An issue with Castle Sieges

A recent node discussion touched on node sieges which in turn reminded me of the current castle siege design.

Castle sieges are supposed to have a limited amount of participants. This design seems faulty to me because it would lead to absolute domination by the huge guilds. Any guild that has over 500 people (split into several sub-guilds), or alternatively can afford to hire enough mercs, can just register half of their forces to the attacking side and prevent anyone else from even attempting to siege the defenders.

And even if Intrepid manage to support 500x500 sieges, the defending guild can hire mercs to fill up the limited attacker slots. Castle taxes can be used freely by the defending guild, so anyone who holds a castle will have a ton of money and would only benefit from buying mercs.

The main question of this thread is whether you think something should be done to prevent that. We don't know if Intrepid have addressed this issue already (if they even see it as one), but I think some preliminary discussion could help them decide one way or the other, before releasing more info on the topic.

I am personally against allowing this kind of "exploit", but don't see a good enough solution, outside of making the slots unlimited. If you agree that something has to be done about this, any ideas would be appreciated.

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Arya_Yeshe

There is also this: in EVE Online the defending corporation (guild) can actually receive aid from other corporations (guilds)

Example adapted to AoC:

guild A: 250 people
guild B: 50 people
guild C: 70 people

A declares war on B
C offers aid to B

Now C is automatically at war against A for free, in a defensive war, the war between A and B ends, then the war A and C ends too

So in the caste siege day they will have 250 x 120, plus my idea of delayed spawn/ress for A
plus possible mercenaries
plus my idea of bounty hunters being able to particpate as Mercenaries
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/54509/bounty-hunter-mercenary

Everything I said makes sense for node sieges and castle sieges:

being able to aid defenders in wars
bounty hunters being able to play as mercenaries
being able to hire npc mercenaries
delayed spaw/ress

Will this "fix" everything?
No, because you can't fix the fact that guild A has 250 and guild B has 50, but at least this gives many options for B

Arya_Yeshe

NiKr wrote: »

A nonsensical off-topic response that in no way relates to this entire thread. Got it. Thank you.

I was editing and adding the Castle siges was added in the end of the reply

check your shit up before you start flamming otherwise I will flame you as hard as I can

Ludullu

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

I was editing and adding the Castle siges was added in the end of the reply

check your shit up before you start flamming otherwise I will flame you as hard as I can

And yet nothing of it addresses what I wrote in the OP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQCU36pkH7c

Dolyem

What if picking one side or the other marked those players as enemies/allies for the month/whatever period of time? So not only would that guild be marked at war with its own counterpart guild that cheesed the siege, but the counterpart wouldn't be able to assist the main guild when all of the other players that were attacking in the siege fight them throughout the set time in open world?

Edit: could also prevent trades as well

George_Black

It's a bad design to make sieging instanced.
I hope they change their minds at IS.

Taleof2Cities

NiKr wrote: »

And yet nothing of it addresses what I wrote in the OP.

We're getting close to the monthly development update stream, @Nikr ... just two days away.

It's a great time to get your question (questions?) in for the Q&A session of the stream.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

It doesn't have to be 2 different guilds. Could just be subguilds of the same one. And I've had a ton of cases where our ally list in L2 was full, but we had several more allies during sieges. The system-based allyship is not necessary to be allies in the game.

I get all of this, but again, I don't see the issue.

Guild cap in Ashes is about 300. Alliance cap is 4 guilds. This means that an alliance can have up to 1200 players in it.

Once again, my position is that IF you are in a position where you have the full trust of more than that many players, the castle will essentially go uncontested.

You will always hit the point where players will not bother (there will be easier castles to take over) long before you are able to achieve this.

Again, this is why I just don't see the issue.

It is perhaps best described as a paper issue, rather than a real one.

I want you to conduct a thought experiment based on this comment of yours.

NiKr wrote: »

Also, considering the potential profits from the castle, I'd assume most guild would be completely fine with doing this thing once a month for some nice stacks of cash. Don't even have to be allies with the defenders.

If a guild has the coin on hand to bribe literally every player on a server to not siege their castle, is that a valid gameplay tactic in a sandbox game like Ashes?

If you answer yes to the above, what if they literally bribe everyone on the server other than one person? It isn't as if that one person is going to siege the castle by themself, so is it still a valid tactic?

If you answered yes, then what about if they bribe everyone other than one guild? Still valid?

What about if they only bribe enough players so that if all of those that are left decided to attack, they wouldn't be able to beat all of those that had taken the bribe. Still valid?

If a guild has that amount of control over that many people, then yeah, they deserve the right to not have their castle contested via a siege. If you want to siege it, you need to first deconstruct that guilds power source. If the castle itself is a power source that strong, then every guild with a castle will be in this position and castles will be broken. If it is just one guild with a lot of influence, then of course they are going to be able to do things like this - and the game should enable them to do such things.

novercalis

Defending Guild and it's guild member can defend their castle every month.

Attacking players will have a cool down to Seige a castle, 90 days. Meaning they can't attack the SAME castle again. They can choose to participate in another castle(s).

Thus Mega Guilds trying to abuse the system can only do it once every 4 months
Alliance Guilds can only help you every 4 months.

This now creates a system of other fairy large guilds that has just enough guildies (250-300) to attempt to seige castle 1. If they fail. They cant attack castle 1 for the next 3 month, so now they need to decide to target another castle, migrate their guilds - creates conflict of interest for guild members showing loyalty to guild or to their citizenship/freehold. Having flux of players moving around the world would be nice.

Probaby also helps economy with all the movement.

Strevi

Castle ZoI will often cover ZoI of different metro nations.
If one large guild can hold a castle this way, then all can.
If all guild members are happy their taxes to go to the guild then they'll support this action.
Also the 5 castle sieges might happen at the same time and those busy with such complicated ways of preventing enemy attacks, will not be able to siege other castles.

Eventually this boils down to human nature.
Greedy large guilds might lose internal support. They'll grow lazy too.
Payments to mercenary guilds can be seen as tax for protection. From which metro nation do they come? They may become a threat too.
If human nature leads to order and discipline, then maybe there will be no pvp at all

Just inocent NPC murderers.

Players who attack the castle caravans should have priority in participating in the siege.

Nerror

I think the main limiter will have to come from the cost of the declaration scroll. Castle sieges aren't just for anyone who shows up to attack. An attacking guild has to complete a quest to get the scroll, and that could be an expensive endeavour. On top of that, they might not be the first there to declare, and even if they are, if they don't manage to defend the guild leader during those 5 minutes it takes to lay down the declaration scroll, another guild may beat them to the punch.

From the wiki:

Guilds are able to sign up to either siege or defend a castle over a week long declaration period.[32][17]
Once a guild registers for the siege a scroll creation quest is initiated that guild members may participate in, and it becomes possible to lay the declaration scroll down as soon as the quest is completed.[40]
Multiple guilds may register to attack and the first to complete the scroll and lay down the declaration may begin to have their members register to attack (there will be a cap).[40]
The siege scroll deployment is a 5 min rooted cast that alerts the region at the cast initiation and names the caster that must be the guild leader.[40][41]
If the guild leader is killed, the casting is interrupted.[42] The scroll will remain until it is recast. It will disappear if it is not cast within the declaration period.[43]
The scroll may only be placed in a ring around the castle.[44] The quality of the scroll determines the proximity to the castle.[45]

In other words, it should be prohibitively costly for the defending guild to pay both for the running castle defenses (building up the 3 castle nodes etc.), and for the declaration scroll. And even if they can afford it, if there is one or more guilds that genuinely want to attack and take over the castle, they can organize and kill the guild leader of the Fake Attackers to prevent them from planting the scroll until their own siege scrolls are planted.

Castles might require alliances to successfully hold. The strain on the ruling guild to keep compensating those alliance members might be too much if they include also having to fake attack themselves.

One thing I would like to see is that alt characters on the same account as the character that is in a ruling guild aren't allowed to participate in guild sieges as attackers. Right now guilds are per character, so in theory the guild controlling the castle can have an alt guild with all the same members that could lay down the siege scroll. I don't think that should be possible.

Sure, people can pay for extra accounts, but then we're entering the territory of making it not only ingame costly, but RL costly as well. The more hurdles against cheesing the system the better. If members of the ruling guild have to spend every moment ingame grinding for money and materials to both defend and attack, they'll grow tired of it after a month or two and either stop or find another guild.

On a side-note, I think the GMs should keep an extra close eye on the 5 ruling guilds per server when it comes to RMT. The temptation to throw RL money at the problem will be great.

novercalis

" And even if they can afford it, if there is one or more guilds that genuinely want to attack and take over the castle, they can organize and kill the guild leader of the Fake Attackers to prevent them from planting the scroll until their own siege scrolls are planted."

That wouldnt work - remember I am 600 strong. I will have the main guild defend and even gank / corrupt to protect my fake guild to get the scroll of.

"One thing I would like to see is that alt characters on the same account as the character that is in a ruling guild aren't allowed to participate in guild sieges as attackers"

2nd Accounts will be a thing, BUT to work with what you stated tho:
Players who are participating in a Castle Siege is on a cooldown. This affects ALTS. So you can only do 1 war per month on your account.
All Castle Siege wars should be on the same day/week and time, so they have to decide which war to participate in.

Then as I previously stated - they have a 90 Cool Down to participate as an ATTACKER ONLY to that SPECIFIC castle. This too is account wide.

2nd accounts strats IMHO is ok. It sucks but AoC is getting $$$ and $$$ = GMs and CSR

akabear

In L2, years in, guild ownership was not so heavily swung between the larger guilds. There were periods where one guild / alliance were just too strong and they held power.

Then there were times where there were financial / raid deals / trades done before the siege to agree to changes of ownership and the siege itself was thrown

But despite this, there were occasions where a rouge guild or even individual was able to complete the critical part of the siege and gain ownership unexpectedly.

So I wonder if it will boil down to the end mechanic of how the castle is obtained as to if a large guild will have over riding influence or not.

Jhoren

Nerror wrote: »

I think the main limiter will have to come from the cost of the declaration scroll.

One thing I would like to see is that alt characters on the same account as the character that is in a ruling guild aren't allowed to participate in guild sieges as attackers. Right now guilds are per character, so in theory the guild controlling the castle can have an alt guild with all the same members that could lay down the siege scroll. I don't think that should be possible.

Sure, people can pay for extra accounts, but then we're entering the territory of making it not only ingame costly, but RL costly as well. The more hurdles against cheesing the system the better. If members of the ruling guild have to spend every moment ingame grinding for money and materials to both defend and attack, they'll grow tired of it after a month or two and either stop or find another guild.

On a side-note, I think the GMs should keep an extra close eye on the 5 ruling guilds per server when it comes to RMT. The temptation to throw RL money at the problem will be great.

I think I agree with making it costly as an approach. Combined with how that cost can be all for naught if a competing guild stops you declaring for long enough that they can get their own people into the siege, it would be a good deterrent.

As for using alt characters, I certainly hope the entire account is flagged as "citizen" of that castle, just like the entire account is flagged as citizen of a specific node. This would easily prevent alt-guild shenanigans, aside from those with multiple accounts.

novercalis wrote: »

" And even if they can afford it, if there is one or more guilds that genuinely want to attack and take over the castle, they can organize and kill the guild leader of the Fake Attackers to prevent them from planting the scroll until their own siege scrolls are planted."

That wouldnt work - remember I am 600 strong. I will have the main guild defend and even gank / corrupt to protect my fake guild to get the scroll of.

If you're 600 strong and half the guild (aka the other guild(s) in the alliance) don't mind not getting any of the benefits of controlling the castle, even though they may even have been working hard to get the materials for the siege scroll, then sure, it'll likely require an alliance of guilds of equal size to attack and get their scroll off first. If nothing else that will provide for some epic 600 vs 600 battles.

I've done the whole thing with a large multi-gaming guild having to split up into two or more guilds ingame due to guild size limitations. Very few large guilds will be both big enough and tightly knit enough where half the guild is completely fine with working their butts off for the other half to take all the glory. Not for month after month at least.

Remember, the longer a guild controls a castle, the better the benefits for all, including all the nodes in the region, so switching out the controlling guild every month in a planned way will likely piss off one or more metropolises and all their vassals. They might want to topple your guild as well in favour of a guild that isn't cheesing the system. So you might be facing 6000 players instead of just 600. The only thing that can save you then is a server crash.

Yeah, this is an issue that needs to be dealt with, but I think the suggestion to make it very costly to cheese in time and resources is one of the strongest deterrents.

Mag7spy

George_Black wrote: »

It's a bad design to make sieging instanced.
I hope they change their minds at IS.

This is a pretty bad take.

1. You can troll a siege by going into the area
2. if you say area is blocked off by other players no difference if it is instanced you can't be there anyway
3. lag issues

Ludullu

Dolyem wrote: »

What if picking one side or the other marked those players as enemies/allies for the month/whatever period of time? So not only would that guild be marked at war with its own counterpart guild that cheesed the siege, but the counterpart wouldn't be able to assist the main guild when all of the other players that were attacking in the siege fight them throughout the set time in open world?

This could be somewhat of a solution, but then how would you account for the attacker guild dissolution? Do you somehow keep singular players as enemies of the defending guild? Does this then translate to any other normal guild interactions?

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

We're getting close to the monthly development update stream,Nikr ... just two days away.

It's a great time to get your question (questions?) in for the Q&A session of the stream.

My current question is about detargetting abilities. I'm more interested in that general topic, rather than minute details of other designs.

Noaani wrote: »

I get all of this, but again, I don't see the issue.

Guild cap in Ashes is about 300. Alliance cap is 4 guilds. This means that an alliance can have up to 1200 players in it.

Smaller guilds will have better perks, so I'd assume that the main part of the guild would consist of 4 60-member guilds. And the second half of the guild would be in a huge 250-member (if not full 300) guild, so that it's easier to fill out the siege slots.

If I was the GL, I'd give most money from the Castle to the second half of the guild to reimburse them for their work and loss of perks, while the main stack enjoys the perks and most of the farmed loot.

Noaani wrote: »

Once again, my position is that IF you are in a position where you have the full trust of more than that many players, the castle will essentially go uncontested.

And that's a totally viable opinion. That's why I didn't really argue with you in the first place

I'm mainly trying to address any and all solutions to the issue. If you see no issue, we've got nothing to argue about.

Noaani wrote: »

What about if they only bribe enough players so that if all of those that are left decided to attack, they wouldn't be able to beat all of those that had taken the bribe. Still valid?

This is where I have an issue. Mainly because the first few questions wouldn't be feasible for a server of even 10k players and because this particular part doesn't even work in the current design. All those who would even want to siege - physically can't. And that's my main problem. I've had sieges where we had puny chances of succeeding, but we could still at least try. And in trying we'd not only train the members, but would also see our weak points, be it purely gear or lvl or coordination or skill or whatever.

And with limited siege slots you just can't do that.

And as for "there's gonna be an easier castle", I really don't think so. It'll take just one successful foe siege to show all the other guilds that it's a viable tactic to protect what you have. Then the defending guilds will either gather enough people to do it, or will try paying enough mercs to do it. 1250 people would still be only a fraction of the overall server population, so it's not like that's impossible to do. And I'm sure you know that a lot of people like to join big strong guilds that "dominate" servers. So any newbish player who hears "ay, we're recruiting players into a castle-holding guild, come join us" - would immediately agree. And that foe attacking guild doesn't even need top lvl players to do what they need to do.

novercalis wrote: »

Defending Guild and it's guild member can defend their castle every month.

Attacking players will have a cool down to Seige a castle, 90 days. Meaning they can't attack the SAME castle again. They can choose to participate in another castle(s).

Thus Mega Guilds trying to abuse the system can only do it once every 4 months
Alliance Guilds can only help you every 4 months.

Would you then put a 90-day ban on joining a guild on every single member of a guild that has recently attacked a castle? Cause this suggestion breaks apart once the for attackers just remake their guild. Their only perk would be the size one, so it's not like any player would lose out on much. And depending on how difficult it is to level up guilds, I feel like the hardcore guilds, that would even attempt the thing I'm worried about, would easily level up a 300-member guild once a month to reap the benefits of a castle (stacking benefits too).

Strevi wrote: »

Players who attack the castle caravans should have priority in participating in the siege.

This is a very nice point imo. Especially if the tax caravans have the same sink as all the others do. This way the defending guild not only loses money, but also has a lower chance to siege themselves.

Two issues I could see with this is any potential limits on caravan attack participants (don't think we've heard about anything like that) and the detriments of losing a caravan attack. If the detriments are negligible - the foe attackers would just sign up for the attack of the caravans and do nothing there, just as they would with the siege. You could maybe link the siege priority with amounts of dmg done to the tax caravan though, so there is a chance.

Nerror wrote: »

I think the main limiter will have to come from the cost of the declaration scroll. Castle sieges aren't just for anyone who shows up to attack. An attacking guild has to complete a quest to get the scroll, and that could be an expensive endeavour. On top of that, they might not be the first there to declare, and even if they are, if they don't manage to defend the guild leader during those 5 minutes it takes to lay down the declaration scroll, another guild may beat them to the punch.

How big of a cost would it have to be though? If it's too much - you're limiting any smaller guilds from banding together and trying to siege a castle as one group, while the defending guild has the castle money (on top of general profits from being as huge guild). If it's not big enough to do that - the defending guild easily covers it.

Nerror wrote: »

One thing I would like to see is that alt characters on the same account as the character that is in a ruling guild aren't allowed to participate in guild sieges as attackers.

Very good point.

Jhoren wrote: »

If you're 600 strong and half the guild (aka the other guild(s) in the alliance) don't mind not getting any of the benefits of controlling the castle, even though they may even have been working hard to get the materials for the siege scroll, then sure, it'll likely require an alliance of guilds of equal size to attack and get their scroll off first.

Only bad GLs would have this kind of setup imo. The working part of the guild should get benefits for working. If my guild holds a castle for a long time because half of my huge guild is in a perkless 300-member guild - I'm giving most of the money from the castle to this sub-guild. The defenders would already have their benefits and would be getting the majority of loots, while this sub-guild would have the money to buy stuff and would get some juicy loots from time to time. Outside of that, I don't remember what other tangible benefits the castle provides to the guild itself.

Mag7spy

I can understand your concern though, in BDO people passed around castles and nodes without actually fighting for it and it kind of kills the siege scene. Which means ruining end game pvp if they can find a way to avoid doing it constantly and be free for like a month.

That is why i suggest for a 24 hour cycle to allow others to be able to dec as well and a random one picked. So if you are on top and have more resources than everyone else you can't always just self dec and won't be worth the mats.

DarkTides

Based on this answer, I assume they will let anything happen without creating systems to interfere...even though this is with respect to dungeons and world bosses, replace dungeons and world bosses with Castles.

Q: How will you stop big mafia guilds from owning all the good dungeons and world bosses by camping them?
A: The real answer to that is going to be what traditionally happens in a non-faction-based game where politics drive player interaction... Over time you have betrayals in the mafia guild and they splinter off into two groups and join the other side or it's like weird things that can occur in that regard. So I think that's the important way that will solve itself. I don't think the developer necessarily has to step in there and say no, let's railroad this politics or let's hand hold this aspect. I think that any time you have a bully, you're going to have a counter bully and that's something that we try to encourage as part of the politics process.[1] – Steven Sharif

novercalis

@NiKr The 90 days is an account flag toward that specific castle.
This prevents your main and alt from "attacking" that castle (Regardless of who owns it).

That doesn't mean it stops you from doing a Seige attack on another castle the following month. You will never not be locked out.

Month 1 = castle 1
month 2 = castle 2, 30 days
month 3 = castle 3, 60 days
month 4 = castle 4, 90 days finished
month 5 = castle 1 again

Defenders can always re-sign up to defend their own castle.

So the concept of disbanding guild and recreating to exploit the attacker cooldown is nulled and blocks you from any other toons on that account.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

I get all of this, but again, I don't see the issue.

Guild cap in Ashes is about 300. Alliance cap is 4 guilds. This means that an alliance can have up to 1200 players in it.

Smaller guilds will have better perks, so I'd assume that the main part of the guild would consist of 4 60-member guilds. And the second half of the guild would be in a huge 250-member (if not full 300) guild, so that it's easier to fill out the siege slots.

You are assuming the perks for a small guild are better than the benefits of being in an alliance. We don't know this is the case or not, but it is an assumption you have to be making here. If it is not the case, you will not be able to maintain the above structure - those in the smaller guild would demand entry in to one of the allied guilds.

However, if we ignore that, you have a core alliance of 240 players, followed by a second guild of 250 players. This now goes back to having to keep that larger guild in check. They all know that at any time they would be able to take over your castle. They also know that the core of the guild looks at them as second class citizens in regards to this whole arraignment.

Even if you are paying that larger guild, this is the kind of setup that absolutely will fail at some point. On the other hand, if the primary alliance is able to hold all of that together, then again, they deserve to have that castle uncontested.

This is where I have an issue. Mainly because the first few questions wouldn't be feasible for a server of even 10k players and because this particular part doesn't even work in the current design.

It is a thought experiment, you are supposed to assume it is feasible. It's like Schrodinger's cat - no one actually put a cat in a box with poison to test it out, they just assumed that it had happened and considered the results of that action.

And as for "there's gonna be an easier castle", I really don't think so. It'll take just one successful foe siege to show all the other guilds that it's a viable tactic to protect what you have. Then the defending guilds will either gather enough people to do it, or will try paying enough mercs to do it. 1250 people would still be only a fraction of the overall server population

A successful defense will show it is a viable tactic, for that one successful defense.

Making this work on all 5 castles would require 2500 people, not 1250 people - you need the core guild/alliance that does need to be large/strong enough to hold off a siege, as well as the 250 people to be on the attacking side.

If Intrepid raise sieges to 500v500, you suddenly now need 5000 people to make this work across all castles.

However, even if it were only that 1250 people to work across all castles, you now have every castle essentially defended by a fairly loosely held together agreement. Any point the guild that has opted to be the defending side in a siege decides to break that agreement, the castle absolutely will fall.

Even if I see a castle on my server defended in this manner, there is absolutely no way I would ever let myself get in to this situation.

DarkTides

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