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
@George_Black i just noticed...
Castle sieges occur in the open world but may become instanced based on testing.[14]
For castle sieges there will be just a a declaration flag.
I think castle sieges are easy to initiate unlike the node sieges which require many resources.
The fourth week is declaration week, where other guilds have the opportunity to lay down their declaration flag or to sign up as a defender of the castle.[30][5]
Then could you clarify what you think this line means?
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]
Ya it gets to the point more numbers is just a mess, unless they have multiple objectives so sustain that many players in a fun way. More players = things lean more towards aoe fest.
I want it to be costly to get a siege scroll for the reasons I outlined in my previous post. I also want it to be costly to prepare the defenses of the castle every month, to a point where it'll be really hard for one 300 man guild to get the stuff for both defending and attacking every month, so they can't cheese the system that way.
I think it's perfectly fine if small guilds can't easily afford to place declaration scrolls for castles. A guild controlling a castle should be sizable and strong IMO, with many dedicated players who can handle the grind and the competition.
However, that's not to say it should be impossible for small guilds of course. Apparently there are different qualities of scrolls and I assume that also means different costs. We don't know how the system works yet, but I assume guilds can prepare in advance for the quest and get most, if not all, the necessary materials first. So small guilds may not be able to afford getting a siege scroll every month, but perhaps every 2-3 months.
In fact, this is an advantage all attacking guilds should have. They can stock up materials months in advance and prepare, while the defenders have to go through the motions every month, because they don't know when someone serious will place the siege scroll.
If some guild was way too strong and had pretty much no registered attackers - they were free to go to another castle and help whichever side of the siege. And rarely this could lead to this strong guild's castle getting sneakily taken, because a very tricky attacker managed to get inside the castle and cast the seal inside.
I'm assuming that Steven wants to transfer this experience onto the node sieges, with them being the open ones. And maybe that's why node taxes can't be taken out by players. But considering that node sieges would mainly influence just the defending side (because I doubt that too many citizens would care much about sieging someone else's node), the politicking kinda goes away.
Castle sieges could attract the bigger part of the server through involving a ton of guilds and would be the culminating "event" of every month, but with limited participants and potentially instanced sieges - none of that would happen.
So unless metro sieges will somehow be happening every month - imo Intrepid will be missing out on one of the biggest attracters of the game. That kind of spectacle would not only attract players to the game, but would most likely interest streamers as well. And I'm sure that open castle sieges would be beyond laggy, but I think that the lagginess would be worth it (and metro sieges would be the same, so it's not like Intrepid's avoiding these kinds of situations).
I was planning to answer when I get to a decent device with a keyboard and mouse where I can press Ctrl+F but i see Nikr clarified that part.
I remember Steven saying in a video that the resources needed to initiate a siege are big, compared to what defending needs to spend to build defenses.
In case of castles, which are lvl 3 nodes, building up is modified to allow faster and lower effort. Even having a similar scroll mechanic, I think the castle siege is easy to be done compared to one against a node because the intention of the game design is to encourage this activity as a weekly / monthly event, and to prevent proper node siege spam.
When I looked a few months ago on wiki to this section, I came to the conclusion that the two siege types are mixed on the same page and can cause confusion. Might be that we'll have to ask in the Q&A a specific question.
I don't think Steven is trying to replicate the experience of either L2 or Archeages sieges here. I think he is trying to take both of those games and fix the issues with their siege content.
The first thing he has done is made it so sieges aren't once a month things. Sure, it may be once a month per castle, but a player is likely able to find a siege on their node every few days if they look. To me, making siege content more common seems to be the driving factor with how siege content in general is designed in Ashes. Basically, Steven took sieges from L2 and Archeage and decided neither were right for Ashes.
So, rather than being a case of "take this experience from this game and place it here", it seems to be more of "take this content type and make it more common, so players can experience it more than once a month".
I mean, the corruption system tells us that Steven isn't above just pulling something out of one game and using it as is. Thus, we have to assume that if the siege system isn't just pulled out of a game and used as is, the intention is for sieges to not be a replication of any other games sieges. He has changed it because he doesn't want it to be the same.
So while it is true that players who're interested in purely the gameplay of a siege itself could probably find one at most times, due to there being 85 nodes, no one outside of that pool of people would really care about other nodes' sieges. And unless node mayors are all involved in guilds and have some deep politicking amongst themselves, I doubt that too many guilds would care for node sieges either. Though obviously that'll have to be proven wrong or right after release.
But my main point in this particular context is that of a missing spectacle. We'll have 3 assured node sieges spread over 3 weeks leading up to the castle one. In theory, those node sieges would function as any other node siege, which would mean that anyone can come there and fuck shit up. This would then mean that those 3 assured sieges could attract a toooon of people (namely the ones who'd want to topple the castle defending strong guild). Yet after those 3, potentially big, sieges we'll get just a limited (maybe even instanced) siege of a castle. To me that seems weird at best and a bad design at worst, and most definitely kinda backwards.
And that backwardness is only amplified by my worry that bigger guilds, that are already more likely to hold those castles, would then use the system in their favor and limit the amount of attackers to the best of their ability. And I would personally prefer that to not be the case.
I'm curious.
You seem to be looking at castle sieges as if it were content for all. Not saying you are right or wrong on that, but it is how intake your stance here - with sieges on the castle proper to be the pinnacle event for all.
If you instead look at castle sieges as being for the <10% of top end PvP players, something others aspire to but are unlikely to ever achieve, the way we understand sieges in Ashes to work makes sense - at least to me.
That said, I do expect to see some changes still in relation to the earlier node sieges associated with a castle siege. My assumption is that either it will be made so that you need to declare an intent to siege a castle before these all start, or you need to successfully siege all of these nodes and then declare a siege on the castle. There may be something else they do, but indo expect changes/clarification/refinement in regards to that.
And the current system wouldn't allow for those 10% to fight each other, because all of those below would be glad to get even the slightest bit of power and the money that the defending guild could pay them (in case they go with merc guilds for this scheme) would provide them with that little bit of power.
As akabear has mentioned, later on in L2's life (especially on official or long-living private servers) castles would rarely change hands due to the power of their owners. And when they did change hands, it was either due to some deal or a very sneaky player. And while most deals were made between the strongest guilds, I've seen quite a few happen between the strong and a few week ones, especially when that one strong guild needed to remove another strong guild from another castle w/o dealing with a yet another strong guild.
And in Ashes those deals can't really be made, because of the limited participant slots. Now if Intrepid manage to raise the castle siege to a 500x500 battle my worries would be quelled somewhat, but we'll have to see if they can achieve it.
Man I would LOVE to see 250 people work together without a single one of them wanting to take the power for themselves or start a counter guild on their own to completely destroy the system. Honestly when was the last time you saw 250 players working together perfectly to farm gold without anyone getting greedy or anything going wrong? I don't think you have to worry at all. And if you actually do have a time when that many people worked perfectly together I would love some proof because that deserves a spot in gaming history.
Sadly I don't think I have any screenshots from that time, so you're free to not believe me.
Wym not to brag that totally deserves bragging! I gotta look up some videos of people leading guilds like that. That many people working together would be killer to see!
I think, like Corruption, you'll have to test it to know.
Even though you have confidence in Corruption because you have experience with Karma gameplay.
Yeah, but was that guild a top 10% PvP guild, and were you actively preventing your guild from meaningfully participating in the games top tier PvP content?
But even though we were like that, we still participated in sieges, we still attacked very strong guilds during those sieges (failed quite miserably) and then teamed up with another strong guild to try and topple the strongest guild on that server. And we almost succeeded during that siege, but we teamed up too late (cause like I said, this was a spontaneous alliance) and didn't have enough time to try a few different approaches.
And in the next wave of sieges (L2 had 2 waves for 2 different sets of castles) that big guild helped us get a castle of our own, which we then had to protect ourselves from several other guilds. And the helping guild wasn't even registered to that siege, so they helped us purely because we helped them attack the strongest guild in the previous wave of sieges.
All of this wouldn't be possible if the L2's castle sieges had limited participants or instanced battles. And like I said before, I think Steven is trying to achieve these same situations during Node sieges. But I personally don't see why node citizens would care much about other nodes. And Steven is trying so hard to push the narrative that guilds don't control the nodes, and I even feel that he might push for system designs that prevent that kind of control (though I'm not sure if he'd go that far).
And if guilds aren't as interested in foreign node sieges and citizens themselves only care about their own defenses - that would lead to fairly rare node sieges that only involve the attackers and the defenders, rather than having a much bigger impact.
L2 was built on guilds and castles were the biggest guild achievement, so pretty much every guild (outside of super casual ones), at the very least, participated in sieges. And if there was even the tiniest chance that they could get the castle - they'd try to do it.
Ashes nodes won't really be like that. Or at least they don't seem to be like that in the current design. Most citizens will most likely just live their random semi-casual lives and not care about what happens to other places, cause they wouldn't have much of a benefit from any given outcome. And castles seem to involve even fewer people into their processes.
I do hope that I'm wrong and that somehow it all works out in the best way possible, but right now I just don't see a reason why castle sieges should be limited, while node ones aren't.
I don't think this would happen at all relative to Nodes. What gives you the impression that it would be so?
I consider 'the thing you're looking for' to be a Node Siege function, and the Castle Siege function be for a different type of gameplay.
But unless you're at some higher point in that system, I'm not exactly sure what would push a plain node citizen to go defend another vassal node that's on the other side of their metro. I could maybe see how metro's citizens might care a bit, because the survival of their prestigious node relies on all the lower ones providing them with node XP, but I don't think we've heard about any direct connections between the vassal nodes.
Hell, if a neighbor falls, which then leads to the fall of the metro - your own node might have a chance to level up, so unless you reaaaally care about the metro's specialized policies and boons (that is if they're truly big enough to feel their impact in day-to-day life) you'd probably be all for the fall of your neighbor.
Now maybe it's my pvper experience talking or just some innate cultural difference, but that's just how it seems to me. From the currently presented design, I see no reason for people to care enough about other node sieges to get involved in them. Let alone sieges across the damn world that would take you ~1h to get to, far from your home, fighting unknown people for the slightest chance of what, a bit of loot that you might not even be able to get back to your place?
But again, I do hope I'm wrong. Mainly because the game would be much better off if I was, I just don't quite see how I'm wrong if I am.
Hiring mercs to fill up attacker spots might garantee you the castle defense victory, but those mercs wont come cheap, specially if they have someone from the attacking side offering them something as well.
That's why I cant really tell if that mechanic will be unfair or not for the moment.
A lot of spying and backstabbing can go on too, which would make things interesting.
As for actual "allies" in a sub-guild or secretly posing as attackers when they are actually on the side of defenders.. I would strongly prefer something to prevent that, but thats going to be very hard to accomplish. As you say, eliminating the "attacker" limit might solve it.
I can't say that you're wrong, only that my EXPERIENCE is different. And I can explain why.
The TYPE of player who is interested in/good at PvP situations, the 'soldiers', the 'bounty hunters', the 'heroes'.
Those people's gameplay IS 'responding to threats and engaging in Siege battles'.
If you are a 'Soldier' of Lord Mayor NiKr's Metro Diagon'Al, you aren't stationary. You're roaming to help your Nation, and in turn, people of your nation are 'helping you', even if relatively indirectly. This is your content.
So while you won't necessarily get 'Fisherperson NiKuar' rushing to defend a Vassal Node on the other side of their country, you will get a subset of people that definitely do that, or who support this. This is how I have experienced the three games (one MMO tier, one sorta-MMO tier, one much slower Strategy/RP) that I've played. This is the consistent outcome.
Those that DO this build big nations, those that DON'T, tend not to, with the overall result being it works exactly like that.
I believe it will matter moreso based on the demographic that finds Ashes interesting, but we can speculate that the demographic Steven is AIMING at are the ones that play political stuff enough to pull in others like it.
But we'll only learn this after release (maybe even a few years in), so yeah, purely speculation for now.
And as I said before, having 500x500 castle sieges would definitely help with my issue, so for now I'll just hope that Intrepid can achieve that successfully.
The reason I mention the Steven target demographic is pretty simple.
If Steven builds Nodes this way and wants the game to work this way, 'having a game where people ignore this' is technically a design fail condition. He might manage to make a very popular game, a very well loved game, but the game would not DO the things he built it to do.
Idk about Steven but this would disappoint me. Even if it was just 'acceptance that people didn't want this game type in large enough numbers after all'.
But my point is that from the perspective of someone whose goal is to make a Node Game, making changes that would make it less of a Node Game because you aren't SURE that there's enough demographic for it, wouldn't help your cause.
The good part is, I think a server can manage with just about 300 'serious politics' players and that they WOULD spread out if they wanted to experience different things. Even some 'lobby game' people seem to manage, simply because if they can level without being bored out of their minds, they'll reach the point where there's always SOMETHING going on or upcoming.
Unfortunately once again the only reference I can give is for 'not a Fantasy game'. I don't view the outcomes as likely to be different, but maybe they would be.