Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
The examples people bring is that they do not have time to play much after work. They just come home and their friends moved to a new place.
Then cool down should be 1 day. People can sell expensive gear too (swords, armor...). One account produces them, the other summons the artisan to sell them where the price is higher.
Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds to refine materials.
It basically needs to be nerfed to Hell and only be useful for its original purpose or else people will find ways to abuse it and fast travel entire guilds, then it'll just be a matter of how tryhard you are or how many accounts you have.
Until we have more information/test it, it's pointless to ask for it to be removed.
There's precedent for a "pact" or "bond" or "contract" being required to Summon or otherwise many difficult ritualistic variables; so having obstacles to summoning may exist while the obstacles may be less if you already have a Jar of that person's blood or otherwise some of their Blood is in your veins because they're Family.
I can imagine a Blood Splotch is still required; a thick tough paper with drop of the individual's blood on it; and that with a Jar of ANYONE'S blood certain rituals besides just summoning could be done (like cursing). . . just thinking ahead here with Summoner design elaborations.
It's pretty clunky to have Summoners that can't summon lol.
There is no solution where that will not happen so its kind of an obvious downside that has to be packaged with this sort of teleportation. In the grand scheme of things I say no family summons, but if the bare minimum is that they can bring a naked crafter to a different location I can live with that.
For various entertaining reasons you should set this quote as your forum signature.
So, we can see what the functions of the family summons are during beta, but we will not really get much of an idea as to how players will use it.
Because teleporting/summoning ruins the economy and "size" of the world. There's no lore reason yet as we have no information to really work on save they are "summoners". However we DO know that they will not be able to summon or teleport other players over large distances as the developers have stated the only way to do so will be with family summons and science metropolis nodes.
Lowering the distance makes sense. If the distance one can be summoned depended on how 'light' the person is; in terms of stuff and even size (fighters be damned) I could see a range of 666 yards down to 6.66 yards.
And the size of char in Customization should affect it too LOL
Being family could increase the range. I just don't see any Lore that isn't BS explaining why mages can teleport but summoners can't summon.
You are refusing to understand that the developers do not want anything else to trivialize travel. That's why summoners cannot summon other players. Its just like how corruption is used as a mechanic to deal with griefers and does not actually follow the in-lore rules for corruption.
@Dolyem - I see a series of memes with all the things we need to be outraged about Summoners not being able to summon.
to be fair, it is neither confirmed nor denied that summoners can't summon
You mean like this one?
Want to summon your whole 40-man guild to some place? Murder 39 people to do so
I'm excited for the FS, cuz I will hopefully be playing with my bro. We have different work schedules so this will definitely provide some quality time (if it works as intended).
I agree with the openminded folks that are waiting on more information or for A2 to test the functionality and then provide feedback.
For obvious reasons the functionality shouldn't be enabled for guilds.
Also I wouldn't worry about anything gank related (hopefully the corruption system will take care of it)...
I have a question thought:
Should this functionality be only while on "in-land" or "open sea" as well?
I would assume there are a few variables that would make this run some problems...
Take care all!
And if you decided to go exploring, and ended up on the other side of the world, well, too bad, you can't get Family Summoned, it was your choice to go that far.
If this is not done, it will be abused. I'll go travel to the other continent, sell my wares, then family summoned back home to save an hour of walking. Then I'll repeat.
Oh, you have some gear you want to sell on my continent? Equip said gear, empty rest of inventory, and I'll summon you over here to sell it, no problem. Then chill here for a few hours, doing quests, whatever, and we'll have another family member summon you back home.
Not sure if this is the bald man himself (jk) but this has been the best suggestion so far for keeping it. I would be fine if this was the setup.
Honestly I don't hate this. If it is exploited, it's minimum damage at least due to range restrictions.
Apart from ship capacity, I see no difference between sea and land regarding the ways many people believe it'll be possible to abuse the Family Summon, such as summoning an entire guild over the span of 5 minutes. To me, disabling FS in the ocean and not on land it's as illogical as removing corruption from the ocean but not from other places/everywhere else, but I digress.
I believe that assuming Family members are from the same region basically renders Family Summon useless. If you and your friends spawn on different corners of the map by accident, FS won't help you and the goal Steven had ("My concern is that the divide that's present in having a largely non-fast travel based traversal for the world might be a very significant encumbrance for more casual oriented players") won't be achieved.
But, in my opinion, the type of FS abuse you described is the least of its problems. Instead of running for one hour to sell gear on the other side of the map, you get instantly summoned there and need to wait for a cooldown to get back. It's definitely a way to abuse the FS for something not related to the original goal, but it's not even close as problematic as being able to summon an entire guild anywhere, that's really the biggest problem with the FS: summoning any number of people divisible by 8 in a matter of minutes. Maybe you'll only be able to summon 160 people 5km away, but what if that's a dungeon entrance? or that's just outside a World Boss radius no-FS zone? You get the idea. So, I agree, it's less harmful to spawn 160 people 5km away than 20km away, but it's still bad.
By the way, I do not want the Family Summon or even the Family System to exist and I hope that people will abuse it during Alpha/Beta until it's removed.
My alternative to the Family Summon which I believe also solves Steven's original concern is a lot simpler and a lot harder to abuse: add a limited number of teleports between any of the 5(?) Divine Gateways for characters level X or lower, carrying less than X gold, not carrying any gear over level X and keep all the current conditions for Family Summon ("no mats, gatherables or certs in their inventory"). So you still have a way to teleport to your friends, but you gotta make sure you go there before progressing too much.
I can think of gold farm mules abusing this, but they would abuse the original Family Summon anyway to move gold, so that's not really an argument and it could even help and be used as a pattern to detect RWT/RMT accounts. Maybe this could also be abused by guilds speed running the game during launch, but I don't think that this kind of abuse is comparable to how much worse Family Summon will be (with the information and premises we have so far).
I conceded understanding and obliged an example range. Get over yourself. Suggest a range, cast time and whatever other obstacles to summoning that doesn't trivialize travel.
If you're that close to each other already, why do you need to Summon each other? Just get on your mount and ride for 20 seconds.
No need for a system, that merely takes away like 10 or 15 mins of riding.
With this being said.
Family Summon is a cancerous system that shouldnt exist in the game. There are significantly better, less game design breaking systems that allow for the benefits they see in a Family Summon system, just with less downsides.
The family summon system is a really weird thing to me, but maybe I'm missing some crucial piece of the bigger picture that Intrepid has planned so we'll have to see in testing.
If you have traversed the land with a group which was too dangerous to cross solo due to current wars, say 10min, then fought through mobs to get deep in a dungeon for 15-20min to get to the deep sweet spot. Then a party member drops and you want another available guild member to fill the spot. Say, the party class combination IS important.. and vital for your continuation that someone joins.,
Having a summoner in party would be a game changer and the freedom to pull that other member in and continue playing great!
There are a wide range of classes, cannot see so many players becoming a summoner so unlikely to be over run with them.
Great in pvp. With the cool down, hardly an advantage for zerging.. so great for small skirmishes.
Zero down sides.. used extensively in L2.. only upsides
But imo Ashes should prevent people from any kind of summoning inside dungeons because traversal is way more important here.
You want to replace a party member after having spent a ton of time fighting through mobs and war enemies? - Go do that again to deserve the ability to do that.
So either upfront commitment from the group , not always guaranteeably, or frustrated parties when not able to do much time together without having to re-start.