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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.
Comments
I am as confident as I can be given that we are given bare minimum information on the system and have not had a chance to even test the first iteration haha. So you know, I am, I think reasonably, open to changing my mind.
So i absolutely agree, but for a 4x game haha. I think when you treat nodes as the agents of the game instead of players, you are in dangerous territory where the implementation of an idea may not pan out as you hope. I do think that you are right though, this would absolutely promote what you say if this is the intention.
That sounds a bit hyperbolic, no? The system that was just announced last week is the critical difference between BDO and AoC? I'm surprised you supported this game to begin with then.
I don't think I would 'dislike' it per se, but it would be a huge departure from my original expectations and understanding of the game. There are certain parts of AoC that I think should take a peripheral or niche role in any avg player's experience. For example flying mounts, the game should function just fine without their existence but they will add cool and rare gameplay moments whether you have one or run into someone who does. I view the mayoral system similarly. The mayor can add a lot of cool things to everyday avg gameplay and you can even make decisions based on how a node has developed in terms of where you hang out and what citizenship you pursue. If a node's buildings and buffs and location are aligned to your play-style, it will feel cool and the mayor is a part of that 'node'. But for a mayor to be too pivotal or powerful in the overarching avg. player experience, it takes it from the background to the foreground for me which causes a number of issues. If being a mayor is too powerful or cool, gameplay will revolve too much around who has the position, trying to get the position etc. I am not signing up for a politics simulator, but an MMO where I can explore a new world and have adventures. I am already weary of how much emphasis their is on citizenship and your node in terms of grounding the player to one location.
If node policies were binding or crucial for player success (whatever that means) then I'm not sure I'd be as into it. We already have guilds and a number of other affiliations where we work towards a collective goal. To throw your node (particularly, resource management in the node) into that mix with a similarly aggressive role as guilds just feels too much for me.
I was just replying to your earlier comment about me asking people to change my mind. Let's reset though, could you clarify what point you'd like to discuss? Or were you just making some observations? Sorry if that sounds aggressive :P
And before doing so, I absorbed every bit of information I could possibly find.
I actually DO agree that I probably made a mistake, in my arrogance, by supporting it already. I looked at a design base and thought 'well obviously it will be proceeding from those principles to this outcome, and that outcome sounds great!'
The main reason I would say not, is something that the wiki doesn't really impart to you from reading it.
Steven believed that a LOT of the stuff he wants to implement was INNOVATIVE in specific ways. I supported the game thinking that he knew those things had already been done and implemented in other games and due to the 'let's combine the best of all those games!' mentality.
But on the other hand, so far, only three things have disappointed me in the direction, so it probably works out.
As for what you are signing up for, consider it this way. There are always wanderers, there are always those who just want to play an MMO world.
But you need the other side. The ones who BUILD it. If you don't attract THOSE sorts of players, you get one of those content-desert sandbox games.
The game needs both sides. The 'I just want to play a game and travel around and do cool things' people, and the 'I want to build a whole Metropolis and run it' so that those people have somewhere to travel TO. In that sense, the Land Management system, the politics, they might not BE for 'you'. They're for 'me'. And it is 'my job' to make it so that you 'have the cool Coastal Node Town with a sort-of-identity and history' to visit in the first place.
That is what I perceive to be 'the point of a Node system'.
I understand your sentiment, but I think you are conflating the node system and the land management system (which this post was originally about). If the land management system was deleted, it would not break the node system whatsoever. It is an additional layer they are thinking of adding on top of it. I do like the idea of nodes, I am excited by the prospect of re-igniting my passion for community-based gameplay. But the creation and development of the node occurs much more passively than you describe. Nodes develop based on players doing normal MMO 'wanderer' type things, just with a little less wandering geographically speaking. They are developed almost as an emergent property of player activity. And no matter how much you want to believe you can step up as a leader or mayor, the system is designed to select mayors based on merits that do NOT include being good leaders or logistics experts (that is reserved for guild leaders). The nodes even have a lottery system sense in my eyes, where in for example if you play the same identical battle royale 50 times, you will have multiple people winning.
The players who make decisions about the node and its direction will do so based on personal whims, not grand visions, because the grand vision does not put you as mayor (unless you are a streamer/guild leader and get voted in via voting in a scientific node) and you only have limited time and resources as mayor. I worry you are romanticizing the world building. My actions are just as likely to build this world as yours are as far as I'm concerned and that is quite an attractive feature of the game in my mind. I am not signing up to play your (no offense) or any other single player's vision of the game, and I am happy the game does not support that.
@NiKr All the MMOs I've played required grouping, for some parts at least, but even in EQ I've solo'd a lot, on a ranger and than a SK nonetheless! (reading LotR helped for the downtime). I've grouped in most games too, but I've always been more interested in the pick up group side of grouping. The thing is, as games came and went, the grouping parts became more important in aspects of the game that didn't really draw me in. And good luck to anyone who wants to tag along with me in my silly game sessions, I wouldn't want to bore anyone with trying to climb a cliff or figure out if it's possible to get over there without aggroing all the mobs.
And you put the finger on why I've never really bothered with guilds: I've always considered my faction to be my "metagroup." Games with PvP and no factions I've played are limited. Didn't play them long enough for a guild to become important. 6 months of Star Wars Galaxies, but there was soft faction options (covert imp or rebel), maybe 3-4 months of L2, was playing with offline friends then, and never saw PvP in all the time I've played.
Enough about me, we're hijacking the thread hehe.
I'm trying to say that the land management system is an integral ENOUGH part of the Node system functioning at a level where it is actually interesting, is a requirement.
Otherwise it is just 'who did the biggest numbers today?'
The Elite Dangerous Background Simulation got MORE complex over time, not less, because the simplistic models got gamed, zerged, and twisted.
Nodes don't WORK without a 'Land Management System'. And then the whole game falls apart. The reason they don't work is because it's too easy to just get the server to manipulate situations with numbers without any of the emergent things that Steven seems to want.
I'll put it another way.
It's Steven that is romanticizing this, I'm just supporting it. I think I can fairly claim at this point that this isn't about me, and you're basically giving Steven feedback on the vision. All I'm doing here is explaining to you 'why the vision works', and some experiences that imply that it is necessary. Your responses mostly lean moreso to 'Oh I don't think I want to play a game with that vision'.
In a way, that's 'between you and Steven'.
Ok now that is a VERY strong argument for the land management system that I had not thought of. It does indeed change node progress races in an interesting and actionable way (by the population, still not single players). I will think about this and reply when I get a chance.
I was almost certain there would be nothing more to say about the topic between us haha but this is a really good one.
There's no point to discuss really - it's just the observation that it may not be possible for other people to tell you.
Sometimes it's show; not tell. So... you might have to wait to test it for yourself in order for you to understand what people are trying to explain.
Military nodes will have some sort of avatar fighting. We don't have any clue how you gonna build up your avatar, but if it's in any way related to resource requirements - guilds will do it better than solos. And if it's pure skill after all - guilds will most likely have the best pvpers in their ranks, or at the very least can "buy" the best pvper.
Economic - guilds pooling money.
Scientific - guild having the majority vote within the node.
So pretty much all nodes can be "gamed" by a proper hardcore guild. And such guilds usually have "grand visions" and will use any means necessary to do that. So I'm betting on most nodes being built up with a vision in mind and some majority of citizens following that vision. There's even a potential of PKing those who don't follow the vision, but I hope that kind of conflict gets resolved with diplomacy. Yeah, I just wanted to see what experience your opinion was coming from.
I don't disagree with this. But having the better vision is not what will determine a winner. As you say, we don't know all of the details but assuming guilds can indeed game this easily, the guild who games hardest will win. But the player they elect could go rogue, and this 'gaming' needs to occur every election cycle successfully for a guild to maintain their reign as mayors to continue their long term vision. All of that while competing with normal in-game conflict in guild wars and sieges etc that may take away from those resources and the ability for multiple groups to combine resources to defeat incumbents... As you can see, there are tons of barriers to overcome for any single node to have a singular grand vision enacted on them by a guild. And ultimately, the guild/player with the best vision will not necessarily win, the guild with the most resources will. And my main point isn't even the barrier to entry, it's the powers the player has once they are mayor. Again, we are lacking details here, but the scope of their role on the node seems to be not oppressive in any way (and by oppressive I mean dictating the session-by-session play experience of its citizens). If someone's vision doesn't fuck with my day-to-day gameplay I don't mind living in it.
Edit: for the record I don't think I disagree with Steven's vision in any way. The fact that my impression is that the mayors do not have oppressive powers over citizens means that our ideas of the role of the mayor is aligned enough for it not to be a problem for me.
This is all tangential to the main point of this thread though, which is to criticize the land management system. I love the node system for the record and have no strong thoughts about mayors at the moment due to the absence of details.
no
One thing that I think I remember from the gathering stream is that with good land management, better gatherables could be unlocked. This sounds like something people would work towards.
For all the people expecting to roam the world gathering/adventuring wherever they want, remember that you can't mail gathered mats, bank-style-storage is tied to node housing and items stored are only available in that node, gathering mats in your inventory drop if you die, and inventory space will be limited.
That beings said, as long as the extremes of consequences are outside the bounds of players, events still have potential to correct/reset/influence then all for it.
Lessons learned through Ultima and so many other land management games since, can only help direct the mechanics to an interesting system..
But a system that makes people 'bad apples' for just harvesting in a specific location is the problem, not the available mechanisms for labelling people as 'bad apples'. A system that makes other people's PvE interactions have negative consequences for others (essentially makes it pseudo-PvP) and earns their ire is not good in my opinion as you are taking away more and more choices to exist in the world without actively bringing about friction and conflict. It is just over-doing it, the game already has so many ways this is true and gathering has historically been a down-time activity for most players which is already less true in ashes due to OWPvP.
I also just re-watched the part of the video where they describe land management and did not find any mention of unlocking 'better' gatherables, could you provide a time stamp for it? The only discussion about positive effects of land management have been spawn rates and total resource availability. And I think it's very hard to feel rewarded for not gathering too much, by being able to gather more later. If 'land management' was actually some eco-quests that the node could collectively work towards with thresholds, that would be more understandable than just an always observing system that looks at all resources gathered at all times.
Roaming the world and gathering is fine and not incongruent with anything. You can do light gathering and hope you make it back to your home node alive, or you can go somewhere far, do some local gathering with local storage and make use of caravans to amalgamate your resources later if you wish. But yes, I am very aware that some of AoC's systems can be anti-exploration and strongly promote staying near your own node depending on the implementation.
Ok so, the reason I thought this was a strong argument I had not previously considered is that I do think there is little to no systems described to prevent the most populated nodes from reliably out leveling less populated nodes.
I think ultimately, there absolutely are better ways of achieving this goal than the land management system but the land management system could indeed HELP accomplish this (gathering is only one of the ways nodes gain xp), although I still think it would benefit from several tweaks. For land management to successfully dissociate nodes, the rewards of the system need to at the very least be on par with the negative consequences and importantly they need to be rewarding at the individual player level.
Currently, and I think this was a misstep by Steven during the announcement, virtually all of the examples given of how the land management score could impact a node are negative with the positives being mostly 'maintain your resources' and the best positive presented is higher spawn rate of resource nodes with high(er) probability of better resources. The system needed to be described better from a positive lens as the negatives are intuitive and easy to imagine. We are told if we take too much from the land without giving back there will be consequences but never explained how practically or mechanically the players can 'give back to the land'.
The reward structure needs to be rewarding for the node, especially in terms of node xp gain (maybe just a straight up buff to node xp gain haha) but also there needs to be reward incentives for single players who help maintain good land management. Not harvesting too much so you can harvest more later is not a good reward, higher chance at getting rare resources is also not a good reward imo (or at least is insufficient on its own). Since we don't know how we can give back to the land, one way we can propose for this to be tackled is to have eco-friendly harvesting methods. Maybe lower yield, maybe longer duration, maybe lower durability eco-friendly tools, and the more you part-take in this eco-friendly harvesting, the more rewarded you would be when/if node-wide thresholds of land management score are met. This way individuals can have a decision point that actually will match their outcome while still being a team/group effort to achieve.
I do think I would be much more amenable to the system if it made these 2 changes: 1. better reward structure for nodes (node xp) and individual players and 2. some way to reward/punish players based on their individual contribution.
I don't think game Devs should play at environmental activism.
Land management and crop rotation are great when there is an authority to manage it, i.e. a farmer managing his land.
It's not going to work for 'public land' in a video game because there is no authority to manage it nor an individual consequence.
The vast majority of the current loud generations (Millennials and Gen Z) are self-centered, with a hardwired Me First attitude. Do you think they'll spare a moment for the consequences of their actions if it doesn't fall on them?
Asshattery among these generations is the fundamental trait. Do you think this system won't be abused for lolz?
This whole system is a bleed over of current politics and needs to piss off from our fantasy game.
Proper land stewardship and taking care not to damage the natural world are excellent goals, but they need to be focused on in the real world, NOT IN VIDEO GAMES!
edit: I grew up on a truck farm and have researched crop rotation and soil management. Please search 'truck farm' before saying something stupid.
They are more or less a lost cause....Some might stay around however.
It will be a free for all cluster fudge at the beginning to warrant any server side resources attempting to handle the metrics.
I think in this first launch phase of the game the land management systems should be detuned/toned down. there will be likely a phase of server mergers and after this period at which point the land management can start to ramp up into action. As players learn the systems in place.
Holistically speaking land management is not just gatherers...crafters and their combatant customers are all inclined to participate when the environment is required to provide for each of their needs...
In otherwords solo players might actually have to engage with other players to achieve common goals...which I am afraid to say to those solo players is better for the long term health of the game and perhaps might even sway a player preference into a more engaged socially involved gamer in an MMORPG.
The most fertile place is the friction area between Chaos and Order.