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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.
Node Sieges Should Be Frequent But Individually Indecisive
ClintHardwood
Member, Alpha Two
Currently, node sieges have the following mechanics:
1) Last up to 2 hours
2) Completely destroy nodes and scatter inhabitants' possessions on success.
3) Provide nodes with varying length immunities on failure (t3-30 days, t4-40 days, t5-50 days, t6/metropolis-60 days).
I believe these are good mechanics, but they have several fundamental flaws.
Firstly, a metropolis node is too vital to be able to fall in a single two hour siege. They are the cornerstone for far too many mechanics including dungeons, homes, apartments, freeholds, processing and crafting stations, field mobs, and so on.
Secondly, a single timeslot cannot be attended by everyone. Imagine not being able to play during those two hours only to come back to raiders looting all of your items you didn't even have chance to defend.
Thirdly, a node falling in a single siege undermines the potential tension and unity of community that can result from multi-stage sieges. Dark times breed comradery. Having to defend a node on its last legs will entice even the casuals into participating.
And finally, a single decisive siege generates far too little content for the massive stakes at play.
I propose a new set of mechanics for sieges:
1) Sieges will be broken up into multiple stages each lasting an hour.
2) The tier of the node will decide how many siege stages are necessary to destroy the node (t3-1, t4-2, t5-3, t6-4).
3) Each stage has its own mechanics and win condition (For example, stage one might involve breaching the metropolis's outer walls, stage 2 capturing the plaza, t3 breaching the inner walls, t4 raiding the mayor's central stronghold.)
4) The time slots of each siege will vary to allow everyone participate (i.e., 10am, the next stage at 1PM, then 4PM, and finally 8PM).
5) Attackers can only proceed to the next stage if the previous had succeeded.
6) Node regenerate one 'stage' worth of collateral damage every two weeks (IE, a t6 that suffered two successful sieges will need approximately a month without successful sieges to fully recover).
7) Sieges can be launched biweekly, and the next stage is automatically relaunched for free on the same day of a successful siege.
I believe the introduction of these mechanics will allow for a more fluid shaping of the world rather than node there in the morning, node gone in the afternoon. They will also generate more content over a larger timespan that allow more players to participate, whether offensively or defensively, giving time for true unions to form or for tight unions to give up hope and abandon ship before all is lost.
1) Last up to 2 hours
2) Completely destroy nodes and scatter inhabitants' possessions on success.
3) Provide nodes with varying length immunities on failure (t3-30 days, t4-40 days, t5-50 days, t6/metropolis-60 days).
I believe these are good mechanics, but they have several fundamental flaws.
Firstly, a metropolis node is too vital to be able to fall in a single two hour siege. They are the cornerstone for far too many mechanics including dungeons, homes, apartments, freeholds, processing and crafting stations, field mobs, and so on.
Secondly, a single timeslot cannot be attended by everyone. Imagine not being able to play during those two hours only to come back to raiders looting all of your items you didn't even have chance to defend.
Thirdly, a node falling in a single siege undermines the potential tension and unity of community that can result from multi-stage sieges. Dark times breed comradery. Having to defend a node on its last legs will entice even the casuals into participating.
And finally, a single decisive siege generates far too little content for the massive stakes at play.
I propose a new set of mechanics for sieges:
1) Sieges will be broken up into multiple stages each lasting an hour.
2) The tier of the node will decide how many siege stages are necessary to destroy the node (t3-1, t4-2, t5-3, t6-4).
3) Each stage has its own mechanics and win condition (For example, stage one might involve breaching the metropolis's outer walls, stage 2 capturing the plaza, t3 breaching the inner walls, t4 raiding the mayor's central stronghold.)
4) The time slots of each siege will vary to allow everyone participate (i.e., 10am, the next stage at 1PM, then 4PM, and finally 8PM).
5) Attackers can only proceed to the next stage if the previous had succeeded.
6) Node regenerate one 'stage' worth of collateral damage every two weeks (IE, a t6 that suffered two successful sieges will need approximately a month without successful sieges to fully recover).
7) Sieges can be launched biweekly, and the next stage is automatically relaunched for free on the same day of a successful siege.
I believe the introduction of these mechanics will allow for a more fluid shaping of the world rather than node there in the morning, node gone in the afternoon. They will also generate more content over a larger timespan that allow more players to participate, whether offensively or defensively, giving time for true unions to form or for tight unions to give up hope and abandon ship before all is lost.
2
Comments
How so? A successful siege would automatically start the next stage on the same day. The point is to let more people to participate than the select few who don't work or engage in other real life obligations during a specified two hour period.
So, for example, if a siege is successful the next stage can start a few hours later.
the same hardcore players will be participating tbh xD
yeah but now you need to beat the node 4935784574 times to destroy it as opposed to just once...
Elongating the conflict is kind of the point. It takes months to build up a metropolis by gathering exp and delivering resources, so it definitely shouldn't take two hours to destroy it all.
or he said there was a cooldown time of 2 months. i forgot...but it was 2 months
but i see what you mean
Large raid content in most games, some of the longest form content I'm familiar with, generally takes a commitment of 3-4 hours at the most. You're suggesting up to 12 hours, with success at any 2-3 hour period being dependent on random people's schedules for an entire day. This would lead to unstable fluctuations of participants that could randomly make or break a siege without a ludicrous amount of organization and strategic planning.
As per the wiki, as it stands right now, sieges are already multi-stage affairs, as attackers will have to coordinate their way through conquering different districts of the node in order to reach the defending flag. The larger the node, the more districts there are. So you're already having to siege the outer defenses, make it through multiple districts with a PvE boss in each, and capture a flag at the end. The stages are there, you're just looking to have them spread out further with winning or losing the entire siege being dependent upon people's availability during non-prime-time hours, which doesn't make much sense to me to be honest.
What I can actually imagine is stage 3 nodes being tuned to a 2-hour window, stage 4 nodes being tuned to a 3-hour window, and stage 6 nodes being tuned to a 4-hour window. If it takes place on a weekend evening, that will allow 9-5ers to participate, and odd-shift workers to either take the day off or get a morning shift in before the action starts. That sounds more appropriate to me, and wouldn't be a ridiculous demand on the players, given the seriousness of the impact which successfully sieging a metropolis would have. That being said (going back to your original concern of non-prime-time players wanting to take part in prime-time events) if you can't get one two-hour period free to play the game with multiple weeks notice, I don't think even a couple extra hours on the front or back end of that are going to help you, and there's just no way IS would make it stretch into the morning.
Having a stake in a node isn't for players who're constantly checked out of the game's goings-on. It's sure to take place after 9-5ers get home, and from my experience as a non-9-5-er, most other jobs generally let you take a bit of time off or move your schedule around for a single day, if you have a few weeks notice - which you will. If that's not good enough for some people, I don't know what to tell them, other than: your individual participation in the siege likely will not have swayed the battle, and most of the players who dedicated themselves to their investment in the game world will have been there and tried their best for all of you.
This pearl clutching of "I was offline, came back to find my shit burned down, NO FAIR!" has also been debunked. Every node siege has a declaration period of days, not hours before it takes place. The only way you are getting "surprised" by a siege is if you don't bother to log in for multiple days. There is also a mobile companion app planned for different offline activities by Intrepid. You can bet that "node news notifications and alerts" will be part of that.
People are coming from other games that allow offline base raiding like Rust, Ark, Atlas and more and either love or hate those mechanics. People got war weariness in New World from the constant territory flipping and exploits, including guilds being able to be in multiple sieges per day by dropping guild and rejoining into another "strike team" guild when a team was needed. These concerns have also all been multiple times communicated in rational and irrational discourse. They are not developing the game in a vacuum and are aware of past and present games and controversies.
In the case of successful siege your materials and processed goods stored in the node are not "scattered," a portion is sunk, and the rest go into a community pot to be fought over in the open pvp area that the node becomes for a to be determined timeframe after a siege. This stops economy glut and stagnation that occurs in many other mmos when people built up lets say a billion iron ore over years. If you are a hoarder that likes to sit on their throne of a million sticks, you are going to be disappointed here.
And finally the two hour siege window. This has always been a flexible metric that is going to be worked on in testing to further refine Steven's vision of what he wants from sieges and how they affect the world. While there is no cap (so far) on the number of people that can participate on either side, and the declaration restrictions related to citizenship and others have some fuzzy areas, they just need to test to see how some of these things work. It could be that the various NPCs and control points that need to be defeated during the siege are increased based on base node level. You just don't know, cause beyond some rudimentary testing of various things in A1, you have not seen what they envision an "actual node siege" to be. People have been playing mmos with territory control for years and many are aware of the exploits, bugs, unintended cheese mechanics and others that occur. So if that is your bugbear, work on it in testing, give feedback, and advocate for what you think should be changed once you get a chance to test it along with hundreds of others.
This way we would not only know in advance about the siege (as unkown mentioned), but would also have a proper build up to the siege with a days-long full-out war with a ton of pvp and small "raids" on the node's infrastructure.
🙄
Thing is, they already have this mechanic in game with castles and the weekly "mini-nodes" that lead into the monthly castle siege. It would just make nodes similar to castles in how their systems and mechanics are addressed. They have talked about covert operations that can be done to raid the reliquary and weaken other node buildings before a siege and have also been very clear to point out that things like monster coin attacks cannot be "targeted through player actions" to weaken a node. Which implies there are already methods to weaken a node before a siege.
Yo this for sure.
I think the best general approach to stuff like Node Sieges is to identify other games which had similar features which were either successful/unsuccessful in their communities.
I saw an Asmondgold clip the other day talking about MMORPG PvP and it never being popular in games. I think he's right in some aspects, but there are aspects of PvP that can appeal to more PvE centric players. I think you touched on some things that make server based sieges unpopular, such as loss of access to PvE objectives on so on. I would also agree that timing of events are super important as well.
I think Ragnarok Online actually did sieges the best with their War of Emperium function. People got so hardcore about it because of access to farming opportunities.
The penalty aspect of PvP turns off a lot of hardcore PvE players. This will always be a balancing act that nobody will really be able to hash out until further down the road.
This seems like over complicating it for no reason. Between the protection after defending, and requirement to siege that node that should be plenty.
There is never a point where you have all the people you need on at all times, having a buffer to prepare before the attack is important and should help give people a chance to know.
In the end you have to have a good and reliable core but also be able to have fill ins, even more so when you are talking about the biggest wars.
Change is a good thing and adds more pressure to defend during that time frame than needing to worry about different times during the day. Also not everyone is going to defend id expect the owners of the node to be the ones organizing that.
I am a Casual Challenge player, so obviously I'm not going to be interested in days-long, full-out war. Especially not with a TON of PvP.
And, then people want to say that Ashes is not PvP-centric.
A War spawns Conflict Zones which then can be won or lost by a specific side. Total number of Conflict Zones won on a day determines the winner for that day. War is 'First to 4' with a maximum length of 7 days.
Conflict Zone victory or loss influences the war resources of the participants, if you are losing too many you start to lose more, requiring injection of resources and time. If the winners start to slack off you can claw it back, or they can push hard for four straight (RL) days to ensure absolute victory.
I support at least 'first to two' in terms of sieges, based on 'some specific thing needing to be destroyed'. Maybe the attackers get two 'Assault Camps' and when they both fall the Siege fails, the defender gets ... maybe Town Hall and Barracks and Town Hall falls first and if Barracks falls the Siege goes to the attackers.
Since the attacker made effort to start the siege, maybe they get at least the benefits for destroying the Town Hall either way if they manage that part.