Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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. And that's a totally viable opinion. That's why I didn't really argue with you in the first place
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. 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). 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. 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. Very good point. 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they have 1000 people they have 1000 mounths to feed
That is not even a problem
Only jealous people care about that
he literally said 1 huge guild split into multiples...like a 2k player guild split into 93457485748 30 players guild.
@NiKr I think whoever declares the siege will be able to select which guilds will participate as attackers, that will prevent 1 large guild from attacking themselves (unless they get to declare first)
But I also think that having a castle would counteract that exact problem. Castles will provide a ton of money to the guild, which can then be used to support the second half of your huge guild. And if they're well-fed, there's fewer reasons for them to disobey or leave their guild. I see. I guess this would work out to prevent the issue I presented, though I'm not sure how people would react to this kind of limitation. Mainly because I'd imagine most people would want to control a castle that controls their nodes of operations. Having a castle that's on the other side of the world from where you mainly play would most likely be quite detrimental. And moving your entire force between several different nodes every single month (in case you successfully siege on castle, but then fail to defend it) would be even more detrimental, cause it would put unneeded strain on your guild members. True, but as I said in a different comment, if alliance benefits are big enough to justify high need of it from the players, there might be bigger balancing issues than just the castle stuff. But we'd need to know either way and we don't. Imo this would only come from having a shitty GL. I've seen quite a few great GLs hold together several hundred people w/o much issue. And those "second class citizens" weren't even paid as much as they would be from an AoC castle's taxes.
Now I'm not saying it wouldn't be difficult, but I'd imagine that any guild that would even attempt this kind of maneuver would already be well-kept, well-led and well-coordinated enough to be fine with this setup. Then I'm fine with that setup as long as the players can at least attempt the siege. And as the current design stands, imo they can't. You only need 1250 because for this scheme to work you just have to fill out the attacker slots and you don't care about the defenders.
As for the reliability of the scheme, like I said, the guilds that might even attempt this would be the huge ones that have a ton of money and power already. We could assume that they have at least the core stack of 120-250 people who have good gear, who have high (or at least above average) skill and who are well-coordinated enough to have gotten to a point where they hold a castle.
Even w/o hardcore defenses, that kind of group would have very high chances of defending a castle from simple attackers. I've seen it done countless times in L2 and there you didn't even have defensive siege equipment.
And even if somehow the defending guild only gets mercs to be the attackers and not half their guild, and if those mercs are somehow super high skill high gear high coordination dudes instead of plain small groups looking for ez money - only one of those merc groups would be able to get the castle onto themselves and they would only be able to hold it for a month. They wouldn't be able to sell it to anyone, because they wouldn't have the means to defend it from those who'd want it. Mainly because they'd now have bad merc reputation and they might lose future income opportunities, for backstabbing the defending guild.
And again, I've seen this kind of stuff happen in L2 too. As akabear mentioned, a few times castles would go to random groups of people, just because they managed to outsmart the defenders (though usually it was just a bad play on the defenders' part) and get the castle onto them. Those groups just benefited from having the castle for one period and that was that. But they'd have good rep purely because they won it "fair and square", rather than backstabbed their deal partners.
And those who did backstab these kinds of deals had bad rep for quite some time. Hell, I've known people who had bad rep across several private servers and several years. Some people couldn't even join voice chats, because their voice was known as that of a backstabbing rat. Though these kinds of situations were fairly rare, in the grand scheme of things.
yeah and the attackers can also fight back and prevent themselves from being pked
10,000 online in a server, 5 castles, assuming 500v500 your assuming 5,000 people on the server are part of an well organized, trusting alliance... nah more likely 1 of the 5 castles is, thus leaving 4 castles open to siege.
Plus if you sign up for a siege, each player should display the number of sieges you have been in and your related stats, that way the guild who started the siege can determine if they want you and accept you or not accordingly. In the case of the castles since the siege is automatic each month then to sign up your guild must register and each individual member accept or decline. That way even if you have 2 large non allied super friendly guilds working together its still a pain in the ass to setup each month and will likely fail at some point.
Like Noanni said, if they can maintain the organization required then seems fine to me.
But as stated - it also creates a boost / boom for the economy.
Two - Steven has mentioned that players are gonna need to make a decision - either for the guild or for their self interest. There will be conflict of interest that will eventually come up.
I wish I can find the video but I remember Steven talking about - players will need to decide, do they help their guild or help their node cause of their freehold being at risk.
Also - Inner guild conflict is GOOD imho. This provides even greater risk for larger guilds and they are gonna need strong structure to maintain power. Easier to move small amounts vs large amounts. This allow other medium size guilds a shot.
I've seen groups like this held together as well, for a few months.
The kind of leader that you would need to hold this kind of arraignment together for a number of years (which would need to be the case to matter) is rare. A game like Ashes may have 4 or 5 of them spread across all servers - in order for this to be an issue you would need at least that many on each server (one defending each castle, and another one to attempt to organize an attack) - and that is just the leaders.
This is why I don't see it being an issue.
The guilds that could attempt this are already in a position where no one is going to seriously contend their castle. Chances are, they will be in a position to retaliate on any guild that DID put up a serious siege attempt - meaning no one would bother.
Basically, my point is that by the time a guild is at the point where this kind of thing is viable, there are a number of other reasons as to why their castle is safe anyway.
BUT
...a substantial proportion of the members of a guild strong enough to take a castle like castle battles. Right? Many of them will be unhappy if their guild leadership deprives them of the fun of a castle battle when they play a 'sure thing' strategy where nobody really gets to fight. By the next month, the guild might start losing lots of members, members who don't get that much of the wealth of having a castle, because those guys are playing AoC so they can be in big castle battles and have Fun.
In other words, a majority of players will probably WANT battles, even if there is a chance of losing. Guild leaders who deprive membership of fun may not lead much of a guild very long.
People essentially want to win close fights as often as possible.
There is in fact often a split between the playertype that plays the game only to 'keep winning no matter the cost' for whatever reason, and the playertype that wants to actually experience the game conflict-wise.
The latter cause opportunities for loss that the former can't tolerate (especially if they ACTUALLY LOSE a few times).
But this doesn't solve the thing described HERE exactly in ASHES I think because of the limit on amounts of sieges. If you're that good AND the game is such that the only people who could give you a fun fight are already your friends/pseudo-allies, I would expect this to happen MORESO than not.
It's almost a waste to 'get sieged by some ragtag group of randoms who think they can beat you' if they aren't fun to fight, when you could be fighting your cool pseudo-guildmates instead. This may not be true for things like politics/story where you get more 'story' out of it, we're talking about JUST the battle itself.
Basically you could 'choose not to lock down the capacity for others to do all the political stuff that is fun to experience' and then still lock down the Castle Siege, with your main 'loss' being that your opponents might just give up after a while on the political side. But that would have happened even faster the other way after you stomped them once or twice.
If anything, you might get better content for longer by 'disrupting their attempt to siege you occasionally', just often enough to keep them trying.
EDIT: This is particularly true given Ashes' system for winning the Siege. It would be SUPER difficult to 'prove' that the attacking guild 'intended to let the person who was trying to channel in the Throne room get killed all five times' without making it hard to STOP such a person from succeeding.
So you'd just 'have a full on, real battle, then every time someone 'tries to claim the castle' they 'happen to fall in combat'.
If the guild is organizing to siege it's own castle in order to give players siege content because no one else on the server is able to challenge them, I again fail to see the issue.
Sure, others on the server "miss out" in sieging the castle, but since there is a cap on how many people can participate in the siege, and the guild in question is basically filling that cap, what is the issue?
It is not intended gameplay. I highly doubt Devs will like people exploiting things and finding ways to circumvent indented gameplays to game the system.
But this isn't an exploit.
We can't even say it's unintended. Why wouldn't it be 'intended'?
Even if it was, the solutions wouldn't be based around changing the Siege mechanics really.
I don't have a problem with it, it comes down to how players 'avoid having to risk losing'. But avoidance of risk is also a strain point for guilds, as pointed out.
wait, how do you know how it works? as far as I know, the scroll is for declaring. like you do a long quest, get materials, etc, then you craft this scroll, you use it, and declare war...so whoever crafts the scroll first, gets to declare.
the casting thing is just to capture the castle once you are in the siege. same as l2
I was thinking about limits too a few days ago but in the context of personal caravans.
A group will be required to successfully attack a caravan.[7][8]
I assume that means a party, not a raid. So a caravan will have up to 8 defenders and 8 attackers.
Once the defenders win, will they be safe the rest of the path to the node?
If a new attack can be initiated, the caravan defenders might see themselves fighting for a long time, wave after wave, trying to reach the target node.
This game mechanic feels artificial. If 40 players know a caravan transports a legendary material and want to take it it, maybe the game will prevent all of them attacking at the same time to keep the fight balanced.
If a cool-down is added, the caravan defenders might trigger attacks just to prevent others attacking.
While this could work, I think players who advanced on the path of being bandits will know from further away that a caravan is fighting in the area and will gather around it. Who will join the 2nd attack then?
The problem with the castle caravans and sieges is that the bandit progression makes less sense because the owner of the castle can change every month and this negative reputation cannot be built up - it should be cleared when the owner changes.
But what could help in the castle caravan case, is declaring a war against the guild which abuses the caravan system and fight them before they join the caravans.
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 the above situation, the server as a whole - minus the guild in question - is unable to offer up a real challenge. This isn't enjoyable for either side.
Why would the intended gameplay be the least enjoyable option?
More to the point, since the server will know that they don't stand a chance, they are not likely to even try (experience bears this out). Why would it then be unintended gameplay for that guild in question to not still be able to enjoy a siege as opposed to not having a siege at all?
At this point, your argument here is kind of "no gameplay is the intended gameplay in this situation, and players had better not have any notions of attempting gameplay!".
While some people would enjoy the fact that their guild has a castle, most players want the actual content that comes with that - the sieges.
For the most part, if you are a guild leader and are preventing your guild from having access to content of any type, you are not doing your job.
This ties in to why I don't see this whole thing as a problem. In order to pull this off, I think we all agree you need a good guild leader. A good guild leader would not deprive their guild of siege content. If a guild is good enough to actually take a castle, they will want the sieges that come with it. As such, the only way I see any guild actually attempting to engineer a siege so they are fighting themselves is if there literally isn't anyone able to offer up that contest in a siege.