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complete servers going to be onesided any counter ?

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

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    George_BlackGeorge_Black Member, Intrepid Pack
    There cant possibly be "one side".
    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.
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    AtamaAtama Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
    Guilds aren't going to be big enough to even take over a node by themselves, let alone an entire server.

    Out of curiosity, what games have you played that had this as a problem?
     
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    Happymeal2415Happymeal2415 Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
    Atama wrote: »
    Guilds aren't going to be big enough to even take over a node by themselves, let alone an entire server.

    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
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    AtamaAtama Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
    edited December 2021
    Ah yes, you might be thinking of Goonswarm. That's reportedly the largest guild of any kind on any online game, at least a few years ago over 21,000 members. Something like that could certainly dominate at least part of a server. But remember that Goonswarm is notable because of how rare it is to be able to keep such a large group functioning, and it certainly has its history of problems, most infamously when their leader tried to shut everything down when he became disillusioned with the group.

    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.
     
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    Wandering MistWandering Mist Moderator, Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha One
    A single guild, or even group of guilds cannot control an entire server, the world is simply too big.

    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.
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    Gaul_Gaul_ Member
    edited December 2021
    Goonswarm was definitely a large guild in EVE. They also didn't control the server by any stretch of the imagination. It was just too big... if you look up political maps in EVE you will see.

    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
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    the only time you need to worry about one side controlling a server is when its a realm v realm system.. otherwise.. what ends up happening is once a guild gets big/strong enough..other guilds will group up to take them down.. youll have infighting and people splitting off to start their own guilds, siphoning off players.. as far as guilds having a size limit.. if thats true.. thats the dumb af.. you cant impose a size limit on guilds..its too easy to get around shit like that and all it does is make the guild system clunky.. ie.. a guild with 300 members but a limit of 50 per guild, will just make 6 guilds and put them into an alliance..wtf is the point in trying to prevent it?.. zergs arent prevented by limiting guild size
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    AtamaAtama Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
    edited December 2021
    Gankez wrote: »
    the only time you need to worry about one side controlling a server is when its a realm v realm system..

    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. :D

    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.
    Gankez wrote: »
    as far as guilds having a size limit.. if thats true.. thats the dumb af.. you cant impose a size limit on guilds..its too easy to get around shit like that and all it does is make the guild system clunky.. ie.. a guild with 300 members but a limit of 50 per guild, will just make 6 guilds and put them into an alliance..wtf is the point in trying to prevent it?.. zergs arent prevented by limiting guild size

    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.
     
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    Atama wrote: »
    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 :( ..so ill just figure it out when time comes :D
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    Gankez wrote: »
    you cant impose a size limit on guilds..its too easy to get around shit like that

    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
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    NoaaniNoaani Member, Intrepid Pack
    Gankez wrote: »
    a guild with 300 members but a limit of 50 per guild, will just make 6 guilds and put them into an alliance..wtf is the point in trying to prevent it?

    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.
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    Flowy1 wrote: »
    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 would love to send you to a youtube video addressing this issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShzeCuIfCXc

    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.
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    A single guild, or even group of guilds cannot control an entire server, the world is simply too big.

    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.

    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.
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    HeetCrusherHeetCrusher Member
    edited January 2022
    From what I gather the fights will be limited 250/250. So zergin bees or honey badgers won't work. I played EVE for 7 years religiously with Black Legion under Elo Knight and saw a lot of the big wars. CCP has their client on many servers not one they use nodes and Dev's on notice to adjust servers as large scale fights break out. They can handle from what I experienced 1-2k PvP good 60 fps as long as you got your overview setup properly. Anything over that they use time dilation. But again I think quality of guild will be more important than quantity with fights limited to 250/250.
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    from the wiki:
    "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.
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    JustVineJustVine Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
    Not saying how it will go down, but there will be 118ish nodes. If we evenly distribute this per node its 127 people per node (assuming 15k.) 424ish if you assume 50k.

    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.
    Riding in Solo Bad Guy's side car

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
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    AtamaAtama Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
    edited January 2022
    JustVine wrote: »
    Not saying how it will go down, but there will be 118ish nodes. If we evenly distribute this per node its 127 people per node (assuming 15k.) 424ish if you assume 50k.

    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.
     
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    JustVineJustVine Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
    I think you are heavily underestimating the words 'on average'. And I also think you are heavily underestimating how powerful the incentives are for sticking together in an alliance to gain control of population centers.

    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.
    Riding in Solo Bad Guy's side car

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
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    AtamaAtama Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
    JustVine wrote: »
    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.
     
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    JustVineJustVine Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
    edited January 2022
    If more people do not conform to the even spread and go to the concentrated pockets instead it makes it easier, currently, for single guilds to dominate those less populated nodes. Given the current incentives for ruling an area, it isn't farfetched for one of said population centers to alliance up to have the majority say and stifle competition.

    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.
    Riding in Solo Bad Guy's side car

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
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    There will be 5 castles on a server and 5 metropolises. So, each castle will influence 20% of the region. It's not like Mega Guild A is going to allow Mega Guild B to hold the castle indefinitely. The ability to build resources, maintain the castle, and defend it is going to take a toll on the resources of the guild or alliance. Remember that for a node to go from rank to rank there are going to be zones of influence. Ten different guilds in ten different nodes are all going to be vying for their node to level up higher than their neighbor. If my node is rank 2, then your node can't become rank 2 until my node becomes rank 3. People also have personalities, and it will still be difficult from guilds to maintain a strong alliance. Guilds can leave alliances; smaller guilds can band together to hold their territory. 8 guilds of 50 players might form its own alliance of 400 players to offer protection to their nodes. As I said before this isn't World of Warcraft so there isn't going to be faction imbalances. What you are probably going to see is a land rush from the starter areas and people spread out and level. As Steven mentioned each server may have its own personality. Server A is going to be different than Server B, than Server C, etc.

    https://www.ashes101.com/
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    tautautautau Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
    Also, remember that there is a maximum of five metros on a server and this does not guarantee that any given server will have five metros. Why?

    - 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.
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    JustVineJustVine Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
    edited January 2022
    Oh you want to talk about native guild coops cool.

    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!
    Riding in Solo Bad Guy's side car

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
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