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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
complete servers going to be onesided any counter ?
Flowy1
Member
dear ashes of creation community,
i love the open world dungeons and raids. because i wanna steal all your loot and after that make fun of how me and the boys did u guys dirty in all chat
in other games ive played ive noticed that usually after a while 1 Guild becomes the strongest and the other guilds are unable to defeat that guild. and yes people can make alliance and stuff but at some point the server becomes 1 sided.
wich means the winning guilds/(alliance) will be able to farm these dungeons. and the losing guilds will be left poor.
wich usually results in everybody joining the winning side just because its more easy and because u get better rewards.
is there going to be any counter to this ?
or is there any fix or solution to this ?
friendly greetings.
Flowy
i love the open world dungeons and raids. because i wanna steal all your loot and after that make fun of how me and the boys did u guys dirty in all chat
in other games ive played ive noticed that usually after a while 1 Guild becomes the strongest and the other guilds are unable to defeat that guild. and yes people can make alliance and stuff but at some point the server becomes 1 sided.
wich means the winning guilds/(alliance) will be able to farm these dungeons. and the losing guilds will be left poor.
wich usually results in everybody joining the winning side just because its more easy and because u get better rewards.
is there going to be any counter to this ?
or is there any fix or solution to this ?
friendly greetings.
Flowy
0
Comments
The reason is that players will inhibite distant nodes. There will be guilds formed on these nodes. There will be many conflicts of interest, which wont allow "one side" to appear, without many other "one sides" popping up somewhere else on the world map.
Out of curiosity, what games have you played that had this as a problem?
I haven't played myself but I feel like eve had this issue at one point. I could be wrong
By comparison, the largest a guild can be in Ashes of Creation is 300. And that's if you level a guild up and choose the "path of size" as the guild levels, which means you're giving up skills and other benefits you'd achieve by going a different route. If a guild instead decides to grant all possible benefits to individuals rather than focusing on size, then the maximum size will be anywhere between 30-50 players.
You can have alliances of guilds, of course, but that will be tricky to manage since those guilds will have their own means of progression independent of one another. They can't all equally share in rewards and power to the same degree. Alliances will eventually fracture as guilds decide they don't have the same goals. If people want something that an Economic node will provide, they will stop supporting the existing Scientific node, and may even actively try to bring it down.
The game is designed to incentivize conflict and it will be extremely hard for one big group to dominate. People will be practically stepping on each others' toes after a while.
Goonswarm may have been large but I wouldn't call them a guild. A guild (to me) is a group of people with the same goals and/or ideals. A group that large cannot exist without it splintering into factions. The 21,000 members of Goonswarm may have had the same guild tag, but I doubt they all had the same goals in mind.
It should be the same for Verra, the world is too big for any one alliance to control it. However, if you get in their way on a particular night then you might regret it
When I played Star Wars Galaxies my server was totally dominated by the Empire. Since I was an Imp that was fine and dandy to me.
But you’re right, in a game like Ashes which is populated by tons of tiny groups instead of having just a couple of factions/realms in a game-wide conflict, that sort of thing just isn’t possible.
It’s true. The developers have talked about guild sizes and it’s on the wiki if you want to read it.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guilds
Most online games have a guild size limit though, even if it’s just a database limitation.
Again, I suggest reading the wiki.
thats too bad but its w/e... i dont bother reading about the game because so much can/will change between now and release that its kinda pointless.. i got the general idea and i know ill play if/when alpha 2 ever comes around
Yeah, they have talked about this, and Steven used to run a super large guild. Basically, they are just going to discourage zergs in some ways with different mechanics. Smaller guilds will have some better passives in their guild progression tree, guilds will have a max member limit, and alliances will have a guild limit. They acknowledge that there is essentially nothing they can do to force large guilds to become smaller though. Here's a quote about their philosophy from the wiki:
"There are absolutely guilds out there that have a large following and good organizational leadership and can structure their raids well; and I think those will be the most performing in the game obviously; and that's where then guild sizes come to play you know creating the opportunity for division in the game to allow for you know this subterfuge to play a role and politics and stuff like that. But our focus is making a place for smaller guilds to be competitive with larger guilds as well."[11] – Steven Sharif
Basically, if you want to run a 3,000-member guild then you'll have to deal with some game design that is intended to create friction in your large community and there will be plenty of opportunity for server drama and intrigue
This is possible, but it adds exponentially to the task of running the guild. Guilds that do this are far more likely to split - which is the point of the limit.
If a guild leader is able to hold together that kind of an alliance, more power to them. Leaders like that will always find a way, and making it harder for them to dominate is a good idea.
Making it impossible to dominate is a bad idea - but adding roadblocks is all good.
I would love to send you to a youtube video addressing this issue.
Tldr: Since content is locked behind node level, type, and region the game will force people to spread out. This will limit people's communication with "guild mates" and it is hard to handle large scale control. This is NOT new world after all.
No, I think at best we controlled 20% of the space at one point. I was only a low-level grunt for a year with that alliance. On a day-to-day basis the individual corporations and members did their own missions and made money for themselves. What the alliance gave you was protections, training, and the leadership came up with events so that you weren't bored. If you wanted to PVP there were raid leaders that would lead 100 ships into battle. Eve Online was one server and the large-scale battles suffered from lag. Since Ashes is not going to be 1 world, but multiple servers I don't think there will be a problem with one large guild ruining everything. This is not World of Warcraft where a server may be 85% horde, 15% alliance. Your race won't cause a server imbalance. At most, a well-organized guild or alliance might be able to control 1 of the 5 castles in the world and be one of the regional monarchs influencing 20% of the world. I think at best an alliance may be able to get a castle or turn a node into a metropolis. I think the other people hit it on the head. The world is too large with too many nodes, dungeons, and freehold. I also hope the sea battles will be fun.
"Server population
Population limits will be enforced on each server.[32]
Around 8-10k concurrent users per server is projected.[33][13][34][35]
Initially there will be a limited number of registered accounts (approximately 15,000) per server to help mitigate login queues.[36]
This limit will increase over time to around 50,000 registered accounts per serve."
With a 300 max guild limit the servers are gonna be mega full with people and it doesn't seem even a 10x alliance could dominate or hold domination.
Given that 15 of these will be castles that practically demand more than a standard node, this lowers a node to feasibly be well within a single guilds domain. Most of the nodes with smaller populations will almost always benefit from aligning with a guild (won't always happen, but will happen frequently.)
I say all of that to assert that while no guild will onesidedly dominate the entire map, I almost assuredly exist the average experience by any given player to be in a large guild dominated zone with very little in the way of choice.
Guilds are powerful forces under the current numbers. 1200 people (maxed out guild x 4 for a completely full alliance) can throw around a lot of weight on a map in a smothering way, even with a 50k server size.
But that's assuming that players will be evenly distributed across nodes and of course they won't be. There will be attractive nodes being leveled up that will have large populations, and unattractive nodes that are sparsely populated.
A guild might dominate a podunk level 1 node without much to do there, but would they want to? And I'm certainly not wasting my time in backwater area where I'm subject to a guild with nothing to gain for it.
The big nodes getting leveled up will have way too many people for one guild to dominate. Maybe an alliance could pull it off, but I expect alliances to be fickle things.
I'm also not sure how common a 300 person guild will be, given that to achieve that size they have to sacrifice all of the other benefits you'd otherwise get for being a guild member. I expect most guilds to be modest in size.
You can sum up my point as 'given the number of nodes vs population spread I heavily expect on average for alliances to control towns and castles and guilds to control everything else, with multiple choices in a node being rare once population trends and spread stablize.'
I currently don't see any signs inspiring me to believe 'unincorporated' (multiguild or no guild controlled) nodes to be more common than single guild existences
Metropolis are probably the exception. Go ahead and live in one. But there is a limit to citizenship even though its a soft cap...
And again, this could be different in practice. I am only rejecting the notion that as it stands, with the current information on paper, the experience of a single player being in an area overwhelmingly dominated by a single group of interest won't be possible or uncommon in a game like Ashes with its current parameters.
A single guild dominating a node might be possible.
I reject your suggestion it will be common, however.
People move because they are bored or don't like toxic people. Not political diversity.
So to me the numbers simply, if subtly, add up to something like less guild aligned people (who have less to do) moce to population centers (to have more to do,) while guilds (who are more capable of generating their own things to do) move to the now less populated nodes, pushing the frontier.
These smaller guilds out of the way make it easier for the larger more organized guilds to now dominate these population centers (thanks in small part to soft caps, the power of trade, and tax leverage.) In other words, given the current numbers, on basic psychological principles and current incentive structure for owning a node, 'a majority of smaller nodes' are guild aligned if not outright run, towns being guild or allegiance run or align ed, and 'an average player experience therefore being in the presence of a single force.' That isn't even touching the concept of 'native node guild coops.
P.S. Thanks for being such a good sport and giving me plenty of opportunity to explain my point more fully. I didn't want to post a wall of text but figured someone here would play the 'I disagree' chorus without actually derailing my explanation.
https://www.ashes101.com/
- The five metros can happen if the nodes which grow large are located nearly ideally. This may seldom happen. I would suspect that the distribution of the largest nodes would usually lead to four metros, and possibly it might be only three.
- Metros will take quite a while to grow, many months. So, at first, we will have none, then one, then two, then three, then number 1 might dwindle so that what would have been number four will turn out to be the third one, and so on.
- Some servers, particularly the ones most wracked by guild wars and drama, may have trouble developing. This could be particularly true if the drama becomes toxic and people go to other servers, giving a few servers unusually low population. We saw this in L2.
- The Underworld will complicate things, since there will be nodes there which will impact the surface. We will have underwater nodes, too, yet another complication.
- Other scenarios which do not occur to me may also inhibit metro growth.
What is the point of this? I agree with the posters above who speculate that we will have limited centers of civilization with edges and pockets of near wilderness. This will be a far more complex and fluid world than gamers have ever encountered before. Ever.
Yes I think this '8 guilds of 50' forming a protectorate is a theoretical possiblity. I also think that is a less and less meaningful 'influencer' after a year or two of the server being up. 'An age of chaos' is definitely something I expect early on. But people will settle and get in a groove. I expect in the current system people will figure out how to manipulate citizenship to create spheres of guild influence in more consistent ways. Early on this will be an incentive for going to war, to prevent consolidation of power. But people can organize unlimitedly. Even if there is a cap on official allegiance 1200 people really is an overwhelming force. People want to be on the powerful side especially when it has benefits. I expect this to happen often, because there are many positives and few negatives to forming said allegiance.
Back to your coalition. In the 'age of reconciliation' they will need to adapt once tge enemy numbers start getting bigger. The bonus to smaller guilds can be an okay bandaid, but organization starts becoming a requirement (or the game will be politically unskilled and a crab barrel anyway, so lets assume it does.) At what point do we consider them the same entity? A private message board for the node? A shared decision making body to mitigate greivances and make tactical decisions? I personally consider those integral components. I think this has the potential to effectively create a federation, but to make everyone happy in such a federation humans will want their slice of the pie. Every part of the alliance will surely get a node. And that is kind of my point. Guilds will dominate the nodes (edit for clarity: the smaller nodes) and it will be uncommon after a point, for them to not be federated while also occupying the same node in terms of governance after a certain point. One party, one node. Join the federation today!