Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I don't think it is reasonable to expect anything less while discussing the game. If the forums weren't aggressive, then that just means the target audience for the game aren't participating in the discussion.
Sure it does.
I am not aggressive. I am confronting peoples claims. I will leave it at that, since I noticed that you are a mod, and perhaps somebody has felt wrong by me and brought this to your attention.
The true ego comes out when you play the game.
They would do the same during a zombie apocalypse in rl
You're saying people would behave the same way they do when playing a game to if they were faced with a life and death situation like a zombie apocalypse, that it would be the PvP players only that would do some sort of fighting?
I'm absolutely lost at the takes on this I really am, I try and stay away from silly posts and offer feedback and such about the game but this is crazy haha.
I agree with your original post that players who are aggressive verbally in game via voice or on forums are often not competent as PvP-ers or PvE-ers.
But in a real situation, where law enforcement collapsed, survival would push people do things they do not normally do. I was not in such a situation though, so I cannot be sure. Is just an opinion.
My take is that there is forum pvp, or word pvp in game and out. My opinion is that those words can do more damage to people and wanting to play the game than the game mechanics could. The negative conotation of always using ones own feelings, not facts, as a crudgle to sway arguments. The use of hyperbole such as the terms: "many others agree with me", or "nobody will play this game" when they should say: "This is how I feel", or I will not play this game". You have to remember that negative comments travel 4 times as much as positive ones. This is from sales training. Word of mouth spreads fast. On the internet these forums will show on some agorythm as how positively or negatively the community feels about the game. Repetative posts about doom and gloom hurt the game, even if people say they are trying to help.
Solution is to take a breath, try to understand each other better before we post. I am guilty as hell for quickly posting things that sometimes I regret and feel like crap later when I re read them.
In real life it is totally a different scenario, and again its all how we are brought up and in what social conditions we are brought up in. Some people would simply not survive a zombie apocolypse because they think the police would come and save them so they just sit and wait, unarmed in their home. But that is real life, the game is fantasy. With both however words have meanings and the saying is: "The pen is mightier than the sword" So be careful of your word pvp, as it does way more damage than any in game pvp could do.
(sorry for the long rant)
Now I think it's best, after that quite frankly ridiculously crazy tangent, we focus the discussion of this thread back to the original question.
Ok. What was the original question?
Ah yes
Freeholds should not be for mega guilds.
Mega guilds should get something even better.
They get castles. Fewer in number, but with most prestige. And I will assume they will have crazy money making features just like in L2.
The FHs however is something that smaller, but competitive communities can look forward to. I am sure all of you, casuals or competitive have sat down and said to your inrl friends, "how good would it be if we could build and defend a home, with activities with which we can make gold".
And no mmos has ever done it. They are all cosmetics and decorations and DPS test dummies, and they are solo.
I have played ESO for 6 years and I used other peoples houses to DPS parse (since I could not be bothered even with the free home and dummie I was given as a participation trophy) and I never ecnountered anyone in those homes, full of decor.
And the times that the guilds would invite people over to someones home, I said to my self "why? why would I go there? What's there to play with?"
AoC has meaningful FHs. AoC is aimed at competitive players. It makes sense to create sought after, hard earned FHs. But there need to be protections from the zerg guilds.
People always complain about zergs and zombie armies and aoe lagfest, but nobody, during the development tries to find ways to counter the MASSIVE benefit of sheer numbers on your side. If anything IS said "what would make it better to run a big guild??" Mistake.
Large guilds are a problem for any meaningful independence of real communities, meaningful guild memberships.
We need to address the FH situation.
It's fine to argue about things, it's just better not to be too direct atleast. It's no issue when you're making firm statements on how things should be from your perspective. I'm just trying to make sure this thread is productive. At the end of the day, even though Ashes is geared towards to a specific audience, there'll be something for everyone, even casuals. can do. I won't derail this thread any further.
And on that note, we do have A2 for a long while, which will allow Intrepid to gather our feedbacks and ensure we get meaningful PvP, and also meaningful freeholds, castles and nodes. While I personally think Intrepid will find a way to sort out the zergfest and large guild numbers, how would you want them to do it? What would be the best way in your opinion?
Make guilds register a "home node" and only allow members of that guild to purchase freeholds in that node.
Remove the ability of people to assign FH "privileges" to guild members, because the number of guild members could reach 1000 or so.
Restrict the ability of people to assign FH "privileges" to family members only, since family members are capped at 8 or so.
This way a guild of 50-80 members has 10 familes which potentially own 10 freeholds. Real tight community of real friends. A true guild. Even if they have less FH that let's say 10, this smaller number of guild members can alternate their access to a FH and use it, by rotating family memberships.
A zerg-guild should not be allowed to achieve the same productivity. The way is to deter people from wanting to join a large guild to find safety and comfort in large numbers, unearned strength in mindless AoE numbers.
How do you deter people from joining a zerg guild? You show them that they won't get to enjoy FHs owned by the guild. Only the core members will, even though everybody feeds the money machine. Or... they can wait for in a looooong queue to rotate family memberships.
Zerg guilds need to be addressed. Look at every mmo. There is no counter to when a large guild full of strangers, steamrolls every proud, skilled guild with numbers 10-1.
Steven has said that smaller guilds will be empowered to counter larger guilds.
I think a great method to do that is to show the players in Vera that joining a large guild will most likely exclude you from FH gameplay.
Large guilds can still break up in small guilds and form alliance. Same leader.
However by locking the "privilege" of FHs functions to family size, the large number of players joining a zerg guild has to wait forever to use a FH.
Have you regularity payed money to a streamer?
I did. Not mmo players though.
But I can imagine a popular streamer, or a few of them joining together onto the same server.
You want the game to make their life hard and force them to split their community somehow? Or punish their followers if they play on the same server in their guild?
The game offers the framework and players use it as they want. You can chose to join a server where the chaos is higher. Maybe it will take some time to find the right server and you will have to give up the one you started on, right after release... but if you want to play a few years long, it is worth doing it.
Hopefully will be more servers to try out. But I am fine with one too. Maybe I will stay with the players from the Alpha 2 server.
What if being apart of a guild was a requirement to place a freehold, but the guild talents had to sacrifice member space in order to increase the amount of people allowed to use a Freehold?
Don't take this question too seriously, I just woke up and its the first thing I thought up when I read your idea. I don't like the idea of freeholds being locked to family only, I like the freedom to give at least guild members access. I do however understand your take on mega-guilds as well. So if freehold placement requires guild membership and that talent point that would normally go towards growth, you would end up with medium sized guilds that have a few freeholds spread across 100-200 players rather than restricted to 10 per estate.
but yeah, let me know your thoughts.
Lemme stop you right there, when I sit down on the PC I play the game with my friends or alone (singleplayer) and that's it. What streamers are you talking about?
Why are you paying a streamer? What kind of joke is this? Pay him for what? What did they do for me?
People have been playing mmos before streamers and waaaaaaay before people started throwing money to someone on the other side of the planet, watching him play games.
IS, which is developing a passion project, doesn't have to take into consideration any streamers.
Steven is attending online personas in order to promote his game, and in return he is honoring them with his presence, whilst driving up their view numbers. Fair exchange, and that's where it stops.
I am happy with any way that comes to the same result. Feel free to open a topic about it.
As long as the devs get the feedback that FHs are a good way for independent guilds to counter zerg-guilds and promote social gameplay of real communities.
Comparable to the point that a full guild vs guild will favor the larger guild, but a small skirmish will favor the smaller guild.
You definitely do not understand that kind of people.
But "waaaaaaay before..." the guild leader had only the game as a medium to interact with their followers.
They are skilled at creating a community. Just like creating a company, some end up with a small one others becomes more popular.
Take Twitch and Youtube away from them and they may still be good guild leaders if they can organize or find somebody who can.
You are at a disadvantage playing only with your friends, unless you have many of them.
I understand now why you think big guilds need to be stopped.
But Steven wants to drive them away too?
I mean, Steven plans on breaking guilds down in to smaller units with battalions or what ever it was - guilds breaking themselves down in to smaller units isn't a stretch.
What if large guilds, named Mafia, Mafia1, Mafia2, Mafia3, Mafia4 all have small individual numbers, with great passive skills, yet by Mafia10 they have the numbers too?
Hahahahahahahaha!!! There are no good mmos to play out there and you believe that ANYBODY will turn down AoC when it releases? Everybody and their gamer grandmother will play. Whoever says I won't play is lying to themselves.
Your laugh sounds evil. Your server will be interesting.