NPC Armies and Territory expansion/creep

Having read the Relics page recently with a little history lesson on King Atrax, is it possible, with some of the systems that are in game and the characters mentioned, to see King Atrax's territory expand via undead army? Is that possible in an MMO, or are there constraints? Single player RPGs(Shadow of Mordor) or RTS games(Total War: Warhammer series) do this, however, unless I'm unaware of a particular MMO, they always require Players for this to happen. When players aren't around, nothing happens. Can something like this happen in Ashes? Unreal 5 Engine increases the map area without "zones", yes?

To elaborate, Undead Lich (King Atrax) resides in a particular area of Verra. If he's been in a slumber, he's awakened, and decides to go on an expansionary conquest of undeath. His army grows in size and physically traverses the landscape, altering its appearance, and progressing their own nodal points, eventually an incursion on our own lands takes place and players are required to defend their own lands or they will be consumed.

I would have AI measures in place, such as this, to offset any significant imbalances that allows for one side to own absolutely everything. Essentially, the game fights back.

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Ludullu

Dungeons/locations can change with the changes of the node that controls them. So in theory, Intrepid could do a world event triggered by a node lvl up where this King appears (or resurrects or whatever, I dunno the lore) and sieges the node or just causes havoc around the node by growing his influence on the region.

Though I don't think if anything of this exact kind of event has been talked about before.

Here's more info on the world events if you're interested. https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Events

P.S. I suggest diving into the wiki as a whole and trying to find answers for your questions. It's not that you can't just ask here, but I feel like this would show you a broader and fuller picture of the game, rather than just getting the info piece by piece.

DarkTides

The concept of Nodes, Caravans, PvP corruption, the economy, zones of influence that cause triggered events, and monster coins is all something that I recall reading about years ago when this game was first introduced. AOC has carried on the flag of a particular game that I had hoped would be created and one that Steven was a part of. I believe he is aware of the technical issues that prevented NPC armies from moving across the landscape, and since I am not a graphics engine authority, I am not sure if Unreal 5 allows for this to now occur. If they can make it happen, I think it would be a huge help, for many reasons.

The monster coin system, in contrast, is player dependent and seemingly task oriented with limitations.

In PVP games, players tend to ruin the server themselves, if allowed. They turn their own server into a useless PVE server, by exterminating all opposing players. My teams getting owned, I wanna win, jumping ship to the winning side. Until there's nobody left to fight.

You can amp up the triggered events in a local area, to make NPCs more likely to attack the nodes of hegemonic guilds, but it seems like it will just end up feeling like a surprise, rather than some looming darkness in the distance that's closing in ever so slowly(or quickly)day after day, and forces you to actually respond, militarily, should you wish to prevent the destruction of your own node. This A.I. army that can traverse the landscape, as opposed to being some localized nodal triggered event (although the nodal event could start it off somewhere else in the world), would essentially force a decision of the hegemonic forces that be, to either defend their node(s), or obliterate all player opposition.

If you're a guild leader and you own 7 out of 9 nodes, as an example. The 2 remaining nodes are in possession by defiant players who are vastly outnumbered and can't possibly defend against the uber guild. At that point, it's a matter of time until we enter into an age of "peace", on PVP server.

Here is where I can see monster coins coming in handy, but really... you're taking away a player from doing their own thing, and yeah they may like being a monster here and there, but what if theyre raiding and the monster coin event comes about? Go help give that uber guild a hard time with my monster coin(which cant destroy nodes)? Or help progress my own character and guild?

I see this as a potential problem, and I think an A.I controlled "team", would be helpful in creating some form of balance at times.

Ludullu

We'd have to see how nodes and guilds work out in practice in Ashes. The world is supposed to be huge and house upwards of 10k active players, so unless some guild has several thousand members (I'm sure there's at least a few of those out there) - I'm not sure if there could be "peace" on any given server. But even if there is such a guild, EVE history has shown that even such guilds can crumble under their own weight.

I would definitely like a world-sprawling mob event that lasts weeks of real time, but I'd personally prefer to see that as a huge expansion event in the future rather than a scope creep feature for release.

Halae

I can see a gaming organization have a few thousand members, but they'd by necessity have to be fairly split up - From what I recall of the discussion around guild caps, you're looking at a maximum of low triple digits (I think the absolute maximum was said to be 300?) and that's when you've invested absolutely every one of your guild perks into extra members.

To add to this, there's 103 node locations in the game , which if you divide the planned 10k players between them means you'll have an average of 97 per node, with it likely being overrepresented in larger nodes (so probably as much as two-hundred people in a single node).

By a pure numbers game, a gaming organization of several thousand players could potentially take over a region, but I legitimately don't think they could take over more than a significant region of the world, and even then their internal divisions are going to encourage them to cause problems for each other due to resource needs; can't build up every node, and everyone wants to be in a big, powerful, and safe node.

With all this in mind, I do think things that shake up the stability of a power bloc are going to be important to have available for the devs, but this is a pretty unusual scenario that isn't going to be applicable to a vast majority of servers, and if said gaming organizations ensure Peace breaks out all over, they're crippling their own gameplay experience.

PherPhur

Halae wrote: »

I can see a gaming organization have a few thousand members, but they'd by necessity have to be fairly split up - From what I recall of the discussion around guild caps, you're looking at a maximum of low triple digits (I think the absolute maximum was said to be 300?) and that's when you've invested absolutely every one of your guild perks into extra members.

To add to this, there's 103 node locations in the game , which if you divide the planned 10k players between them means you'll have an average of 97 per node, with it likely being overrepresented in larger nodes (so probably as much as two-hundred people in a single node).

By a pure numbers game, a gaming organization of several thousand players could potentially take over a region, but I legitimately don't think they could take over more than a significant region of the world, and even then their internal divisions are going to encourage them to cause problems for each other due to resource needs; can't build up every node, and everyone wants to be in a big, powerful, and safe node.

With all this in mind, I do think things that shake up the stability of a power bloc are going to be important to have available for the devs, but this is a pretty unusual scenario that isn't going to be applicable to a vast majority of servers, and if said gaming organizations ensure Peace breaks out all over, they're crippling their own gameplay experience.

I think it's going to be a never ending battle against P2W players trying to cap out nodes and take over the world. I mean unless the gold farmers and bots are getting constantly killed on that particular server.

Halae

ChipsAhoy007 wrote: »

I think it's going to be a never ending battle against P2W players trying to cap out nodes and take over the world. I mean unless the gold farmers and bots are getting constantly killed on that particular server.

Real Money Trading (which is not P2W, as P2W is specifically coming from the developers themselves to give you a boon, not third parties) has been acknowledged by the devs, many many times over the course of development, to be a problem they're going to come down like the fist of god on. The economy of both gold and resources is THE most important part of Ashes' structure, and external disruptions to that aspect would undermine the game at its core, so I can absolutely believe that they'll crack down on RMT things as hard as humanly possible.

I find your position utterly uncompelling in the face of that. But now I've got to ask; what the hell does your position on RMT and P2W have to do with AI legions disrupting things for other players? My own post was about how this kind of balancing feature is probably unnecessary due to the way that stuff works for gaming organizations that could theoretically take over the world; nothing about wallet warriors, bots, RMT, or any of that. Was this just an attempt to twist a topic completely unrelated to it over to your pet issue?

Mag7spy

If bots become that much of a issue there is incentive for them to have people banning them as every bot will be paying 15$ for another account.

Gold farm accounts I don't see as being as big a issue as long as they scale gold gain towards the higher levels. So if it takes like 100 hours to get max level or such, more than likely they are at least putting 50 hours in before making decent gold, but not really enough for massive selling. And if they are to get banned to get back tot he same point again would take a insane amount of work making it less and less viable to be doing it.

Granted there will be some actual players that try to do it but it will be more irregular, same with account selling.

DarkTides

Halae wrote: »

I can see a gaming organization have a few thousand members, but they'd by necessity have to be fairly split up - From what I recall of the discussion around guild caps, you're looking at a maximum of low triple digits (I think the absolute maximum was said to be 300?) and that's when you've invested absolutely every one of your guild perks into extra members.

To add to this, there's 103 node locations in the game , which if you divide the planned 10k players between them means you'll have an average of 97 per node, with it likely being overrepresented in larger nodes (so probably as much as two-hundred people in a single node).

By a pure numbers game, a gaming organization of several thousand players could potentially take over a region, but I legitimately don't think they could take over more than a significant region of the world, and even then their internal divisions are going to encourage them to cause problems for each other due to resource needs; can't build up every node, and everyone wants to be in a big, powerful, and safe node.

With all this in mind, I do think things that shake up the stability of a power bloc are going to be important to have available for the devs, but this is a pretty unusual scenario that isn't going to be applicable to a vast majority of servers, and if said gaming organizations ensure Peace breaks out all over, they're crippling their own gameplay experience.

I vaguely recall the player caps, now that you mention it. That, alongside the size of the world and nodal count, definitely hampers such things from becoming an issue.

If they can make AI happen, I think it would be rather fun to have an AI "team", so to speak, to add some flavor to the fantasy.

Dygz

If we don't squash the predicate Events... it's possible.

DarkTides

Dygz wrote: »

If we don't squash the predicate Events... it's possible.

Dygz, did you read the entire post, because the reply I made lacked context.

Dygz

I read the entirety of the original post.

DarkTides

Dygz wrote: »

I read the entirety of the original post.

Ah ok. That is great if they can... I cannot find anything. Did they say this can happen in a video somewhere?

Dygz

The Events system is somewhat similar to a feature that was being developed at Daybreak Games for EQNext. The Ashes dev team has quite a few former Daybreak Games devs on board.
The Ashes version may not be as robust as the EQNext version hoped to be...although since EQNext was being developed 10 years ago, it might be easier to implement now.

The limiting factor is that players are very likely to squash Events before they become Major Global Events.

For example.
When we first arrive in the game, the 5 Castles of Verra are occupied by The Ancients.
Players have to win the Castle Sieges and oust the Ancients before player Guilds move into the Castle.
Castle Sieges are once per month.
It's likely that all 5 Castles will be occupied by Guilds fairly quickly, so...
We won't see what could happen if we let one of the 5 Castles remain occupied by the Ancients.

If we don't squash predicate Events, those could grow into Monster Coin/Horde attacks.
Those are only supposed to destroy buildings rather than completely destroying a Node, but...

It would be fascinating to have a server where all the players worked together to allow one Castle to be taken over again by the Ancients and allow one Metro to be overrun by Monsters. Maybe Siege the Metro asap after that and see what the mobs do.

https://youtu.be/qYuL-GrMmRM?t=1986
mark 33:06

DarkTides

I dont think the squashing of events would be designed to deny content. If I was one of the Devs and I wanted an event to have a specific outcome, its basically part of the storyline at that point, so they just make it impossible to stop. If the Ancients are holding the castles, I think thats just a place you go to see if you can defeat the "boss" and take the castle. I doubt they do anything else but stay there.

Of event examples given, I have not seen any mention of NPC armies that can start at one side of the continent and physically move across the landscape to the opposite side of the continent. That would be a local event trigger, with NPCs that expand their territory, becoming a regional problem. Would be cheese if they just randomly surprise poof in every local zone, as an army that came out of nowhere, instead of starting far away and slowly becoming a larger problem as time goes on, encroaching on player nested territory.

Would be more interesting this way.

Thaedd

DarkTides wrote: »

Having read the Relics page recently with a little history lesson on King Atrax, is it possible, with some of the systems that are in game and the characters mentioned, to see King Atrax's territory expand via undead army? Is that possible in an MMO, or are there constraints? Single player RPGs(Shadow of Mordor) or RTS games(Total War: Warhammer series) do this, however, unless I'm unaware of a particular MMO, they always require Players for this to happen. When players aren't around, nothing happens. Can something like this happen in Ashes? Unreal 5 Engine increases the map area without "zones", yes?

To elaborate, Undead Lich (King Atrax) resides in a particular area of Verra. If he's been in a slumber, he's awakened, and decides to go on an expansionary conquest of undeath. His army grows in size and physically traverses the landscape, altering its appearance, and progressing their own nodal points, eventually an incursion on our own lands takes place and players are required to defend their own lands or they will be consumed.

I would have AI measures in place, such as this, to offset any significant imbalances that allows for one side to own absolutely everything. Essentially, the game fights back.

This would be amazing to see in a game, AI kingdoms that are trying themselves to build up and provide other enemies besides players. Implementing it might be difficult.

Dygz

DarkTides wrote: »

I dont think the squashing of events would be designed to deny content. If I was one of the Devs and I wanted an event to have a specific outcome, its basically part of the storyline at that point, so they just make it impossible to stop. If the Ancients are holding the castles, I think thats just a place you go to see if you can defeat the "boss" and take the castle. I doubt they do anything else but stay there.

Of event examples given, I have not seen any mention of NPC armies that can start at one side of the continent and physically move across the landscape to the opposite side of the continent. That would be a local event trigger, with NPCs that expand their territory, becoming a regional problem. Would be cheese if they just randomly surprise poof in every local zone, as an army that came out of nowhere, instead of starting far away and slowly becoming a larger problem as time goes on, encroaching on player nested territory.

Would be more interesting this way.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "deny content".
In Ashes, Events don't really have a "specific outcome". What the outcome is depends on how the players respond to the predicate events. So different servers will have different storylines.

We'll have to see how often the Ancients try to regain control of Verra.

I think we currently have two official Ashes examples of specific events: The Winter Dragon and the Goblins.
"Far away" is relative. Ashes Events beging with smaller predicate events... which can build up to Major Global Events if the smaller events are not properly squashed.
So, yes, we should expect to see a local even trigger, with NPCs that try to expand their territory and become a regional problem...but... they cannot occupy the urban areas of Towns, Cities and Metros.
It's theoretically possible that NPCs could re-occupy a Castle - although it's unlikely. And they could probably only hold a Castle for a month before players ally to kick the NPCs out.

The EQNext example is that Dark Elves from Serpentspine Mountains are farming Dryads in Kithicor Forest, stealing their Life magic and transmuting it into Shadow magic to power their spells and augment gear and abilities, like Stealth.
Players who rely on Shadow magic will go into Kithicor to farm NPC dryads, but the players in Kithicor will want to prevent that because as Life is drained from the region, blight spreads across the land.
Unbeknownst to the players, if too much Life energy is drained, eventually the bonds which hold the Shadow Demons at bay will break and they will march across the world devouring anything living...even the Dark Elves should the Shadow Demons encounter them.
At that point, it's in the best interest of all the player races, including the Dark Elves, to ally and attempt to imprison the Shadow Demons again.

We have enough Daybreak Games devs on the Ashes dev team to expect Ashes Events to be designed in a similar fashion.

Voxtrium

I agree with @NiKr Mega guilds have been shown to collapse into themselves with the likelihood of collapse increasing with size, plus quality of life actually goes down with less competition because of the way ashes is designed. A NPC faction could be a fun expansion in the future but for launch they should finish what they have promised before adding more content.

Warth

My only beef with NPC factions is, that they have and will never be a challenge to face.
Making them constant opposition to the players will either become a drag or boring through the lack of challenge.

I'd much rather have impactful, meaningful events than a constant faction. Like the opening of a corrupted portal that will spread corruption across the entire continent if not dealt with properly. With meaningful, I mean even having the possibility of destroying Nodes if the players fail critically to address the problem.

The negative impacts of such events should be bad enough, that everyone affected does his darnest to stop it and everybody being happy with their rival's suffering works towards maintaining it.

For a spreading corruption like the one mentioned above i'd like to see a lot of things like:

no node exp contributed in corrupted areas. (eventually leading to node atrophy and its destruction)
stronger regular monsters in the area
less loot from gathering and killing in this area
stronger death penalties (exp and stat-loss)
...

All Nodes could trigger an event like this with similarly bad effects upon reaching Metro Stage. Whether its eternal winter, plagues, corrupted portals, cultists and sects, an ancient creature devastating the land, the volcano becoming active...

DarkTides

Warth wrote: »

My only beef with NPC factions is, that they have and will never be a challenge to face.
Making them constant opposition to the players will either become a drag or boring through the lack of challenge.

I'd much rather have impactful, meaningful events than a constant faction. Like the opening of a corrupted portal that will spread corruption across the entire continent if not dealt with properly. With meaningful, I mean even having the possibility of destroying Nodes if the players fail critically to address the problem.
...........

Cant agree more. NPCs in MMOs are not a challenge, minimal programming. A.I. usually provides weak competition, and this seems to be addressed by beefing up their stats to compensate, as opposed to beefing up their capability to function.

I would want to see this as being a triggered event somewhere on the map, like a slumbering Lich awakens, we dont know where, its influence over areas is apparent based on what we see happening, so we have a general idea of where he may be... Lich needs to die to stop it, but as time goes on, it spreads, getting stronger, encroaching on our own lands. Players push back, eventually find and kill the Lich for loots, and that ends that event. Definitely not a permanent faction.

Could always ask Elon to have openAI take control of this NPC temp faction to make up for what most AI lacks.

Dygz wrote: »

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "deny content".
In Ashes, Events don't really have a "specific outcome". What the outcome is depends on how the players respond to the predicate events. So different servers will have different storylines.................

............We have enough Daybreak Games devs on the Ashes dev team to expect Ashes Events to be designed in a similar fashion.

Denying content. Some of their events hinder resource acquisition/trade and nodal progression. Crop yield affected if you dont stop the winter(kill the winter dragon)....Prevents the player from doing something or getting something until it's overcome. Cant XP here and further progress the node until the dragon is dead... or the trade caravans are being destroyed until that raiding party is annihilated. Overcoming the event will allow you to return to normal. If you leave those events untouched, you do not return to normal. No special 'beneficial' story arises from allowing the triggered events to persist. Its seems as though we are encouraged to stop them. By denying content, I imply, if you leave it alone, you arent missing anything aside from being denied the ability to return to normal. You more than likely lose something if you let those kinds of events persist. There is no content missed from leaving the event as is. So leaving the Ancients alone in the castle doesnt lead to more and better loot. Kill them asap. Might be cool to watch things go awry and be disaster struck, but thats it, theres nothing that encourages that otherwise from what I can see.

My understanding of how Servers stories differ appears to stem from the players decision to progress node 2 to max instead of node 1 or 3, and the type of node you choose, scientific node, will trigger a different event than a military node. Havent heard if a dwarf node triggers different events than Elf nodes.

When theorizing potential, I can't expect them to do that based on whats out there so far. It would be really cool but no solid evidence of this kind of capability. It seems like the right triggers are there, but are any designed this way? It seems like when corruption spreads, it spreads to a region, but the effects are local, like monster attacks are more frequent in those areas.. but they spawn out of nowhere and remain local, despite a region being affected... a timer is ticking... if you dont defeat a certain local areas corruption, when that timer is finished counting the next local area gets affected, and then things randomly spawn there... nothing actually physically moves around.

What kind of event do you think an npc army, that starts on one side of the map and can traverse the landscape, falls under? Local, Regional, or Global?

Dygz

I have no idea what you mean by “if you leave it alone, you arent missing anything aside from being denied the ability to return to normal.”

Who says that players can’t ally with Ancients and earn something by helping them stay in control of a Castle??
It’s probably more likely that a Guild will get better stuff from owning a Castle.

Who says that players can’t gain anything by allying with the Goblins?
An Ice Wizard might gain quite a lot from allying with a Winter Dragon - especially since their abilities will be stronger during winter.

And it all progresses the story one way or another, for good or for ill, so…I don’t understand what content is missing.
It’s just different content.

What is your suggestion supposed to encourage? King Atrax and his horde marches across the world and what?
We’re going to try to stop that the same as we try to stop any other threat.
Or let it play out so we can see what happens.

Many of the differences on a server will be based on which Node types are progressed and destroyed, which races have Cities and Metros and which buildings are constructed and destroyed.
Many of the differences on a server will depend on which Events we defeat and how far those Events played out. As well as which Bosses we’ve defeated.
Different Events will be triggered based on which Social Orgs we’ve advanced and which Religions we’ve advanced.

As far as I know, Corruption does not spread.
Where is the info on Corruption spreading to a Region??
I know nothing about Corruption timers. Where is that info??

NPC horde Event would start local and potentially escalate to Major Global Event.
Depending on how the players react to the smaller, predicate events.

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