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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.
Good Design or Massive Failure?
Craiken
Member
Last weekend, my alliance suffered a major defeat. Our long-time base was ransacked by invaders. I'm talking about Eve Online, but I think the discussion has relevance for any territory-control MMO.
The fight was not close. A large Alliance brought overwhelming numbers. So my question to the AoC forums is: Do one-sided fights reflect good or bad game design? I expect many node sieges in Ashes of Creation will be one-sided as well.
Pros
-The event was highly immersive! Eve's universe truly feels like a scary place full of cold-blooded killers.
-It rewarded cooperation and planning. The attackers won decisively and got to haul away loot.
-It helped keep the in-game economy active. Lots of value was destroyed.
Cons
-The fight was over before it started. All decisions that mattered (scheduling, coordination, etc) were made off the battlefield and probably outside of the game entirely.
-Individual combatants and their skills were not important.
What do you think? Are there benefits/downsides that I haven't considered? Are you looking forward to similar battles in Ashes of Creation, or are you dreading them?
Eve Killboard Link for Reference: https://zkillboard.com/kill/101257746/
The fight was not close. A large Alliance brought overwhelming numbers. So my question to the AoC forums is: Do one-sided fights reflect good or bad game design? I expect many node sieges in Ashes of Creation will be one-sided as well.
Pros
-The event was highly immersive! Eve's universe truly feels like a scary place full of cold-blooded killers.
-It rewarded cooperation and planning. The attackers won decisively and got to haul away loot.
-It helped keep the in-game economy active. Lots of value was destroyed.
Cons
-The fight was over before it started. All decisions that mattered (scheduling, coordination, etc) were made off the battlefield and probably outside of the game entirely.
-Individual combatants and their skills were not important.
What do you think? Are there benefits/downsides that I haven't considered? Are you looking forward to similar battles in Ashes of Creation, or are you dreading them?
Eve Killboard Link for Reference: https://zkillboard.com/kill/101257746/
1
Comments
EVE would not be EVE without it, and would probably have long since shut down without these kinds of events.
However, that doesn't mean other game would or should follow suit, as there are a very limited pool of players that are in to this kind of thing.
I recall hearing Steven say it's not the developers' job to balance the number of players involved in node sieges. I took that to mean he thought the pros of allowing one-sided fights outweighed the cons. Do you think that will make Ashes of Creation a niche game?
Ashes is indeed a niche game.
As I see it, so long as the bigger force spends more resources to siege and win a smaller node than the resources they get out of that node - the system is "balanced". And with defenders, allegedly, having advantages over the attackers, the force sizes might balance out somewhat too.
Of course, I also want those groups capable of attacking and defeating such a guild to be proportionately rewarded.
It's bad for mmorpgs when one person and their close friends run faceless zergfests. But people have got used to joining a guild in order to find instanced gameplay groups, and guild leaders have got used to having endless number of healers, tanks, dds for instanced gameplay runs.
It will be better for AoC, which isn't based in instanced content to make it more difficult for megaguilds to form and allow real guilds, independent guilds to form true alliances. In such alliances the alliance leader won't have control over all the members. In such alliances there is room for real human interaction. Leaders and members may argue with each other and if there isn't a sense of unity in the alliance it may stop existing, bringing fresh air to a server. In most mmos the unity is forced upon the faceless members, under one leader and his/her circle.
Guilds Lvs should be fairly hard to achieve. The max capacity of total guild members should not exceed 150. I dont think the plan of giving guilds the option to choose between passive skills and extra member slots is healthy. I think leveling a guild should be done by awesome guild quests with 2-3 full groups, gold and mats.
Guild passive skills should be earned by in the open world, raiding in the instanced content, or helping members reach milestones, such as players reaching the stage where they can combine their main class with the secondary, reaching a high lv in a gathering/crafting profession etc etc.
I think this will help guilds in AoC be full of members that are friends with each other, help each other, play with each other. I think this will create healthy guilds and healthy alliances that won't turn the server into two sides dominating everything for an eternety.
If there is a leader out there, that under the above circumstances manages to create a megaguild of 1500-2000 members, and that megaguild dominates then good on them. They spend time leveling up Avengers, Avengers2, Avengers3, Avengers4 in order to be able to have a total number of 2000 members, and in the process THE MEMBERS OF THIS MEGAGUILD BECAME FRIENDS WITH EACH OTHER, AND PLAYED TOGETHER.
If Intrepid gets to 500 vs 500 like they want to then there's a bit more runway there for it though. I dunno, I don't completely understand how the siege system is going to work yet.
Edit: My understanding is that castle sieges are intended to be 250vs250, if not 500vs500. And node sieges are meant to be open or something, like anyone can sign up to attack or defend? Well what happens when 1500 attackers show up and crash the server. Is it instanced, is it sectioned off or something, I dunno.
There are no such rules as to who can declare attack or defence in a siege castle and how many people can be present. The more people will be there, the more lag will be. AoC just wants to manage a large number of players in a location, without lag.
A key thing to keep in mind here is that the 500v500 (which I think we should all just assume will happen) is only the limit for the actual siege.
This leaves the lead up to that siege - collecting materials, running caravans etc - to be interrupted by many thousands of players, if that many players are against you.
This isn't exactly the same as it is in EVE, where thousands of players can attack you at the same time, but Ashes does still have systems where more people against you and your node makes it much harder for you to successfully defend it.
If you have a lvl3 node with lvl 25-30 dudes and a lvl6 node with lvl 50 top gear dudes and the lvl6 node, for whatever reason, decides to siege lvl3 - lvl3 is fucked. Which is why I said that there should be a higher cost for that kind of siege on the stronger side.
Also, we don't know how the defenders will be picked if Intrepid decides to have sieges as instanced battles. Every citizen is registered as the defender, but who knows who exactly will get to fight.
Yeah the entire server could declare total war on this node. Full blockade, corruption killing everyone at all times 24/7. Even inside their city too lol. They can definitely make life there hell and basically force them to go broke and give up. Much like a real life siege...
But ultimately the actual battle would be at whatever numbers the server can handle I guess. And I don't really understand how they would stop ungodly amounts of players showing up and making it unplayable or crashing it. I dunno, I just got questions heh
Yeah I saw that reference. Reference 14, 15 and 28 makes it sound like a lot of people can sign up though, even people unaffiliated with the node. So how many hundreds if not thousands of people will be eligible to sign up.
And yeah if there's limits on how many people can participate, how is it determined who gets picked.
"The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack."
The 250v250 (or 500v500) numbers sound like technical goals, not limits imposed by game mechanics.
The battle was a relatively small affair. In AoC terms, it was a village-level siege. But the attackers probably spent less on the operation than they gained. Edit: I suspect they were motivated by the fun of blowing stuff up. The money was small potatoes.
Im kinda curious about how impactiful quantity vs quality is in EvE, is it normal to see reasonably smaller alliances winning against fairly bigger ones, or number are almost always the definitive factor in winning or losing in EvE?
In Lineage 2 for example smaller well geared, organized and skilled groups/clans could wreak havoc against less geared, less organized and less skilled Zergs, quality was more important than quantity quite frequently, and sometimes a single Top player/party could make a crazy difference even in a fully fledged siege.
i like to link this video as an extreme example of 9 players(1 party) messing up with 170+ people (a big clan)
Aren't we all sinners?
This is something what developers needs to weight when designing the system. How to keep the core idea of dynamic control system without making it too punishing for the players. Even a player loses something the game should encourage to continue playing. Even some could argue that people should not be that soft but from the game's longevity point of view it is important to try keep players within the game and not push them away.
In Alpha 1, we experienced sieges. I can't say whether castle or node sieges are different, but I can tell you what we have actually seen:
The siege signup period began before the siege. During this time, party leaders could register their party as either an attacker or defender. When the siege properly started, you would each individually talk to a NPC to enter the instanced siege battlefield. After a few minutes, the siege began, and you were able to leave the spawn area.
Each side of this siege instance did fill up, and people were not able to join beyond that point. (I don't remember if it was a limit on entering, or registration, unfortunately.)
Sieges (at least the type we experienced in Alpha 1) are instanced, and capped, and you had to register as either an attacker or defender in advance.
So, rather similar to New World, it pains me to say. I hope open world becomes possible, even if there must be invisible walls once cap is reached.
Discord
Forum
I consider these things to be bad design IF two specific things are true.
1. The process of reorganizing, starting a recovery, etc, doesn't depend on the losing player's status but that of the winners or neutrals
2. The attacking winner gains a mobile form of strength or resources that can be used to generate a mobile form of strength quickly.
Basically, the winner was trying to get a result, they got it. If the losers now 'are at their mercy' on top of losing whatever it was, and are easily scattered... If anything can hit the human psychological feeling of 'this is pointless' or 'people will mock us or tell us to just accept it/get over it', I think it's bad because this is actually what makes most people give up, apparently. Sure you can be upset about a loss for a while, and a few people never let it go, but even those people will help with the rebuilding, etc, if they don't feel like the community is going to laugh at them for trying to.
There's no reason to 'require' that level of psychological fortitude from basically every player of your game (since everyone is subject to this).
Similarly, #2 technically leads into #1 in a pretty real way. If the loser has to cede control and territory, and that territory can be used to push them down further instead of TAKING more effort to maintain, then it's bad. Right now it sounds like big forces will be able to crush smaller Vassal nodes and then just leave them like that. If the crushed 'come back to rebuild' without gathering allies, it will just happen again.
If potential allies look at your situation and go 'just get over it, fighting back is pointless/stupid' even in the case where the attackers just left the Node as wilderness, I'd consider it bad design.
I've had countless sieges where the defending small guild would partner up with a huge guild and get protection for the siege. Now that's obviously a cool social interaction for the game, but it's only cool when you're on the receiving side of the protection. Quite often you're not.
So depending on how they go about controlling registers for node sieges (if they even will), we might get an absolute imbalanced stomping of small nodes by bigger ones or we might get smth more balanced where maybe the leaders of both sides of the siege could choose the top 250(or 500) people from the registered list. With leaders being the mayor of the defending node and the person who threw down the siege scroll. I personally hope it's the latter.
I think it was something like 40 vs 20. That's what I heard in Discord anyway. I wasn't there myself. It was early morning on a Saturday. >.<
As to your other question, I'm not an authority on Eve PvP, but it's certainly possible to defeat a large force with a smaller one. If you know the attackers' fleet composition, you can bring specific ships that counter them. That said - numbers help. And outnumbering your enemy will probably be even more important in AoC where people can't swap out their characters for ones with different functionality.
I feel you are very much misquoting him hugely , unsure why you would do that but ill just shut it down now with a simple fact. Sieges have a max amount of numbers based on the size of the town, a max they are aiming for with the largest is 250v250. Sounds balanced to me as far as numbers are concerned.
That is part of politics, if you have a issue with large guilds you need to use politics to create a equal force against them or break them up. End of the day there will be alliances in the game between large guilds and its up to use as a player to decide what to do. Be it joining the zerg, joining another guild, or being in a leadership position. Making a mega guild isn't either as well, you have to realize the amount of leadership work that goes into it.
Free sieges would be terrible design and takes away any sign of competitive element away. One of the best designs in new world is how they did they set up for sieges and something other modern games should look to going forward for organization.
It's certainly possible that I misunderstood. However, even if numbers are capped at 250, wouldn't you expect to see a lot of battles in which one side couldn't reach the cap? It could be 100 vs 250, for example.
To be clear, I am NOT saying that one-sided battles are necessarily a bad feature. Like you say, unequal forces encourage informal alliances and social interaction.
Edit: I found the quote! He definitely said sieges would not be balanced.
"There might be a higher number of individuals who are part of the attacking or the defense. Those are components that we aren't necessarily going to put on railroads so-to-speak."
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_sieges#cite_note-livestream-25-June-2021-1:10:52-11
I hope that the player number cap on guilds and alliances is reasonable.
I also hope the geography is sufficiently vast such that an underdog guild can go somewhere distant, and quietly build up in numbers/wealth/gear and re-insert themselves into the more active areas and become an unexpectant contender for a node/zone
PROS: That's one of the reasons many people play games: starting to sweat and maybe even shake a little bit while playing during difficult situations. When I'm on clutch situations in CSGO I need to focus a lot for my hands not to shake, and that's probably why I still play that cheater-infested piece of shit.
YES! Risk vs. Reward. If they got slapped by you guys, they'd hopefully have gone bankrupt, perhaps taking months to build back from what they lost.
Yes, sir. Material/gold sinks are sometimes necessary, and when they're designed well and/or transparently, it's good for everyone. That's why, although I personally hate it, degrading gear and/or other kinds of sinks can be good for a MMORPG.
CONS: I disagree. In an alternate universe, if a band of space pirates were to attack a space base somewhere, they'd have prepared everything off the battlefield and outside the fight if they were smart. So I disagree with trying to make good management and coordination done in Discord sound like a bad thing.
This is a very good point. There are games which, even if you're outnumbered, you can still win because of better skill, better coordination and communication - some FPS games come to mind, like Rust. I have no idea how EVE works, so I will assume that that's almost impossible and higher numbers are next to impossible to overcome, which is a bad thing. Obviously numbers should matter, but in some cases I would hope that skill, base design, team play, communication, etc could overcome being outnumbered.
In Ashes case, if you're doing a 8-man caravan and 40 people show up to attack it, you're most likely dead. But if you're defending a castle, it would be interesting to see how they could allow defending players to overcome higher numbers if they are skilled enough.
Some time ago there was a discussion regarding how large guilds will be penalized for their high numbers and how smaller guilds will be incentivized. I do hope that, even if you can have 500 members on a guild, that means they have chosen to only upgrade the "guild size" tree and left the "member buffs" tree untouched. That sort of thing will incentivize smaller guilds, which is good.
However, like someone pointed out, those 500 member guilds will exist, so they'll create multiple smaller guilds called Zerg, Zerg2, Zerg3, etc with less members so that they can upgrade the "member buffs" tree while still keeping their big numbers.
In my view that's a big challenge Ashes will face: how to combat zergs. Each person has their opinion on zergs, there are plenty of reasons to join one and not to join one, but even if you're part of a zerg (I have been in multiple games) I believe we can all agree that zergs are more often than not bad for a server/game, especially in the MMORPG genre, hence why I believe Intrepid needs to find ways to penalize zergs and/or to incentivize smaller guilds.
We'll see how well they work.