Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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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
Working as intended, and I love this design. I hope we get to test it soon so you can get meaningful feedback based on data, a dozen people saying a system is garbage after a 10 minutes dev chat about it doesn't mean much.
I love the node systems and the player driven aspects of the game, looking forward to test and play this, I'd hate to see yet another game going for what is 'safe' where everyone can play their singleplayer campaign in a lobby world just minding their own business.
People that don't want to be bothered, and engage, be part of a guild, get to know their mayors and be part of a real mmorpg community with all it's ups and downs have plenty of good games out there that allows for that.
And the angle of the light from the sun reflecting off mars hit the swamp gas, and that's what you saw....
I like the system too, I just hope while we're doing our ecological warfare there's a method that flags people so they can't grief a node and be protected by the corruption system. As well as enough systems to let players do quests to raise the land management score back up.
If you are not the citizen of the node you are in, you will become flagged as a combatant for 30 seconds after gathering.
This encourages players to stick to their own area and gives them the tools to properly manage their node against outsiders. It isn't forcing pvp on gatherers they are making the choice to move into a riskier area if they decided to go outside of their node.
Slap a paten on it and ship it out Steven gogo.
If this is true (and determining if it is true or not is it's own discussion) then the thing to do is to leave gathering as it is.
For most players (at least that I know) gathering is considered the lowest common denominator activity in an MMO. It is the thing most players do when there is nothing else to do. If you have plans with friends at 8PM but are able to log on at 7PM, no worries, spend an hour gathering.
I'm fairly sure it is obvious to all of us here, and I have no doubt at all that you would agree with this statement - but you don't mess with a lowest common denominator activity without explicitly providing a substitute activity to fill that void. Any change to gathering along the lines of what has been suggested by Intrepid (let alone the places posters here have run with it) removes the concept of gathering being a lowest common denominator activity.
If an acceptable activity cant be conceived, you shouldn't mess with gathering.
No swamp gas involved at all.
Don't be too hard on yourself. #lotsofswampgas
See, now you're posting at a Mag level.
The land management system doesn't have to mean doom and gloom for some gatherers at all. It can add strategic and political aspects to gathering resources that I've mostly only seen in Eve Online before, which to me is a good thing. It can add variety and spice and unpredictability to a system that in many other games have none.
Clearly some people like routine. In some games they have their little gathering route they can log in and complete in 20 minutes, with somewhat expected results. Ashes might not be able to provide that experience day in and day out with a land management system that keeps things fresh and malleable. I think that's good. There are other games for that.
My main request for the land management system is that it allows for players to actively increase the land management score of an area in equally significant and rewarding ways. Don't just make systems that are destructive by nature, where the only way to counteract extinction of an area is to stop all gathering through inaction or by force. The example @Vaknar gave with two competing nodes is good and something I want, but I think there has to be more to it. I also want the other side of the coin, if you will.
Please let us be good stewards and wardens of an area. Let us plant trees and flowers and help wildlife grow by feeding them, or even breeding them and releasing them into the wild. And let us be rewarded for doing so in more direct and tangible ways than simply having healthy land around us:
Indeed, the parent-vassal relationship in AoC is a game mechanic to bring the nodes themselves together.
If players have to care about the well being of the parent node, that means they also have to see the sibling nodes as allies. Players will have to defend caravans running between sibling nodes, which are indirectly vassals of the greater metropolis. For the same reasons they should care about the resources. After-all these resources go into the caravans which somehow sustain the nodes themselves.
Then there might be alliances and trade agreements between nodes of different metropolis ZoI.
In that case, those allied players should also have the incentive to protect the resources which eventually will reach them via caravans. If they don't, then it may lead to war.
Which node will become a metropolis can be seen as a random event even if is not.
Players who want to be in high level nodes, will have to move as soon as their node becomes a vassal.
Which might eventually be expensive because
Taxation rates scale based on when a player joined a node as a citizen. The goal is to exert financial pressure on node populations by making taxes increasingly expensive as nodes advance, rather than putting in place hard population caps.[7]
So guilds formed before the server starts buy cheap apartments in lvl 3 nodes and might have to stay where they are. Or might be split between a few nodes but always trying to stay in the same Metropolis system.
When a node falls and guilds or solo players move, going directly to a Metropolis might be way too expensive.
And might even be risky. If the metropolis cannot defend it's vassals, then it may also fall soon.
In this context where players should avoid over-harvesting, my wish is the game to offer the possibility to burr the actions of a player.
What I want to see is a system where there is a trade agreement between nodes and that is broken because players of one node go and take resources from the other. Or the trade agreement survives because it turns out that only a few players broken the rules and the node took some actions.
It should somehow involve reputation and deception and attempt to identify those who break the rules and declare them enemy of the state (or something similar but less drastic).
It can also happen (if the game is made so) that the resources are enough to sustain a node to stay at level 3 or 4. But as it grows, it need more resources. If you as a mayor of a level 4 node allows harvesting too many of them, the parent node or the metropolis itself may get upset about your policies as the they are responsible for the survival of all nodes in the structure.
I'm not trying to say that everyone is the same. It's just that, from what I've seen/heard so far, quite a lot of people dislike systems that prevent them from playing how they want to play. And while there's obviously those who prefer that (me included), I feel like they're more of a minority within their group.
Just like a lot of people like to say (justifiably so sometimes) that most owpvpers just want to kill weaker players instead of having equal pvp, even though from my experience that is not the case.
Doesn't have to be most OWPvPers to be a significant problem for non-PvPers.
While yes, the seas are a permanent thing so, in theory, you can never go there because it would always flag you, but I'd imagine that relatively speaking there's a chance that the amount of explorable stuff in the sea would take even less time than any future LMSed overharvested lands.
Open seas imply no connections to nodes, which means that their dynamism is way lower, if there is even any. So, theoretically, there's only a few places that you could explore there and they won't change in the future (unless expansions). But LMS will be influencing stuff as long as players farm lands. And as that UO video says, players will always be locusts. And Intrepid would have to balance the LMS against that. True, but if it's a fraction of owpvpers against thousands of pvers - how many of those pvers would get killed often? But a ton of pvers complain about the system as a whole just because THERE'S A CHANCE! And quite often they say seem to imply that this chance is almost always 100%.
But they seem to forget that raiders quite often don't have their preferred content (Noaani not included cause EQ2 had hundreds of raids for him to constantly farm), not even talking about AoC's open worldness of bosses. PvPers also have preferences that include time-limited content, so they have to do smth else in the mean time (for me it's sieges).
In other words, almost every type of player spends some amount of their time not doing their preferred gameplay. So why should gatherers be an exception to that rule? Dying once or twice every several hours is but a tiny fraction of the overall gameplay, while sieges would only happen once every few weeks (unless you participate in each node siege and start them yourself) and top raids will have long respawns and in Ashes they'll be contested too.
And even then! As you said yourself, the gatherer can usually just move to another location and avoid their potential attacker, while raids and sieges might just not be happening for some time so other types of players will literally have nowhere to go to enjoy their preferred content.
tl;dr everyone will have times where they can't enjoy their preferred content, including gatherers.
This Mag guy sounds awesome.
Mag>Noanni.
I have a command for you to follow Noanni, since I've reached Mag level.
I ORDER you to reply to as many posts on these forums as possible, especially this post. Now every time you make a post, you'll remember it was because I told you to.
Yeah I would agree that they will just move elsewhere, like grazing. We seem to get little drips of info as time goes on, which causes a stir.
I mostly just want to touch on these three points.
To the first, yes, in Ashes you cant always fo what you want. However, that doesnt mean this needs to apply to literally every activity in the game - in fact it should not.
For your second and third points, Intrepid need to change their intention here.
When you are talking about players coming to the game by themselves and finding their way, node first perhaps makes sense. When you are talking about players that have been in the same guild with the same people across multiple games, for multiple years (or indeed multiple decades, as is now the case for some people), persisting with this notion that players will care more about their node than their guild shows a total lack of understanding of human beings as a species.
Does gathering generates xp for the node? If so, then:
1) Is outside the Zone of Influence?
A: Than that's just being smart, there's no abuse in any kind here
2) Is within the Zone of Influence?
A: It depends if gathering generates xp for the node...
If gathering generates xp for the node:
If gathering doesn't generate xp, then:
I could not find yet where is the proof that gathering gains xp for the node.
Will that generate xp for B?
In the wiki I found:
How about gathering?
How about PvP?
Mainly because I believe semantics to be important, yes, literally every single thing in Ashes has limitations and players can't all get and do what they want. We can argue about the degree and nature of limitations we like though, and land management vs. no land management is one of those.
Au contraire!
Humans are tribal, yes, and we generally want and need that group affiliation, and I think we both agree that guilds are akin to tribes right? Ashes is taking that to the next logical step with the node system. It perfectly aligns with human nature. Tribes form alliances. Alliances form mega-alliances. Once you combine that with holding land (nodes), we start seeing nations forming. Call it kingdoms if you prefer. A single unaligned node can be considered a city-state, and historically they weren't typically comprised of a single homogenous group. There were all kinds of groups and factions within. Rome grew from a city-state to being a vast empire.
A node can have patron guilds, defined basically as the guilds that contribute the most to the node. This provides direct and tangible benefits to the guild and it's members: Stockmarket access, abilities, guild hall, guild emblems for armor, and guild missions to improve the guild. This incentivizes guilds to focus on one node, or a few nodes at the most, in order to get those benefits.
Node and guild affiliations can be complementary to each other and they can be at odds with each other. Much of that is up to the players to decide individually. If a guild leader decides to break with a node, there is a good chance they'll lose a bunch of guild members if they are fond of their current node. I think this is an amazing thing. It keeps the sometimes bloated egos of guild leaders in check and it provides the players with options and the game overall with a whole new layer of dynamic politics and conflict and reconciliation that not many games can provide.
In RL I would sure as hell rather belong to a nation than to a tribe with only loose alignments with other tribes. And if my tribe in the nation decided to go against said nation, and I believed in the values and ideals of that nation, I would seriously consider switching tribes. I am not alone in this I am sure. In the game I have some RL friends I'll be playing with, and we'll come to a consensus and take it from there whether to leave the guild or leave the node if a conflict occurs. And yes, I understand the concept of old guilds that go from game to game. I am in one that was formed 20 years ago. I joined it 14 years ago.
Tying all this back to land management, if Intrepid can deliver on the idea that node affiliation really matters to a lot of people, sometimes even over guild affiliation, and they provide both constructive and destructive ways to manage the land, I can absolutely see the value in it. It's a lot of "ifs" for sure, but that's what A2 is for.
That is an incredible bartle score.
I remember I asked you one time something like, so what do you do when your village is attacked? And you said something like, "Sometimes you get back from exploring and the whole village is gone." lol that reply still kills me, so awesome.
Anyway, I think you're going to be pretty safe exploring everywhere except the open sea. And even there it will be "safe" in the sense that it's harder to catch people by surprise on the open sea in many situations. In Archeage, it could be pretty hard sometimes to catch people at sea who don't want to be caught.
Depends on a lot of things though, the width and length of the lawless zone. The different speeds of ships. Draw distance/visibility on the sea. How long it takes to get a motionless ship underway etc. I dunno, we'll see.
It does not deplete all resources within a zone. And, you can still go Gather in other nearby Nodes.
And... even if it did, that wouldn't be permanent for that location - it would be temporary for that location.
Similar to Node Ruins, rather than similar to the Open Seas.
The Open Seas is a large area and is dynamic; not static.
So... we disagree.
Open Seas is still connected to seasons and other forms of dynamism.
"Way lower" is an unsubstantiated claim, so not worth discussing.
Players will likely be locusts if there are no consequences for being locusts.
Again... we will have to see if there are consequences for depleting an area - like triggered Events - rather than just needing to move to a non-depleted region to farm while waiting for resources to replenish.
Fraction only has to be significant enough for Non-PvPers to choose not to play.
Frequency only has to be often enough for Non-PvPers to choose not to play.
What fraction of a population has to mug me before I choose to move from that location and live elsewhere?
How often do I have to be mugged before I choose to move from that location and live elsewhere?
When I drove from DC to Los Angeles, people advised me to drive around Texas.
I don't know that "preferred content" matters.
It's not really about content. The issue is non-consensual PvP.
I don't know what you think "the rule" is.
You are trying to equate Gathering with non-consensual PvP... and failing miserably.
Yep. The Gatherer will move to a different location and then return when resources replenish.
So... if auto-flag on the Open Seas were somehow temporary... I would play... and then return to the Open Seas during the periods when normal flagging with Corruption was active.
You seem to be tryng to equate "preferred content" with non-consensual PvP... and failing miserably.
Ok, I kinda figured you weren't referring to me but just wanted to make sure. I don't think Steven neccessarily assumes that though. I'm not in his head, but that'd be a pretty broad assumption for someone who has been mmo gaming for decades, like Steven. I don't know how he wouldn't realize that that's wrong. I think it's pretty common knowledge that there's a substantial segment of gamers that just want very casual, relaxing systems that don't take much thinking.
I think he's just trying to break the mold some. Ideas that break the mold have a chance of being wildly successful, or falling flat on their face. But that's how innovation happens generally.
I think this is where we're envisioning different things with this system, because we don't have it in our hands, in the game. I envision people generally still being able to casually gather in offtimes. Because players would be able to just move to an area that is not currently overharvested. My assumption is that overharvesting isn't going to be this constant, major wrench in the works either. But I could be wrong, I don't have a firm grasp on what Steven is envisioning.
But just to put it into perspective, this system will exist somewhere on a spectrum. Examples of the extremes of this spectrum - it could take 500 players to successfully overharvest an area, and when done it's really just a minor or moderate impact on the resources and node. On the opposite extreme, 20 players just passing through on the way to a dungeon could stop and start harvesting for a few minutes and accidentally overharvest the node, with major impacts, like slow spawning resources for hours afterwards.
Extreme examples of the spectrum. I imagine it being somewhere in the middle of the extremes and gatherers still generally having access to gathering either way, but perhaps with some inconvience sometimes.
Obviously if this system goes through, it will upset the people in the camp of "I just wanna go around gathering pressing E on things at all times, with no hassle, no complications, ever. Ever." There's only so much Steven can worry about that though when he's trying to innovate and create compelling systems. And the people in that camp...I think they're going to have even more issues with the current design of the game regardless.
Anyway, I'm officially rambling. But just to sum up, I think you're envisioning more of a savage system than I am. I just wanna gather but damn the node I'm in is overharvested, great. Well let me go to the next node over. Overharvested. Ok next one. Overharvested. On a DAILY basis. Fuck it I give up. Yeah that would suck. But we don't know yet what exactly Steven is envisioning. I don't at least.
Nodes are large entities whose membership is essentially open and unregulated. You wont see or directly interact with most members of your node on a weekly basis, let alone a daily basis.
Guilds are smaller entities with restricted membership. You often know the people in your guild well, in game and irl. It isnt unusual at all to have met family members of guild members.
Your guild mates are people you generally play the game with daily - if you are heavily involved in an MMORPG, it is rare to have a day where you do not interact with the bulk of your guild in some manner.
Now, the issue here isnt which of these two would people pick to be in - most players in Ashes will be in a node and in a guild. The issue here is that when the interests of a node and a guild collide, will people pick their node (nameless, faceless masses) or their guild (actual friends).
Right, which is why I didn't say it like that at all. The point is that many people want to be part of something bigger than their immediate group/tribe. Sometimes people need to make a choice though, and if they choose the node, they'll find a different guild to be a part of that share that vision.
First of all, you are most likely underestimating how much people will interact with fellow node-citizens. Maybe YOU won't, but that is a different matter. I can 100% envision guilds forming out of node-citizenships, or just be group and raid and gaming buddies in general, centered around node chat. It won't just be "nameless, faceless masses" as you say. The bigger the node, the more faceless masses there are though, obviously, which is one of the downsides to being in one.
I understand the old guild thing where people know each other in RL. We've done christmas parties, summer parties, became RL friends, etc. Two of my ex girlfriends were guildmembers. I have a couple of friends who met, got married and have kids that met each other in a guild. Many other became couples the same way. I get it. But that type of guild is not the norm. By far most guilds are not people that meet up in RL or become RL friends. Of course those types of RL friendship guilds are way more likely to stick together rather than break up to stay in a node. But they also constitute a minority of the playerbase. I hope you know that most guilds don't do that at all.
The node system in Ashes seems to be built for that too, intentionally or not. Node and guild affiliation conflicts are simply another thing to cause node wars and dynamic changes on the servers, so the world doesn't become stagnant.
Are you afraid the node system will challenge loyalties in your guild?
Yeah I mean I think Noaani has a pretty negative view of the node system and it functioning how Intrepid intends it to. Same with this land management system.
And it's a fair view. Nodes haven't been tested really. We don't know how it will all play out. That's just where we're at. It's cool that we have a company willing to try out new, maybe even revolutionary, ideas though.
I agree with Noaani that in a general sense, guild loyalty will be greater than node loyalty. But there will be some crossover where node loyalty wins out, and interesting politics that play out due to nodes. That's just all my own personal theory until it's tested.
I think you are right in that it may cause some interesting interactions. or more dynamic relationships between guilds/nodes/players in that I can see scenarios where guilds or nodes start making decisions that very directly impact you as a player much less/more than others so you might find yourself at a crossroads (I know for me personally this won't happen much). Something like a guild being paid to disrupt a parent node which might have an effect on your freehold or crafting set up and severely impact how you make money. Do you side with you guild or do you try to hold on to your set up or other scenarios like that.
Even if we assume that all those kills were against different people, that's still just a fraction of citizens of one node. Unless each node has several such PKers who somehow manage to kill 5-10 people every day, while also removing their PK count so that they can repeat this forever - the amount of gatherers impacted by non-consensual PvP is negligible.
And when we consider that those victims can move to another location and that Steven promised to balance the system in such a way that PKers can't in fact keep killing dozens of players daily - we have even fewer death at the hands of PKers.
In other words, at the bigger scale of the game the impact on most gatherers will be miniscule, if there even will be one. But the only thing that non-consensual PvP impacts is that preferred content. You don't want to play the game because forced pvp prevents you from enjoying your preferred content. Some gatherers want pve servers because they want to enjoy their preferred content in peace. Same applies to all the raiders who want to have more instanced content or those same pve servers - they all want owpvp to have no impact on them when they're partaking in their preferred content.
Which brings us to the LMS. If there is a way for other players to influence people's preferred content, and especially if they can completely prevent it - to me that seems like the same thing as non-consensual pvp. Now, you disagree with me that this is even a possibility within LMS, but I don't think we have any details either way, so it's hard to know who of us will be correct. The same applies to open seas. I'm not sure that open seas will be as dynamic as nodes, but you seem to think otherwise. I'd like to be wrong on both, because to me that seems like a better design.
Non-PvPers don't care about fraction of PvPers who PK.
Non-PvPers care that non-consensual PvP is as minimal as possible.
Non-PvPers don't really care about that.
Steven also promised that the game would release before 2020.
Steven also promised that the game would not have permanent zones that auto-flag as Combatant, where Corruption is not a penalty for PKing.
Why should anyone care what Steven has promised? Everything is subject to change.
Doesn't matter how many times an individual PKer can PK once there is a permanent zone that auto-flags as Combat - because PKing does not occur on the Open Seas.
The Open Seas, everyone is a Combatant with half-normal death penalties, so that is not balanced to deter or minimize non-consensual PvP. It forces players to auto-consent for PvP.
So people who are against non-consensual PvP are unlikely to be willing to accept that ruleset.
I guess we agree that Land Management will not be an issue for Gatherers.
Your comparison of that with non-consensual PvP is still tragically flawed.
No. I don't play games with non-consensual PvP.
I especially don't play RPGs with non-consensual PvP.
So I have to be convinced to play a game that has non-consensual PvP.
The Corruption penalty has the potential to reduce non-consensual PvP to a frequency I am comfortable with. A permanent zone with no Corruption is an automatic deal-breaker.
I have played the Carebear Challenge where I only level by Gathering resources.
I don't see how Land Management could be a deal-breaker for Gatherers.
It is normal gameplay for Gatherers that when resources are depleted you Gather elsewhere until the resources replenish.
Land Management might increase the time it takes for resources to replenish, but it's still going to be temporary rather than permanent.
I think the other players would have to not only completely prevent the Gatherer from Gathering but also force them into some hardcore activity they did not wish to engage in - like train a difficult mob on them.
Which is closer to being flagged as consenting to PvP, but is still significantly not the same thing.
I think what seems to you like non-consensual PvP is likely to be flawed because you have the mindset of a PvPer, rather than the mindset of a non-PvPer.
I didn't say that the Open Seas will be as dynamic as Nodes. I said it will be dynamic.
If the Open Seas is dynamic at all, that means explorers will want to explore the changes in the area.
I can see this happening as well - but this is my point.
If you are one of the nameless, faceless citizens of a node (of which there could be well over a thousand in a Meteopolis), and you decide to form a guild from select people within that node, then you have literally just done the thing I am saying will happen. You have formed a smaller collective that you are inherently going to be more loyal to than you will be to the greater node.
This is kind of my point. The smaller the collective is, the more restrictive entry to it is, the more loyalty people will have towards that collective.
I mean, what is the point of forming a guild out of players within a node if that guild isnt then going to become your primary social unit?
Since guilds are by design selective membership and smaller in number, and nodes are jot selective in membership and larger in number, the default status for most players will be guild before node.
People that have been in guilds for years (or decades) are indeed the minority. However, they are not the only people that will out their guild before their node.
What I just dont see at all is why any person would pick a group of people they didn't chose to associate with over a group of people they did chose to associate with.
That is essentially the difference between a guild and a node.