Any chance at all that sieges on timers will get changed?

The thing that initially caught my attention with Ashes of Creation was my impression that there was going to be a major focus on open world content and, particularly, open world PvP. Taking another look now, though, it seems that I was either mistaken or, somewhere along the line, the devs starting moving more and more towards a New World-esque concept of PvP, where technically you can PvP in the open world, but there's really no reward as well as no meaningful objectives as those are all locked behind scheduled events. The only thing I see that fits the bill (for me) as good, objective-based, open world PvP are caravans since they can show up at any time and anyone can just walk up and partake.

So my question is, is there any chance at all that the devs will change course on the whole sieges-as-scheduled-events thing and make them possible at any/most times? I understand the point of the schedule is to ensure even teams and all that, but to me, that's not what's exciting about open world PvP. The exciting part for me is that open world PvP is dynamic: it can happen at any time under any number of circumstances.

On top of that, with schedules, that effectively means I would never end up being able to take part in sieges because I'm not going to schedule my life around a video game. That's what happened to me in New World: despite playing regularly for PvP from launch until about a year after, I never once got into a war because I couldn't schedule my life around the game (and therefore I also wasn't of value to the people filling the war rosters). I want to be able to just hop into the game when I have time, at whatever time of whatever day of the month, and take part in whatever happens to be going on, and if sieges are scheduled affairs, I can pretty much guarantee that players like me will literally never get to take part.

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Ludullu

joshisanonymous wrote: »

I want to be able to just hop into the game when I have time, at whatever time of whatever day of the month, and take part in whatever happens to be going on, and if sieges are scheduled affairs, I can pretty much guarantee that players like me will literally never get to take part.

If you don't have a stable time schedule, I'd assume you won't be able to be a part of guild that would siege anything anyway. Your node might get sieged I guess, but if you can't play the game during your chosen server's primitime - ya ain't partaking in those either.

Your only way to "just pvp in the open world" is to either go and flag up against random people (though you'd probably get killed if you can't play a lot) or hope that your node gets into a node war.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_wars

Otherwise, the general answer to this is the usual "not everyone gets to enjoy the same stuff". If your life can't support even a single hour at the same time of day to play the game - Ashes might not be for you. Well, not for you if that's the only content you're looking forward to in the game.

Sieges are meant to be structured content, not some random low-stakes thing that might happen at 3 am on an empty server.

joshisanonymous

NiKr wrote: »

joshisanonymous wrote: »

I want to be able to just hop into the game when I have time, at whatever time of whatever day of the month, and take part in whatever happens to be going on, and if sieges are scheduled affairs, I can pretty much guarantee that players like me will literally never get to take part.

If you don't have a stable time schedule, I'd assume you won't be able to be a part of guild that would siege anything anyway. Your node might get sieged I guess, but if you can't play the game during your chosen server's primitime - ya ain't partaking in those either.

Your only way to "just pvp in the open world" is to either go and flag up against random people (though you'd probably get killed if you can't play a lot) or hope that your node gets into a node war.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_wars

Otherwise, the general answer to this is the usual "not everyone gets to enjoy the same stuff". If your life can't support even a single hour at the same time of day to play the game - Ashes might not be for you. Well, not for you if that's the only content you're looking forward to in the game.

Sieges are meant to be structured content, not some random low-stakes thing that might happen at 3 am on an empty server.

I feel like you both didn't read my post (since your response is basically "tough luck" rather than answering the question or taking into acocunt that I addressed the things you're mentioning) or don't have much experience with MMOs that don't have scheduled sieges. Not having a schedule doesn't entail "random low-stakes thing(s)."

The obvious example is Dark Age of Camelot. This was a game where you could log in at any time and possibly find a siege building up (or possibly not, it's dynamic because there's no schedule). You could then partake or not partake, but you didn't have to think about logging on at just the right time and being in the right guild or having the right friends to be able to play major parts of the game.

Caww

Sieges are meant to be large scale events with hundreds of players so the scheduled time slots during prime server times are just a basic requirement.

I hope there will be more frequent, including off-hour, types of on-the-fly semi-organized war-type events as well for jump-in & jump-out participation depending on play time available. Choosing a server in the most opportune time zone for your general play hours is going to very important, or even have several toons going for different servers to increase your participation.

Ludullu

joshisanonymous wrote: »

I feel like you both didn't read my post (since your response is basically "tough luck" rather than answering the question or taking into acocunt that I addressed the things you're mentioning) or don't have much experience with MMOs that don't have scheduled sieges. Not having a schedule doesn't entail "random low-stakes thing(s)."

The obvious example is Dark Age of Camelot. This was a game where you could log in at any time and possibly find a siege building up (or possibly not, it's dynamic because there's no schedule). You could then partake or not partake, but you didn't have to think about logging on at just the right time and being in the right guild or having the right friends to be able to play major parts of the game.

Did those sieges have any stakes? Did they mean anything other than "here's some pvp"?

AoC's sieges will have a shitton of meaning because node sieges literally mean destruction of people's houses (potential) and direct gameplay impact, because node's services will be shut down and you need those in your preferred node to get access to several sources of content.

Castle sieges control 1/5 of the damn world and will bring insane riches to the owner.

If you have any of those at random times, people will just register for off-hours and people will lose things when they didn't even know the loss could happen.

There will be several other sources of owpvp, but sieges are not that. And it's intended design.

Talents

They understandably don't want people scheduling sieges for 3am so the sieges have to happen during the prime time window.

RazThemun

It is a smart decision to have events such as sieges timed. As this prohibits one guild or node graveyard shift workers dominating everything in a few hours each day that no one is on.... do we create a game where 9,000 of 10,000 players will likely be available according to the data. Or do we say screw it, do a seige whenever you want and now 500 people create enough annoyance on a server everyone else leaves. Not because that guild is good at anything.... but they were able to do things at an off hour at 2am over and over. If I got to log in at 2am to defend a node Ashes just became a job...

joshisanonymous

Caww wrote: »

Sieges are meant to be large scale events with hundreds of players so the scheduled time slots during prime server times are just a basic requirement.

I hope there will be more frequent, including off-hour, types of on-the-fly semi-organized war-type events as well for jump-in & jump-out participation depending on play time available. Choosing a server in the most opportune time zone for your general play hours is going to very important, or even have several toons going for different servers to increase your participation.

Large-scale sieges still occur in games that don't have have scheduled sieges. See DAoC, WAR, ESO, hell even Gloria Victis.

NiKr wrote: »

Did those sieges have any stakes? Did they mean anything other than "here's some pvp"?

Yes! Why do sieges have to be scheduled to have any stakes? That doesn't make sense even on the surface.

Talents wrote: »

They understandably don't want people scheduling sieges for 3am so the sieges have to happen during the prime time window.

RazThemun wrote: »

It is a smart decision to have events such as sieges timed. As this prohibits one guild or node graveyard shift workers dominating everything in a few hours each day that no one is on...

That's a valid concern, but there are many many options for dealing with that outside of "sieges can only happen between 5pm and 7pm and require you to be part of some specific guild that's willing to slot you for the event". Even just making it so sieges require large forces to be successful is often enough since you're pretty unlikely to have huge forces waiting until 3-5am just to run a siege, and if you do have that many people around on one side during those hours, you're probably going to have that many around on the other side, too. Again, just look at DAoC: there were certainly late night sieges, but they were far harder to pull off and far less frequent than daytime sieges, and that's with no mechanism in place to cut down on them at all. We can look at games like Gloria Victis for in between options to dissuade people from sieging very late (although sieges are too easy in that game for those mechanisms to be effective, which doesn't have to be the case in AoC).

Basically, scheduled sieges are a very hamfisted solution to a problem (late night sieges) that could be addressed in numerous ways. And the result will inevitably be that most players never get to experience sieges. You can see that result in New World: there are regularly posts from long-time players who've never successfully gotten into a war despite wars occuring far more often than once a month like in AoC. And it's not just as simple as "well you just need to be able to schedule one hour for it if you want to do it," because that might literally be impossible for some players in the first place (work nights, have kids, aren't besties with the leet guilds that run the seiges, etc.) or just not be how they play video games because it makes the game feel too much like a job.

Taleof2Cities

joshisanonymous wrote: »

And the result will inevitably be that most players never get to experience sieges.

After a solid start, your posts are starting to degrade into slippery slope fallacies, @joshisanonymous.

As many of the replies have already said, sieges will be scheduled so that the vast majority of players have the ability and bandwidth to opt-in.

Of course, there will be some outliers that can’t make the scheduled time … which may include yourself. Same as in New World — there are a few players that have a bizarre enough schedule that prevents their participation in scheduled events.

That doesn’t mean a core mechanic should be changed.

It also doesn’t mean that sieges are the only PvP content that players can participate in Ashes.

It also doesn’t mean that every Ashes server will have siege content scheduled at the exact same time.

At the end of the day, however, it is not “inevitable” that most players will not get to participate in sieges.

Most players will.

tautau

Consider also that a player could play on a server based in the EU or Anzac so that the server's 'prime time' might match up better with their 'available time' as a way to potentially solve their problem.

Depraved

joshisanonymous wrote: »

Caww wrote: »

Sieges are meant to be large scale events with hundreds of players so the scheduled time slots during prime server times are just a basic requirement.

I hope there will be more frequent, including off-hour, types of on-the-fly semi-organized war-type events as well for jump-in & jump-out participation depending on play time available. Choosing a server in the most opportune time zone for your general play hours is going to very important, or even have several toons going for different servers to increase your participation.

Large-scale sieges still occur in games that don't have have scheduled sieges. See DAoC, WAR, ESO, hell even Gloria Victis.

NiKr wrote: »

Did those sieges have any stakes? Did they mean anything other than "here's some pvp"?

Yes! Why do sieges have to be scheduled to have any stakes? That doesn't make sense even on the surface.

Talents wrote: »

They understandably don't want people scheduling sieges for 3am so the sieges have to happen during the prime time window.

RazThemun wrote: »

It is a smart decision to have events such as sieges timed. As this prohibits one guild or node graveyard shift workers dominating everything in a few hours each day that no one is on...

That's a valid concern, but there are many many options for dealing with that outside of "sieges can only happen between 5pm and 7pm and require you to be part of some specific guild that's willing to slot you for the event". Even just making it so sieges require large forces to be successful is often enough since you're pretty unlikely to have huge forces waiting until 3-5am just to run a siege, and if you do have that many people around on one side during those hours, you're probably going to have that many around on the other side, too. Again, just look at DAoC: there were certainly late night sieges, but they were far harder to pull off and far less frequent than daytime sieges, and that's with no mechanism in place to cut down on them at all. We can look at games like Gloria Victis for in between options to dissuade people from sieging very late (although sieges are too easy in that game for those mechanisms to be effective, which doesn't have to be the case in AoC).

Basically, scheduled sieges are a very hamfisted solution to a problem (late night sieges) that could be addressed in numerous ways. And the result will inevitably be that most players never get to experience sieges. You can see that result in New World: there are regularly posts from long-time players who've never successfully gotten into a war despite wars occuring far more often than once a month like in AoC. And it's not just as simple as "well you just need to be able to schedule one hour for it if you want to do it," because that might literally be impossible for some players in the first place (work nights, have kids, aren't besties with the leet guilds that run the seiges, etc.) or just not be how they play video games because it makes the game feel too much like a job.

u cant set aside 1-2 hours a month at night after work? you dont have to plan ur life around a video game...but you are the one with the issue, not everybody else.

darthaden

If you could siege a node at anytime guilds would just lay siege at like 3am when nobody but the attacking guild would know to be online

Hinotori

As others have said you could play in a region more suited to your timetable or engage in the open world pvp that isn't scheduled. Like the caravans or open world raid griefing.

Or you can do the small scale arena pvp.

Castle sieges are important to server economy and politics. They aren't an off the cuff encounter people can do at just a moments notice. They're a spectacle fight for potential access to a vast amount of resources that makes players think: "I was there when we changed the history of the server."

It's the same with node sieges. They're scheduled in advance so people know exactly when they need to defend their city because the stake is high and they may not wake up with a home the next morning.

Not everyone gets a trophy and not everyone will participate as you say. But the opportunity is there. If you decide you can't spare a couple hours you know about a week or more in advance then just hope for the best and catch the next one. If you decide (like it seems already) that you'll never be involved in them then that's fine. The content just wasn't for you.

Dygz

joshisanonymous wrote: »

The only thing I see that fits the bill (for me) as good, objective-based, open world PvP are caravans since they can show up at any time and anyone can just walk up and partake.

FFA PvP in the Open Seas doesn't fit the bill? Why?

Dygz

joshisanonymous wrote: »

Your only way to "just pvp in the open world" is to either go and flag up against random people (though you'd probably get killed if you can't play a lot) or hope that your node gets into a node war.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_wars

Or pirate the Open Seas??

joshisanonymous wrote: »

Otherwise, the general answer to this is the usual "not everyone gets to enjoy the same stuff". If your life can't support even a single hour at the same time of day to play the game - Ashes might not be for you. Well, not for you if that's the only content you're looking forward to in the game.

Ashes is a dynamic game, rather than a static game.

RazThemun wrote: »

Basically, scheduled sieges are a very hamfisted solution to a problem (late night sieges) that could be addressed in numerous ways. And the result will inevitably be that most players never get to experience sieges.

Pretty sure that Sieges are handled differently in several different ways:
Castle Sieges, Node Sieges, Node Wars and Guild Wars do not all happen on the same schedule.
But... why would most players never be able to experience Node Sieges?

RazThemun wrote: »

You can see that result in New World: there are regularly posts from long-time players who've never successfully gotten into a war despite wars occuring far more often than once a month like in AoC. And it's not just as simple as "well you just need to be able to schedule one hour for it if you want to do it," because that might literally be impossible for some players in the first place (work nights, have kids, aren't besties with the leet guilds that run the seiges, etc.) or just not be how they play video games because it makes the game feel too much like a job.

Uh. What?
The objective-based combat is scheduled between 3PM - 9PM. That's a 6 hour window - which allows people to schedule, in advance, around work nights and kids, etc.
In Ashes, a War is different than a Siege. The stakes are also different for Wars than they are for Sieges.
Guild Wars could possibly feel like a job, I suppose... if you are just following orders.
You don't have to be in a leet guild to experience a Node Siege or a Node War.
I don't understand how Node Sieges and Node Wars would feel "like a job".

RazThemun wrote: »

"sieges can only happen between 5pm and 7pm and require you to be part of some specific guild that's willing to slot you for the event". Even just making it so sieges require large forces to be successful is often enough since you're pretty unlikely to have huge forces waiting until 3-5am just to run a siege, and if you do have that many people around on one side during those hours, you're probably going to have that many around on the other side, too. Again, just look at DAoC: there were certainly late night sieges, but they were far harder to pull off and far less frequent than daytime sieges, and that's with no mechanism in place to cut down on them at all.

Hyperbolic claims do not adequately support your concern.
Sieges happen between 3PM and 9PM. 6 hours, rather than 2 hours.
Castle Sieges require guild membership.
Node Sieges do not require guild membership.

I think DAoC did not have towns/cities that the players spent weeks and months constructing?

Even New World does not have towns that the players constructed. In New World, I never flag for PvP because I'm not going to be affected signifcantly enough if my town loses a war. Services might not be as robust as during prosperity, but I can always do the stuff I want to do. Services aren't completely shut down.

Spif

DAoC had some of the best 8-man group PvP, but it all happened in a PvP lake called the Frontiers (this is all before New Frontiers). The larger scale keep PvP centered around relics and realm-wide buffs that impacted PvE. While there was no destruction of property, you would regularly see multiple groups suicide out of good PvE locations to defend relics (before the days of multiple PvE/PvP alts)

DAoC probably coined the term "alarm clock raid", as it was the only way to take a relic from an evenly matched foe. Alarm clock raids are why AoC is going to stick with an attack window, and it will be one set by the defender.

Veeshan

Caww wrote: »

Sieges are meant to be large scale events with hundreds of players so the scheduled time slots during prime server times are just a basic requirement.

I hope there will be more frequent, including off-hour, types of on-the-fly semi-organized war-type events as well for jump-in & jump-out participation depending on play time available. Choosing a server in the most opportune time zone for your general play hours is going to very important, or even have several toons going for different servers to increase your participation.

however being able to force a seige outside of typical play time allows for a power shift. If a powerful guild gets a keep and during prime time there unstopable then they tend to always win being able to seige outside of a prime time throws a spanner in the works and there for allows for a powershift in the area. (also allows players who cant play during prime time to participate too alot of people works the night shifts or later afternoon shifts that i feel should be able to participate now and then) in the larger scale stuff.
even in off peak times in darkfall they were still very much large scale still aswell, during peak darkfall days you could get 800+ players during a seige and 500 in off peak in its early days when it had like 10k players when it first came out

So i do see a valid reason to have them be done any time (there should be suffient warning however to allow for planning if they do go this route) for either castle or node seiges

Veeshan

darthaden wrote: »

If you could siege a node at anytime guilds would just lay siege at like 3am when nobody but the attacking guild would know to be online

Nothing wrong with that tbh it allows for a power shift if a guild cant win during peak time it allows for them to try a new stratergy of shifting the time to where it might suite them a little better.
its sometimes the only way to take thing of zerg guilds too since it harder to get all there members on at a obscure time compared to smaller guilds so it does allow for combatting numbers.

that being said there would need to be an planning time so defender can react like there a 24 hr timer or 48 hour timer for example before seige actually happend from when ever it is declared for example

Veeshan

Dygz wrote: »

joshisanonymous wrote: »

The only thing I see that fits the bill (for me) as good, objective-based, open world PvP are caravans since they can show up at any time and anyone can just walk up and partake.

FFA PvP in the Open Seas doesn't fit the bill? Why?

why not? the sea's have been lawless longer in time than they have been lawful. the ocean being safe to a degree has only realy happened in the last century or so and before that was pretty much lawless. The seas being lawless open world pvp all the time makes more sense than them not when in context of time period, not easy to police a vast ocean when all you have is sail boats and telescopes :P

Ludullu

Veeshan wrote: »

So i do see a valid reason to have them be done any time (there should be suffient warning however to allow for planning if they do go this route) for either castle or node seiges

This will simply lead to a seesaw effect for sieges. There's gonna be a guild that's super strong in the off hours of the server, cause they have all the strong players that play at that time, and there's gonna be a strong guild during primetime. And they'll just throw the node/castle between each other like a hot potato. There won't be any real competition, there won't be any real conflict.

If anything, there's just gonna be less fun in the game because those 2 strong guilds will dominate their respective timeslots, due to having the node/castle benefits every time there's a siege available (especially if Intrepid makes them more frequent as you suggest).

I've experienced pretty much this exact situation in L2 with its fortress feature. Best fortresses on the server would flipflop between couples of guilds that played on opposing timeslots. Those guilds got super strong due to the fortress benefits, which lead to a swamp-like social interaction.

But this was not true for the castle sieges, because they were planned and always during primetime. The guilds from off-time would band together with the weaker prime-time guilds and would try to push the strong primetime guilds out of castles (or not let them get one). And those fights had some difficulty for both sides, instead of them just being a one-sided slaughter, because one side had just way more players during that timeslot.

As was already stated before, if your real life doesn't allow you to play during primetime on your local server - just play on a server whose primetime matches your free hours.

Tahiti02

joshisanonymous wrote: »

The thing that initially caught my attention with Ashes of Creation was my impression that there was going to be a major focus on open world content and, particularly, open world PvP. Taking another look now, though, it seems that I was either mistaken or, somewhere along the line, the devs starting moving more and more towards a New World-esque concept of PvP, where technically you can PvP in the open world, but there's really no reward as well as no meaningful objectives as those are all locked behind scheduled events. The only thing I see that fits the bill (for me) as good, objective-based, open world PvP are caravans since they can show up at any time and anyone can just walk up and partake.

So my question is, is there any chance at all that the devs will change course on the whole sieges-as-scheduled-events thing and make them possible at any/most times? I understand the point of the schedule is to ensure even teams and all that, but to me, that's not what's exciting about open world PvP. The exciting part for me is that open world PvP is dynamic: it can happen at any time under any number of circumstances.

On top of that, with schedules, that effectively means I would never end up being able to take part in sieges because I'm not going to schedule my life around a video game. That's what happened to me in New World: despite playing regularly for PvP from launch until about a year after, I never once got into a war because I couldn't schedule my life around the game (and therefore I also wasn't of value to the people filling the war rosters). I want to be able to just hop into the game when I have time, at whatever time of whatever day of the month, and take part in whatever happens to be going on, and if sieges are scheduled affairs, I can pretty much guarantee that players like me will literally never get to take part.

I'm sorry but if you can't play during prime time then there isn't much that can be done. The alternative is to have sieges at 3am which is a horrible oversight.

I think a lot of people need to come to the realization that this game will have aspects that you can't partake in. I work a 9-5 job, have a wife, need to do adult things, and can't dedicate every hour past 5 to gaming. I won't have a freehold, probably won't have the best gear, and will miss out on a lot of content. And that's fine! Because there will be plenty that I can participate in. The biggest selling point for me is that they are building a social world. We've had trash for almost 2 decades because all developers did was cater to people that only had an hour to play a day...

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