, and a new date for the siege will be decided within the next few days. What we are avoiding here is a scenario where a bug happens, and the node gets to sit safe for the protection duration or even worse the node is destroyed and affects a large group of people wrongly. How crappy would it feel to lose your node to a bug after spending hours of actively grinding exp to level it?
I've already made my peace with losing my node. I'm fully expecting it to happen semi-regularly, so I'm not intending to be too precious about it. I can re-level it, move to a different node, or try some form of vengeance against whoever destroyed it. Or maybe all three! I don't intend to be too upset if it falls, given that it's a design principle of the game.
Yes you are you and not everyone else. I wouldnt be the only one that would hate a bug ruining all my progression just as there are people like you that dont seem to care about wasting their time.
At the end of the day our request doesn't inconvenience your interaction with this so why come out as if you are against it?
If I have to spend an additional 2+ hours defending/attacking a node I've already defended/attacked, then that's a pretty darn big inconvenience for me. That's 2+ hours of gameplay that's just been made irrelevant. If I don't join in again, then I either lose my node or I lose the materials I spent on the attack. Also a loss for me, and an inconvenience.
Also, GMs are human. They make mistakes. I've played games where GM involvement has actually ruined the gameplay, whereas if they'd just stayed out, things would have righted themselves naturally.
I still don't see any benefit of resetting the game state. Fix the bug, move on.